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Pelle Lindbergh book excerpt |
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As a special thank you to everyone who has asked about the status of my English translation of Swedish journalist Thomas Tynander's biography of Pelle Lindbergh, I'm posting a lengthy exceprt from the first chapter of the American adaptation.
While I still need to do another full round of edits on the book, the project is finally entering the home stretch. My goal is to have it done by the end of the summer if possible.
The text is finally starting to get to a point where it's becoming accessible to North American readers without sacrificing the integrity of the original Swedish text. Thomas is a very good writer, with an excellent eye for detail and nuance.
Wherever possible, I've tried to retain Thomas' narrative on Pelle's world and character traits -- a lighthearted, gentle down-to-earth sort who got to live out his boyhood dream before making a horrible lapse in judgment one night and paying for it with his life.
Pelle was no saint. He had flaws like anyone else, especially his false belief that he was indestructible. On the flip side, what endeared him to so many people was his earnest optimism and love of life.
The excerpt below focuses mainly on Lindbergh's game day rituals, and some of the dynamics on his Flyers team. It takes place on the night of what would be his final start in the NHL (he was rested in the game played the evening before the fatal car crash).
I hope you enjoy it.
***********************************
Thursday, November 7, 1985
The water glistens on the Delaware River. After a week of bad weather, the sun is shining at last. It’s the first week of November, and when the late afternoon sun begins to set over Philadelphia, the temperature will fall quickly.
There’s heavy traffic on the Walt Whitman – the huge steel bridge that connects the suburbs of south Jersey to Philadelphia.
In the midst of the traffic snare, one car stands out: a bright red Porsche. Behind the wheel, in the bowl-shaped driver’s seat, Pelle Lindbergh grips the wheel impatiently. He’s dressed in a suit, necktie and cowboy boots. He's pained that he can’t call upon the 400 horsepower motor that awaits the call of his right foot.
Traffic jam notwithstanding, Pelle Lindbergh is in good spirits. He’s living his boyhood dream, and he knows it.
He grew up in the working-class southern part of Stockholm fantasizing about playing hockey for the Philadelphia Flyers – the team of his idol, Bernie Parent. Now, at 26 years old, he’s in his fourth National Hockey season for the Flyers. Parent is his goaltending coach and has become a surrogate father of sorts.
He’s engaged to Kerstin, a beautiful Swedish girl, with whom he’s hopelessly in love. The couple shares a lovely home in peaceful King’s Grant.
He’s got the car of his dreams. His love of speed is surpassed only by his passion for hockey, music, family and friends. For as long as anyone can remember, Pelle has been obsessed with sports cars. Now he owns the custom-made Porsche that inches along the bridge.
What’s more, he’s about to become wealthier than he ever thought possible when he was a boy. As the defending Vezina Trophy winner – representative of the best goaltender in the NHL – the Flyers have rewarded him with a long-term contract that will make the highest-paid Swede in the NHL, and one of the league’s best-paid goaltenders as well. All the terms have been worked out. Now all that remains is the signatures.
Pelle switches his car radio from an FM music station to a local AM station with frequent traffic updates. He mutters as he hears the announcer say the rush hour traffic started early today and to expect delays. At last, the Porsche gets over the toll bridge.
To pick up time, Pelle accelerates and navigates the car in between the traffic, switching lanes frequently. It’s nearly 5 o’clock. Pelle knows that if he’s late to the arena, he’ll catch hell from Mike Keenan, the Flyers’ tyrannical head coach.
Finally, Pelle slows down as he reaches South Broad Street, nearing the entrance of the Philadelphia Spectrum. It will soon be time to prepare for the team to prepare for its game against the Chicago Blackhawks.
Two minutes later, he pulls the Porsche into the players’ entrance at Pattison Avenue, parking in the same spot he always uses. He locks the car and walks down to the underground entrance at the back of the arena.
Pelle goes through the admission door that all of the Flyers players enter as they arrive at the Spectrum. As he strides in, he greets the guard – a wiry Filipino man named Leo. Sporting a pencil-thin mustache, Leo is dressed in a winter coat, jeans and a cap with Spectrum emblazoned on it. He’s an affable sort, and a familiar face Pelle has come to enjoy seeing as part of his regular routine.
The two men exchange smiles.
”Hey, Leo! What’s up, man?” Pelle asks in the breezy colloquial English he’d picked up during his five years of living in the USA.
They exchange small talk. Leo says something that strikes Pelle as very funny. A warm, familiar laugh fills the otherwise cold and sterile area.
****
The rink-level entrance way is poorly lit and untidy. A humming sound from distant fans serenades Pelle as he continues up the broad path up against the arena floor. He passes an aging Zamboni that’s parked too close to the wide gate that opens to the 17,000-plus seat arena.
The Philadelphia Flyers dressing room is set deep within the long internal corridor leading to and from the ice. Pelle knows the way by heart.
With quick steps, he turns right and heads down the long corridor that loops around the long sides of the stands in the tuna-can shaped building. The lighting is better here.
He he passes the visiting team lockerroom to his right, where Chicago Blackhawks players stand outside the door in shorts and t-shirts; some taping up their sticks. Pelle wordlessly acknowledges a former Flyers teammate, Behn Wilson, with a quick nod and continues on his way.
On the opposite site of the corridor is the Flyers’ family room, where a catering company is setting up a buffet. The Philadelphia 76ers lockerroom is the right. Pelle passes by without stopping.
