Garrison Keillor’s “Help Me Rhonda Chair”, an imaginary device, sold by an imaginary company, “Jack’s Automotive”, endlessly played the Beach Boys’ song, while you sat in its cocoon-like personal environment. The constant refrain, repeated and repeated, had the affect of masking the everyday world, by creating what was an external, artificial mantra.

Garrison’s humor helped me understand a very real technique I had long used. I didn’t know what a mantra was. I hadn’t heard of white noise, either. What I did know was the “Telstar Effect”.

I was the goalie of our high school’s state championship hockey team. Most of my teammates had been playing organized hockey for years, in Canada. The players on my team were very good. Several went on to play in college, a couple became All Americans, three went on to try out for the US Olympic team, and at least one played professional hockey. In this group of skilled hockey players there was not a single goal tender. I was the one willing to wear the pads.

A true beginner, I was a high school sophomore when I started to play, not only hockey, but any sport. How good can a non-jock look compared to players who have had a ten-year head start at a complex sport? I was not a natural. My inexperience forced the other players on my team to play even harder, which undoubtedly pleased our coach. They played in constant fear that if they lost control of the puck to the other team, it was a sure goal against us. I proved this to be true many times over.

My own teammates thought I was a terrible goalie. I made all the classic beginner mistakes, such as catching the puck and tossing it into my own net, or coming out of the net when I should have stayed back, or staying in the crease when I should have advanced. I recall all those times my mind and body wanted to take opposite actions at the same moment. There were times I ducked when I shouldn’t have. It is unnatural to allow a fast moving object to hit you. So, yes, they should have played scared. I didn’t know what I was doing.

I was inexperienced, and could not accelerate to their level of play overnight. I would forever be ten years behind. But I could, if properly focused, play beyond my lack of experience and become a stone wall around the goal. It was a surprise when it did happen.

There was a tiny on/off switch in my brain that could help me achieve what I later learned was “focus”. I was unaware of this mental switch. During one practice session our coach skated up to me. He told me which drill was about to commence. Then he added, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the guys are keeping track of the goals they score on you today. They are betting they can score every time they shoot”.

That might have been true. I really hated drills and did not enjoy looking foolish as pucks flew past me. Our coach pushed the button and spun the dial that brought me up to a higher level. He said: “the guys are keeping track of the goals they score on you”. I heard: “score on you”. It flipped my switch. That day they were less successful than usual.

My teammates might have been as puzzled as I was that day. But, I suspect they wouldn’t have given me credit for rising to the occasion, and instead they probably thought they were having an “off” day. How had I suddenly become an impenetrable wall? Was it motivation? I believe it was focus.

Intuitively, I had taken my coach’s words and run them over and over in my head. “Score on you, Score on you, Score on you, Score on you, Score on you,
Score on you, Score on you”. It was a variation on the chant I repeated when I went to the neighborhood store to get a loaf of bread, butter, and a bottle of aspirin: “bread butter aspirin bread butter aspirin bread butter aspirin bread butter aspirin”. The repetition engaged my brain, blocked me from thinking about anything else, and kept me on task. Unfortunately, my experience with chant focus was of short duration, no more than a few minutes.

I couldn’t keep a string of words replaying in my mind for a full hour or even twenty minutes, could I? Maybe some pre-game activity would put me into the proper frame. I was really searching for a short-cut that would compensate for my late start as a goalie.

I discovered a technique for heightening focus in an old hockey training book, Lloyd Percival’s The Hockey Handbook. It suggested that before each game a goalie might engage in a routine called a “sitz bath”. It called for sitting in a chair in a shower, with a shower head aimed at your gut. The shower would be cold water only, and would last ten minutes - thirty seconds on, thirty off. It seemed crazy, but anything that could give me the success of that morning at practice would be worth it. I locked the bathroom door, hopped in the bathtub and rhythmically drenched myself in this bizarre ritual.

I didn’t feel more focused after the “sitz bath”, but we won the game. All I could think of at the time was that I was torturing myself with some crude water game. It mostly gave me a feeling of tensing up. Maybe I needed to try the technique again. Maybe I wasn’t doing it quite right.

I had never heard of any goalie who admitted using this water drill. But I was willing to try anything to be more successful at stopping pucks. Perhaps I should have sat under a beam of blue stained-glass light, upon my knees in church before each game. Fortunately, no one suggested that approach. I tried the “sitz bath”, rereading the directions to make sure I was doing it correctly. The second time, I added music.

