Digesting the Pre-Game Meal (Night 1)

My gear and I crashed into the apartment through the front door somewhere between 8:15 and 8:30 pm, and the thud brought Sid to the top of the stairs in a hurry. "Hello? ...Are you alright?" I don't know how I must've looked extracting myself gingerly from my coat and scarf, but of course, the next question would've been the same no matter how I had made my entrance.

* * *

Around 2pm, I knew that I was in a little trouble. The night before had been a night not at all conducive to next day athletics, no matter what time they were. Being a hockey fan as long as I have, of course, my thoughts during the week leading up to this day were many, but unoriginal, derived from the routines of those players I had long admired... I should have a nap, like all pros do, was one of my thoughts. It was a little hard to do after waking up at noon or later... which, of course, took care of any concerns I might've had about the morning skate as well... Though this blog was supposed to be in real time by now, I have to admit, looking back three weeks, I really don't know what I was doing the afternoon of January 6th, at least not in the earlier hours - I would venture it was some combination of pottering around the internet and generally being hungover and lazy. Mostly, though, I was looking forward to a pasta dinner of some description - you know, complex carbohydrates, a.k.a. the one and only pre-game meal for most people who take this sport seriously. About an hour to an hour-and-a-half before the 6:30 start time seemed about right.

The trouble, though, was this: another phone call had come through from Dan the equipment guru, with the suggestion that I also pick up some long underwear to put under my gear, as well as get some equipment tape (though I was well ahead of him on the latter!). No problem, I thought: Sid had to stop and see her mom - it had been her birthday that week, and she was about to leave for Mexico in the next week - so I would go two stops down the subway to Dufferin, leave her at her mom's place for about 20 minutes while I went over to the mall and got my last piece of "equipment", come back and pick her up and we would walk home to a nice pasta dinner. I could finish packing my bag and I would be at the arena with plenty of time to put on everything properly. Being a novice, I counted on having an hour to do so.

The mall was an unimaginable disaster: nothing at Champs. Nor Foot Locker. Wal-Mart, my diamond in the rough (or so I thought) was packed with people, and its men's wear section was falling to pieces. Short of a pair that one could easily tell is supposed to come packaged that was contorted into some form of garment that could be draped and/or clipped - it might have been tied - onto some form of clothes hanger, the only option was a cheap form of Under Armor-like tights found on the bottom floor, which I dismissed as being not worth the $30 asked. So off I went to Winners - really, how hard should this be? - and again, struck out. Back to Wal-Mart, where I got the sports tights or whatever they're called ("Compression Pants," I remember now, which is an incredibly tough locution for what these things really are), and headed up the Movator to cash out. Talk about bad timing. Having gotten to the mall (finally) a little after 4 pm , the cashiers at the mall exit were closing - it had drifted on to 5 by this point, so the checkout lines at the outside exit we doubled as the horde of Sunday shoppers (don't they have anything else to do? I hate shopping on Sunday) rushed to the other checkout line and swarmed all around me in something that was nowhere near a lineup. A ten-minute wait, a strained call to Sid, and the tights found themselves tossed into the shelving unit of Honey-Nut Cheerios or some lower-priced equivalent and I set off, already late and empty-handed.

I rushed Sid out of her mom's house, and we walked back - a little silly, I guess, but somehow or other she didn't have a metropass, or there was an intention to get groceries on the way home, I forget - but being as late as I felt I was, and panicked from the crowds in the mall (that's a personal thing - apparently, it has an official name, demophobia), I found myself getting several steps ahead of her about every 45 seconds to a minute. I'd like to look back now and think it was anticipation, but anyone who knows me knows that I hate being late, and I only hate rushing more than that.

I still had to pack and shower when I got in, and I hadn't eaten since lunch. We came in the door and I checked my cell: 5:53. Seriously. The grocery shopping had fallen by the wayside, and Sid warmed me up some leftover lentil soup she'd made while I took history's fastest shower. If I were her, I'd have left me to my own devices given my continual crabbing about how I didn't want to be rushing to this, but about a third of a steaming hot bowl of soup later, and I was packed and out the door.



