Why did Malcolm Gladwell write a World War II book? The bombing campaign over Europe and Japan is hardly his typical beat: Cliff-noting TED talks for the MBA crowd. Where’s the investment edge here?

It’s an obvious question that Gladwell addresses in the opening Author’s Note. The Bomber Mafia is not so different than his other books, he says, because it is about “obsessives,” “my kind of people.” The topic is no less than “one of the grandest obsessions of the twentieth century.” Join him, for “I don’t think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.”

Which I think we can all agree, if nothing else, is a completely bizarre way to open and frame a book about killing millions of people with air strikes.

The Bomber Mafia was my first chance to experience the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect with Gladwell. You know the phenomenon, if not the name. Michael Crichton described it this way:

“You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Turn the page on Gladwell—the self-proclaimed reviser of history, who helps us see and understand the overlooked and misunderstood—and what do you find? It wasn’t until he wandered into my area of expertise that I appreciated the extent of the shallowness, so to speak.

My first encounter with him was Outliers, which in classic Gladwell fashion promises to explain sociological events with a surprising counter-intuitive twist. Why are rich New York corporate take-over lawyers Jewish? Why are 40% of professional hockey players born in January? (They’re not.) The book stuck with me because I had a young son obsessed with hockey; should he just “give up” because he wasn’t born in the right month?

Gladwell calls Outliers a how-to guide, but always dissatisfyingly so. I can’t change my son’s birthday. And even if you accept his case for why Jewish people from the Garment District born in the 1930s were destined to become highly successful attorneys, he never explains how the individuals themselves did it. Why one poor boy in the tenement and not his friend? Why one hockey player born in January and not another? One gets the sense that the answer may undermine Gladwell’s thesis and so is left out, or, more conspiratorially, is revealing of other Big Ideas that Gladwell has less interest in exposing, such as the false meritocracy.

I am not a sociologist or a sports psychologist, so I can’t tell you the failures in Gladwell’s arguments in Outliers. But as a former Air Force officer, I know a fair bit about the service’s history and culture, and so I was curious what would happen when he took on a subject I knew.

My conclusion is this: Gladwell is right about Air Force pilots being obsessives, but completely wrong about the object of their desire. Which is surprising, because if anyone should be able to understand amoral perfectionists, it’s a wanna-be Tech Bro like Gladwell.

*

Before I go further, a relevant admission: I tried to write a Gladwell book once. Or, more specifically, I had a book proposal that several editors said would be more successful as a Gladwell book. Meaning, crush the narrative inside a big unifying theme that obliterates nuance but provides more reader satisfaction, that simplifies reality into an easily digestible 220-page pill with a plain white cover. “Gladwell on IEDs” or “Gladwell on Modern War.” This was the editorial feedback.

My second book, All the Ways We Kill and Die, was this book. The only vestige of the Gladwellian feedback is the biz-speak ubiquitous white cover. Any airport bookstore patron can tell you that a white cover with a single centered object says this is a book with easily digestible ideas.

But the Big Idea in my book—that my friend Matt Schwartz had died because he was targeted by the Taliban individually, just as the United States fights the “War on Terror” by targeting individuals as well—was really always more about personal pain than an objective critique of American SOF policy. My friends died and lost arms and legs and so instead of writing a revisionist counterfactual I wrote about grief and suffering, which are not really business seminar topics. That Matt’s death was premeditated murder, and not just random violence, was confusing, and more hurtful somehow. Working with the right editor, I eventually found the unifying theme, but never the hubristic clarity. And without an application for corporate America, my Gladwell cover did not have the effect my publisher’s sales department hoped.

Gladwell’s Big Idea in The Bomber Mafia is that in the 1930s and 40s there was a deeply moral initiative by a small group of pilots at the Army Air Corp’s Tactical School in Montgomery, Alabama called the Bomber Mafia. Their secret plan was to “make all that deadly, wasteful, pointless conflict on the ground obsolete” by strategically bombing key pieces of enemy infrastructure, forcing them to surrender. This “dream” is embodied by two men, the flawed true-believer Haywood Hansell, and the hardcore Curtis LeMay who betrays the cause and falls to the “temptation” of winning World War II through the indiscriminate firebombing of Tokyo.

It goes without saying that such a fable ignores plenty, including most of the people in said mafia who worked on the doctrine and were responsible for its conception, implementation, and later revision. For example, Gladwell makes much of the fact that to prove the efficacy of precision air strikes LeMay led an exercise bombing US Navy ships in 1937, while ignoring that Billy Mitchell did the same thing to prove the same point, but sixteen years earlier, in 1921.

But a short book only has room for a few characters, a hero and a villain, plus a few cherry-picked anecdotes disguised as the discovery of something new, the surprise of the “overlooked and misunderstood” papering over the messy reality. The Bomber Mafia’s small pages, large font, and conversational tone are noted in every review, but it bears repeating: this book should appear on creative writing syllabuses at colleges all over, as a cautionary case study in the major differences between writing for the eye and the ear.

