Growing up in Glencoe, ON, a town of about 2,000 people in SouthWestern Ontario, hockey was, like in most agriculturally-based small towns, the undisputed king of sports. I have been a fan of the Blue and White practically since the day I was born, and all of my friends played for the local teams, from house league through the ranks of AAA, and several from our area into Junior B, the OHL, and in the cases of the now-famous sons of nearby Strathroy Andy McDonald, and Brian Campbell - my elementary school principal's son - all the way to the NHL. My mom's cousin, Darryl Edestran, played for Don Cherry's lunch-pail gang in Boston in the 70s, and even my neighbour's older cousin who used to pick on us all the time in the backyard got a tryout with the Columbus Blue Jackets.
This isn't a unique story, though. One in a thousand minor hockey players in Canada will make the NHL, and the numbers don't lie. Eventually, you will know someone who made it all the way, and sometimes - like in the case of the former Strathroy Junior B Rocket McDonald - one who brings home the Stanley Cup one historic summer.
But another aspect of the life-story inalienable from my being, my past and my present, is an at first surprising but equally unspectacular fact: of all the working-class, agricultural families in towns like Glencoe all over Canada, there are the kids who don't play hockey. It's just a game - a great, beautifully masculine and powerful game, the violent and yet somehow poetic lifeblood of our nation - but it's just a game... a game that, after ice-time, ever-too-small-for-the-last-growth-spurt equipment, insurance, gasoline, accomodation, registration and vehicle wear is without question the most costly of youth sports in our nation if not all nations. Not to mention the intangibles: time, for one, especially if you're a parent whose child is blessed with talent, and is on the "travel" team, or makes AAA, and you spend a weekend driving to and from a game that takes a whole two hours to play.
It all adds up, and for many families, it's too much. It was for mine, and though I found my share of pond-time and days at a time of road hockey, I never did really lace them up in any league, or even at any level that required equipment. It was always one of those things that I accepted, and shelved, hoping to one day live vicariously through my children as they played from a young age and won the Stanley Cup just to bring it home to Dad.
It's strange regretting something you have no control over. You put it out of mind, and life happens. First job, first car, first of too many girlfriends over a ridiculously short time, university, moving, internships, students' union, travel, graduate school, a "grown-up job" - it's not like I haven't had my share of other priorities. And all the while, watching the Maple Leafs continue to reign as the only franchise less futile than the Chicago Blackhawks... watching Canada finally send its actual best to the Olympics... and lose... then win!... then lose again... the World Juniors, Women's World Championships, Canada Cup, World Cup, my first Leafs game in 2006 (coming since the age of 4 - an exhibition game, first of the season, where they sleepwalked to a 4-0 loss despite having all but one regular dressed). Two road trips and four NHL games in college: Blackhawks at Blue Jackets, Sabres at Canadiens, Thrashers at Bruins, Hurricanes at Penguins (Mark Recchi had a hat trick for the Pens in a losing cause... 7-5 final, and I saw Crosby in person... it was also the game where Brooks Orpik injured Erik Cole's neck so badly as well, and yes, it was as bad as it looked on Sportscentre if not worse). Playing hockey pools, Saturday night double-headers (the second game was always shinny in Victoria Park in London, where ringing a puck off a garbage barrel was the only way to count a goal), and a million hockey cards. Mini-sticks, Blades of Steel, the Mighty Ducks movies, and even more memorized stats. Rod hockey, air hockey, basement hockey, and a school-year variety called "boot hockey," or "foot hockey" in some regions, which involved kicking around a tennis ball in a sport that anywhere but Canada would be called football... (meaning we should at least take it as a variety of "soccer"...) but no, it is and always will be boot hockey. Always obsessed with the game, I always thought of trying the coaching route, one day becoming a GM and building a cup winner... or just learning to skate really, really well and start refereeing, even...
If I didn't lose you entirely above, you get the picture. Maybe this lack was hanging over me this last quarter-century, and maybe someone could tell.
I turned 25 this most recent new year's eve, and received easily the most thoughtful gift anyone has ever given me, from all of my friends in Toronto (and some who contributed who aren't from the GTA but know what this could mean): Sidonie, my girlfriend of nearly two years, signed me up at the Canadian Pro Hockey Clinic to take beginners' hockey instruction, and took up a collection from my "inner circle" to buy me equipment.
The most popular question since I received this gift (other than "did you cry?") is some variation of "how are you liking hockey?" In short, I love it, and I don't know that I can say enough about it - so, to avoid having everyone I know only hear about one thing for what may very well be the rest of my life, I will be writing regular dispatches (sometimes shorter than this, I hope) from the significant moments in this new love affair. The first few are backdated, (because of course, who thinks of chronicling anything until it's too late), but by next Sunday (January 21), you can keep up with my career in real time. At worst, my first actual attempt at serious, sustained blogging will turn out to be a boring list of people met, skills "learned" and a catalogue of the endless varieties of skating drills; at best, though, it will endeavour to display what Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented as the mark of genius: to carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.
In short, my future with hockey is finally in my hands, and all the years of loving this game from afar are over. It is now time to stop letting what I can't do prevent me from doing what I can. I have been given the clean, white sheet, something essential to the hockey player and the writer alike, and with any luck, I will unite the vocations somewhere along this journey.
I'm reminded of this great Bauer commercial that I loved as a kid, that began and ended with clips of the zamboni resurfacing the ice: in closing, I will just thank you all for sharing my attempt to respond to this challenge on both levels presented in its poem:
"If I give you a clean sheet, what will you write?
Will your words be long and graceful or short and sweet?
Will it be poetry or brute instinct?
If you have something to say, best say it now.
For soon, always, too soon.
My sheet will be filled.
And this chapter will end.
As sure as the next will begin.
With a clean sheet, new authors, and a million possibilities."
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