from Gare Joyce at the New York Times,

This is a story about one of those scouts, Fred. I tell Fred’s story whenever I overhear a fan talking about scouting as a dream job.

When I first met him, in the early 2000s at the World Junior Championships in Pardubice, in the Czech Republic, his scouting career was off to a promising start. He was in his early 30s, in his first N.H.L. gig.

As a player, he was short and, to be polite, stubby. On the ice, he had lived by his wits. Scouts grade prospects on “hockey sense,” an intuitive understanding of the way the game should be played. Scouts, of course, would be helpless without it. As a player and scout, Fred had hockey sense in spades.

Though he never played in an N.H.L. game, Fred believed he had found his niche as a scout, and now wanted to get made, to become a part of the fraternity, to have not just a career but a good career, to be a 25-year, maybe a 30-year hockey man.

We got to where we’d call each other up every couple of weeks or so to swap notes. On more than a couple of occasions, we shared rides to games — braving icy two-lane highways on the banks of the St. Lawrence going into the small-town Quebec. We became friends.

Fred was a good scout, industrious, conscientious, always looking for a certain type of player, like he had a favorite flavor.

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