The walk there was good, if quick, and the gear wasn't as heavy as I'd thought it would be. Sid of course came with me this first night, snapping cell phone pictures all the way. It's a little hard to see, but there's a nice interplay of dark and light in it all... in my left hand is all my gear in an old gym bag (I never did get the "hockey bag" proper), and over my right shoulder, the sticks are hard to see, but you can just make out my skates hanging over them, as is my helmet (a good hour or so of Saturday having been spent battling with the face shield attaching it to the old Tacks helmet).


It's kind of funny, really, when I think back on this first night now. I called myself a novice, and here was Sid, the purveyor of my registration and my equipment, having just gotten my meal ready for me, now walking me to the rink and taking pictures: this is a moment that countless five-year-olds could point to as a regular Saturday morning occurence, but playing the analogy out turns her into a sort of hockey mom, so perhaps I should stop there. Nevertheless, it was kind of like going to the doctor or an airport too: one of those experiences where it was really nice to have someone by my side when passing through a portal to the unknown.

And in the same way as a hospital or an airport, actually, the William H. Bolton Arena (Bill Bolton, as it's called, a whole 10 minutes' walk from the apartment) has a pair of automatic aluminum-framed glass doors that hum open when you walk up, equally good for getting gear in or for getting stretchers out, I suppose. Coming into the rink, though, this portal took me back to a place I hadn't been in years.

Hockey arenas and I are old friends, it turns out: in the summers, in Glencoe, the town ran a day camp program (fun enough, the first couple years, even if it was glorified babysitting), and aside from the daily visits to the municipal pool - a couple hundred yards across the tons of fill and gravel that were originally dumped to build the hockey and curling arenas alike and have sort of come to be thought of as a planned parking lot since - the activity par excellence of the day was ball hockey. My most enjoyable experience as an eight-year-old related to hockey might actually be playing on no ice at all, knees skinned - burned, more accurately - from occasional tumbles on the hard arena floor while chasing tennis balls to beat the band.

When I entered Bill Bolton, I realized that I can't think of the last time I was in an arena when there was ice in it. I suppose that there was ice under everything when I saw Meat Loaf at the John Labatt Centre in London in March, and of course the Leafs game in the fall of '06 as well as the various games I saw the winter before in Pittsburgh, New York and Vancouver were all held on ice. (Digression: The latter was a World Junior game, round-robin, and Canada won 4-3 over Switzerland at the Pacific Coliseum - if you can believe it, that was a supposed consolation prize when the friend I was visiting couldn't get Canucks-Predators tickets. She didn't even know she was making the wrong choice at the time, but suffice to say we sorted it out and got the right tickets after all! Watch out for the Swiss, they've got a great program. They'll be playing in the bronze medal game in 2010, and I hope that this blog is still here to gloat when that comes true.)

But the Glencoe Arena and I have a little more history than I remembered before this moment, and feeling what I felt walking into that arena I remembered the parts of my life actually spent in hockey rinks. The Pacific Coliseum, and to a lesser extent, Mellon Arean in Pittsburgh, showed me that there are really two kinds of arenas now that you can watch a hockey game in: the ones where you can feel the cold air, to point where it seems to frost your nose hairs and you smell the condensation on the concrete floors and cement walls surrounding you, and the other kind, where the feeling of the arena is gone: Air Canada Centre, Bell Centre in Montreal, Boston's TD Banknorth Garden and Nationwide Arena in Columbus all provide examples of this. In fact, even the JLC is one that has taken the rink out of the arena, providing a much more sanitized replacement for the old Ice House (which was of course, the old London Gardens, where I saw a couple of Knights games, and one time, the Colonial Hockey League's London Wildcats, who featured one-time Maple Leaf Lou Franceschetti, in a game that featured my grandfather getting hit in the knee with an errant puck, and me nearly fighting a kid that I knew from school - Richard Sutherland, who may still have that unibrow - for the souvenir, that we were leisurely picking up when he dove in front of us to try to get it. His dad even asked my dad if he could have the puck afterwards, as they went to all the games and had never gotten one... I'm serious. This league folded in less than four years, and he was begging us for a souvenir puck... My program was autographed by their captain too [Steve Pepin, #47 - http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php3?pid=16263], which entitled me to some special privilege at intermission, but I forget what at this point... maybe some shooting competition on the ice? I have no idea).

