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Dmitri, eight years old, sits on a child-sized Pittsburgh Penguins bean bag chair. He stares at the camera with a moue on his face. He glances at someone to the left of the camera. Off-screen, his dad whispers, “Go on.” Dima smiles for the first time since the camera has been trained on him.
“My name is Dima. I’m eight.” He holds up seven fingers and then adds another one. “It was my birthday in the summer.” He glances again at his dad, waiting for his cue.
Dima focuses on the camera again. “Hi. Is this for the Penguins?” He tilts his head, waiting for an answer.
“It’s for HBO,” his dad replies.
“Is it for Papa?”
“Yes, but for everyone, too.”
“Why?”
“Because—“ At the hesitation, Maxime Talbot steps in. This is his project after all.
“Because we want to show other people what you and your family are like.”
Dima contemplates what he’s been told. He scrunches his nose in displeasure. Then takes a deep breath and blows out an exhale. He is sitting on his hands and swinging his feet.
“Will you interview me, like they do to Papa?” His eyes are wide with excitement.
“Sure, Dima. Okay—First question: who do you like better? Dad or Papa?”
The whole room is silent. Not one person moves. Dima releases his hands from where he’s sitting on them and folds his arms in front of his chest, looking petulant, offended. He is glaring at the camera and at Max now. He has a deep frown on his face and his eyebrows are furrowed. His deep brown eyes have gone darker.
“You’re not supposed to ask me that.”
The screen cuts to black.
Max’s heart stutters and then stops. He might as well just die now. He told himself it would be easy, just Geno Malkin and his brood of eight or nine kids and his doting but uncompromisable husband. It’s literally day one of filming and he’s already fucked up. Max puts his hands up in surrender and turns to Sidney Crosby with an apology ready for him. Max had known, he’d been told from the very beginning that it doesn’t matter if Sidney or Geno agree to this, their children will always come first and if Max makes any of them uncomfortable, he’s out. No strikes or fouls. Just out. Done. “Sidney—I—“Laughter—boyish, devilish, mischievous— fills the air. Max’s cameraman hits record again.
“You should see your face! It’s so red, Max!” Dima is almost doubled over on his bean bag chair, cackling maniacally. He is evidently the product of Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby and highly influenced by his older brothers. All of them tricksters and pranksters and Max is the latest victim. Max knows a tempestuous sea when he sees one. This will not be the last.
“Dima,” his dad says, half-amused and half-disappointed.
Dima straightens up in his seat. He waves at the camera. “I can’t pick. It’s not fair. Ask me who my favorite brother is!”
Max hesitates. But he knows there’s an answer to this.
Dima’s smile is blinding. He’s missing one of his teeth and he has dimples on his chubby face.
“Okay...who is your favorite brother?” Dima stares at the camera and then winks.
The screen fades to white. Music and credits.
HBO presents.
In Association with NHLTV.
Directed by Max Talbot.
The screen is still white. The sounds of blades against the ice, scraping, gliding. The white blurs, focuses into ice.
The camera is literally ice level. A pair of children’s skates pass by. Followed by two and then three and then four other pairs, faster in their glides. Another passes by a beat later, the number 42 is etched on the side of the skate closest to the camera. Then another pair skates in reverse. Another beat. Some garbled voices in the background. Two pairs of skates slowly come across the screen. They are facing each other, moving in opposite but complete unison. Once they’re out of screen, there is one last pair coming towards the camera at full speed and turns to stop, blowing snow.
The approximation of a blizzard white-out.
Entitled:
The Home of Hockey
Episode One: Crosby-Malkin
Max wipes the snow from his face. Beau laughs at him and doesn’t stop.“Max said to!” Beau says, defending himself against Sidney’s impending glare and admonishment. Max doesn’t mind the snow shower. It had been his idea. “I don’t think that was the perfect shot, Max. We should do another take,” Beau says, getting ready to skate away so he can reset his shot. Sidney grabs him by the back of his sweater.“Okay, nevermind. That was perfect, Max. I’m a natural.”Beau gives him a thumbs up. If this wasn’t such an important project, Max would be formulating his revenge prank. But this is important. Max’s first directorial debut. Max’s path to so much more than just an NHLTV cameraman. Tanner shrugs at Max. On to the next scene then.
