Some people make fun of my old Honda. Not much longer, baby. My wife was in a car dealership the other day when she was invited to enter a contest to win a four-wheel-drive Mercedes. As I see it, the thing is practically in the driveway.
I’ve always been drawn to contests and games, a trait that surely comes from my grandmother. Nana’s weakness was Bingo, known to her and other Massachusetts Irish as Beano. “Beano” because Protestant legislators had banned Bingo nights once it became clear they were the source of half the revenue of the Catholic church. That the very same game became legal when renamed “Beano” was an early lesson in legalistic sophistry for the Boston Irish, not that they were ever a people desperately in need of such lessons.
If you were willing to leave your parish, you could play Beano every night of the week, which is what Nana did. But her luck was bad. She never won anything in her entire life.
Sorry, she did win one thing. One weekday, my mother took her to some gargantuan ladies’ luncheon. There was a raffle, and in a packed room, Nana’s number came up. The prize was “Got My Mojo Workin’,” a tape by a jazz/fusion crooner called “The Incredible Jimmy Smith.” When Nana got home, brandishing the cassette with considerable pride, I offered to play it on my tape recorder. So there we sat at the kitchen table in Lynn, Massachusetts, my 62- year-old grandmother and me, while Jimmy Smith, as Incredible as they said he would be, went through a series of suggestive grunts:
Oh! Ohhhhhhhhhh! Mo-jo!
Ugh! Ugh! Mohhhhhhhh-jo!
Work it! Ugh!
Work it, baby! Ugh!
At that age, I liked all music, from “All Along the Watchtower” to ” Julie, Julie, Julie, Do Ya Love Me?,” but here I drew the line. Nana didn’t like it much, either. We shut it off before Jimmy had even got his mojo halfway worked.
I had been similarly deceived by the Salem Evening News, for which I had a paper route. One winter afternoon a flyer arrived announcing that any paperboy who got ten new subscriptions could enter a drawing to meet Don Awrey of the Boston Bruins. Awrey was my favorite hockey player. God knows why — he was a scrub defenseman on the great Bruins teams of Orr, Esposito, and Bucyk. But that only made me the more desperate to seize this rare chance to pay him homage.
My neighborhood was Lynn Item territory. Potential subscribers for the Salem News were thin on the ground, and to get them meant transforming my paper route from a tight little 12-minute circuit into an afternoon-consuming odyssey through neighborhoods I’d never seen before. But, after weeks of bicycling through sleet, with my fingers frozen to the handlebars, I got them. My name got drawn. And one night in January, my father drove me up to a gymnasium in Beverly to sit at the hero’s knee.
The gym was stifling; there were at least 200 kids there, sitting on folding chairs with their chainsmoking dads in tow. It was clear that I’d been had. There hadn’t been any subscription contest. Anyone who’d wanted to come could have come. I probably wasn’t even going to get to shake Don Awrey’s hand.
Awrey started off with a contest of his own, waving an official Boston Bruins winter hat in front of the throng. “I’ll give this hat,” he said, “to anyone who can tell me why, when someone scores three goals, it’s called a hat trick.”
It was a no-brainer. Two hundred Salem News paperboys were wildly waving, screaming, “I know! I know!” Awrey lifted his head, looked down his nose, and pointed directly at me. Then he said something I’ll never forget. He said:
“Uh. . . the little girl in the back.”
I plead long hair (it was 1973) and the smoke in the gym. I said, more pipingly than I would have liked, “I’m a boy.” Then I explained — at least I’d get a hat out of it — that whenever a player scores three goals, fans throw their hats on the ice.
Awrey said only one word: “Wrong.” He turned to the (now-chuckling) crowd and explained that the right answer was that in 1890-something, a Montreal hat merchant promised that anyone on the Canadiens who —
I told my father we had better go. What a humiliation. No handshake, no prize, no food, my eyes watering (from all the smoke, of course). And the realization that for this I had saddled myself with a paper route that would have prostrated Lewis and Clark.
Awrey left the Bruins soon after. He was ignominiously benched for the 1976 Stanley Cup finals, a coaching decision that still tops my list of Great Moments in Sports History. But I’m more magnanimous now. After all, this stuff is small beer for someone who’ll be tooling around in a four-wheel- drive Mercedes in another week or so. Then I’ll be saying, “Hey, Don Awrey, who’s the little girl now?”
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
