Capitals Spread Warmth, Cheer Off Ice (2024)

Most of the men who congregated in the lobby of the Veterans Administration Medical Center had left the confinement of their rooms, which were small and crowded with medical equipment and black-and-white TVs that chattered incessantly. They had come here to be alone, yet near people, and to watch the hard, frozen rain wash the world outside the windows.

A chartered bus, followed by a caravan of cars and jeeps, pulled up out front. A score of young men, most of them wearing jeans and sweatshirts and bleach-bright sneakers, hurried out of the rain and stood shivering in the cold of this day last week, using their reflection in the walls of hospital windows to make right their wet, disheveled hair.

In the lobby, a man wearing a battered homburg hat--the same man who had lost both his legs to war and spent much of his day relating that sad, sad story to strangers--asked a friend, "Who on earth could they be?"

"That's that hockey team, s'pose to be," said the friend, who was missing three fingers on his right hand. "I heard they were coming."

"A hockey team?" the first man asked.

"Yeah. They came here to visit, shake hands. They're s'posed to have some pucks to pass out."

"What hockey team?"

"The Capitals, from here in Washington."

"The Capitals?"

"Uh-huh."

"Who the hell are the Capitals?"

Rod Langway, the captain of the team, nearly slipped hurrying up the slick walkway to the hospital door. He was tired and sore and was telling a friend how he hadn't learned how to skate until he was 12, but how his late start only gave him more reason to work hard and improve his game.

Back then, the winter school session let out at noon and he went straight to the ice. "There was nothing else to do," he remembers, "You go play or you stay at home."

There were tennis courts near his house that iced over in winter and he and the kids in the neighborhood would play until night had descended upon the city and all the lanes and back roads of Boston filled with the sound of mothers calling their boys home for supper.

Sometimes, when the games were good and he was deep into making believe he was Bobby Orr or Phil Esposito of the Bruins, he would turn on the lights of the tennis courts and pretend not to hear his mother's summons. He loved the ice, loved to sweat on the ice and see the steam lift off his body like white-hot human fire. But sometimes, when the other kids scattered and promised to return by tomorrow afternoon, he would march home and fight for extra helpings at supper with his four brothers.

The last he heard, the tennis courts in Boston still bustle in winter. It has become traditional for his small circle of old friends to meet when he returns to Boston and take him out for a beer. Invariably, they say, "Remember when we used to play outside? Now we watch you on TV. We saw you the other night."

And Langway says, "Geez, guys, we're getting old."

He has two sons of his own now and both have learned to love the ice. Once he told a teammate, "You know where you come from and how you got here, then you know there's no real sense in changing. Know what I mean?"

Otto wore glasses and a goatee and looked a little like Sigmund Freud. He rolled his wheelchair down the corridor of the cardiac unit and stopped 10 feet short of the crowd of players, who had been autographing arm and leg casts and handing out souvenir pucks to the multitude of bed-ridden patients. "My name's Otto," he said. "And my room number's 4. I used to be with the underground. Come over here and talk to me."

There was a Santa Claus cutout taped to Otto's door, which was open, revealing his rumpled bed and a television set tuned in to an old movie. The fuzzy screen showed a nun praying on her knees in an empty prison cell, but the sound had been cut off and substituted with Muzak from the radio. "Who's the one always getting into fights?" Otto asked the crowd, and moved closer. His right leg had been amputated just above the knee and the leg of his baby blue pajama bottom poked through the spokes of the chair's wheel.

"Me," said timid Timo Blomqvist, the defenseman from Helsinki. "I fight." Everybody laughed as Blomqvist, who had instigated a brawl with the Montreal Canadiens, touched the purple puff of his left eye and traced his fingers along the rough, red scab on his jaw.

Then Otto, laughing too, wiped his hands on the free leg of his pants and pushed himself closer to the group of players. He sat up high in his chair and extended his hand to Blomqvist. "I like a man who puts up a good fight," he said.

His future was determined long before he could even spell his name, when, at the age of 2, Darren Veitch put on his first pair of skates and discovered an alternate form of locomotion. His father, who had been a hockey player and is now the superintendent of Saskatchewan parks and recreation, came home one day with a bunch of studs and hammered them into the ground, then nailed a baseboard around it and said, "Soon, you'll have your own rink."

Of the seasons, only winter seemed to matter to the kids in Saskatoon, where Veitch grew up. The snows sometimes began as early as late September and ended in March or early April. Once, the snow drifts were so high they reached the rafters of the roof, right up to the eaves.