Kasperi, eighteen, freshly drafted. The new addition to what will surely be a long line of a hockey family dynasty. No. He’s not a new addition.
Hockey runs in his blood, even before he became part of the Crosby-Malkin brood.
“How’s your dad?” Max asks. Kasperi chuckles.
“Y’know...busy coaching the new generation of Finnish players.”
Kasperi’s hair is cut short. For the new season, his new beginning. He runs a hand through his short hair; unused to it.
“The flow comes later,” he says, jokingly. What he really means is that this is a new beginning.
“How does it feel? Being back with Sidney and Geno?”
Kasperi sits on his hands, much like the way young Dima does when he’s in the hot seat.
“Feels good. Like home, y’know?”
He casts a sideways glance. Sidney is there, cheeks red, eyes soft, mouth curved up in a small smile.
It piques Max’s curiosity. How the children always seem to find Sidney’s gaze for...well, Max isn’t sure. Not for approval, something closer to confirmation or validation, something they definitely don’t need, but want nonetheless. A familiarity, a bond, a reminder, perhaps, that they agree with each other, that they’re on the same page.
Home. But this is not Kasperi’s first home with the Crosby-Malkins.
A slideshow of photographs. A compilation of polaroids and pictures.
The emptiness first. A furnished abode.
Next comes Beau with scrapes and bruises and a broken skateboard. Sidney and Geno on a porch swing. Beau on the grass in front of them, hiding his face.
Tom and Beau trapped in blanket burritos, smiling toothily at the camera. Conor with his tiny fists clutching the legs of Sidney’s jeans, his eyes wide like he’s a deer caught in the headlights. Geno wrapping Beau’s arm with a bandage.
Tom drawing on Beau’s cast. Brian with Conor on his shoulders. Sidney sprawled on the living room floor with Conor sleeping on his chest, with Beau curled up beside him. Geno and Tom working on Tom’s magnetic levitation project. Sidney and Geno in the kitchen, a breath away from each other, the moment before a kiss.
Brandon showing off his new shoes. Zach with gleaming eyes as he holds his new paintbrushes.
Jake in Sidney’s arms. Bryan on Geno’s shoulders. Bryan in his bed while Geno reads to him. Sidney, on the living room floor again, with Zach and Bryan, surrounded by art supplies.
The boys in the pool in the backyard. Beau in the air right before he cannonballs into the water. A chicken fight in the water between Geno and Brandon versus Sidney and Zach.
Sidney in bed with Jake and Zach and Brandon and Bryan. They’re watching Geno’s game. Sidney with goalie pads stopping a shot from Brian. Zach helping Bryan tie his rollerblades. Geno and the puck he scored his 50th goal with.
Dima, a newborn, in Geno’s arms. Geno is crying. Dima asleep in a bassinet. Dima sleeping on Sidney’s chest, Geno’s hand on top of where Sidney’s hand is securing the baby to him.
Dima crying fitfully in Beau’s arms. Dima snuggled peacefully in Tom’s arms, happy and asleep.
Sidney and Geno kissing under a mistletoe.
Kasperi talking to baby Dima, holding his tiny feet.
Sidney and Geno marrying each other in their backyard. Multiple versions of this moment, one after the other, crediting persons of interest such as NHL captains Alex Ovechkin and Kris Letang.
The screen blurs into warm gray.
When Max first pitched the idea to the producers, he only had an inkling of how much he’d have to do to tell their story, because it is so deep and interconnected. The day the project was green-lit, Max drove down to Wilkes-Barre, to see the house where it all really began. Sidney had met him there, welcoming him into the house and showing him what it had looked like before they used it to billet the AHL players.
Brian is tanned, having just got back from a weekend trip to Las Vegas with his older brother, Beau, to celebrate Brian’s return to Pittsburgh, not just as a resident, but now also as a Pittsburgh Penguin.
“How unreal does it feel?” Max asks.
Brian laughs. “You know...it felt like it was bound to happen.”
“Did you know it was going to happen?”
“Making it in the NHL was already a dream come true. But now, to be able to play with Papa G and even Kasperi...I don’t think I have words for that.”
“And being back with your family...how is that?”
Brian shares a look with Sidney before he turns back to the camera and to Max.
“Coming home is…” He looks up briefly, with a huge smile on his face. “Always good.”