So the last time I was in a hockey arena was... still no idea. Glencoe Arena used to have public skating every Sunday afternoon, to which we'd go as a family (though only my sister and I had skates) once most winters, some winters twice, and as I got older, I would go to on my own and inevitably end up meeting up with someone I knew.

Meeting up with a friend was harder than you might think, though, as I didn't go to school in Glencoe. From the age of six, I was bussed nearly a half hour each way to school in Strathroy, to attend one of the two French Immersion schools in the county (the other being further away, in Lambeth, which was swallowed up by London sometime around 1991 I think). I really didn't know anyone, in fact, in Glencoe, aside from the few people I remembered (or who remembered me) from... Kindergarten. Seriously. There was Richard - Walsh, not the unibrow kid - my dad's friend's son, and sometimes Jeremy (famous neighbour to my Grandma and longtime accomplice in the lifetime championship series of basement shootouts), then the occasional one or two familiar faces that I would never quite escape the rest of my time in town. Of course, it was skating among a large group of people, so more often than not it was not much different than being on my Grandad's pond, just going in circles the whole time - the goal was not to socialize. Now that I think of it, I must've been the sternest skater out there, just focusing on going faster if I could while avoiding the humiliation of falling down and making it evident that I was not a hockey player. The hockey players in Glencoe would scream up and down the ice during public skating, snowing each other and making like they were going to push the girls down (sometimes actually doing so), and often engaging in the emulation of the other kind of hockey heroes they idolized: Bob Probert, Tie Domi, Ken Baumgartner and Marty McSorley (pre-stick swinging) to name a few.

Meeting up with friends was so unlikely and rare, in fact, that I could more pleasantly point to one rink experience that takes me back to being about 10 or 12 at the very most, and actually going to see Glencoe play Strathroy or Mount Brydges so that I could see my school friends play. I would walk the length of Glencoe, from my house near the elementary school on one side of town's big piece of municipal land to the big empty space the arena stood on at the other end (only about a mile, actually, but about as far as you could go while staying in Glencoe the whole trip) to sit with the Godfreys or the Humphreys or the Halls and secretly root against my hometown.

But it was this feeling of watching the game in a rink - not a new multi-function entertainment complex, but a hockey building - that came back to me. It was having my skates tied by my dad when I wasn't strong enough to lock my own ankles in place, it was the one time that with the church youth group we rented the ice and, even though we used an orange, soft-rubber puck, we took over half of the surface and played three-on-three, the closest I would come to playing ice hockey until the famous shinny double-headers in my university years. This was when I was about 12, at the most, and it's the last time I remember putting blades on arena ice. I won't rule out the possibility that it's not the last time, and should I remember I will come clean in a future dispatch.

Standing there that night, it had been, as far as my memory can tell me, 13 years since I'd been on the ground level of a hockey arena. Half a lifetime.

Sometimes there are benefits to not writing everything that you can about an experience right on the heels of it, as it gives you a little time to reflect. Looking back four weeks now I can say that as I said goodbye to Sid and my nosehairs froze a little before I entered the locker room, there was a feeling of a return somewhere that I had buried - not deliberately, I don't think - deep in memory that is only flowing back to me as I write now. That smell, the moisture in everything that close to the ice, took me back to a part of my life that I can't say I've thought of since it ended.