But that was long after Veitch's old man dressed for the tremendous cold, walked outside and placed a spitting water hose into the rink frame he'd built out of simple human ingenuity. It didn't take long to freeze over, didn't take long for the throngs of neighborhood kids to discover the icy wonder in the Veitch's back yard and come out to play shinny until dark, and later.

The other day, somebody asked what shinny was and Veitch told him. "It's hockey with as many players as you want out there. It's like a free-for-all sometimes, you get so many kids." Then he was asked how to spell shinny and he said, "I never tried to spell it. I only liked to play it."

Masha Klatz ("It's not Marsha; it's Masha. Ah-ah-ah. It's a Russian name."), a recreation therapist at the medical center, told the Capitals' staff photographer he wasn't allowed to take pictures of "where we're going. We're going to see The Family. They're all young men, all Vietnam vets. And they're all heroin abusers. No pictures."

She had asked so many men if they were interested in having their picture taken with the Washington Capitals, and when dozens had said, "No, go away," she had enticed them further by saying, "But one helped beat the Russians in the '80 Olympics." And if that didn't work, she gave in to their demand for privacy and moved on, allowing the group to stick their heads through the door and say, "Merry Christmas," or, "You get well, now."

One barefooted man had shuffled down the hall and said, "I'm Army, WWII. I'm not a real hockey fan, I'll be honest with you." But still he wanted his picture taken. Langway wrapped his arm around the man's shoulder and the players formed a semicircle behind them; then the photographer crouched down low and said, "Come on, smile for Santa. Give old Santa a big smile."

Long after the picture was taken and the group had rounded the corner and disappeared from view, the barefooted man shuffled back down the corridor and stopped to address Otto, who was sitting alone, staring at the signatures on his souvenir puck. "That was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life," the barefooted man said.

Then, without saying a word, Otto pulled his pants legs out of the spokes of the wheel, spun around in one grand eliptical sweep and vanished with a sharp right at room No. 4.

It will always be remembered, he knows, but says "it will never haunt me." Even in the hospital, for those who do not know hockey is played in the Washington area, they know it was played nearly four years ago in Lake Placid, N.Y. Sometimes he's introduced as "one of the guys who beat the Russians." But Dave Christian is his name.

He comes from Warroad, Minn.; folks call it "Hockey Town U.S.A.," and only 1,100 people live there, most employed by a window manufacturer. The places really worth seeing are the window plant, the river that freezes over in winter and his father's hockey stick company.

His father Bill and his uncle Roger played on the U.S. Olympic hockey team in 1960 and 1964. Before that, another uncle, Gordon, played on the 1956 squad. Now you can walk into almost any sporting goods store and see his family name scribbled across a stick that looks like a long-armed boomerang. Christian Bros, they all read.

No doubt his father was the great influence in his career, but a river flows through his mind. It was right behind his house and, in winter, it froze solid and looked like a hard, bloated snake rolled over on its belly. His father would stand on the bank and call his name, tell him it was late and time to come home. Now, people call his name for the place in sports history he holds; 24 years old, and most of his buddies took jobs at the window plant; others went off to school. He thinks about home often, and never minds going back. "I'm just a regular person when I go back there," he says. "Most folks know me by my name."

The Family, 20 or so patients of the Veterans Administration Narcotics and Alcohol Treatment Association, greeted the team with applause and by rising from their divans and fold-out chairs and embracing them all like long lost brethren.

The open picture window in the room looked out on a stark brace of trees and rain that fell horizontally and in sheets. There was the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee mixed oddly with dirty socks. While the players stood and studied the posters and placards taped to the wall, a member of The Family stood on his tiptoes and said he and his brothers "were sick, but here to whip this ugly disease" of drug and alcohol addiction.

A small poster above a board of empty hooks read, "Is your cup clean?" Another listed "The Defects Of Character," which included "fear anger hatred/revenge worry greed."

Klatz proposed everyone sing a Christmas carol, but someone in the back of the room had started singing his own version of a familiar tune, altering and creating verse to fit the occasion.

When a few of his friends seemed hesitant to sing along, the leader of the song started clapping and shouting for everybody else to join in. At its best, the chorus didn't sound too bad. They sang, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine/Out on the hockey field, I'm gonna let it shine."

As the group was walking back down the corridor, goaltender Al Jensen turned to a teammate and said, "I hope they weren't disappointed. I don't think we were quite as big as they had expected."