The idea that the strategic bombing campaign of World War II in Europe and the Pacific is overlooked is laughable on its face — few campaigns have been discussed at greater length, or in more detail. Presumably Gladwell has written his book because he believes we misunderstand the campaigns, then, and the misunderstanding is the deeply moral nature of the effort.

Reviews at The New Republic and The Baffler have thoroughly discussed the repugnancy of this view. Say what you will about the military necessity of strategic bombing, it should be beyond question that killing millions of civilians as a by-product of that bombing was immoral. Gladwell is not interested in considering how the ends may or may not have justified the means.

Instead of discussing Gladwell’s ethical stance, I’d like to address his central conceit: was the Bomber Mafia motivated by morality? Were their intentions pure? Were pilots and leaders animated first and foremost by a shining ethical ideal while planning and executing one of the most harmful events in absolute terms in the history of warfare?

Here, not only does Gladwell misunderstand how events unfolded, he misunderstands the part that speaks to his supposed greatest strength as a journalist: corporate organizational culture. The Air Force, dominated as it is by pilots, has a distinct culture from the other branches. To Gladwell, the precision daylight bombers are early Silicon Valley pioneers, just trying to make the world a better place through scientific advancement.

Whether Gladwell misjudges all Tech Bros, I cannot say. But at least he misunderstands pilots. Precision daylight bombing is not a moral undertaking. It is an amoral obsession with perfection.

Pilot culture is about never making mistakes while operating in extremely complex situations. When a mistake is made, and a plane crashes, investigators will spend hundreds of pages documenting every error and failure. The goal is absolute perfection at all times.

In All the Ways We Kill and Die, I wrote about this culture, through the eyes of an F-15C pilot named Evil. He explained to me that being a pilot is about tactical thinking.

“First breaking a problem down into its component variables, and then solving the equation repeatedly as each variable changed second by second: …. air speed, heading, altitude, missiles, gun, radio, radar, wind speed, direction, cloud ceiling, the Cons, restricted airspace, wingman’s location, wingman’s heading, target, tactics. Double that number to consider the enemy’s equivalent of each. Computing and computing and computing every second.”

Relentless problem-solving and obsessiveness, according to Evil, permeated everything. “It’s why our wives hate us. We are all competitive, and we all try to make everything perfect,” he told me.

Missing a target with a bomb is not primarily a moral question, to this culture. It is a mistake. It is inefficient. Unprofessional. Flawed. Culturally, precision daylight bombing was an opportunity for pilots to maximize their equations. A greater chance to be perfect.

In the Cold War, the search for the perfect bombing campaign expanded, from a strategic theory to the entire reason for the Air Force’s existence. At its heart, the Air Force’s main goal is to fight and win wars all by itself. Small wars are distractions from this purpose. The Air Force exists to win the Big One, all alone.

Being able to win a war solo is still fundamental to the Air Force identity. It’s why the Air Force became a separate service, why it so jealously guards its budget and chip-on-its-shoulder heritage. On a basic level, the Air Force believes that everything the Army and Navy might do in Big One will be secondary to the main fight. Evil told me once that he trained his whole professional life for the first hour of fighting over Iran and the first 24 hours over Taiwan, in which he needed to be no less than perfect.

In the decades after World War II, the service worked to develop the technology to win the perfect campaign. TV-guided weapons, then laser-guided, then GPS-guided, and now automated weapons that synthesize information and guide themselves. As the Cold War turned hot in Vietnam, the leadership of the Bomber Mafia gave way to the Fighter Mafia, as the best pilots and top leaders followed the action. But as fighter pilots took over key leadership posts in the Air Force, the pursuit of perfect precision remained.

And so the Air Force has never really gotten the war it wanted. In the last 80 years, it has come close twice: Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. All military objectives achieved from the air, no messy boots on the ground during the fighting, only for the boring stabilizing afterwards. Not the Big One, but almost a Perfect One.

In the late 1990s, when I was studying to become an Air Force officer, I read serious articles in academic publications, like Airpower Journal, that predicted the end of ground combat had arrived. Airpower had finally lived up to its potential, specifically when led by the Air Force, which allowed the Navy a few sorties as a goodwill gesture. As late as the Winter 2001 issue, the last pre-9/11 edition, authors were still writing articles with titles like “Airpower versus a Fielded Army: A Construct for Air Operations in the Twenty-First Century,” about strategies for the Air Force to defeat enemy ground forces singlehandedly. There is a certain wistful tone. Yes, the Air Force existed to strategically crush the enemy’s overall will to fight, but they could tactically destroy soldiers too as required. Air Force weapons were so precise, the scalpel so sharp, they could slice off fingers individually as well as carve out the heart, just tell them where to start cutting.

