There was a time in New York, if one were a certain age and a certain type of writer, when the name Nick Paumgarten elicited reverence, along with a little envy. Here was a writer whose career one wanted to emulate. There was the plum position of staff writer at The New Yorker, along with the assignments themselves and the man’s ability to turn them inside out. Paumgartner could take a subject in miniature — the life of a commuter; a man stuck in an elevator for 48 hours — and blow the doors off the thing, getting at something both intimate and universal; something intrinsic to the way we live.
Paumgartenian, as I once heard a friend pretentiously describe the guy’s style, to which I pretentiously nodded in agreement.
But there was something else to Paumgarten, it seemed. Maybe it was the name Nick, that most literary of names, or the type of quirky, swashbuckling stories to which a young male writer — a dying breed, perhaps — aspired. Paumgarten wrote about The Grateful Dead, trying to get through the door at Berghain and downhill ski races in Austria. He’d also cut his teeth as deputy editor of “Talk of the Town,” which meant — by way of inference — you knew the guy cleaned up nicely. There were a few pictures online — the fop of hair, the narrowed eyes, the hint of a sarcastic grin. You could picture him as the type of clever prep school boy, a roguish upperclassman, to which freshmen found themselves immediately enamored.
The only thing lacking, then, was a book — proof of Paumgarten’s promise. The guy could go long, his prose crackled, his reporting was solid and insights sharp, so what gave? When would he join the ranks of other New Yorker writers who’d delivered the big payload— your David Granns and William Finnegans and Patrick Radden Keefes?
What kept Paumgarten from ever writing a book is the subject of his new memoir, The Intangibles. In it, the native New Yorker recounts his lifelong love affair with the game of hockey, from his Philadelphia Flyers fandom as a kid (one who grew up on the Upper East Side in the 1970s but stayed loyal to his Main Line roots), through his own lackluster career, to that of being a father, often on the 5 a.m. shift, inhaling coffee and Zamboni fumes while his two young sons goon it up on the ice. Along the way, he tucks in just enough exposition about the game, from its history to its unique social strata, in which the worlds of blue bloods — “cake eaters,” Paumgarten self-deprecatingly calls them — and blue collar collide. We get revealing glimpses of the man’s somewhat esoteric family, his life in boarding school and later Princeton, where he abandons hockey in favor of skiing and falls in love.
But it’s beer league hockey that serves as both the spine and heartbeat of the book. The Intangibles is about the men who duke it out almost nightly in the lowest rung of local amateur hockey while the rest of New York City sleeps. It’s about Paumgarten’s love for this game — a game and its outcome, he admits, that nobody save for its motley crew of participants gives a shit about — and his love for the men he plays it with. In addition to the play-by-play between the boards, we get the team recap emails, the post-game pints, the funk of dirty hockey bags, the thrill of arcing a blade across the “matte finish” of unsullied ice or chipping a puck through an opponent’s legs and into the net. We even get the fist fights, petty and hilarious and brain-rattling as they are because, yes, it turns out grown men with wives and jobs and kids and retirement plans are still willing to brawl over a game in which there are no stakes.
And yet, of course, there are stakes. To Paumgarten and his cohort, beer league hockey is the stuff of life — a game that is both comical and cathartic, often at the same time. In chapters devoted to teammates, a rag tag crew from all different walks of life, we come to understand the camaraderie, the decorum, the quest itself, however quixotic, of becoming champs in one of the sport’s lowest divisions and the balm that is locker room banter among men with sagging and failing bodies, as well as their bid — in this age of toxicity — to improve both themselves and how they see and respond to the ever-evolving world, one, it seems, that sometimes still outskates them.
Does The Intangibles earn itself a place in the canon of great American sports books? Yes, it does. It also feels like necessary reading for men who, in an era of unprecedented loneliness, could use the type of community that beer league hockey provides.
With that in mind, I joined Paumgarten via Zoom to talk hockey, the silly pursuits of men and the power of seemingly banal stories.
James Jung: The Intangibles, for a memoir that really feels like it’s already entered the canon of classic American sports literature, is also — in a way — a meta commentary on why it took you this long to deliver a book.
Nick Paumgarten: One of the reasons why I hadn’t done a book, or why I procrastinated for so long, was because I was playing so much hockey and then doing the hockey dad stuff on weekends. I was burning the candle on seven ends. I was just permanently strung out. No sleep, The New Yorker was a full-time job. So I end up writing a book about the thing that had prevented me from writing a book.
