AFTER THE MEDIA JACKALS get their fill of Parise and the other players—their Twitter feeds pinging in cyberspace with new intel, their notebooks stained with ink and scribbles, their digital reels loaded for the evening news—they move on down the hallway toward the press conference room, where Wild head coach Mike Yeo and general manager Chuck Fletcher await.
As the locker room begins to clear, it’s just me and Parise left standing there in front of his locker. Every piece of equipment is in its right place and ready to go. But the sad reality is that there are no more games to play until next season.
The media disperses, and all that is left are Parise and his scars, the ones visible on his lip and chin and mouth, and the ones that are hidden, dug deeply into the crevices of his memory and cut into his heart. Parise is, pound for pound, one of the toughest players in one of the toughest sports. But standing here in front of his locker, he appears to be a smaller, wounded version of the Captain America that fans have come to know and love. Standing here alone, out of his pads and jersey, all of his hockey heroics sidelined for the summer, Parise has been reduced simply to a son who has lost his father, and he is grieving. “My brother and I were talk- ing,” Parise tells me, his eyes welling slightly, “and we were saying that we don’t know if we’ll ever be over it. It’s so weird to say that my dad’s not here anymore. I don’t know if you ever get over it. But you just try. You try to deal with it the best you can.”
Before we wrap up our interview, I show him an old photo of his dad from the 1970s when he played with the Minnesota North Stars. J.P., devilishly handsome with a shag of dark hair and a hard, angular nose, is clad in heavy sweats and stands in his skates on a cement floor, holding a wooden stick with a banana curve, a whistle draped around his neck. Next to J.P. in the photo is my father, Gary Smith, who was working as an athletic trainer at the hockey camp.
Parise stares at the picture and smiles. He notices that his father is wearing the old-school hockey gloves that were ridiculously large and as cumbersome as oven mitts. Then Parise laughs, and it is the kind of honest, guttural laugh that can save a man. It is a laugh that means way more than a simple expression of joy, and is in- stead a much-needed respite from all the pain and darkness he has suffered during the season. Inside his laugh, a tiny window has been opened after the thunder- storm has passed, and Parise realizes, however briefly, that he has survived—and, in the end, everything just might be okay.
“I remember those gloves,” says Parise with a chuckle. The redness in his eyes begins to fade. “He kept a few pairs at the house. We still have them. This summer I have to go through all of his old hockey stuff.”
As Parise takes one last look at the picture of his dad, a smile opens up wide, the scar on his lip stretches out, the new tooth gleams, and the warmth of a good memory flashes across his face. It’s no coincidence that a little bit of healing oc- curs right there in the locker room of an ice rink, a place where the Parise men have always found solace.
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