That the enemy would put their hands in their pockets, or hold hands with children, never seems to occur to the grand strategists; this is a perfectionist pursuit, not a moral one.

*

Gladwell provides no primary source evidence that the Bomber Mafia generals themselves saw precision bombing as a moral undertaking. Instead, he provides quotes from two modern historians, Stephen McFarland and Tammi Biddle, as proof of this belief. (There is no bibliography, and according to the notes the book is based on interviews with eleven people.)

And yet the evidence that the Bomber Mafia were obsessed with perfection rather than morality is to be found in the book itself. LeMay, a dyed-in-the-wool member of the mafia, eventually dismisses the strategic bombing plan as nothing but late-night grad school discussion, calling it “trying to find something to win the war the easy way, and there ain’t no such animal.” LeMay was cold-blooded in balancing aircrews lost versus bombs on target. He counts percentages of cities destroyed, as later generals would do body counts in Vietnam and “AFRICOM assesses four terrorists killed” press releases about drone strikes today. When he talks through the details of his tactics, how they kept trying different methods, practicing take-offs in the fog, changing formations so all his pilots flew in straight over the target (even Robert McNamara later called him “brutal” for doing it), Gladwell sees a moral stalwart rather than someone focused on continuous improvement. Later, Gladwell quotes Conrad Crane, the former director of the US Army Military History Institute, who calls LeMay “the Air Force’s ultimate problem solver.” But also, “he was one of those guys that, if you gave him a problem to fix, you didn’t ask a whole lot of questions how he was going to fix it.” Correct, and also hardly someone engaged on an ethical crusade. It is someone doing the best he can with the tools he has.

The American general Ira Eaker, in selling his bombing plan to Churchill, says that if the British bomb at night and the Americans by day then “bombing them thus around the clock will give the devils no rest.” Biddle tells Gladwell that it is “very odd” that Arthur “Bomber” Harris of the Royal Air Force (who bombed at night) and Eaker would become such good friends. But it’s only odd if you think the Bomber Mafia was about signalling virtuous behavior rather than achieving success.

If Gladwell had chosen other quotes by those characters, the case is even stronger. Yes, LeMay is famous for saying he would bomb his enemies back to the Stone Age. But even that same Ira Eaker, briefing President Truman in June 1945, about the upcoming invasion of Japan, said that he agreed with General George C. Marshall that “It is a grim fact that there is not an easy, bloodless way to victory in war.”

The ugly truth is that LeMay was not “tempted” to do a bad thing, in the firebombing of Japan. Neither temptation nor salvation were on the table. Rather, the perfectionist simply saw firebombing as the best amoral option, the best solution to the problem. LeMay isn’t cruel, he’s indifferent. And ultimately, the Air Force continued LeMay’s problem solving mindset to fix, ironically, the process he had derided as “the easy way.” As the technology has gotten better, “the easy way” has remained the goal.

Gladwell writes as if the way history happened is the only way it could ever have been. That any attempt to imagine another historical path is to misunderstand an inevitability that only he can explain. By providing the counter-intuitive “revisionist” version of this history, he aspires to sound doubly convincing. My new explanation is air-tight, he implies confidently. A Calvinist dressed up in a pedantic sociologist’s clothes.

Jewish people in the Garment District were destined to run law firms and LeMay would inevitably fall to temptation. Hansell was too pure to succeed, LeMay too gruff to stay true.

Couching the bombing campaign in terms of a tragic character flaw, rather than a choice, makes Gladwell’s offhand descriptions of the firebombing itself more grotesque. Nothing more than the cast-off by-product of one of his obsessives. It’s jarring and incongruous. Is this truly a moral issue, or just a bad business decision, as he would cover in his other books? Gladwell engages with the actual horror of war as he would a quarterly loss report, and yet even manages to praise the actions in the end. Japan surrendered and gave LeMay a medal in 1964. Maybe it wasn’t lost profit after all? Maybe the firebombing was an investment that paid off.

*

Gladwell ends the book with a chatty roundtable of current Air Force generals at the Chief of Staff’s elegant home on Fort Myer, Virginia. From the quotes provided, the journalist Gladwell was seemingly asking such hard-hitting questions as “Tell me again how great airpower is,” a continuing of his tendency to go to the leaders of organizations to find out what it’s like to be a peon.

After listening to the generals brag about the precision of today’s weapon systems, Gladwell concludes “Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.”

Which is more than simply confusing and factually incorrect. It also presumes that Hansell didn’t just “win” the ideological battle within the Air Force, but that he was objectively correct as well.

Air strikes are regularly cited as a swiss army knife solution to seemingly every international problem, from Yemen to Afghanistan to Ukraine. Last July, during anti-government protests in Cuba, Miami’s mayor floated the idea of bombing the country.

