My Manliest Moment

By Joel Stein

I have proved myself ungifted in every athletic endeavor, and yet there's a part of me that watches pro sports and thinks, "I could have caught that." It was during one of those moments that I asked the people at the NHL to suit me up in goalie pads and let a player take slap shots on me. The strangest part was not that they said yes but that they required me to sign absolutely no legal waivers. This is a tough sport.

For advice and, I hoped, a convincing argument to back out of this arrangement, I called George Plimpton, who spent a season training as a goalie with the Boston Bruins for his 1985 book, Open Net. "Hockey players are the greatest cats on earth," he said Plimptonly. He then recounted his own experiences and lacerations. "I envy you," he said. "You'll have a lot of fun. Maybe you won't have so much fun. I don't know."

Plimpton's advice, though kindly, didn't seem like quite enough, considering I don't know how to skate. So I scheduled a lesson at a local ice-skating rink with a guy who coached the Israeli Olympic figure-skating team, which seemed impressive until I really thought about it. Still, in half an hour, he taught me to skate backward, scuff up the ice in front of the goal, bang on the goal pipes with my stick and blame my equipment when I got scored on.

My other method of preparation took place the morning before the big event, when I ate Wheaties and put on my lucky shirt. Never having played sports seriously, I didn't actually have a lucky shirt, so I just picked one and called it lucky. If I didn't do well, I would just call it my unlucky shirt and throw it away. I spent most of the morning on the shirt thing.

The NHL sent me to the practice facility of the New York Islanders, because while most teams were gearing up for the playoff season, which starts this week, the Islanders were gearing down for golf season. Their goalie, Felix Potvin, helped me put on four boxes' worth of equipment, which weighed 30 lbs. He then had Warren Luhning, a rookie forward, take shots on me. What I didn't realize was that Luhning had not yet scored an NHL goal and had a lot of pent-up aggression. This became obvious when he skated around the net with his arms in the air after scoring an 80-m.p.h. slap shot on me. Potvin thought that was overdoing it.

After 20 minutes, I was surprised to find I was drenched with sweat. I knew goalies were flexible and focused, but their job looked kind of sedentary, which is why it appealed to me in the first place. It turns out a goalie can lose 10 lbs. during a game. I couldn't believe how exhausting it is just to fall down on your knees and quickly get up again.

In his next game, Potvin had the game of his life, stopping 55 shots out of 57, which tied a team record. After the game, in a moment I now appreciate as a narcissistic epiphany, I pulled him away from a group of reporters to ask him about my goaltending. "Honestly, you were good," he said after much hounding. "You were very good. You made some good saves." Our experience, he suggested, may have contributed to his performance. As he left to get on the bus to the Islanders' game in Toronto, he turned to me and asked, "Can you come with me?" I said no. I've got my own game to work on.