JJ: You’ve written a lot of notable stories for The New Yorker. I am sure over the years friends and colleagues thought you’d turn one of those into a book.
NP: Subjects came along, other stories. I’d write a big fat piece for The New Yorker and someone would say, “That could be a good book.” But I would feel that the piece had achieved what it wanted to achieve. Once it was finished and edited and chopped down to where it should be and fact-checked so that it was nice and airtight and ready to travel into the world, the idea of reopening all those doors and pumping it full of gas and steroids and fat, all while not discovering something new but instead just taking something that was done and making it bigger… that kept happening, and I kept shying away from that kind of work.
JJ: So when did you finally decide that you wanted to write about beer league hockey? What was the genesis of the book?
NP: I wrote an essay for my friend Adam Ross, who edits The Sewanee Review. He wanted me to write something for him that was not a New Yorker thing. I think, secretly, and then later not so secretly, he had an ulterior motive and that was to try to get me to write a book. But I was an unwitting dupe. He just said, “Write about something that is front of mind, that you feel like you could write about with ease or with interest.” And I just started writing an essay. It was almost in a voice that was different from my ordinary New Yorker voice. It was sort of more like a fictional type voice about my hockey dad experiences. It was very impressionistic. It didn’t have much of a narrative arc. The sections barely related to each other. I did it in, like, three days. It came easily. It was different, and it had a vibe to it. And it sort of exposed a root system of stuff that I hadn’t realized was there — this was deeper territory than I even imagined when I was just going to write something quickly to get out of an obligation to my friend Adam.
JJ: When did you realize, “Hey, I might have something here?”
NP: I don’t know, it just really jazzed me. I really felt some gravitational force that I hadn’t expected. Mysteries there. Then that little essay, which was called “Quitters,” got some traction and my agent — who is not a hockey fan at all or a sports fan at all — was kind of bewitched by it. She actually planted the seed in some ways. I was skeptical because, like, who cares? I’m an athlete of no distinction. There’s nothing special about these games. But then I wrote some more and it kept happening; I kept feeling that sapper, the writer’s sapping wand or whatever you call it kept vibrating.
JJ: You say there’s nothing special about these hockey games, but clearly, to you and your teammates, they were.
NP: The stories that interest me are the more banal stories of my life — they seem to have some hidden significance or power. That’s what intrigued me about this project in some ways. No one cares about beer league hockey except for the participants themselves. I was intrigued by a project in which there was a level of difficulty to try to get people to care about something that no one had ever cared about.
JJ: There’s a rhythm to the writing, a voice. To me, the early chapters evoke Tobias Wolff, particularly This Boy’s Life. There’s some Cheever in there, too, and of course a voice and milieu wholly your own. Was there any book or writer you were looking toward as a lodestar?
NP: When I started writing [The Intagiables] I happened to be reading Proust for the first time in my life. That was probably a mistake because my prose got kind of nuts. It was like Proust had cast a spell over me. You’re reading those big chunks and those sentences, those long sentences and all that sensitivity. So when I was starting out writing this book, I was just basically rolling up my sleeves — writing by day and Proust by night. I had to undo a lot of that. You rev up the machine and write some sentences and the next morning you’re in the clear light of day and you’re like, “No.” So then you have to undo everything and you turn it into a pile of nails and screws because it’s boring. In the end, I tried to sort of luxuriate in the Vulgate of hockey.
JJ: Did you leave a lot on the cutting room floor?
NP: Yeah, tons. What I started doing was just writing down everything I thought I could about hockey. I kind of wandered the terrain for two years, writing everything that came to mind. The pond hockey experiences, the beer league stuff, just taking the memories and the old emails and the shreds of records that existed and turning it all into narrative. I mean, I had dozens of seasons and hundreds of teammates and games. The results and incidents and follies — there was just way too much of that. So there’s plenty left out. There were also tangents that were not as much about hockey but were maybe more about, for lack of a better phrase, toxic men or difficult men. But it ended up being too on the nose or it was distracting.
