Turtle Bread and Coffee in South Minneapolis is the sort of quaint little business that could be used for a romantic comedy starring Paul Rudd. Set on a bustling corner in a leafy neighborhood with an artisanal ice cream parlor next door and an indie bike shop with a wily shop dog lazing around out front, it’s a setting where an earnest single dad might get another shot at love and fall for a cutesy baker wearing a dusting of flour as she quietly works the hearth in back. With its creaky hardwood floors, buckets filled with fresh baguettes, and air toasted with sugar, it is an idyllic place for conversation, for a connection, for a good solid chat over a cup of coffee.
Into this picturesque setting strides Jack Carlson, a former professional hockey player. But you most likely will not even recognize his name or even know who he is. If you’ve ever seen the legendary movie Slap Shot, though, you know exactly what he did during his career battling through the ranks of professional hockey.
If you look closely, you’ll easily recognize Carlson’s big-hearted smile, the nose—my God, the nose—and the rest of his rough-hewn face. Your memory will slide into focus, and you’ll recognize Carlson’s face, and then you’ll see two more faces that look exactly like it. That is because besides being a well-known hockey player, Carlson was, along with his brothers Jeff and Steve, the real-life inspiration for the Hanson Brothers, the affable, black-rimmed-glasses-wearing hooligans of Slap Shot, widely regarded as one of the best sports films of all time.
Carlson is the man with a true Hollywood story, and he’s ready to share it: how the son of a miner from northern Minnesota made it into professional hockey with his two brothers.
Today, Carlson, sixty, is still the hard-charging, good-natured guy he was when he and his brothers ran roughshod over the world of professional hockey. Carlson strides right past the gaggle of older ladies gossiping over their coffee, the hipsters clickety-clacking away on their laptops, and the couple nestled together in the sunny window like a pair of house cats. Carlson doesn’t need coffee, though. He doesn’t need a spot of tea or a bagel or a muffin. He walks onto this set and he’s already plugged in. He doesn’t need to go Method on the acting bit and try to in- habit a character’s instincts and clothing and dialogue. Carlson doesn’t need to get into character or to rehearse his lines. He’s the genuine article.
“Todd, I don’t need a coffee. I don’t need anything,” Carlson says, smiling with gusto. “I’m all jacked up.”
Carlson’s turbo-boosted spirit comes as no surprise. In person, his good nature is bursting with exuberance, and it matches the rambunctious playing style that he wielded for so long during his career. In the world of professional hockey, the Carl- son Brothers were solid, hardworking hockey players, and they could play it any way you wanted it. They were skilled and tough, and sometimes sprinkled in a dash of lunacy. If you wanted to fight, sure, they could fight you all game—Jack and Jeff especially would oblige you. At one point, Jack Carlson was one of the best heavy- weight fighters in the world of hockey and routinely beat up the toughest players in both the NHL and the WHL. But if you wanted a nice, clean game, why, then, the brothers could do that, too, and would hang some serious points on the score- board.
The Carlson Brothers were a package deal. Whenever they were on the same team, all three of them skated on one line. No exceptions. If you wanted one of them, you’d get all three. This was always the case, whether it was on the forecheck or cycling the puck or in a fight on the ice or in the stands (more on that later). The boys stuck together. During their playing days, there was no real way to control the Carlson Brothers for too long, no real way to rein them in. You just kind of let them go and do their thing, and that meant chaos and goals and, on occasion, a little jail time.
Carlson sits down at a table next to a sunny window in a quiet corner of the cof- fee shop. He’s smiling and demonstrative. His massive hands, with fingers as thick as C batteries, fly through the air, and when he sets a hand back down on the table it hits like a dumbbell. Every time. A hearty, rolling laugh, the sort you’d ex- pect to hear from a gentle giant in a children’s folktale, belts out early and often, and echoes around the room as he begins to tell the story of his hockey strength.
“Why do hockey players play in pain?” I ask Carlson.
He sits up straight, eager to get started. It’s not hard to imagine that he’s sitting on a team bench, ready to go into an actual game, waiting for the coach to call his number so he can get in there and stir the pot.
“I think it’s a passion for the game,” he says. “It becomes a thing where you don’t want to let your teammates down. Okay, so you got dinged up a little bit. One of the things I’ve talked about with other teammates is that you never wanted to leave the lineup, because you never knew if you were going to get back in.”
