Chapter Text
“With the fifteenth overall pick of the 1996 National Hockey League draft, the Philadelphia Flyers select, from Windsor College, defenseman William Loomis!”
A performer was born in that moment. Billy Loomis knew exactly how to smile for the cameras that were already pressing in around his face, waiting to see how the 18-year-old would react to this honor. A kid from a small town in northern California was now, officially, an NHL player. He tried to hide behind his curtained bangs, his smile a little crooked and a little sheepish, telling the audiences watching at home that he couldn’t actually believe his good luck. He shook his head a little for good measure, wondering how he could be so lucky. His shoulders were slumped inwards when he bounded up the stairs, when he shook the commissioner’s hand, when he accepted the burnt orange jersey. The number 96 was stitched onto one sleeve, the number 15 on the other.
After taking all the customary photographs, Loomis was led off-stage to make room for the next selection, and he was met by a bevy of reporters. Most were from the city that he was about to call his new home, but there was one face he recognized. “Gale Weathers, correspondent for Channel 4. I’m sure you know this already, but you are the first native of Woodsboro, California, to be taken in the NHL Draft. What message do you have for those back home who have seen you grow?”
“Wow. I mean, I don’t really know what to say.” Billy shook his head, brushed his hair out of his face, rubbed his eyes like this was a dream from which he was about to wake. To a trained eye, it was all a little too practiced. Whoever his media coach was, they were damn good. “I mean, we didn’t even have an ice rink back home. I had to play out in the street, or beg my dad to drive me somewhere that did. This is just… wow. It’s a colossal honor. I just hope my buddy gets taken. That would be cool, right? Two Woodsboro guys in the same draft class. I don’t want to have to play him, but if it comes to that…” He smiled again, revealing sharp teeth, and laughed a little at the possibility.
Everyone back home knew the story. Billy Loomis and Stu Macher grew up watching hockey on television. While their peers were busy with football or baseball, they were setting up goal posts in the middle of the street, practicing their puck handling with inline skates. At least once a week, someone would leave their house to yell at the pair when a puck went right through some neighbor’s window. The sound of glass shattering became synonymous with Loomis and Macher.
Billy got both his wishes in the end. Stu Macher fell to the third round, and Philadelphia took him at number sixty-four overall. They already had one – might as well complete the set, if such an opportunity was going to present itself. Backstage, some marketing agent was already brainstorming how to advertise this new era of orange and black. The Flyers already had their Legion of Doom, their offensive trio meant to stampede the competition, but there was a danger in putting Lindros, LeClair, and Renberg out there to die. Now the trio had some protection, a defensive pair that was ready to maul and kill. At first, hockey insiders referred to them as the Bash Brothers, but that nickname had already been locked up several years prior by Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. Ultimately, Woodsboro Killers was the epithet that stuck.
Loomis and Macher were never the most technically proficient. They were poor skaters, compared to many of their peers – a natural consequence when one spent more time practicing on the asphalt than on the ice. Neither were projected to be taken in the first round. the 1996 draft was heavy on better defensemen, and while nobody could deny the pair’s physicality, one year in the college circuit had been enough to establish a reputation. They were dirty players, leg sweepers and elbow throwers, happy to blindside you with a hit from behind. Whatever talent you were getting would always be covered up by the penalty minutes that Loomis and Macher accrued.
Which was, of course, exactly what the Flyers wanted.
Philadelphia had its reputation too. They called them the Broad Street Bullies. They played their best hockey when a couple guys on the team had no job other than hurting people. They needed a couple of players with black eyes, broken noses, and missing teeth. Guys who knew how to throw their weight around. Someone familiar with the law of simple exchange. On the one hand, you have a misplaced elbow or knee, a supposedly accidental hit to the back of the head. It cost you two minutes in the penalty box when you pled your case – it was an honest mistake, Stripes, I swear! I would never want to hurt someone like that! Meanwhile, the guy on the other side had to be carted off the ice. The doctor would tell him it was six to eight months before he could start skating again, if he wasn’t pushed to an early retirement.
The Flyers needed the Woodsboro Killers. They needed an insurance policy for their top scorers, they needed to live up to their reputation as a bunch of bullies, and they needed to sell tickets. Billy Loomis practically fell into their lap. They weren’t supposed to pick so high, not at first. Instead, they had managed to slough off a project to the Toronto Maple Leafs: take Dimitri Yushkevich off our hands, we don’t know what to do with him anymore. In exchange, they received the new face of their franchise, a name eternally associated with that era of hockey.
Sure, Stu Macher had his fans. He was a career chirper, always slinging insults across the bench at the other team. He looked the part of the mad dog, the guy practically foaming at the mouth as he reached the end of the chain leash that the team had to keep on him. He would stick his tongue out through his missing front teeth, spitting at and licking his opponents, and he had a reputation for playing through anything: cracked helmets and concussions, separated shoulders and fractured ankles. Just before Christmas of his rookie season, Stu had his stomach slashed open by a skate blade and insisted on finishing the period, blood blooming across the front of his sweater as he netted the game-winning goal.
