.. Wisdom Keith He came from his mother, who was from Muskegon. She named him Keith after her father, who had passed away decently three years prior. Five years after her father’s death, her two-year-old son started to show signs of great flexibility. At first it wasn’t much to talk about. Some of the other mothers had kids who were learning how to play checkers and singing along in a cute and ironic way to the leftover Joan Baez records common in her circle. So Gina didn’t really share her son’s talent.What happened was that Keith as he grew older became heavily interested in fractal arts. He was fourteen when he first brought home some logarithms. At the time order had him processing such work through the calculator. To that point, the Texas Instruments DX3367-L76N personal scientific calculator seemed to be of decent value for the amount of work it did for him. That first night, his flexibility altered forms without relegating itself to one of the three absolute states: physical, mental and artistic. It altered in the clear way he’d been wishing on, being young and ambiguous, he had been waiting on something so clear as an obvious skill. What he found was the infinite patterns and counter-logic logic that fed directly all three states. He slowly delved into fractals over the remaining school year, so eager that he was often censured by his math teacher for an outward self-absorption Keith demonstrated by asking unidirectional questions. Destination: Fractals. This was art, this was math, this was love. This was responsible for awful similes and their embarrassing citations he would receive for using them in his English papers. Something was missing.
And then he tired of it by summer. Keith got a job as a way to stay out of the house. He put up chain link fences around the fields of his town’s university. He was flexible.
Keith got to joining a boy’s field hockey team. Caging a soccer field in the southeastern corner of campus on July 14th, he got to chatting with some of the players and it was loose, and they too were flexible, so he started casually joining them. He didn’t much know how to play the game, and his wrists weren’t too comfortable with the “stick-mallets”, so the team (the Strykers) left him in next. The physical end of the game wasn’t his gimmick, but the bruises were good for conversation. He spent the remaining 48 days of summer working on the logic of his position. He sharpened his reaction and tapered his anticipatory instincts (if there are such things). When the season ended, his team did too. A mediocre season not worth remembering but well worth playing, that was the general consensus of the players. For obvious reasons, Keith did a good job in goal.
And then came winter and the hockey leagues. He wanted to goaltend again, so he needed to learn how to skate, to some degree. No problem. Motivation was as good for Keith as adrenaline. He was too calm for adrenaline, anyways. Second day of tryouts he told Rory, who became Rory only two minutes before he told him, he told him that its smarter to stare at the stick face. This was light years ahead of PeeWee strategy rhetoric. For this, his future friend Rory dubbed him “Wisdom Keith”.
Five years of pursuit landed Keith in Rochester, playing for a minor hockey team as a first-string goalie with no hope of ever making “The Show”. Another year passed and he became the player to be named later from a year-old trade between two of the big league teams.
“Welcome to Salt Lake City” read the curiously barren banner hanging from the overpass outside of the Salt Lake City’s international aeroport. Everything was flat for Wisdom Keith, who knew that goaltending theory was taking him nowhere. Or Salt Lake City. He stretched himself in Utah, trying to open his mind to new ideas and possibilities. He wouldn’t acknowledge the sadness from the lack of both. He heard himself telling a gorgeous Mojave women (in transit to Cheyenne) about a weekend in Vegas, and how he had to take the bus there. From that, he could acknowledge the loneliness, so in keeping with his opening policy, he felt comforted by the attention the media gave him as a starting goalie. In Rochester, two forwards and one enforcer were enough to fill the columns and build up the airwaves.
The attention he got from the media in Utah was specifically from the Salt Lake Tribune and KSL AM 1160. He even once got interviewed by ESPN2, which warranted a rare phone call to his brother. The fans learned about his nickname from the prefaces of the 14 interviews he had done with the () that year. During pre-game radio interviews, he would often air absurd proverbial musings on the coming game. The name was on the verge of breaking into the mass conscience.
And then on December 12th, 1999, it broke like a punchline. The night before, Keith’s Utah Grizzlies, of the IHL, were up 4-0 going into the third period. Keith gave up three goals in the first ten minutes of that last period. His coach, Rick Mysinuker, pulled him for the first time all season. The Grizzlies went on to win 5-3, but the Tribune broke it: “Grizzlies Pull Wisdom Keith”
The end of the peel...
... ritual seasoning