In the past, Pelle had briefly met the NBA team’s biggest star, Julius ”Dr. J” Erving. Lindbergh is not much of a basketball fan, nor is Erving an ardent hockey follower. But their passing acquaintance is colored by a mutual admiration for each other’s rare athletic gifts, and a willingness to embrace the pressure that comes along with playing for one of Philadelphia’s pro sports teams.
The corridor folds off slightly to the left and a little further forward, on the right, stands the central door to the Flyers lockerroom. But Pelle, like most of the players, walks past it and instead opens an unmarked black door a few more feet away. All at once, he’s at work and he’s at home.
Pelle strides into a smaller room with rows of personal cabinets where the players can hang up their suits and store belongings. Here is also where the team post office is kept.
As one of the most popular players on the team and the NHL’s reigning Vezina Trophy winner, Pelle’s stack of mail is usually piled high. Despite his best efforts to regularly keep up with the fan mail, autograph requests and postcards he receives, the task has become increasingly difficult. The vast majority of the mail is postmarked from Sweden and the Delaware Valley.
Pelle scans around the room at the armchairs, huge TV set and refrigerator filled with beer and soft drinks. He sees several teammates standing around and his face breaks into a grin.
The small talk and good-natured ribbing begins immediately. Pelle is the shortest in the group, but the others have come to look up to him.
The previous season, Lindbergh proved his worth by not only winning the Vezina for his regular-season performance but also backstopping the team to the 1985 Stanley Cup Finals. Such deeds carry a lot of prestige in the lockerroom.
Stereotypically, goaltenders are supposed to be a moody lot. But the Flyers players can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times they’d ever seen Pelle in a bad mood – and never when he arrived at the rink.
With less than two hours to go before the drop of the puck for the opening faceoff, the players begin their preparations for the game. The joking stops and the players turn serious in their demeanor as they talk shop.
The room grows quiet for a moment as team captain Dave Poulin winds down the discussion.
“Anything else?” Poulin asks.
“Who are we playing tonight?” Lindbergh deadpans, furrowing his brow in mock confusion.
Everyone laughs.
As a fourth-season NHL player who’d emerged as one of the sport’s top stars, Lindbergh knows it's safe to joke around in that manner. Back in his first full NHL season, 1982-83, he’d have kept silent. There’s an unwritten code in hockey that rookies are supposed to be seen and not heard.
But Pelle knew by now that he’d earned his teammates’ trust and that his playful side wouldn’t be misinterpreted as disrespect or inattentiveness.
***
Hockey players in general and goaltenders in particular tend to be creatures of habit and superstition. Pelle is no exception. He’s developed a rather elaborate pre-game dressing ritual, and never willingly deviates from it.
From a wardrobe at his locker, he takes out his socks and undergarments, including a special long athletic t-shirt he purchased many years earlier at Ingvar Eriksson’s sport shop Stockholm. He considers the orange shirt to be an old war buddy.
Pelle originally chose that particular shirt because it sported the Flyers’ most distinctive team color. He hadn’t been drafted yet by Philadelphia, but it hardly mattered. The Flyers were his favorite team and he instantly declared the shirt to be a good luck charm to him.
Now, these many years later, Lindbergh’s Flyers teammates often teased him about the shirt’s weathered appearance. The guys made wiseass suggestions of better uses for it, advising Pelle to hang it from a car antenna, use it as a rag, or simply go bury it where no one could see or smell it. But to Pelle, the shirt’s every tatter and mend added to its character and comfort.
Pelle Lindbergh removes his street clothes and begins dressing for the game. He steps out into the main lockerroom.
His demeanor changes as he enters. Lindbergh ceases all chatter and puts on his game face. It’s in this room that the Flyers’ players transform from regular guys with outside lives into members of a professional team single-mindedly focused on winning a hockey game.
The team’s equipment managers have already prepared each player’s stall. On a shelf above each position-player station, there’s a white helmet and hockey gloves. Players’ pads, skates, black pants, white leggings are also arranged in easy-to-find fashion. The Flyers home white game sweater hangs neatly, with its orange and black sleeves and with names and numbers visible for everyone to see.
As the goaltender, Pelle gets a bigger locker space in a corner of the lockerroom lying at a ninety-degree angle to the shower room. He is particular about the placement of his pads, mask and other equipment, and the staff is very accommodating. Lindbergh runs his hand gingerly over a leg pad and then lays it carefully on the floor with the straps facing up.
Bob Froese, the Flyers’ backup goaltender, sits in the corner opposite Lindbergh. Their relationship, while cordial on the surface, is tinged by a degree of unspoken tension. On many NHL teams, the two goalies sit closer to one another, but not these two.
There’s almost always friendly rivalry between goalies on a team, with the camaraderie ideally outweighing the sense of competition. While Froese and Lindbergh have no personal animosity toward one other, there’s also little in the way of a quasi-fraternal bond. Froese has made it clear, through his frequent half-joking barbs, that he believes in his heart that he’d do just as good of a job as Lindbergh if given the opportunity.
Pelle’s idol and mentor, Bernie Parent, had the same sort of relationship with his longtime backup, Wayne Stephenson. The latter was a capable NHL goaltender. Stephenson could have started for many teams, but his talents were a cut below those of the future Hockey Hall of Famer. Now, as Flyers goaltending coach, Parent is in the unique position of trying to help Froese play the Stephenson role.
So far, it’s been working. Both keepers have played well. Last night, Froese got the nod from Keenan in a game against the Rangers at Madison Square Garden. It was his fifth appearance of the season, and also his fifth victory. The Flyers won the game, 5-2. Tonight, Pelle is back in net against Chicago.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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