But Billy? Billy was special. He had the affection of the old men in their Bobby Clarke and Bernie Parent jerseys, nodding in their faded 1975 baseball caps as they remarked how good it was that their team had someone who knew how to play the game right. But there was something that Loomis possessed that seemed to elude the other enforcers of his era: charm.
Every game, it seemed like there was a roar when Loomis took the ice, a cheering section that wasn’t usually found outside of performances by popular boy bands. Girls in their early twenties would line up at the glass, cardboard signs in hand to profess their love for the defenseman, begging him to give them even a shred of attention. They were the unwashed masses reaching out to touch the edge of Jesus’s cloak, happy just to be in the proximity of their hero. The luckiest among them would receive a gift, a puck tossed over the glass and into their hands. Others were content to receive a smile, or a wink, or a kiss blown their way.
Billy knew how to play to the crowds. When he was sitting on the bench between shifts, he made a show of taking off his helmet and shaking out his hair, spraying himself in the face with his water bottle. On his way into games, he wore tight shirts that showed his physique. He went out clubbing with his fans after games and showed up the next day with a blinding hangover, ready to do his job. He wasn’t just a hockey player. He was a stud, and he knew it. More than that, he used it to his advantage.
On May 19, 1997, Billy Loomis was sitting on a coach bus from the CoreStates Center in Philadelphia. Destination: Madison Square Garden. His team had split the first two games of that year’s Eastern Conference Finals and were headed into enemy territory, staring down the New York Rangers at home. They were three games away from reaching the Stanley Cup Finals. Not bad for two guys whose hometown didn’t even have its own ice rink. On the bus, Billy Loomis and Stu Macher laughed about a kid that they had wrecked in the last game over. A fellow rookie by the name of Steven Orth who would miss the next two seasons as he tried to rehabilitate his injuries. He never reached the projections, hindered by constant pain, and he retired as a draft bust with a painkiller addiction.
Across the country, Christina Carpenter was lying on her back alone in a hospital room, with a doctor telling her that she needed to push. She had held out hope that her daughter’s father might want to be there for this moment, but she understood that some things were more important.
“With the third overall pick of the 2019 Women’s National Hockey League entry draft, the New York Stampede are proud to select, from Blackmore College, center Samantha Carpenter!”
Sam had not inherited her father’s natural charisma. She hadn’t received his media coaching, either. She ignored the cameras that were zooming in on her face when her name was read aloud, instead turning to her sister, the only person who had accompanied her to the draft. It seemed like Sam had forgotten that she had to stand up and participate in the pomp and circumstance, as after embracing her sister, she and Tara spoke amongst themselves, whispering in tones too low for the cameras to pick up. She had to be nudged by some crew member to stand up and take the stage.
She wasn’t sure when it was going to hit her, that this was all real. That her dream – no, not her dream, never hers – was actually real. It wasn’t when they said her name, or when she walked up the stairs to the stage and shook the line of hands: the commissioner, the president and general manager of her future team. It wasn’t even when they asked her to hold up her hair so that they could put the navy and sea foam green jersey on her. The number 3 was stitched onto one sleeve, and the number 19 on the other.
Billy Loomis had to feign his humility, pretend that he didn’t think he deserved everything good that was coming to him. Samantha Carpenter had nothing to fake, just genuine slack-jawed shock as the camera lights filled her vision.
She was led off the stage just like her father had been, with a flurry of microphones shoved in her face, reporters who wanted to talk about her experience. Some of them were from New York, vultures waiting to hear who the Stampede expected to save their franchise, and others were from Woodsboro, seeking out the prodigal daughter. She recognized one of them as the sports beat writer for the Blackmore Letter, a student journalist who looked overwhelmed by the national reporters that circled in.
“Hi, hello, pardon me,” an older woman said, pushing through the crowds with practiced precision. She knew how to create space with her shoulders and elbows, weave through the crowd like someone who had been doing this for nearly a quarter-century. “Gale Weathers, Channel 4. Sam, as I’m sure you know, you are the first Woodsboro resident to be selected by a professional ice hockey league since 1996, when your father Billy Loomis was selected fifteenth overall by Philadelphia. How does it feel, following in your father’s footsteps like this? Do you have anything you want to say to him?”
Sam’s face fell when her father’s name was mentioned. She should have known this was coming, known that they would never just focus on her accomplishments. He would follow her around no matter what she did. It was inevitable, ever since the first time that she had laced up a pair of skates.
She heard Tara’s voice in her head, telling her not to rise to the bait, that she was better than that. At the same time, there was a microphone in her face, an opportunity to say something to the deadbeat that she had never been able to before. Sam reached out to pull the mic closer and stared into the Channel 4 camera, something cold and furious brewing behind her eyes. “Yeah, I do have something to say, actually. Go fuck yourself, you deadbeat piece of shit.”
Sam dropped the mic and pushed through the crowds, looking for her sister. Interview over.