Chapter Text
Early June 2009
„Shane Hollander?“
Shane sat in a hallway somewhere in the depths of a huge sports facility near Toronto with a dozen other aspiring NHL players, nervous about the mental testing he was about to face in the last portion of the combine when his name got called by the assigned doctor. When he got up in one swift motion, he was suddenly way too aware of his body, his movement and, most of all, his facial muscles. He tried his best to keep a cool – or at least cool enough - exterior.
It helped that he picked out his most comfortable suit, shirt and tie he could find. Still, comfortable was a relative term here. He was convinced that suits were invented as a form of low-grade, long-term torture. He could not imagine how much the devil had paid the NHL to get them to enforce a suit-and-tie rule on their bulky hockey players, just so that Prada, Armani and whoever else got to use the players as a walking billboard every fucking game day.
“You can follow me in here” the doctor called out to him.
Shit, in all his effort to keep calm, he had not moved a single muscle after getting up. Great start.
Move. Now!
He finally got into motion, following the doctor into their designated room. He shook her hand, briefly glancing down at her name tag. Dr. Madelene Mearns had a slender but finely muscled frame, was in her early 40s and looked at him with a warm expression that was supposed to insure he was safe with her. On any other day, he would probably let that emotion seep into his tense muscles if it was not for the fact that this testing was a ridiculously large factor in deciding his future.
So instead, Shane decided to take in the rest of her, analyzing her back as he was sure she already had taken mental notes about him the moment she called out his name in the hallway. Hell, maybe even before that.
She was sitting with fully relaxed shoulders, her spine in contrast engaged throughout into a perfectly aligned position. Her hands were elegantly roaming through the documents, precise and unhurried. She was organized but seemed to double check that everything was in order and ready to go. She starkly reminded him of the choreographers that helped the ice dancers in the Ottawa ice facilities with their programs and who would also give them ballet and ballroom lessons. The neat bun she had on her head screamed ballet from what little Shane knew about it (he had seen The Nutcracker basically every year since he was 4, twice on ice, his parents insisting on it as a holiday tradition).
Shane's thoughts started wandering like they almost always did when his brain needed distraction from too little or too much input. In this case, too much.
How easy would it be to lift her in the air? He had never tried lifting someone over his head before, but he was pretty sure her weight was under his PR and the barbell did not have any muscles to gain real momentum. Would jumping make it easier or harder to get her overhead? I would have to stop the jumping momentum at some point. Should I squat and get her directly on straight arms so the lift would need more of my legs than arms? That would definitely make it easier, he decided.
Before he drifted away any further, she finally looked up from her papers at him, now with a slight smile on her lips.
"Hello Mr. Hollander, before we begin with the final portion of your combine, I will take you through the procedure and if you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask." she said, somehow sounding genuine about the question thing.
Mr. Hollander leaned in a bit to show he was actively listening, nodding at the right places, taking all the “new” information in as if he had not prepared for the tests for months.
Some information, Shane was able to find online. The rest was filled in by Max Ziegler, one of his teammates back home. Max’ older brother Seth was 4 years older than them and had gone to the draft in 2005. The weeks before this year’s combine, everyone had loved asking Max over and over again about Seth’s combine testing and the combine itself. Thankfully, Max had loved talking about all of his brother’s stories. He would talk and talk and talk… and talk and talk and talk, sometimes sounding like his brother had gone to war and won it all by himself. Shane had soaked up the information and filtered through the exaggerations to get to the core of what he would need to succeed.
What Shane currently loved was that Max’ last name started with a Z and therefore he was in a different group over the whole combine weekend and even in a different hotel. He was grateful for the preparation, no doubt, even got him some extra nice stick tape that Max' favorite NHL player uses as a thank you, but he was also grateful that Max was not with him, talking his ear off between tests (sorry Max).
They started off with some memory and association tests. Dr Mearns went through a list of twenty items he had to write down right after hearing them from her. Easy.
He handed over the paper and got a new one. Now, he had a minute to write down every word starting with a B. Bockey was unfortunately not one of the acceptable answers. He still got a good amount. Next was a minute of scribbling down zoo animals. Shane tried not to linger too much on the implications of writing down six different penguin species (King, Northern Rockhopper, Humboldt, Magellan, African, Australian Little Blue) then immediately blanking and just writing down “reptile?”.