One day, while riding my bike, I found a Japanese transistor radio. Transistor radios were a new invention. This one was laying in the street. I stopped my bike, reached down, and picked it up. Except for a small scuff on the brown leather case, it seemed to be in perfect condition. I must digress further and tell you that I went door to door to try to locate the owner of this electronic marvel. No one had lost such a thing. No one I knew even had one to lose.

My Dad said, that the rule applied in this case was “Finders keepers”. Dad’s authority on such matters seemed questionable. Being a good Catholic boy, I went to a priest for advice. A priest certainly would have a more trustworthy and well thought out answer than “finders keepers”. I told the priest the full story, starting at the moment I spotted the radio while riding my bike. It could as easily been a pack of cigarettes or a dead chipmunk. There were no cars passing by, no houses nearby. I rode closer to look. Looking up at me was a slightly scuffed transistor radio. I picked it up and spun the dial that brought it to life. The song emitted was familiar, one I owned a 45 rpm copy of: “Telstar”. I turned the switch off when the tune ended. The priest didn’t appreciate the details. He just wanted to know how much such a thing was worth. I said a new one cost maybe one hundred dollars. So, he told me I should put one hundred dollars into the collection plate at mass or into the “Poor Box”.

One hundred dollars? Sure, the careless person who dropped the radio probably paid that much for it, but I was fifteen. My weekly allowance was two dollars. One hundred dollars would take me a year to save. If I had a hundred dollars I wouldn’t spend it on a new transistor radio. I was lucky to have money to buy a pack of baseball cards and a brittle slab of chewing gum. Did he really expect me to cough up a hundred bucks? From where? What should I do? Drop out of school and get a job? Steal money from the “Poor Box”, buy a gun, rob a bank, all so I could pay for something that had miraculously appeared in the road? This priest was nuts, or so I thought.

Upon refection my preamble likely made him jump to the wrong conclusion: I’d stolen the radio. I guess telling a priest that I had found a radio was comparable to telling him I had a friend who stole a radio. It gets too convoluted.

Dad was correct. The finders keepers rule did apply, after all, and a gift from heaven is not to be denied, and is intended to be used. I played my radio as often as possible.

As I started my “sitz bath”, the radio played on the bathroom counter. While the shower ran the broadcast music was drowned out. When the water stopped the music filled the room, as best as it could. Transistor radios were not boom boxes. They had tiny speakers, not very loud. Ten seconds of water, ten seconds of music, ten of water, etc. During one musical interlude, the tune playing was “Telstar”, that same novelty instrumental that came out of the speakers when I found the radio in the street. Something magical happened as I listened to the tune. I didn’t bother turning the water on again.

Telstar was the name of an early communications satellite, actually visible from earth. I saw it one night at dusk, as it floated slowly by. The setting sun lit it up.

A British band, the Tornados, commemorated the dawn of a new age with a joyous melody. The instrumental builds a thrilling feeling around a simple theme, not unlike Ravel’s “Bolero”. Unlike the “Bolero”, it does not crash, but speeds on past, flying into the future. The music was the first British record to reach number one on the US pop charts. It was uplifting enough to become the anthem of the space age. When it hit the charts all things seemed possible, Kennedy was President.

With the water off, I noticed that the music had an effect upon my focus and attitude, greater than all the water I had sprayed on my belly. In addition, Dad was no longer pounding on the door telling me to stop wasting the god damn water!

I dressed and went into the bedroom I shared with my brother, Tom. I put my 45 rpm disk of “Telstar” on the turntable and played it again and again, until I left for the game. The tune enthused me. It spun the dial inside, filled my head, caught me up and carried me away, or at least masked the world around. Without external distractions, I slipped into a surprising state of focus. During the game, the puck became the size of a beach ball and moved slowly, as if suspended in a jar of honey. I played well in goal that day, beyond what might be expected from someone with so little skill and experience.

>From that point on, Telstar became my game day music. Around the family it was no longer called “TELSTAR”, but Sandy’s damn hockey music. They still refer to it the same way, after all these many decades.

Although I don’t spend much time on the ice, the “Telstar Effect” remains my most constant tool in the studio. It is my rope to the other side where the paint comes from.

Sandy Kinnee is an artist whose work figures in the collections of many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He lives in Colorado Springs. See website.