I spent a large part of Grades 2 and 3 - when, by all rights, I think I would've been a novice, or whatever the next one up is (one below Atom...) - in arenas. In fact, I was in an arena nearly every Sunday with the Flames, the Strathroy Industrial League team composed of people who worked at Gates Power Drive Products, the pulley and belt factory in Strathroy which employed my father. I was eight years old, and I went with my dad nearly every week to these games... and I have no idea what I did there. I think I spent most of the time behind the bench, either in the coach's position or in the seats right behind, but most of the time, I remember being able to talk to my dad during the games.

This team was absolutely terrible, and their best result the whole time I was around them was a 2-2 tie they managed against the Stingrays - the best team in the league, as Murphy's law would have it for the leaders that day - which resulted in calls to frame the scoresheet for Roy Beer (that is his real name - his son, Matt Beer, came to be a friend-of-a-friend in high school, as he played on Ryan Godfrey and Chad Humphrey's teams over the years), as he had two assists, possibly his only career points in this league. The team consisted of a few really good players: Russ Taylor, who warmed up doing full splits in skates on the ice, had a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and gave me his sticks at the end of the season (they too tall, and were lefties - I shoot right - but I kept them in our attic for about three years); Dave Rastin, probably the second-best forward on the team, and the number one defenceman (I guess) Jeff Henshaw, son of a hunting buddy of my Grandpa's who happened to work in this factory with his longtime friend, that is to say my dad.

My uncle Rick (my mom's brother-in-law) also worked in that factory and was on the team, as were a few other names I can barely remember: Mike Ross (last name may be wrong) who showed me the ugly side of the game one day with a profanity-laced tirade at the referee that ended in a misconduct for shattering his stick on the plexiglass of the timekeeper's box; Joel Terry, who used to buy me snacks after the game (and his brother, whose name I can't remember - maybe Joel and Terry were brothers and I forgot their last name, could go either way); Tim Tadgell, who wore number 6 or 27 and was half of the sarcastically-dubbed Sittler and Ellis pairing, was father to one or the other of the cousins Sarah or Jonathan Tadgell, both of whom wound up in the younger half of my split class in Grades 7 and 8; and Dave McDonald, the goalie who backstopped the team to its only non-loss in the season-and-a-half I was around this team on the one day he wore his glasses (and, to all the other losses as well, as he regularly didn't). The only other be-spectacled one on the team was my father, and though Dave's glasses always fogged up under his goalie mask (contacts weren't so common in 1990), my Dad's never did, and the argument from week to week never changed: the team would play a lot better if the goalie was less stubborn, and would keep a towel out on his net to wipe his glasses down at the whistles.

After all this losing, we just sort of stopped going, and I'm not too sure why, but I think the argument with Dave might've been part of it: the futility of trying to win with a blind goalie may have gotten to my dad after a while. But I think in the end, it's safe to say that my dad suffered from the same problem I did: he didn't understand what he was talking about, because he too has never actually played actual hockey, and had never had to deal with fogging glasses while trying to stay in the game. Yes, the kicker in the story is this: my dad was this team's coach.

Now I mean no disrepect to the men mentioned above, all of whom are likely somewhere between 45 and 60 now - about the same age as the touring NHL old-timers that actually came to Glencoe when I was about six and pretended that they couldn't kick the absolute crap out of the special-for-the-occasion Glencoe Old-Timers team - and are probably decent guys. They were completely uncoachable, though; the only players they had were two decent wingers, which my dad tried to put on the points at one stage simply because they were the only ones who could skate well enough to backcheck.

