It was a moment sometime in January when I was thinking about how much fun I was having with hockey when I decided I would write an essay. As a regular reader of The Globe and Mail, I thought the essay might make an ideal submission to the paper’s Facts & Arguments section, a daily essay about someone’s life experience.
After many drafts and trying to stick to keep to a 1000-word limit, I submitted my essay and lo and behold it was selected for publication. It ran on Friday May 2, 2008. It is reprinted below along with some bonus content that did not make the final edit due to space and profanity restrictions!
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A jock finds his happy place
Yelling at players, whipping pennies at referees – I was a competitive nightmare. Then I discovered hockey.
The first time my future wife saw me play basketball, I was kicked out of the game after my fifth foul, then physically removed from the gym when I grabbed some pennies from my gym bag and whipped them at the referee, enraged over his “cheap” call.
That was classic me. Yelling at referees and other players, throwing water bottles, kicking garbage cans. Sports were one long anger-management class that I kept failing. Finally, though, I may be about to earn a pass.
Who could have imagined that a hothead could find salvation through hockey?
Last summer, I went down to the local pub with a few other dads. I asked Frank what he had been up to, and he said he was taking an adult beginners’ hockey course.
I sat on the edge of my seat as Frank told me about glide turns, wrist shots and transitioning out of your zone. He could have gone on all night, but he had me at adult beginners’ hockey.
I have always liked the sport, but being the only child of a single working-class mother meant playing it was not an option. And when a Grade 6 school trip to the local rink ended with me being mocked as an “ankle-burner” on my “Howie Meeker Shit Jabbers”, hockey became something I experienced only through television.
After that night out, I became fixated on taking the course. Along with finding out once and for all whether I was indeed an ankle-burner, it seemed like a perfect complement to my rabid support of the Ottawa Senators. What better way to understand why Wade Redden often can’t keep it in along the boards?
I went online to book a spot in the nine-week course. Cost: $149.
Wanting to play hockey is not the same as being equipped to play. And wanting to be equipped is not the same as knowing how to become equipped. Elbow pad size? Who knows the size of their elbows? Protective cup? Did I have to measure that, too?
Eventually, I cobbled together a solid mix of new and used equipment. Cost: $700. After Googling “hockey equipment order put on,” I was set.
Now, almost a year later, I can crossover in both directions, my stick is cut down to chest level and I know firsthand that keeping it in along the boards isn’t always as easy as it looks.
More than that, I have learned what I’ve been missing in sports for the past 25 years.
When I started playing competitively by making the Grade 9 basketball team, I felt an obsessive desire to practise and improve. My daily routine included getting to school at 8:30 a.m., hoping the gym would be open. By Grade 13, arrival was 7:30 and, instead of crossing my fingers, I went straight to the caretaker’s room to ask Marty to open the gym.
Summers were spent at basketball camps, and for the one summer I worked on the grounds crew for the Toronto Blue Jays, I would take the subway to Union Station where I would then jog the remaining 4 km to Exhibition Stadium dribbling a basketball.
When I was cut from the university team, I filled the void by picking up soccer. My obsessiveness reared its head again. Twenty-three years old and I would think nothing of going down to the local pitch with a bag of balls and a set of pylons to do drill after drill after drill.
That was 16 years ago. After climbing through the divisions of a city soccer league, I am now on an over-35 “old-timers” team – and I still head out and set up the pylons to work on my game.
But to be honest, I never enjoyed playing basketball or soccer. What I enjoyed was being good. Being good was one big ego stroke.
As a teenaged jock, being good gave me confidence and respect; it was the reason Marty opened the gym for me. As an aging jock, being good hangs there like some invisible diploma, reminding me of what I accomplished and still could if I dropped a few pounds.
Perhaps I read Sports Illustrated too much when I was younger, but I wanted to be seen as a player who worked at his game, played hard but fair and stood up for himself and his teammates.
This image – being good, being competitive – became my misplaced motivation. When that image was distorted by a blown call or botched play, that’s when the pennies came out. It was something I had to protect, even reinforce.
As the years and pounds added up, this image became more and more distorted. My temper quickened as my foot speed slowed.
But hockey has been so very different. On the ice, I am not good. Hell, I am quite often comically inept. And yet I enjoy myself in a way I have never known. With no glory days to relive, and nothing to prove to others or to myself, I go out and simply play. I arrive home from the arena beaming about having fun.
It may have taken 25 years, but I now see the difference between competing and playing.
Allen Ford lives in Ottawa.
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