Which is why it is noteworthy that Gladwell never asks this basic question: what is the evidence that strategic precision bombing works? He cites no cases, either positively from Kosovo or negatively from, well, anywhere else. A la Outliers and the illusions of the meritocracy, this is perhaps not the kind of question Gladwell tends to ask of his obsessives.

So let’s instead ask a similar question on the book’s own terms: what is the evidence that strategic precision bombing is more moral? Or that it simply kills fewer civilians?

Azmat Khan’s reporting in the New York Times has put to bed the lie that the American-touted bombing campaigns spared civilian lives. Rather, officials denied civilian casualties, or failed to investigate, to ignore the true cost. Khan reported that one American official broke down when he realized that though the US had seemingly taken great pains in precision attacks in Raqqa, and the Russians had no such precautions in Aleppo, in the end both Syrian cities were utterly destroyed.

“Eventually I stopped saying that this was the most precise bombing campaign in the history of warfare,” the official said to the New York Times. “So what? It doesn’t matter that this was the most precise bombing campaign and the city looks like this.”

The Russians purposely target hospitals and chicken farms, the Americans accidentally hit them; either way, the results are the same.

And is it not results, measured quarterly, that are most important to Gladwell’s MBA readers?

In many ways, contemporary Russian attacks in Syria and Ukraine are closer to what the American World War II generals actually wanted in their bombing campaigns: both precision and impunity. The ability to target a hospital, hit it precisely, and get away with it. Modern American generals enjoy immunity in other areas. Drones strikes, on average, kill ten times more civilians than attacks by manned aircraft, and yet have a reputation for precision and cleanliness, and thus largely, until recently, get a pass by the general public.

Are precision strikes a moral way to win war? Not yet. Strategic bombing campaigns remain bloody, messy, often ineffective, and still of arguable necessity. This ambiguity is difficult for even experts to handle, and Gladwell’s entire raison d’etre is not to write as an expert but as an amalgamator of expertise. The Bomber Mafia isn’t an honest or earnest look at what experts have written and thought about America’s air campaigns during WWII. In the end, the book’s central flaw resides at the core of Gladwell’s supposed greatest strength. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effects predicts sociologists and sports psychologists would say the same for his other books.

John Gurdenson’s legs weren’t what they used to be, and though the veteran charged hard on the forecheck, he was slow, too heavy and slow, and all of us in the arena groaned as the puck slipped down the ice away from him again.

The opposing defenseman took control, easily stepped away, beat Gurdenson along the wall, and made a crisp first pass. The rush headed back the other way. Gurdenson swung his stick at the legs of the Pittsburgh defenseman, gave him the look and the head nod—we knew the signal and a few of us started to clap in anticipation—but the other player ignored him and skated away. Gurdenson drifted back to the bench for a change.

First line out. Tailor hopped over the boards and sprinted into the offensive zone. We all stood, every time Tailor hit the ice. His skates churned the surface with each step, as if he was grabbing great fistfuls of ice and pulling himself along, climbing a rope with his strength alone. It was beautiful to watch. Tailor was just a rookie who had found his spot in the lineup halfway through the season, after Gurdenson broke his ribs. . We loved to watch him fly, plus he had a nose for the net, and was tough and squirrelly and just a bit of a pest, the kind of guy you definitely want on your team and not theirs, which made us cheer all the more.

Gurdenson waited on the bench. Another change, and another. Third line, second line, first line, goal. Amirov, from Tailor, off a cagey steal in the offensive zone. A pretty play, the announcer said, muscle to finesse and a big finish.

We threw our hats on the ice in a shower of New Year’s confetti. The home crowd, the sound we made, it was the din of starving men gorging at the master’s table. We were up 4-1. We wanted five. We wanted ten. We wanted to feast until we puked. After years of losing, we couldn’t get enough.

“Gurdsy, Renault, Scotty, you’re up,” the assistant coach yelled, calling the line.

Off the faceoff, the puck skipped past Gurdenson, his feet always stuck in cold oatmeal, but then, behind the action, an opportunity. The young defenseman never saw the thick tree trunk fall. Gurdenson’s check caught him on the hip and shoulder, flipped him sideways, all legs and outstretched arms so he spun to the ice like an unbuckled passenger tossed from a moving car. The noise in the arena hadn’t dimmed since the goal, but now we found a new octave. We stood up as one, pounded our seats and our fellow fans because we knew what was coming. The Troll had been our champion for a decade.

Gurdenson skated backwards away from the fallen man. A dancing partner from the other corner approached. They shook off their gloves and each grabbed a hunk of sweater and turned on the two piston engine. We were incensed. The fighters traded right hands.

A spectacle at center ice, and all eyes on Gurdenson.