Approximately five minutes after he had learned the list, he had to write it down a second time. He got all 20 again, smiling a bit to himself as he was sure he was at least doing well here. The bockey/reptile? incidents were basically already forgotten.
The doctor continued with a short IQ test. He had 15 minutes for a series of logic questions, trying to complete number or shape sequences correctly. He tried to not get side tracked about it always being 5 choices, so a 20% chance to just guess it right. How many people got labeled “gifted” by guessing? Probably not many, but also likely more than 0. He had to guess twice. Once on a number sequence where he did not know what replaced the question mark in -10, -8, 6, 40, 102, ? and once on some circles in squares in triangles with different combos of black and white dots and stripes he could not figure out to save his life. Not even holding it sideways helped. Hopefully, he guessed his way to genius.
The list made another appearance. This time, Shane took a bit longer than before. When Dr. Mearns called time, he got 19 out of 20 on paper. After handing his results over, the missing word came crashing back to him. Pants. Thankfully, that was the only time he forgot pants today.
She informed him the memory test was over with the most recent list recital. The last step with her today was a series of reaction tests. They started with some short bursts of simply having to press space as fast as he could after the screen switched from green to purple. He felt a bit on edge, thinking he might get jump scared again like he had gotten last week after opening a link in the ICQ hockey group chat with a similar setup. Then, he reminded himself where he was and locked in, maybe hitting the space bar a bit more enthusiastically than strictly necessary. If Dr. Mearns noticed, she thankfully did not mention it.
They continued through the endurance reaction round, a full 45 minutes of this time gently pressing the key every time he saw the right color (blue) appear in front of him. He refrained from asking if the computer actually blue screening would also demand a space bar activation from his side. He finished with another short reaction sequence, this time he had to shoot a fish every time it appeared in the barrel on the screen. Maybe the ICQ group chat made it to the NHL combine after all.
"Wonderful, that completes the reaction tests. Please follow me.", Dr. Mearns informed him.
Shane went with her into an adjacent room that had the same set-up as the previous room. If someone designed the rooms, would they have been paid for one room or two rooms, he wondered. Dr. Mearns interrupted his thoughts by handing him a stack of papers.
"Please fill out these forms in your own time. Usually, it will take no longer than two hours. There is no rush though, we just need honest answers here. When you are done, you can put them in the side table over there. I will store them somewhere safe before the next person comes in. Speaking of..."
She turned around to the side table, collected the papers and locked them in the cabinet next to the side table. She ushered him over to a comfy chair at a small table and handed him a glass of water and a pen.
"Goodbye, Mr Hollander and best of luck with your draft. I am usually not supposed to comment but your reaction times were rather impressive, maybe the best I have seen in the last 10 years."
With her closing the connecting door behind her, he was finally alone. He released a long breath, letting the impact of the physical challenges, the team interviews and the mental tests from the last few days wash over him. He was tired and ready to not speak to anyone for the next 48 hours. He also had an irrational, sudden craving for a bánh mì sandwich, one of his favorite snacks his dad had made him whenever he had needed a quick meal between school and hockey practice. The idea came after the only other Asian kid in his hockey team brought them in when it was his birthday one year. He had only informed the other kids that it was a Vietnamese specialty after they had eaten the sandwiches. At that point thankfully no one had dared to make fun of the “foreign food” after they all had just said how good it had been in front of the kid's mom and their coach. Shane wasn’t so sure, they would have kept it together otherwise. He was proven right as the usual name calling and eye lid pulling started up again only two days later. He really wanted to throw some rotten bánh mìs at them but settled for a couple of harder checks for that practice. Also what kind of absolute monster would let bánh mìs rot on purpose?
He was so close to being back in his hotel room and taking the world’s longest nap. Then he looked at the papers. Questionnaires. So many of them. No inclination what they were supposed to test. Thinking back, Max had mentioned some paperwork his brother had to fill out after the tests but he had made no mention about the psychological warfare Shane was about to face.
The first one asked him a lot about his feelings. How often he felt sad or angry. Shane was in no mental state to explore those feelings right now really, so he went with the safe route. On a scale through “always” to “never”, he mostly went with “almost never” for the negative emotions to indicate he definitely HAD feelings, but not that many of them. He went with “often” or, when he felt daring, “very often” for the positive questions. Again, feelings, but not too much.
