Timmy College is growing up.
It is not a question of whether he, with "he" being Icers sophomore forward Tim O'Brien, wants to or not. It is because he has to.
He has to because with 13 graduating seniors, no one -- not O'Brien, not his ever-talkative teammate Matt Kirstein, not even his head coach Scott Balboni -- knows for sure what this team will look like come next year. He has to because with the graduating class leaves Luke DeLorenzo, the only Icers forward who knows what O'Brien is going to experience next year as opposing defenses make stopping him their priority. He has to because as a sophomore he was Penn State's lone representative at last weekend's ACHA All-Star Game -- an honor Balboni typically reserves for the team's seniors (but admits it's an honor O'Brien "was absolutely deserving of as our leading points scorer this year.")
And it was with that in mind, on a day last week, the enigmatic forward sat on a bench in the East Area Locker Rooms weight room, waiting for a photographer's instructions.
"What are you doing?" asked Kirstein, knowing that O'Brien's wrist, the one he injured in December and required him to wear a brace while playing much of the spring, still limits him from most upper-body lifts.
"Posing," he proudly declared, the way a king would have -- that is if kings were known to raise both arms, bend them at the elbows and flex just as Kirstein had minutes earlier as he examined himself in one of the gym's many mirrors. He flexed in a way similar to that of a wild animal exerting its perceived dominance over a challenger to its throne.
"Should I put some weight on here?" asked Josh Davis, the weight trainer who was laughing, just as he had earlier as O'Brien struggled through the morning's workout, as the 20-year-old forward flexed before an empty barbell.
"Yeah," he decreed, again from his temporary throne. "The big ones. I want to look like a beast."
Out came two sizeable free weights and with O'Brien seemingly pleased with his new backdrop, out came the instructions.
So he sat there, not staring, but full-on glaring into the camera. He focused on the lens in a way that muted his typical off-ice facial expression -- an expression that emanated from a smile one-third devilish, one-third cunning and one-last-third confident, and spread to eyes partially obscured by rising cheeks -- and left him with a face that said Tim O'Brien doesn't care if his opponents like him, and that he'd prefer if they didn't. A face that is the odds-on favorite to be the face of the Icers offense next year.
***
There was a conversation in China not too long ago that summed up Tim O'Brien in the eyes of his opponents. At least that's how the story goes.
Supposedly O'Brien's teammates DeLorenzo and Jaime Zimmel were part of a conversation with their World University Games teammates (many of whom came from the Icers' biggest rivals) over who was most hated on each other's teams back home. There were two players from the Icers mentioned in that conversation: senior defenseman Craig Brooks, the team's runaway leader in penalty minutes, and a sophomore forward named Tim O'Brien. When pressed for a reason as to why O'Brien was on that list (Brooks's reason was obvious), Illinois defenseman Brad Hoelzer -- whom O'Brien described as "a pretty cut kid" -- responded, "He's the only person in the league that's ever got to my head from chirping." O'Brien, who claims only to have repeatedly called him "fat," was of course pleased.
For the past two seasons it's been that on-ice demeanor, that face in the picture, that's been the biggest difference between O'Brien and DeLorenzo, his predecessor as the key to Penn State's offense. DeLorenzo is marked by composure and control while on the ice -- he's always among the peacemakers whenever a skirmish breaks out. Meanwhile, O'Brien is often at the center of such shoving matches. Where DeLorenzo goes about his business quietly, O'Brien is often seen laughing in opponents' faces as they react to his constant badgering. As he put it, he doesn't care what they're saying back to him, and that remains the same whether he was just calling them "fat," or as he was overheard politely informing a goalie who was hitting his linemate Kirstein with his stick earlier this spring, that he was going to remove the wooden object from his hand and break it over his head if he didn't stop.
"When you take the helmet off and go off the ice he'd probably be the first guy to go over and shake their hand, but when he puts on the helmet he has that demeanor that he doesn't care who it is -- who he's playing against -- he just wants to win," Balboni said. "So he's chirping. He's in their head a little bit. He's always talking on the ice, but more from the standpoint that he'll do whatever it takes to win."