Our man absorbed three fists to the side of the head before his helmet went flying. His challenger’s helmet stayed on though, and good thing too, the announcer would say. Gurdenson bloodied the lip of his younger opponent with a right and the kid went woozy and his knees buckled. Gurdenson shifted his weight, leaned back, kept the boy upright with the left hand, didn’t let him fall, and then delivered another right to the mouth. Teeth flew. Gurdenson’s hand split between the knuckles and his grip with his left started to falter. The kid was all limp dead weight, lights out, but Gurdenson didn’t hesitate, swung and connected twice more before the unconscious boy finally slipped free, his helmeted head bouncing off the ice when he landed.

Gurdenson stood over him for a moment, and then skated away even before the referees approached.

Nineteen thousand of us chanted “Troll! Troll! Troll! Troll!” As many cell phone cameras flashed. Gurdenson pointed a finger at the Pittsburgh bench, picked his next victim, gave a “see-you-in-the-playoffs” nod, and we roared even louder. Two minutes for roughing, five for fighting, and a game misconduct. Gurdenson’s night was over. He skated to the door, shuffled back to the dressing room, and waited for the rest of the team. The third period would end soon.

Gurdenson sat in front of his stall. He was the only one in the room. He gingerly removed his jersey, stretched a shoulder, checked a bruise, shook out his right hand and stuffed it in a bag of ice that quickly turned pink.

He sat and waited for his team, and it was there, alone, helmet and shoulder pads off, towel over his neck, that it happened.

The general manager walked in from the side door that led to the executive offices. A tie and cologne and a red face and slicked back hair. It was just the two of them.

“You’ve been traded, Gurdsy.”

Gurdenson looked up at him, a moment, and then back down between his skates.

“You’re headed to the Island, effective immediately.”

Silence.

“You can get dressed.” Pause. “Thanks for everything you’ve meant to this organization.”

The general manager walked out. Gurdenson’s deliberate breath and the creak of his tightly laced skates and our dull rumble muffled all until the double-swinging locker room door burst open and crisp sticks and shouts and clatters from the team and the crowded arena behind.

The game was over. Gurdenson didn’t move. The coach gave a speech and the team congratulated young Amirov on his first hat trick and slapped Tailor’s back and Gurdenson sat and stared a hole in the plush carpet. Water bottles and the showers and sticks checked and re-taped. Then slowly, at a level below the operational clamor of full professional locker room, restrained voices passed the news from player to player. They glanced over. Gurdenson met no eyes.

The others gathered their gear and put on their suits and ties, but as they left the room, one-by-one each man walked up to Gurdenson where he still sat with his skates on, tapped him with the blade of their stick, under their breath:

“Tough one, Gurdsy.”

“Good luck, Gurdsy.”

“See you around, Gurdsy.”

The coach put a hand on his shoulder. Gurdenson couldn’t see him shake his head.

“It’s a tough deal, Gurdsy. It’s a business now, eh, but it’s a tough deal. You take care of yourself.”

The coach was the last to leave. Gurdenson again sat alone in the empty dressing room. He sat there for a long time. Then he got up, put on his suit without showering, and left out the back door of the arena where no one was waiting for him.

*****

OCTOBER 1996, SAULT STE MARIE, ONTARIO, SOO GREYHOUNDS RADIO BROADCAST:

Knights recover the puck, slip it along the halfwall, lose control, now they have it back, and dump it into the Soo zone.

Robert with the puck, finds his man, Soo coming away, long pass to Paquet and OH MY Ballard just stepped into Paquet at the Soo bench.

Paquet had his head down and Ballard just freight-trained him!

Paquet never saw it and he’s hurt. Paquet is down.

Play continues, puck slides into London’s end but now there’s some chirping going on and it looks like Gurdenson is challenging Ballard.

Gurdenson, in his first game here with the Soo, he isn’t wasting any time and they throw down the gloves and here they go!

Gurdenson and Ballard!

Gurdenson grabs on and starts throwing rights in there!

Ballard can’t get his head up, Gurdenson’s pummeling him with the right!

Ballard hasn’t even swung yet but now he does and both men are swinging away. Ballard and Gurdenson!

Ballard connects on a right and another one but WOW Gurdenson just caught him square on the nose. Gurdenson KO’d Ballard and he’s stunned. That nose has gotta be broken, Gurdenson dropped him like a sack of potatoes.

But now here comes McCarthy. You knew he was going to get involved.

And Gurdenson has got to be exhausted. He’s got to be just spent, after the tilt with Ballard and Ballard is one tough customer but he is still down on the ice and you can see the blood now pooling at his knees.

They need to get in there. The officials need to get in there and stop this. Gurdenson just fought and he’s got to be spent but the linesmen are distracted with Paquet and Ballard and the scrum in front of the Soo bench.

Well, McCarthy has taken exception and Gurdenson isn’t backing down and so here they go.

