Beacon had only been a bystander to this little drama up until now, but the gay slur instantly doubled his blood pressure. “Hey!” Beacon called after the ref. “You can’t let him say that shit! How many kids do you think just heard that? Bet the network got it on camera.”
The ref frowned, his eyes following Skews to the box, where the red-faced player was still cursing under his breath. Beacon saw the official think it through, his gaze snapping toward the television cameras. He turned and skated toward the scorekeepers’ bench. When he got there, he leaned in to confer with the official, and the linesmen skated over to join them.
Beacon fidgeted in front of his net, watching the confused faces of his teammates. Although the delay was probably only ten or fifteen seconds and counting, it was unusual in hockey.
A moment later, Beacon was stunned to hear the announcer call for Skews’s ejection from the game. “Unsportsmanlike conduct,” the ref had called. But instead of a bench minor, the guy was thrown the hell out.
There was a roar inside the stadium, as well as inside Beacon’s head. Holy shit. Holy shit, he repeated to himself. Players had been ejected from play-offs games before, but it was rare, and Beacon couldn’t think of an instance that did not involve egregious bodily harm to another player. Beacon was willing to lay odds that this would be the first time in NHL history that a player was ejected for hate speech. And in a play-offs game!
Holy shit. Their opponents were going to lose their ever-loving minds.
While the crowd continued to shout and stamp their feet—some in favor of this development, but many against—the refs called for a face-off. All his teammates were rested from their unexpected timeout, but their faces looked tense as the puck dropped.
Tampa won the puck, and play transferred quickly to Beacon’s end of the ice. His attention snapped back to the game. “Trevi’s open!” he barked at O’Doul, who couldn’t see the field as clearly as he could. “Man on!” he shouted at Castro a moment later. His whole world was reduced to the scrape of blades against ice and the slapping scramble of sticks and bodies.
His boys cleared the puck before things got too crazy. They iced it, though, so both teams went scrambling toward the other end of the rink. And it was on like Donkey Kong for the rest of a very sweaty period. Ultimately, the loss of their star center cost Tampa, though. And it was Beringer who put one in the net for Brooklyn before the buzzer rang. They all clomped down the chute into the visitors’ dressing room for the second intermission, awash in adrenaline.
“Well boys, that was interesting,” Coach said, snapping his gum. “You better lock this one up now. That’ll really make ’em squirm. And you need to show that whole goddamn arena you can clobber them with this weird-ass opportunity you just created.”
“We didn’t create it,” Beacon spoke up. “Skews did with his punk-ass mouth.”
“Excellent point, sir.” Coach put a hand to his chest. “My mistake. But your game better follow through. Capitalize on this disruption. Don’t let ’em get their shit together before you get your shots off.”
There were murmurs of agreement while everyone slugged back water and tried to stay loose. Beacon did some stretches, and then it was time to get back out there.
As everyone predicted, their opponents were downright pissy about the ejection. Things got chippy right away, and the game devolved into a hairy melee with a lot of artless potshots taken all around.
Beacon watched Leo Trevi get slashed in the back by a Tampa stick when the refs weren’t looking.
“They’re desperate,” Beacon reminded the sweaty rookie as he skated by. “We like that.”
“Right,” Trevi said through clenched teeth.
It was a brutal period, but scoreless for Tampa. When the ref caught one of their opponents’ illegal checks, Brooklyn got a power play and used it to score one more goal.
When the buzzer sounded, it was Brooklyn over Tampa, 2–0.
The minute he followed his team back into the locker room, Georgia Worthington scurried up to him. “The network has your face in the clip they spliced together about the Skews ejection. And the journalists are asking questions. I’m going to have them come into the dressing room to ask you what happened, okay? Because if I put you on the dais at the press conference, that makes the incident seem like some kind of Bruisers strategy.”
“Huh. Okay.” He stripped off his pads and tried to shake off his exhaustion. Georgia was a clever girl, and her instincts had never steered him wrong. Talking to reporters didn’t sound like all that much fun, though.
“What do you plan to say about it?” Georgia pressed. “They’ll want to know what made you prod the ref over Skews’s behavior.”
“I’ll just say that I didn’t want my daughter to think that hockey players were homophobic. And that we don’t ever use that word.” That made for a pretty good quote. He liked the sound of it. “If they press me, I’ll say that Elsa and I have close friends who battle discrimination, and it bothers us.”
“Or it saddens you,” Georgia suggested. She was always massaging their language to make them sound more approachable.
He chuckled, grabbing his jersey and hauling it over his head. “Fine. I’m saddened.”
Sure enough, he was saddened to find three sports writers and a cameraman waiting by his bench when he came back from the showers. “Is this where the party is?” he joked, grabbing his suit pants. “Give me sixty seconds and I’m all yours.”
He ducked back into a more private area near the showers to change, so his ass wouldn’t end up on television. Then he came back and put on a shirt while all three journalists asked their questions at once.
“Why did you ask the ref to consider a different penalty for Skews?” “Was it part of a strategy for Brooklyn?” “Are you involved with gay rights issues?”
“I heard the comment, and I didn’t like it,” he said slowly. He buttoned his cuffs and looked into the camera. “My child is a hockey fan. She was watching the game tonight. We talk about discrimination at home, so it, uh, saddened me to hear that word at the rink.”
Georgia gave him a wink from behind the cameraman.
“If a player dropped a racial slur in a game, he’d be punished, right?” he continued. “This was exactly the same thing.”
“It didn’t hurt that Tampa lost one of their best players,” suggested a male reporter who was scribbling on a notepad.
“I had no idea what the officials would decide,” he said, trying not to sound pissed off. “I wasn’t thinking about the outcome—only that his language wasn’t something the league should condone.”
Georgia gave him a thumbs-up. And she was smiling, so he decided to quit while he was ahead.
“That’s all I really have to say about it. Thank you.” He turned around and grabbed his tie off a hook. “I can hear my phone ringing,” he added. “That’s probably my little girl wanting to talk. So if you’ll excuse me.”
The reporters scattered as they often did when he played the single dad card. But his phone was ringing. He fished it out of his bag and took the call. “Elsa?”