Free The Code by Gare Joyce

bidding war to have him move up to the pros. After Hanratty’s second season and the championship, Summers, well past the best-before date for any working hockey man, gave in to the inevitable—though Hanratty greased the Batpole from Summers’s corner office by burying him with the Peterborough board of directors. Some of Hanratty’s gripes were even valid, to my understanding.
    Over his thirty-seven-year career, he coached two Hall of Famers …
    Who the hell fact-checks this stuff? Three.
    â€¦ and more than fifty players who made it to the NHL.
    Well, again, technically true but misleading. A few of those fifty dropped in for a very short stint—guys picked up late in the season when Hanratty was loading up his team for a deep run in the playoffs.
    â€œI know I never would have made the league if it hadn’t been for Red,” said Bobby Reagan, the former Peterborough captain who played for three Cup winners in Detroit during his twenty-year career. “He made me a player and I was lucky enough that he coached me at the most important point in my development. Any young man who played for Red was lucky that way. Red got the most out of his teams, and he helped his players get the most out of themselves.”
    Schmaltz. One: Bobby Reagan would have made the league and been an all-star and Hall of Famer if he’d been coached by Oprah. He was never, never, a marginal player. Two: He wasn’t afinished product at age sixteen when he landed in Peterborough. Hanratty was lucky to get him and smart enough not to screw him up. And that was true of all the pros who came out of the Peterborough program. Reagan was simply reinforcing the Myth of the Coaching Making the Player, the notion that attaching your son to the right coach for four years will make him (and you) a millionaire. I guess Reagan felt obliged to do the faithful son routine, honouring his former coach by repeating the sales pitch he gave hundreds of parents.
    Mr. Hanratty recorded 1485 regular-season wins in leading Peterborough to seven Ontario league titles.
    A matter of record. He had about six hundred more wins than Norm Pembleton, who started around the same time but did a couple of seasons in the pro bus leagues and four more on the sidelines out of work. Pembleton had been saddled with some dog teams, too.
    â€œHe was the heart and …”
    It couldn’t be …
    â€œâ€¦ soul of junior hockey,” says television and radio commentator Grant Tomlin. “I’ve known Red for twenty years and for him every day was a great day of hockey.”
    So said a guy who never played a shift for Hanratty. Or, for that matter, against Peterborough in the Ontario league. Until Tomlin landed his television gig eight years ago, he’d never met him. Hanratty might as well have been the Red-Headed Stranger. Grant Tomlin didn’t even play junior hockey. Heplayed in the NCAA, just like I did. He was an effing walk-on. He didn’t even get a ride. I can’t imagine why the Gelled Blowhard felt qualified to offer his opinion. Then again, I’m just a naïf on media matters. I’m sure he solicited the paper rather than vice versa. He’d call them on a daily basis, trying to get his name into print.
    I lost my enthusiasm for this brief voyage through the Late Lamented Mentor’s life five words into Tomlin’s banal hearsay testimonial. Thankfully, at that very point my heart vibrated. Sandy calling.
    Conceptually, Sandy thinks of my work as an adventure. Whenever she looks behind the curtain, though, she attaches quotation marks to “job.” Her best line: “When I was in school you could improve your mark 5 percent with perfect attendance, but with you guys 100 percent of it is just showing up.”
    The vagaries of my working dodge were lost on her.
    â€œSugar,” she said, “are you really stuck in Peterborough? It would be one thing in April or May when the