But the fact remains Tim O'Brien -- or what has become somewhat of his alter ego, Timmy College -- on ice and laced up shares marked similarities with a notable professional athlete with whom he also shares his initials (Tim O'Brien; think about it). While he has yet to make a fool of himself by doing sit-ups in his East Beaver Avenue driveway (at least as far as this writer knows), he has sat on his porch and made fun of back-up goalie Teddy Hume as he walked by on the sidewalk. He has several tendencies that could alienate teammates as well as opponents, foremost of which is his mouth.
It's constantly running, the mouth. Whether he's on ice and telling opponents they eat too much, or outside the locker room after games and insulting his own teammates. It's constantly running. He was at one point late in the season in the process of saying the team wasn't going to lose again all season. At least he was, before an upperclassman bumped into him from behind and stopping him mid-declaration. It's constantly running. In uniform. In his post-game suit. In his warm-ups. At the rink. On the radio. And, of course, at his house.
"The goalies are good," he recently said of his on-ice mantra, while sitting in a recliner in the living room of his house with one of his housemates, junior defenseman John Conte, sitting close by. "I love getting a goalie. That's my favorite part. I don't even know what I say. I just get caught up in running my mouth so much. Usually I say, 'I'm coming for you,' when the ref's not there. Because I'm not coming for him to hurt him, I'm just getting inside his head that I'm coming. I've always wanted to score a goal and just celebrate right above the goalie."
"And take a sip out of his water bottle?" asked Conte. "That's the one I want to do so bad."
"That's a good one, but no," O'Brien responded. "We were working on some celebrations earlier this year, me and [Steve] Peck. Remember when it was me, Peck and DeLo[renzo] and we were scoring a lot of goals? Me and Peck were always getting on DeLo's case about how he never celebrates with us. He'd celebrate by himself over in the corner and we were like, 'You're the man! You're the best!' But me and Peck were going to do the putt. If I came down and scored, Peck was going to go to the corner and hold the flagstick and then I'd putt. Then he'd pull it up and I'd do like the Tiger pump."
And so the two continued, for close to 10 minutes, talking about O'Brien's intentions to further damage his opponents' pride.
"One of the best that I ever saw was in like the Interstate Junior League and somebody scored in overtime and the kid skates by his bench and takes his glove off and threw it in the bench and all the guys jumped out like it was a grenade," Conte said.
"I've still got two more years to do celeys that I really want to do," O'Brien responded. "One is the T.O., which I know I'm gonna do."
"Where you take the marker out of your skate?"
"No. No. Where I skate down the ice and do this," said O'Brien as he stretched out his arms as to make himself into a human 'T' and then moved them into an 'O' shape above his head. "The other one is, I want to score in overtime and I want it to be down on the other end, I have it pictured perfectly in my mind. I come across the middle, take the shot and score, go to the student section dropping my gloves and jumping up onto the glass and like climbing up. I want to do that. I want to do the T.O. I'll drink out of the goalie's water bottle next year for sure."
"Like on a Thursday practice?"
"I think Teddy [Hume] would get angry, because I always shoot the puck and like smoke him in the head."
***
Tim O'Brien is a child. Even though he stands over six-feet tall and tips the scales these days at a little over 180 pounds -- a size when men have dropped most of their childish tendencies -- there are reasons no one really ever calls him Tim. It's always "Timmy" "Timmy College" or just "College." Tim would imply too much maturity for a six-foot, 180-pound kid. Tim O'Brien is a child, or at least that's what John Conte says.
But O'Brien does little to dispel that notion. On a day last week -- a short while before he and Conte would discuss goal celebrations -- he sat in the same recliner, in the same room, and cheered as the house pet, a 9-month-old white-haired Boxer named Brick, jumped onto the couch shared by senior defenseman Kyle Mills and his girlfriend, Karrie Crane (whom O'Brien refers to as a "retired sorority girl"), and sat not on either of their laps, but on Crane's face. ("That a boy, Brick!" shouted O'Brien as Mills and Crane tried to move the dog.) When conversation turned to whether his on-ice demeanor extended off the ice (to which Kirstein had to hold himself back before answering, "Absolutely. He will make fun of everyone, any chance he gets. Any chance he gets. He'll just send me text messages that just say, 'I hate you.' 'With a passion.' ") he did little else but wonder aloud who else he could make fun of. As Conte would later say, "He's like a child."