Max could tell immediately that it was a home. Most of their things have now been moved to the Pittsburgh house, but there were still signs in Geno Malkin’s first house that told the stories Max couldn’t wait to present. Stories speak for themselves when they’re etched in stone. The physical evidence of history is still present in the house.
“This is…” Sidney motions to the notches on the wall corner, sometimes overlapping one another, marked with initials. “Growth chart.”
The camera pans starting from the bottom up. Brian’s is the one on top. Sidney chuckles. “Maybe Dima will grow as tall,” he muses. But the rest of Dima’s story is being written in Pittsburgh.
“Beau broke this wall once,” Sidney says. There’s a patch of drywall that’s just a shade lighter than the rest.
“Roughhousing?” Max asks.
Sidney laughs. “You’d think, huh?”
What had Beau been doing?
Beau is getting ready to pack for a trip. He is topless, but as he moves to put on a shirt, the camera catches a glimpse of the expanse of his back and the tattoo across his shoulder blades, cyrillic inked on his skin В гостя́х хорошо́, а до́ма лу́чше. (A souvenir from his visit to Washington courtesy of his uncle.)
“I don’t remember,” he answers Max’s curiosity about the patched-up hole in the drywall. “Man, I think I broke that wall so many times.”
Max tells him Sidney says once.
Beau stiffens and then laughs. “He only knows about the one time.” Beau looks around his room, conspiratorially, in mock paranoia.
“You should ask Dad. I’m sure he knows.”
“I tried already.”
Beau’s face softens, his eyes crinkle. In a secret-like language Max isn’t privy to, much less able to translate.
Max doesn’t ever find out. There are some parts of their story that neither he nor the rest of the world are entitled to, no matter how good-natured their curiosity is. And so, instead, Max focuses on the crux of his documentary.Hockey. And the three rivers from which its life flowed.
The camera pans across newly minted name-plates. Crosby — Malkin — Kapanen.
A voice-over, Geno’s voice, replaying in the background—
“The Pittsburgh Penguins…”
—Geno comes through the doors of the locker room—
“...are proud to select…”
—Brian a second behind him, walking through—
“from KalPa…”
—Kasperi’s eyes are wide. This is the first time he is setting foot in the Penguins locker room without a doubt that he will be staying.
The camera follows Kasperi’s gaze to the logo on the floor, to the words on the walls, to the nameplate on his stall, right beside Geno’s.
“No way…” Kasperi says, his voice just above a whisper, the mic barely picks it up. Hastily, he pats his pocket and produces a tiny slip of paper.
A sticky note in Penguins gold.
Kasperi sticks it to the side wall of his stall. He taps it twice and smiles.
On the other side of Geno’s stall, Brian does the same. Same sticky note on the side of his stall.
The screen cuts.
Dima at the dining table at home, happily scribbling on a notebook.
“What are you up to?” Max asks. Dima doesn’t look up from his paper but he does answer Max.
“Drawing.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, like Zach.”
“You draw a lot?”
“I try but Zach is better’n me.”
“Only because he’s practiced for years,” Sidney says gently from across the table. He’s reading something on his iPad. It’s just the two of them awake for now.
“I like to write too. Like Beau.”
“That’s nice. What do you like to write?”
Dima shrugs his shoulders.
“Oh!” He perks up, remembering something, jolting out of his seat. He gets up and pulls on one of the kitchen drawers—the one where random things go.
He has a pad of sticky notes in his hand. Bright yellow. Gold.
“I like to write these for Papa and Brian and Kassu.”
For what is combat without preparation rituals?
Geno is sitting on an armchair. He has a box resting on his thighs. The box is worn but significant, treasured by its owner.
“Rusty make,” Geno says, pride on his face. The four sides of the box are artfully decorated. Geno turns the box over and over so Max can see each face. “Zach.”
Geno opens it carefully. The box is overflowing with little notes, written by a learning but determined hand in crayon and marker and pen.
They are Dima’s notes, given to his father for every game day. A token of good luck and support.
Geno starts going through them, eyes twinkling. Like being able to go back in time.
The camera cuts.
The neighborhood streets of Magnitogorsk, from the shaky, field camera of a young boy who is visiting for the first time.
Behind the camera, young Beau exclaims, “That’s the church Baba and Dyeda got married in,” as they pass by.
Eventually, they arrive in Geno’s childhood home.