He got a couple more pages about feelings, this time about different situations. Some hockey or team related and some more general ones about family, friends, and, to Shane dismay, partners. The partner ones were the hardest. Why they needed to ask 18-21 year olds about partners, he did not want to know. Thankfully, there were only a handful and, to their credit (maybe), there was an option to skip, which felt like a test in itself somehow.
It was not like he didn’t have a girlfriend. Jessica was very real and very much his girlfriend after he reluctantly asked her to their winter formal back in January. His mom practically forced him to go (“Socializing is important, honey”) and his classmates egged him on until he finally asked Jessica to go, mumbling his whole way through the question. Jessica decided, they were dating after that and Shane went along with it.
But now, sitting here alone, he realized how little he had interacted with her in the months they were together. He blamed it on their full schedules, mostly his (it was fascinating how many hockey related things you could do if you wanted a full schedule, especially watching tapes of other prospects, no one in particular, especially not the guy he shook the hand of TWICE in a span of five minutes at the last World Juniors) and not anything else and put it aside. He was not sure if there was a way to guess his way to genius here but he took enough educated guesses to calm himself down a bit. He stuffed the thoughts surfacing about what the full schedules were an excuse for further down so they had no chance of bothering him anymore. He locked that mental cabinet before anyone could walk in and moved on.
The last two questionnaires were different. The first one asked him about difficulties to finish tasks. It didn’t specify which tasks it was talking about. Household chores? Household chores assigned by his dad? Household chores assigned by his mom? Three different answers right there. It also wanted to know how often he interrupted people. “Not often enough” was somehow not a possible answer. He had to hold his tongue so often as he had learned how fast you could make yourself (even more) unpopular when you would tell someone that their “facts” weren’t facts at all. And then, there was this question about how often did he leave his assigned place while in a meeting or similar situation. Not how often he wanted to - that was a fucking lot - but how much he did. He said never. He also restrained from writing a comment next to the question to correct the question itself.
The second questionnaire and last of the paper stack was made up of 50 questions. It was a weird mix out of questions that lacked any sort of clarity and questions that were straight up unsettling.
Did he prefer the museum over the theater? Well, what museum? What play is running? How comfy are the seats in the theater? Where is the museum? Are they showing anything special? Does he need a guided tour or can he wander around on his own?
Did he do well with social chitchat? Okay, no, but they made it sound like a bad thing that it always felt forced when he had to talk about things he did not care about.
Was he often the last to understand the point of the joke? Quite the opposite. He was usually the first one to get the joke, especially the punching down ones. There was a different rhythm to them than the lighthearted, situational ones. He could smell the first one from a mile away and was excellent in ignoring them. Social survival beat out the avoidance of the headache he got from clenching his jaw too hard after his teammate initiated a round of “guess the fairy on the other team”. If they'd asked his teammates they would say he just didn't get the joke though. So what was he supposed to answer here?
Was he fascinated by numbers? Numbers? No. Stats that are technically compiled of numbers? Yes. He put in “slightly agree” and moved on.
Did he prefer to do the same thing over and over again? Why did that feel like a trap. He was about to be drafted to the NHL where repetition was a key factor to success. Where a lot of running jokes are about superstitious players that cannot play without kissing their goalies helmet or putting on their gear in the right order. Where was the line here?
Did he have very strong passions that he would get upset over if he was not able to pursue them? HELLO? Again, for the people in the back: NHL, pro athletes… you do not get to be a pro athlete without being at least a little obsessive over something, preferably over your chosen sport. Why was this phrased so negatively?
The paper wouldn’t offer him any answer to his questions, so he sighed and just decided on what they could maybe mean, then answered all 50 questions, no skips. That had to do it. He was glad he was alone. His face the last 30 mins had probably gone through every iteration of a frustrated grimace it could produce.
He left the papers where he was told to. And then left the room. Done. Fini. Time for that bánh mì or three. And his hotel room. His flight was at noon the next day, so he could have all the rest he needed. And between bánh mì two and three he fully forgot that tests, at the end of the day, usually meant results.