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IntensivePorpoises · 01-20-2020, 09:44 PM

*new writer bonus 404 words*

“I never really watched hockey games,” diminutive forward prospect Washington Wales tells me. “Just the highlight reels.”

And that’s really all you need to know about Wales as a player and as a person. He’ll dazzle you, show you something unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and then disappear. His shifts are lightning fast, and so are his interviews. And then he evaporates so completely that you wonder if he was ever really there.

“I think he said something about an exhibit,” defenseman Harry James says when I ask him where Wales headed after practice. “Maybe a zoo? Or like an art thing?”

The thought crosses my mind that he might be avoiding his coach, who has been critical of his one-dimensional game. But Wales has never been shy about accepting responsibility. I wonder why I find it so unfathomable that a young player might just have priorities outside of hockey.

“Oh, Jamesy must’ve been thinking about that time I faked sick to go see the new baby beavers,” Wales says. “But nah, this was all about my boy Picasso.” He gives me a brief review of Cubism before his phone rings with a call, “he just has to take.” Not to report eavesdropping, but it involved plans to qualify for Jeopardy.

What started as a simple prospect report has by this point become a kind of fascination for me. I needed to know more about this kid, so I tracked down his older sister Martha for an interview. She tells me right up front that I’ll never hear from her parents about anything hockey related.

“Too busy,” she says. “Besides, they’re boring anyway. You can quote me on that, they’ll never read it.”

Naturally, I leave the interview feeling like what I know of Wales is only a drop in the bucket. He drank Pediasure until he was 16 to bulk up, he nearly failed high school but aced the SAT, and he just spent 6 months assembling a LEGO Death Star. If hockey doesn’t work out, he plans to study dentistry. Apparently, he says they will “need dentists on Mars. More than astronauts.”

I ask him about all this the next day.

“What a s****y prospect report,” he says, laughing. “So, you hear about this shark that just went extinct?”

It wasn’t much of a conversation. He just hit the highlights (6 billion years old!) and then he went off somewhere else.

*fishy* · 01-25-2020, 11:57 AM

hey @IntensivePorpoises as this is about a smjhl prospect and was written during the x2 draft media bonus week, I used that bonus instead of using your first article bonus, so the next article you write you can use your first article bonus!

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