"Timmy looks at me as a little bit of a father figure," Mills said. "I can't say that Timmy really ever chirps me that much ever, unless it's for a good reason. Maybe to fire me up a little bit and get me going. But when Timmy College came in, you know, he was an excited college kid. I took care of him, reached out and tried to pass on my wisdom to him. So, he calls me 'Pops.' "
But when his teammates are asked about where the nickname "Timmy College" came from, it evokes one of the only defensive remarks O'Brien makes.
"Eeeeeaaasyyyyy now," he said last week when Kirstein, another of his housemates, was asked where the name came from.
"I would say the Timmy College persona comes from the fact that he redshirted his freshman year," Kirstein said despite the plea for leniency. "So he was just so happy to be at college, because he came in halfway through the year. We had all had our Fall to, you know, warm up a little bit. So he was so noticeable, because he was just so happy to be there. And I guess he encompassed everything that was college. He still lives the Timmy College persona, but it's not as prevalent because he's settled down a little bit."
The way Conte tells the story, is one night as the team was hanging out during O'Brien's first days on campus, one of the women's lacrosse players saw him checking Facebook on his cell phone and shouted "COLLEGE!"
"From there on he's been Timmy College," Conte said. "He got to live it up, that and he's like a child."
"But that nickname is no longer there anymore," O'Brien was quick to respond.
"I don't know about that."
"It lingers," O'Brien continued to respond. "Now it's a persona."
"It depends on whether it is a good or bad persona."
"To my parents it's a bad persona."
And so O'Brien, as a redshirt sophomore, is trying to grow up. With next year, his first year as an upperclassman on the team's roster, not too far in the distance, he recognizes the importance of leaving that persona in the past. He's trying to leave the nickname behind, after all, how feared -- or respected -- on the ice can you possibly be when ever your coach occasionally addresses you as "College."
Timmy College is growing up.
So it now appears he wants to, but he still has to. Next year there will only be a small handful of seniors (with his roommates Conte and Kirstein included). Next year, with 13 incoming freshmen, is likely to be, as he put it, "a learning year" -- but a rebuilding year, as dreaded as that term may be, by any other name is likely to be just as unpleasant.
And so that is why, after a season in which he led his team in goals and total points scored, Tim O'Brien is growing up.
***
Say, for a moment, O'Brien successfully leaves the Timmy College persona in the past. Then say, in the moment immediately following the last, he's ready to embrace his place as the team's star.
Will he be up to it? Can he be the program's savior? Will Tim O'Brien, the team's leading scorer in both of his first two full-seasons, be the one who rescues the Icers program from its comparative obscurity? Can he deliver the team's first national championship in seven seasons? Like it or not, much of the scoring burden looks to be headed his way.
If John Updike was indeed correct when he wrote "a man, in America, is a failed boy," then O'Brien and his Icers are in for rough roads ahead. Tim O'Brien -- or rather, Timmy College -- will have to fail.
And not just fail to win a national championship as he did this season; anyone present at this past weekend's Icers banquet could tell you that's on the exiting class of seniors -- they all but said as much in their departing speeches. No, he'll have to fall short on his own, without the Luke DeLorenzos, Frank Berrys, Steve Pecks and Jaime Zimmels there to deflect some of the spotlight's glare. He'll have to falter when the focus is on him. He'll have to fail on his own, much the same way a young bird has to when learning to fly. Only then will he spread his wings and soar. Only then will he be able to take this team to recently uncharted heights.
But then, just maybe, that failure came on the same day the seniors were saying their goodbyes. Perhaps that failure came as O'Brien stood as the Icers lone representative -- the Icers collective face -- at the ACHA All-Star Game. Hopefully, for his team's sake, that failure came with his failing to score a goal, or even register a point, while on the losing end of the contest.
"Is that what this story's about, the All-Star Game?" Karrie Crane (the "retired sorority girl" and Mills's girlfriend) asked as O'Brien sat in the living room of the East Beaver Avenue house last week.
"Well, it's just as much about who Timmy College is," answered the reporter.
And then, from his seat in the corner of the room, O'Brien spoke up.
"It's not easy being the man."