Gurdenson and McCarthy!

Gurdenson is giving up twenty pounds easy and McCarthy has his grip with the left and here he comes with the right, over the top.

And Gurdenson is still trying to get a hold and McCarthy comes in with another right and another.

He’s firing the right and Gurdenson can’t get his grip and he still hasn’t swung and OHHHHH McCarthy popped him right on the button! He caught him square with a right!

But Gurdenson is still on his feet somehow and now he comes back with a right. And another!

Both men just firing the punches in there and now Gurdenson frees his left hand and switches sides and starts going overtop with the left.

He surprised McCarthy and he caught him with a beauty and McCarthy looks dazed.

Gurdenson has McCarthy’s jersey up over his head and now the left and an uppercut and another, Gurdenson is working the side of the head and down to the ice they go!

WOW!

Gurdenson, the young kid from Detroit, a troll from below the Mackinac Bridge, makes his mark in the Soo!

He’s fighting like a troll out there.

Ballard still hasn’t gotten up yet and the trainer has come out and I can’t see his face but it has got to be a mess. McCarthy has gone straight to the dressing room with a huge cut over his eye and that’s gunna need stitches.

And this crowd is on their feet here in Sault Ste Marie as Gurdenson is still squawking at the Knights bench.

Welcome to the league, Troll!

*****

“You know, Bobby, I can’t even believe I need to make this phone call.”

“Oh lay off the bullshit, Tom. I’m not buying, you can stop selling. You and John both knew this was coming. Or you should have.”

“My client’s been with you twelve years. That should count for something.”

“It does. It means we’ve paid him a lot of money and he should be grateful for it.”

“He was with you in thick and thin, Bobby, and there was a lot of thin. And this is how you treat him?”

“For fuck’s sake, we’re making a run. You can see that. I have to do what’s best for the team.”

“John Gurdenson is best for your team. He’s given his body and soul to this team and this city and now, on your best shot at the cup in thirty years, this is when you move him?” Silence. “This game used to be about loyalty, Bobby. What happened to loyalty? What happened to veteran leadership?”

“It’s a different game, Tommy. I need goals.”

“You need leadership and toughness.”

“I need goals and toughness. You can’t have one or the other anymore. Did you see what Tailor did last night?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“He destroyed his check and then set up Amo. I never saw John make a play like that, never. That Tailor kid can fight but he can also hit and pass and …”

“And he’s only played what, fifteen games for you?”

“Yes, and so he makes fucking half what Gurdenson does! Fifteen games, four goals, five assists. For half! We needed the cap room. This is our year, Tommy, this is it.”

“The fans love him.”

“The fans love winning. The fans love the cup.”

“True, but not like John. He’s old time. He does things the old way. He’d do anything for the cup and you know it. You’ve seen it. The things he’s endured for this team. This is like, like….” He searched for the word. “… a banishment or something. You can’t do this to him.”

“Listen, Tommy, I like you. I like John. It would have been nice to keep him. If it was like a couple years ago, you know, he used to be able to chip in a couple goals a year. He had what, ten, in ‘08? Those days are long gone, Tommy, you know it. Tailor has nine points in fifteen games. John hasn’t had a point in the last twenty, at least. And he’s not nearly as tough or durable as he thinks he is. With the injury troubles too, John should consider this a hint.”

“A hint for what?”

“I wish him all the best. Tailor is our man now. Tell Gurdsy good luck.”

*****

Gurdenson read the rule book six times, but there was no loophole or caveat or mercy clause to find. The league was explicit and direct. To get your name on the cup, you had to be in the series final or play forty one games that season.

Gurdenson looked at the schedule. Sixty two games so far, but he missed two with a hip strain, seven with a busted hand that was still broken when he came back. And then the ribs, cracked in practice when Tailor hit him on a non-contact drill. Over-excited or deliberate or what, didn’t matter, Gurdenson went out five games, Tailor went in, earned a spot in the lineup. After that, the worst, the coup de grace, ten games as a healthy scratch. Ten games gone so Tailor could play.

Gurdenson did the math. Sixty two minus twenty four was thirty eight. Thirty eight games. Three short.

Three short, no cup.

They’d win it this year, everyone knew it. Three short. No cup.

Tailor would only have thirty six, but he’d be in the cup final for sure.

Gurdenson took another drink.

The ribs. Tailor. Three short, no cup.

He checked the schedule again, noted every game left for his old team, saw that the Island wasn’t on it, and then he picked up the phone and called his agent.

*****

The closest we came to the Stanley Cup was the year before. We made it to the conference finals, the last step before playing for it all. We hadn’t made the playoffs in five years, hadn’t won a series in twice that. But now we had a young and up-and-coming team, a bench full of draft picks still in their diapers; only Gurdenson had endured the previous long years of toiling in fallow fields.

