Talking with Batterinski in Finland this past spring, there was absolutely no hint of what was coming. We sat, measuring out his curious career in coffee spoons and flat beer, in a small restaurant in Lahti, a small city a hundred or so kilometres north of Helsinki. That evening Batterinski’s Tapiola Hauki would meet Lahti in the first round of the SM Liiga Hockey Championships. He seemed completely content with himself, a great tickle of a grin spreading over the face that ‘seems to have been shaped by a furious Greek sculptor with his fists,’ as Philadelphia sportswriter Jim Kennedy once wrote. He was going out a winner, he said. He was wrong, of course, but it was as hard to see then where he was going as it was to understand from where Felix Batterinski came. His own past he shied away from the way others avoided the arena corners he would patrol that night. They have a saying for this in hockey, and that is that the player ‘hears footsteps.’ And whenever it came down to Batterinski’s early life and what had shaped him, he would suddenly turn on edge, wary, almost as if something might be sneaking up on him from behind.
