The Gentle Art of Ice Hockey (penned in 1995)
Skate blades biting into the winter cold ice, the opposing team's right winger flies down the side boards, forcing me to back up at top speed. Keeping my eyes set squarely on his jersey and away from the puck cradled in the curve of his stick, I prepare to ride him into the boards just inside the blue line.
Before I can get him lined up, however, he winds up and slaps the puck past me and into the net, completely startling our notoriously feeble goalie.
He raises his stick in celebration as the opposing bench erupts.
I crush him into the boards anyway, setting off a major brawl that stops the game for a good ten minutes.
That was ten years ago, the last year I played organized hockey. Since then I have enjoyed watching the game on tv, even enduring the wretched Leaf teams of the 80's, but seldom have I ventured onto the ice myself, and never as a member of an actual team.
Until now.
This season, I will return to the ice as a full member of the hockey playing community. In other words, I'm joining a team.
My decision to hang up the blades all those years ago had nothing to do with money, or a lack of time to devote to the game, or even encroaching old age (I was only 22). It was because of the violence that is, sadly, inherent in this, the greatest of games.
Not that I was concerned with getting injured - in fifteen years of hockey I had never sustained a serious injury. It's just that I didn't like who I became once I stepped onto the ice.
Like most Canadians, I was a peaceable, law abiding, good natured type of guy. I would never intentionally inflict pain or violence upon anyone. Never that is, unless it was during a hockey game.
Once on the ice, however, I could (and often did) cheerfully and deliberately dole out measured doses of agony to anyone wearing the wrong colour sweater.
It was this unwanted transformation that eventually led to my exit from the game. For reasons no longer clear to me, I began to actually examine the game that I had alway taken for granted, as part of growing up Canadian. The fist fights, the trash talk, the viciousness that would inevitably erupt during a game were all, until that point, more or less accepted as integral to the sport. Part of the exuberance of youth, the unfocused aggression of adolescence. But I was an adult now, and this kind of behaviour no longer made sense. I could no longer inflict pain on my opponents without remorse as I once had, and towards the end of that last season the intense negative emotions generated during the games left me drained and sick at heart.
It was time to leave.
How the game of ice hockey is able to transform normally reasonable, non-violent individuals into lumber-wielding psycho-jocks is beyond me, but anyone who plays the game will tell you that all too often this is exactly what happens.
If you give someone a gun, odds are that they will eventually fire it. If you give a man a hockey stick, it is a virtual certainty that he will soon find a way to use it as an implement of pain.
A hockey game without at least one violent incident is a rare game indeed, no matter how skillfully or elegantly the rest of the game is played.
As a former hockey player and avid fan of the game, I can tell you that nine out of ten players probably deplore its more violent aspects. I can also tell you that those same nine players would cross-check their own mother in the spine if she were foolish enough to park herself in front of the net.
I think you have to agree that this qualifies as odd behaviour for Canadians, a people who take a strange kind of pride in their image as sturdy, reasonable, albeit somewhat dull folk.
Such behaviour appears even stranger if we compare our national sport to that of our more aggressive southern neighbours. Compared to hockey, the great American pastime of baseball is a slow, dull, interminable contest between overpaid and sometimes alarmingly overweight crybabies. Temper tantrums aside, actual physical contact on the baseball diamond is discouraged, even abhorred.
Hockey, on the other hand, is the sporting version of the cruise missile: fast and deadly. Punishment is meted out as part and parcel of the game, and not only by its officials.
It's as if our respective national games had somehow been switched at birth. Shouldn't Canadians have adopted the more passive, laid back game of baseball? And shouldn't Americans have taken to hockey, with its inherent violence and weapon-carrying sensibilities?
Perhaps if the freezing point of water had been a few degrees warmer than it is, ice hockey would now be an American game, and Canadian sports fans could cluck their tongues in disapproval over its violent and all too "American" tendencies.
But history has unfolded otherwise, and gentle Canadians all across this land have nurtured a love for this elegant but brutal sport that borders on the obsessive. Myself included.
So. Do I expect things to be different for me this time around? Will my maturity as a person enable me to become that one in ten player, the player who avoids on-ice conflict in pursuit of the purer, skill side of hockey? I fervently hope so.
But I doubt it.
Even though I left the world's greatest game in large part because of its violent side, I fully expect to become a club-wielding goon no later than the second period of game one of this upcoming season.
This worries me. Sitting here at my desk writing this piece, I can honestly say that I have no desire whatsoever to harm another human being in any way, no matter what team they may play for. Once my skates hit the ice, however, I'm afraid those noble sentiments may suddenly vanish like so much slush under a Zamboni.
On the one hand, I can barely wait to rejoin my Canadian brethren in the icy ritual that is our national pastime. On the other hand, this enthusiasm is somewhat tempered by the prospect of finding myself slashing my mother across the spine. Figuratively speaking, of course.
I pray to the Great Gods of Winter Pastimes that my long overdue return to the game I love will not be marred by the kind of undisciplined behaviour that prompted me to leave so long ago. I promise to try to be good, really. And to act like the gentle Canadian I am.
Just keep away from the front of my net, that's all. 