A photograph of a young Evgeni Malkin being shown to the audience, held by the caring hand of Geno’s mother.
In Russian, she says, “I am so glad he got to live his dreams in America.”
In Russian, she says, “I am even more glad he found Sidney.”
In halting English she adds, “Zhenya, Sidney, come home. Together. One day. No bad rule.” She has a hopeful smile on her face.
She’s sitting by Beau, now all grown up. It’s unbelievable how many years have passed since the first time he visited Magnitogorsk.
He lays his head on his grandmother’s shoulder. Maybe it is not quite so unbelievable. She pats his cheek. He is still a boy to her. One she needs to feed like he’s never had a meal in his life.
She prepares a feast for Max and his crew as well. It is futile to refuse her.
Sprawling Munich. The inspiring campus buildings of Ludwig Maximilian University.
Tom in his dorm room, sitting ramrod straight on his desk chair.
He is speaking in German, reading off of his award-winning speech about his childhood and his fears and the people who loved him enough to let him fly.
The English subtitles reveal:
“Beau and I were too busy distracting ourselves from our troubled pasts to sit down and swap war stories.
We were young, too young to understand the magnitude of what we’d been through.
By the time we understood, we were already past it. By the time the rot of the trauma was supposed to eat us from inside out, our adoptive parents had already scooped out the mold and bacteria, and left us looking untouched, uninfected.
They gave us their hearts and their home and expected only one thing in return: to pay forward the same kindness to friends, to other people we encounter, and more importantly, to our younger siblings.
They taught me the most treasured lessons in life I will ever learn. They taught me the most valuable lessons in love, as well. Lessons I will be unable to discern anywhere else in the world. Lessons I will try my best to share with the world.”
Max sends him a detailed email after, thanking him profusely for taking time in his busy schedule to send the video as Max has an even tighter schedule and could not get to Germany in time. He thanks him for sharing his speech, however personal. Max deems it invaluable to the story, to the narrative, validating so much of what he is seeing while he’s filming the lives of this loving, tight-knit family.
The locker room. The ice rink. The battlefield.
Kasperi’s first skate on Penguins ice. He stumbles when his skate first touches the ice.
The camera comes close to Kasperi, lens almost turning black at the contact. The camera moves away from the subject and reveals…
Daybreak. Sweltering summer heat. It is a memory, immortalized in video.
In the footage, Kasperi is getting up, having fallen on his knees. The angry red on his knees contrasts the big smile on his face.
Max knows this scene, not taken by his own hand though. He had been invited to the house, to the party, to the celebration and Max had been there when this was filmed.
Kasperi is fourteen here, has rollerblades on, falling on purpose to make Dima laugh.
Whoever is holding the camera is bad at it—it’s like they keep forgetting that they’re filming something.
“Oopsies,” the young Kasperi in the video says, smiling. Dima smiles back. He’s been walking for a couple of years now, but still fresh on rollerblades so he stumbles and falls, lip quivering, ready to cry. Kasperi scoops him up so that he’s upright again. “We fall. We all fall. We get up again,” he says to Dima.
“Up,” Kasperi repeats the most important part of it. Dima, unsurprisingly, understands.
Learning is half the battle.
We follow Kasperi again, now, as he is, 18 and green, as he gets up back on his two skates.
“Welcome to the big show, rookie,” Captain Letang hollers from across the ice, laughing fondly.
When the Penguins won their Cup a few years back, Max had been a rookie cameraman. He had been full of passion and excitement. He sympathizes with Kasperi, this kid who has got legacy in his blood, both shoulders chipped in a way.
“Okay, first question,” Max asks to start the interview. “What are you looking forward to the most?”
“Playing with Geno,” Kasperi answers, blooming. More words jumping out of his mouth animatedly.
Finally, “Coming into the league, what scares you the most right now?” Is maybe an unfair question, but Max has to ask. Kasperi may choose not to answer, but Max will ask regardless.
Kasperi, sitting on their couch in their Pittsburgh home, looks anywhere but Max’s camera. He plucks the decorative pillow beside him and starts playing with its seams. Kasperi is biting his lip. It’s taking him forever to answer, an almost painfully awkward passage of time.
Beside Max, Tanner is jiggling his leg nervously. Max knows what it means; it means Tanner wants to call cut. But Max is the director and he wants the camera to roll until Kasperi himself says stop.