The first two rounds were a breeze, but in the third round the team encountered an older and tougher squad. We were hesitant and unsure, exposed as pretenders merely playing dress-up in our father’s clothes. We lost that series in only five games, but no true fan among us would forget that our team’s tender spines only bent and did not break, that our will was not permanently dashed, because of the actions of John Gurdenson in game three.

Our boys had been out-muscled in the corners, out-bruised in the paint, stripped and pushed off the puck, knocked about and we boo’d them hard until, as a final humiliation, our goaltender was sent sprawling, a blind hit from behind. Somehow his mask hit the pipe on the way down. He didn’t move for several minutes. The shame was not that he went to the hospital for a brain scan, but rather that every man on ice watched it happen and did nothing.

The coach was planted behind the bench as an unvented furnace. He grew red and silent. No more shouts and mocks and cajoles of the line of smooth faces before him. He put out Gurdenson. We all knew the reason why, for the Troll but to do and…well, you know the rest.

When the puck was dropped Gurdenson ignored it. He skated directly to the opposing bench, discarding his gloves as he went.  We knew what was coming, we started our chant for the Troll. His target knew as well, and was half out of his seat when Gurdenson arrived and grabbed his sweater by the outside of the shoulders and pulled him over the boards and onto the ice. The man hit awkwardly but was up quickly. He had bent over goaltenders before, and knew how to stand tall to answer for the taking of liberties.

We always loved Gurdenson because he fought like he had nothing to lose, like he wouldn’t earn his supper if he didn’t take his licks. The newspaper said he fought like a bareknuckle boxer in the hidden back room of a speakeasy, betting the rent money on himself. That he fought to win, not to prolong a show until a referee might step in. Fans knew that a Gurdenson fight meant blood and broken orbitals.

That night, when Gurdenson got to that bench, eleven years of losing poured on the head of his opponent. He pummeled the man and discarded him, but then a second contender approached, and a third. More hands reached out from the bench, grabbed Gurdenson’s elbows and collar. His left arm was pinned. He lost his grasp on the other man’s jersey. A fist swung.

There was a time, not that many years before perhaps, when John Gurdenson would have ducked his head, broken free, twisted away at the last second. But no more. The years hung from him as invisible weights on his ankles and wrists. The right hand hit him in the temple, providence fled, and then surely nothing but a few dim stars amidst the void.

Gurdenson staggered. The rest of his team watched as he was pulled into the opposing bench and gang tackled. Two men pinned his lower half, many more on top. Gurdenson never said what happened to him at the bottom of the pile; it was hidden behind the boards, away from the cameras, never appeared on a highlight reel or replay. It took several minutes for the referees to pull everyone off, and all anyone ever saw was the result.

When Gurdenson emerged he was unrecognizable. He head and face were lumpy, like a thawed Thanksgiving turkey just taken out of the packaging. Blood pooled in unnatural places behind tight skin. His eyes were swollen to blindness. His left arm hung. We were quiet. No Troll calls in the arena. He was guided to the locker room to be treated by the doctors, and would spend two days in the hospital.

The coach stalked behind the bench, slammed a heavy palm against the glass behind him, and finally opened the coke oven door:

“Now you sons of bitches will believe we’re in a war!” he roared.

*****

“You know Tommy, we could have talked on the phone,” said Tampa’s general manager, a round balding man with a stubbly goatee. “Why not that? Why fly down?”

The waitress came over and filled the two water glasses. She spilled a few drops perilously close to the big man’s lap and he looked up and gave her a face but she didn’t notice.

“And they don’t even offer sparkling instead,” he mumbled to himself. And then, louder, “Tommy, why are we here?”

“Maybe I just missed seeing your face?” Tom said, and took a sip.

“The trade deadline is tomorrow and I have work to do. Why did you come down here?” he asked again.

Tom closed the menu.

“We’re here because you record your calls. I’d rather not have a transcript of this business when we’re done,” Tom said.

“Well, spit it out then. You have my attention,” the other man said, and closed his menu as well and placed it on the stained linen.

“I need you to trade for John Gurdenson,” Tom said.

“He just went to the Island.”

“The Island isn’t going to work for us.”

“Why would they trade him to me?”

“We’ve already worked that out.”

“Well, what if I don’t want him? He’s a has-been.”

“We’ll make it worth your while.”

“We? Who’s we? The Island is trying to put fans in the seats, they need a small time showman. I, on the other hand, am trying to win hockey games here. Your man’s got nothing left in the tank. My team’s trying to make the playoffs. You can’t make it worth our while.”

“I said we would make it worth your while.”

Everything went quiet.

“Tommy, what are you doing?”

Tom looked down and smoothed the table cloth with his large hands. His wrinkled fingers looked like overboiled sausages left out too long on the plate.

“I’d rather not say,” Tom said finally.

