What is it about hockey that causes people long past their athletic prime to don bulky equipment and risk their wellbeing in such a violent game? With just the right mix of candor and affection, that's the question longtime New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten ponders in his engaging memoir, The Intangibles: Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game.
Paumgarten was raised in privileged circumstances on New York's Upper East Side and later Long Island, coming to the sport as an eight year old and playing in Central Park in the 1970s. It was an undistinguished career that saw him abandon organized play while attending St. Paul's, a New Hampshire boarding school, but something about the game, not least the outlet it provided for his anger, grabbed him and wouldn't let him go.
After returning to New York City following his graduation from Princeton University, it wasn't long before he began a two-decades-long engagement with a succession of more than a dozen teams. Their games ranged from roller hockey on the Lower East Side to ice hockey above a parking lot at Chelsea Piers on the West Side, all of it adding up to a "cultish pastime" that felt "clandestine, a kind of secret life." Those efforts climaxed with the battles of the eponymous team through several seasons in its dogged pursuit of the "marvelous, meaningless accomplishment" embodied in the "towering plastic trophy" awarded to the champion of its C League in what's aptly known as "beer-league hockey," for the postgame gatherings that are as much an element of the experience as the on-ice contests.
Paumgarten's memoir is episodic, blending his often self-deprecatory reflections on his experiences with portraits of his fellow players like Junta, who once co-managed the band Phish, and the Brad, a master rigger of industrial cranes, whose ardor for the sport matched his own. Paumgarten is unafraid to visit the dark side of hockey, not least the casual homophobia that was "as common as mildew" among some of his teammates. Despite his reservations about hockey's less admirable aspects, he wasn't reluctant to introduce his two sons to the game, as he describes in a section on his experiences as a youth hockey coach and parent.
The Intangibles concludes with Paumgarten's wistful reflections as he considered, in his mid-40s, finally hanging up his skates and facing a "puckless life." Even with a growing list of chronic injuries, including several concussions, he adroitly captures the internal struggle facing any aging athlete when it's time to abandon a beloved game for good. "I love these men," he writes, and thanks to the intimacy of this memoir, he allows readers to experience some of that love along with him. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: In a heartfelt memoir, New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten recounts his decades-long infatuation with the sport of hockey, focusing on his time in aptly named beer leagues in New York City.