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NP: Well, of course, there is that kind of locker-room talk. It exists, and we all have different levels of tolerance or enthusiasm for crude talk among men. I know where I stand on that spectrum. But it’s very specific and it’s a place I’ve arrived at with a lot of consternation and thought and experience through the years. What I find interesting is the locker-room talk that’s not this dumb talk, but it’s actually, occasionally, really thoughtful — men being really honest about their lives. That’s what I found funny, especially thinking back on it; some of the moments of actual tenderness. They don’t read in the room as tenderness because it’s all banter. But with the benefit of hindsight, and having grown together with these guys and been through a lot, it changes how you see it. Everyone has been kneecapped in one way or another, and as a result, we kind of feel like we’re family for life, and so we’re warm and supportive of each other in a way that 23-year-old hockey players probably aren’t at the outset.
JJ: Some of the locker-room scenes, in all their corporeal detail and comedy, remind me of a story that a writer friend recently told me. He was in Rome and he went to some spa and decided to keep his underwear or bathing suit on. It was full of these old Italian guys, who were naked, and they just kind of looked at him with disgust, like, what the hell are you doing? In the age of young guys looksmaxxing, I find that attitude, the kind of cavalier attitude of these old Italian guys, to be encouraging.
NP: Yeah! It’s like, who cares? What we were doing was anti-maxxing. There was no benefit in this, you know? We weren’t doing it to look better or to get in better shape even. I mean, there were guys who took good care of themselves. There were younger guys who had come right out of playing collegiate sports, and they were in shape. I remember making a comment when I was in my late 20s about a friend of mine who was six years older and had achieved an impressive beer belly. I made some remark about it and he was kind of hurt. The other guys in the room were like, “Why’d you say that?” It stuck with me. And then, years later, I’m the one with this beer belly — people making remarks about the hair on your back or whatever. The young guys get to chirp the old guys. But, again, the fact that everyone is basically stripping down in the same room and not making a big deal out of any of it, I find that sort of encouraging.
JJ: Do you think if you’d made it as a hockey player, not to the NHL, but D3 college puck and had really given it a go, do you think you would have still become a writer?
NP: That’s what we call a good question. I have no idea. I really don’t know if I had the temperament to be that kind of an athlete, to have committed for so long. My veering away from being an athletic kid and into degeneracy was so sharp. But I was also really interested in school work. I liked to read. I liked to write. I liked the difficult stuff. It’s hard for me to imagine another version of myself that doesn’t ride in the back of the bus and throw spitballs. Sometimes, when I flatter myself, I like to think that if I had stuck with it, worked out and not smoked pot, that I could have reached X level — maybe fourth line at a good hockey school. And the writer thing, well, nothing else came along. In the absence of any other great ideas, I just kept doing it. I think I got addicted to the feedback, positive feedback. You get a little bit, you want more, you kind of push that lever.
JJ: That reminds me, there’s a great scene in the book where your father comes to watch a beer league game, and then you talk to him the next day and you’re hoping for a compliment.
NP: Yeah, I’m waiting. I’m hoping. And he says, “You guys are terrible.” That was at a time when we were going to games at The Garden with some frequency and watching Brian Leetch work the left point on the power play, and [Mark] Messier and [Alexei] Kovalev. There was some good hockey to watch, and then you come to our game and the ice is bad, we’re disorganized, there’s no coach. So he didn’t hurt my feelings that much. But I know I’m guilty of wanting someone to notice that I’m doing something well. It’s kind of embarrassing, you know? It’s pathetic. Writing is a little like that, too. It’s very much a child performing for his dad. Work that one out in therapy, I guess. But until I really practice non-attachment, I’ll be an egotistical ape like everybody.
JJ: Your parents aren’t critical to the book, but they do provide some memorable vignettes, which feel very honest. Plus, beyond beer league hockey, fathers and sons and family are braided throughout the narrative.
NP: I think it’s pretty honest. I mean the punch gets pulled every now and then, but I have really nothing but gratitude. The fundamental baseline of all of it is gratitude and love. My mother, when she was alive, once said to me when I was thinking about writing about the family, “You can’t write about us, can you?” I said, “Oh, I can write about whatever I want.”
JJ: OK, last question: what’s the best hockey movie?
NP: To me, Slap Shot is not only the greatest hockey movie, it’s actually supreme cinema. It’s better than I think a lot of people remember. It’s a sort of piece about the American decline and male behavior. Nancy Dowd’s writing is just incredible. To me, it’s like scripture.
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