“How many other GMs have you approached?”

“Three.”

“Did they all tell you to piss off?”

“Basically.”

“And you haven’t given up yet?”

“I read in the paper about Melissa’s latest court filing, and I thought I’d give it one more shot.”

Silence again. Tom took a drink of water.

“It’s a shame about Melissa and the kids,” Tom said. “I’m sorry. I never thought it would get so ugly with you two. I can only imagine the legal fees.”

The man sat and stared at his empty plate a long time before answering.

“Will the Island play ball?”

“Sixth round pick. You won’t even miss it next year. And my client is in the line-up the rest of the season.”

*****

CHICAGO SPORTSRADIO 720 POST-GAME SHOW:

PARKER: I think he planned it.

WHITE: Oh, you can’t be serious.

PARKER: He went into tonight with the idea. Two games left in the season. We’re the top seed. They’re going nowhere. He’s going nowhere. This didn’t just randomly happen in the heat of the moment.

WHITE: You don’t think the booing got to him.

PARKER: Everyone gets booed when they come back to play a game in their old building against their old team. Even after twelve years, it happens. No, that can’t be it.

WHITE: Well, this is a big charge, planning to do it. What’s your proof?

PARKER: Go back and look at the replays of his shifts. He’s completely distracted, oblivious. He’s not   involved in the play, he’s not chasing down pucks…

WHITE: He hasn’t been a scoring threat in years. How can you tell the difference?

PARKER: …he’s not doing anything except waiting for that Tailor line to get on the ice. In the first period he stretched his shifts, and when that didn’t work, I think he iced it on purpose. To lure them out.

WHITE: Well, I’ll say this, and they showed it on the broadcast, he had no one around him when he finally recovered the puck at the end of that long stretch in their own zone. He could have skated it out, to get his line off, but he didn’t, he iced it   instead. And the announcers questioned that decision at the time.

PARKER: Of course they did. It was a bad play. But it meant he was stuck out there, and that we were going to put out the top    line in the offensive zone, which is exactly what he wanted. That was the first time all game that he and Tailor were on the ice at    the same time.

WHITE: Is that right? Can we check that?

PARKER: This is what I’m saying: John Gurdenson meant to do it. These guys, and especially him, we saw this last year, they will do anything for the cup. But now he’s gone, traded. What does the code say?

WHITE: The code says you handle it on the ice, but this went way beyond the hockey code.

PARKER: Well, code or not, he handled it on the ice alright. And someone, the league, the police, someone, is going to ask him. Did you plan to do this? Was this the plan all along? And I’m telling you, the answer is going to be yes.

*****

And then there stood Tailor, on the side of the scrum, against the boards, back turned.

Gurdenson skated alone from center ice, eyes on his target only, skating more quickly now, silently gathering momentum as a pendulum released. At the last moment he pushed off, left his feet, and raised his elbow. Tailor’s back was still turned. Gurdenson caught him at full speed, full body, along his left shoulder and hip, Gurdenson’s elbow on the young man’s left temple. Tailor’s face hit the glass, he momentarily went unconscious, and in that second, fell to the ice like a butchered cattle carcass let off the hook.

In the arena, we shouted and jeered. Tailor was our man now, and we pointed at the officials to intervene and yelled for our boys to step in. Gurdenson shook off the hit. Hands clutched at him but he jerked loosean elbow and swung at his restrainer behind him and dropped the shocked and unprepared referee. Every other player was paired off with an opponent, locked in entanglements of gear and jerseys and arms and legs, wrestling or recovering.

Gurdenson was alone, free. He loomed over Tailor, who was still face down, groaning and only slowly moving to his hands and knees.

Gurdenson raised his stick and then swung it like an axe down on the back of Tailor’s head. The stick shattered and Tailor’s helmet flew and he dropped to the ice again. Gurdenson carefully took off his gloves and picked the kid up by the sweater and spun him so they were face to face. Tailor was in and out. He tried to get his hands up but he was too limp to fight back and he fell at Gurdenson’s first blow. So the big man rolled the kid over and sat on Tailor’s chest and began to beat the boy’s unconscious face with his bare scarred hands. Tailor came to and started to twitch but he was pinned. Sweat and spit and snot and then nothing but blood, a wet slap with every impact. Gurdenson threw rights until he felt the bones in Tailor’s face yield to gritty mush. He didn’t stop, not even when the nose tore, revealing a cavern, and boiling blood erupted everywhere.

Tailor screamed.

Gurdenson never slowed. He swung again and again and again and his jersey dripped gore. We stared in silence. Tailor’s cries rang in the rafters and then faded to a gurgle, and his red hot blood melted the ice beneath his sprawled body. The benches emptied, and security ran on the ice, but not in time. The Troll leaned over and whispered into what was left of Tailor’s ear.

“No cups for us.”