Kasperi sniffles. He’s been contemplating. He looks to his left. Max knows who’s there. Kasperi sighs, and puts the pillow he’d been fussing with next to him. He puts his arms on his knees and his head in his hands.
Max calls cut. Kasperi shakes his head. “No, no. Let’s go. Keep rolling. I was just thinking. Sorry.”By his cue, Max records again.
“There’s…a lot to be scared about,” Kasperi says. “Expectations, mostly. Proving people right. Proving people wrong. But…for me, it’s not about the fear as much as it is about…how I get over that fear or how I deal with it.”
“And what’s the secret to dealing with your fears?”
Kasperi laughs out loud. There’s a secret hidden in his smirk. His eyes momentarily glance to the left again and then back to Max and the camera.
“If I tell you, I’d have to…”
“You can't say the k-word, Kassu.” Dima springs into the screen, throwing himself onto the couch. Kasperi pulls him close.
“You know the secret, don’t you?” Kasperi asks his little brother.
“To what?”
“To not being scared.”
“Yeah,” Dima nods.
“Yeah? What is it?”
Dima shuffles and reaches up to whisper into Kasperi’s ear. Kasperi nods along.
“Yeah, sorry Max. It’s our secret,” Kasperi shrugs.
Max will tell them later that the mic Kasperi had had picked up Dima’s whispers. In the name of storytelling, he’s tempted to air it. In the name of journalistic integrity, he doesn’t. The answer is much simpler than he’d thought. And in hindsight, the answer is very obvious. Who would fear anything when you have someone like Sidney? Max figures out what the look is for when the children seek Sidney’s gaze. Respect, in the highest regard.As he concludes the episode, Max knows that the story would not be as compelling without Sidney. Sidney connects all of them to one another; he is the confluence.
A long lost interview Max uncovers the year before Kasperi Kapanen is drafted.
In it, Evgeni Malkin is seventeen years old, adorned in Team Russia gear, gold medal around his neck, weightless and means the world to the young player.
Max contacts a handful of people to make sure the translation is accurate.
Evgeni is being asked: Where do you see yourself in the future?
Evgeni answers: NHL.
Then: But it’s important to me that I’m successful and happy and doing what I love best and being with people who support me to no end.
He is being asked: Do you think all of that is possible? Don’t you think there should be a compromise?
Evgeni answers after a moment when his confusion abates: I won’t know until I get there, I guess. I’m prepared to make my dreams come true, no matter what.
Geno Malkin is twenty-three. The Captain of the Wilkes-Barre Penguins.
He is being interviewed by The Trib about his possible promotion to the Pittsburgh Penguins.
He is being told, bluntly, that sports organizations like their players to be eager to move up. They say: you’ve been in the farm team for longer than everyone thought you were going to be. They ask: Are you not ready for the NHL?
Geno, self-assured, confident, but not cocky, says: If Pittsburgh call, I answer. NHL is dream, sometimes, dream change, life change, have to look at other things. Different factors. Not just me. For family too.”
He dares them to contradict him, to question him further.
He adds: I know Pittsburgh put trust in me. I’m not mean to look not thankful for chance when I stay down here. I want NHL, want Pittsburgh, but is best for me right now as player and person to stay here. I’m hope all can understand.
Geno is in his early forties, coming in from the first warm up of the season, the first warm up with Brian and Kasperi on the ice with him, as his teammates.
“You sure you still got it?” Max teases.
Geno laughs at him and pushes the camera away jokingly. “You think I’m old or something? Show you.”
Geno scores forty seconds into the game, cutting through defensemen half his age, and sliding the puck so gracefully casually that they don’t catch onto the goal at first. When the horn blares, Geno points to Max’s camera with his gloved finger and roars. He takes the puck that Brian has disentangled from the goal and, smirking at Max, chucks it over the glass into Sidney’s awaiting hands.
Geno skates off the ice and jumps onto the bench, sliding down until he’s beside where Max and his camera are perched. “You see? Still got it. You see most handsome man in the crowd? Still my biggest fan.”
Max pans to Sidney who is shaking his head and laughing.
Geno is as sure in his words as he had been at seventeen, at twenty-three.
Max has no doubt that Geno will have the same convictions about Sidney when he is past his forties and fifties and well into forever, probably.
“Even when hockey over, as long as he still love me, means I still got it.”