As he talks, his momentum picks up, and within seconds Carlson is hustling, huffing up and down that wing, sorting it all out in real time, his thoughts stream- ing together one into the next until he’s coming in hot and at full force, as if he were in on the forecheck and trying to separate his man from the puck.
“Back in my day, the expectations from the general manager and coaches were there. I remember managers coming into the locker room and saying, ‘You’re play- ing tonight, aren’t you?’ Well, they’re the GM. What are you going to say? ‘No’? ‘I have a headache. I’m not feeling well’? ‘I went down to pick up a bar of soap and I tweaked my back’?
“The other thing, too, is that athletes in other sports will tell you when they are coming back. Not the trainer. Not the doctor. A baseball player will tweak his back and he’ll tell people he should be back in the lineup in three days. Oh, okay. Three days. Really? Three days. It’s not the doctor expecting him to be out. They tell you when they’re going to be back. In baseball, if you have an injury, you have the right to get back into the lineup when you come back. In hockey, you don’t. You might sit. Especially if the guy taking your place is playing really well.”
For a player like Carlson, with his particular skill set—which consisted of a healthy mix of vigilantism and goal scoring tinged with the grace of a bazooka—he had to stay in the lineup at all costs despite his injuries, because he knew manage- ment could always find someone else crazy enough to willingly fight through the ranks of hockey. He suffered fractured vertebrae, hip injuries, three shoulder surg- eries, and three knee surgeries, but tried to play through. Carlson had nose recon- struction, teeth knocked out, and more than two hundred stitches.
In August one year, Carlson broke his jaw and the doctor told him it had to be wired shut for six weeks. The problem was that training camp was in September. So, two and a half weeks later, Carlson went to his family doctor in northern Minnesota to get the wires cut out so he could play at training camp. He’d been losing weight because all he could eat was Dinty Moore stew through a straw, so he was worried he wouldn’t be strong enough to survive the demands of his pro- fession. Still, Carlson was hockey strong, so he told the doctor he had to get the wires out, and when the doctor asked him how long they’d been in, he lied. Carl- son, naturally scared about losing his job, told the doctor six weeks, even though it had been less than three.
“The doctor says, okay, and then he left the room only to return and say, ‘Jack, you’ve only had the wires in for two weeks!’ You get to the big league, right. Then you have to keep in mind, what’s the guy up in Manitoba doing this summer? He’s going to try and take my job at training camp. So the passion for me was that no one was going to take my job. I’m not going to lose it. I might not play well, but it’s not going to be from lack of effort.”
Then there was the time Carlson was playing in Philadelphia. He had ditched his trademark black Hanson Brothers glasses and was now wearing contact lenses. He went to sweep the puck away from a guy and got knocked down in the process. When the other player took a stride, his skate came up and the blade hit Carlson right in the face.
“It hit me right in the corner of my left eye,” Carlson says. “It tore across my nose and forehead. There was blood all over the place. It was inside my contact lens, so I thought I’d lost my eye. I ended up getting twenty-two stitches from the corner of the eye and across my nose and forehead. But I went back in. You just go back in. You get stitched up. I probably missed a period.”
Game after game, he fought for both his teammates and his job. He played an entire season in St. Louis in the NHL with a brace on his left arm because the tendons and ligaments were so stretched out that the arm would dislocate or pop out of the socket even after doing something as easy as reaching for a salt shaker. He played through it, of course, and simply wore a brace all year, in more than 50 games and while racking up close to 100 penalty minutes. At the end of the season, mercifully, he got it fixed.
Everyone can see the black eyes, the scars, and the gaps in their teeth that hock- ey players sport. Those injuries are the showtime wounds of the hockey world, the marks that come with a spotlight of attention and an aura of bad-boy bravado. But a blown-out arm, especially one used to fight off the goons of the hockey world, is the type of injury no one knows about. A player like Carlson would often have to hide his injuries and then privately battle through in silence, seeking treatment in the quiet corners of the training room. During Carlson’s career in the 1970s and ’80s, when knuckles really flew in the NHL and WHL and playing in pain was a regular part of the job description and the surest way to keep your job, there were no excuses, no straying from the old-time script. When the game’s biggest stars, the truly gifted ones with their names emblazoned on trophies—names like Orr, Hull, Esposito, and Howe—when all of those A-list talents played in pain, the ex- tras like Carlson had to follow suit.
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