But I was obsessed with this team, and with everything hockey that was a by-product: cards, stickerbooks, the games at night - I remember being sent to bed during Hockey Night in Canada and waking up the next morning to find the final score and the three stars scrawled by my father in the margins of Saturday paper, well before London had a Sunday Free Press - and who knows what else. I remember being heart-broken to have fallen asleep during the Oilers' clinching game in 1988, parts of the Flames' win in '89, and of course, seeing the Oilers do it under Messier in 1990. Messier became my favourite player for a little while there, actually; talk about the accident of one's birth, despite it being my generation, and being hockey mad before the age of six, I never actually saw Gretzky win a cup, or even play with the Oilers. You think you regret passing out that night in high school at so-and-so's party when you got markered all over your face? It could've been worse. Gretzky was traded from the Oilers that summer, and I settled for reading about it in about 1992, in his autobiography ghost-written by Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated.

I missed the great Oilers teams, the last real dynasty (the 1995-present Red Wings don't count, with apologies to Colin A., Adam T., Tom S. and Uncle Rick, among others), and yet, in a way, I had my own idols. I was so obsessed with hockey - and this was right when rap was going mainstream, with MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice hitting the big-time - that this team even became the subject of my own rap about the team, which, while it might've been my first attempt at writing lyrics - something I still can't quite figure out, if you follow the band I'm in at www.myspace.com/thesnipesmusic - I insisted on performing in front of my Grade 3 class for show and tell. I hope to God I threw those papers out, they don't seem to have surfaced in about 16 years (if my mother is hoarding them I will be very upset), but I do recall in one of those "so-mortified-to-remember-it-I'll-never-forget-it" ways this one line, a lyrical gem for an eight-year old:

"With Rastin, Taylor and Henshaw too/you can win, tie but just don't lose."

I also remember taking the last part of that line out before performing: "...but just don't lose like 15-2," which was pretty close to a regular outcome for this crew. It still scares me that the goalie drove home every week, but I presume that he left his glasses in his car? Don't ask, don't tell.

But where all of the above was going: this might be the only beer league team in history to have a coach. Beer league teams never have coaches. Not unless your team is being followed by a big fan of the game living vicariously through other people - I suppose the apple doesn't fall far from the tree that way (cue the Harry Chapin). But that was a life that I think that I decided not to go through with after watching a few of my friends' games in about Grade 6, then turning away from it entirely, concentrating only on the NHL, and only on what was on TV. But what I didn't mean to do half my life ago was turn my back on arenas entirely.

All of that was still well behind me the moment that I stepped into the locker room, the familiar air having stirred something that I would only remember a month later. I didn't have time for nostalgia, it was about 6:15, even later than that, and I had to get into full gear for the first time in front of people, with only about a quarter of my expected amount of time to do so. The instructor tossed a jersey in to me: "it's a double X, should be lots of room in there for ya," and all I could think was well, at least I'll be able to get this one over my head, and I set to work. The jersey fits well, which makes me think that they must be sized up from a small intended for age-appropriate novices. All of my gear had the tags still on it, so I was cutting them off while getting dressed. And still, there were two guys who got into the room after me, and were dressed and out before me. There was little to no small talk in the room, but it was a communal silence in a strange way, a pre-cursor to the oddly comfortable conversations that would inevitably start occuring among half-naked strangers over the coming 12 weeks.

I hadn't taped my sticks yet - that was another little thing that was supposed to happen during the day and didn't get done. After quickly wrapping one blade (which came after I went to war with my jersey only to learn that it's easier to put the shoulder pads on but not the elbow pads, put the jersey over, then roll the sleeves up, put the elbow pads on and pull the sleeves back down; there were other guys in the room that could get their jersey over the whole shooting match, but I figured that I would work my way up to it), I was thinking about how I was overmatched and looking to catch up to my classmates before I even left the locker room as I headed out to the ice.

Once I set foot out of the dressing room door, teetering on my skates and wobbling as I went out to the ice, the blurs of my colleagues' red jereys whizzed past and the scraping stops could be heard the length of the rink over. I was not only behind, I was late too; if there was an introduction to the instructor (even a "Hi, my name is _____, and I'm going to skate you like dogs for the next three months!"), I totally missed it. I also did no warm-up, which I figured would come back to haunt me. Sure enough, it did.

As for what we did exactly that night, I couldn't tell you anymore, and before or after that class, I couldn't tell you a name for any given drill anyway (except for "suicides", which were for a time called "Herbies" in hockey mythology, after late U.S. National Team coach Herb Brooks who was particularly fond of them). If you've played basketball or soccer before, you know these ones, though, so they don't count.

There were some lengths of the ice, some "blue line-stop/red line-stop/blue line-stop" exercises that I failed miserably at (as I can't yet successfully stop on skates), and some other skating drills that became incredibly difficult very fast. I was winded almost right away, my ankles were turning in the whole time, I hadn't packed a water-bottle and I even chose to sit out a couple of drills. Yes, late and sitting out: a great start. We did some stick-handling afterwards, though, which I was okay with (at least, for a beginner, having a little muscle memory from dreaming on the pond), but I was already starting to feel the pressure: these guys were good. Trying to keep up with them, I fell, I lost the puck, I had at least one stick-banging-worthy screw up, and frustration had already set in. I was without a doubt the slowest and worst skater on the ice, and hope was hard to come by. Right away, I was advised by the instructor's assistant that my stride was wrong, as it was too straight and not at a 45-degree angle - meaning that, though I had skated and/or played shinny a couple of times a winter most of my life, I still had next to no skating skills.

The guys were encouraging, though: everytime I would pull out wide and slow down into the boards (the only way I can stop on skates!), winded and surely looking like I was about to die, I heard the odd "good work"; "stick with it"; "you'll get it", and they were all coming from the other players. There were 12 in all, and which ever grouping I found myself in, I was encouraged.

I had a problem, however, one which I feel can be fleshed out in the next entry, for this one too has gone on too long already: my skates just weren't up to the job. My ankles complained the whole session, through the stick-handling and into the scrimmage. Scrimmaging at this level, while it would surely present the most opportunity to get out and just have fun, actualy turned out to be terrifying. I thought I was going to develop motion sickness at one point, as everything was peripheral movement, and I couldn't turn or stop to face any given situation before it had morphed into a new one. I took a couple of spills, helped out digging along the boards on one play, and might have touched the puck once otherwise. The rest of the time, I tried the "stay-at-home-defenceman" trick, hoping to at least not be so readily and evidently exposed.

The time ran out. 7:30, only an hour. Less, as I was late. We retreated to the dressing rooms a little more lively bunch than before, and the encouragement was there right away. "You'll get it - you did some good work out there," said the guy on the bench across from me, a balding man in his forties, as he commiserated with his mates about how "having two weeks off" made it just impossible to get going again. These guys all started in September, I realized: I was a lifetime behind some of them - like the long-haired player beside me, who played in his teens (and still had a North York Rangers bag to show for it) and hadn't since, who told me I did better starting this way, as there was no pressure - and four months behind all of them. No pressure?


My comment among the group was something to the effect of "well, at least you guys have worn full equipment before tonight," and immediately one guy - one who had been really supportive on the ice - told me (again, he'd said it on the ice too) that I should've seen him when he started: he'd never even been on skates.

So I changed out of my equipment, pretty slowly all in all - mostly marvelling at how much I could actually sweat - packed up, and again caught a whiff of the cold air of my childhood in my nose as I left the arena, and started on the trek home.

* * *

It was bad enough that I hadn't showered - I forgot my towel, which, all things considered, could've been worse (what if it was my helmet, or, the unattached and unpacked and therefore easiest thing to forget, my skates?) - but the whole way home, it was raining, so I came home effectively drenched from two sources. I crashed through the apartment's front door, and the question that couldn't be avoided came: How was it?

I looked up to the stairs and told her gravely: "It was awful"; and, just as that little flutter of remorse started in to her eyes and lips and she started to wonder if she'd made a horrible mistake with this gift of hockey, I finished my thought. "But I loved it."

Next: The saga of my skates, and week 2.