Consolation

I posted a little while ago about my friend and colleague Justin, and mentioned in passing that I've been timekeeping for a little four-team ball-hockey league he had set up. I had a lot of fun just being around the game...hockey is hockey, whether it's played on a floor or a rink: to my mind, the best game going.

Just managing the clock was, at times, challenging, especially after Justin slightly pulled a hamstring and had to bow out of refereeing the games. The guy he enlisted to replace him is a certified ball-hockey referee...and a stickler who would flag the slightest infraction. Justin had let most of the little stuff go. Sam at one point had five guys in the penalty box at once, and let me tell you the arena computer was groaning under that strain. So was the brain of the guy at the timekeeper's bench trying to input it all. Especially in the heat of that bloody arena...some weeks it was easily 30+ in there.

One of the teams--the Choppers, fittingly enough--was largely made up of guys from work. (And one girl: the only team so blessed.) Watching them careen all over the floor at top speed week after week filled me with admiration: how the hell can they do that for an hour at a time? I'd die several times over. Bearing in mind these sprats are half my age, and further noting that while I'm not (quite) the most out-of-shape man in the world, I'm definitely more spud (as in couch) than stud...it was probably a mistake to mention my admiration aloud. Let alone to sound wistful about it. The next thing I knew, Justin was telling me that if the Choppers didn't make the final game, he'd see that I got into the consolation match, if only for a shift.

The Choppers probably won't make the final, either, I mused to myself. Although there were some fine, fine players on that team and they had without a doubt the best goalie in the little league, they lacked the benefit of ever having played together as a team (whereas other squads, notably the Red Army, had set plays and defensive systems borne of easy familiarity). And as a whole, the Choppers treated the defensive zone as if it was radioactive--looking, most nights, remarkably like a blue-and-white-clad NHL team whose name we will not mention.

At the end of a six game 'season', the Choppers were 1-5, having shocked the Whalers in the final game with a total team effort that had me cheering them from my place rinkside. "You watch, Kenny", said Justine as she came off the floor at the end of that final match. "The plan is coming together. We're gonna sweep the playoffs."

Not if Red Army has anything to say about it, I thought. They'd skedaddled through the season 5-1, oftentimes making it look all too easy. Their Achilles heel was their goaltending, which was average bordering occasionally on mediocre. Didn't matter most nights, because their "D" was so good the opposition could hardly get a decent scoring chance in. Still, I was cheering for those Choppers out of solidarity with my work-pals...and also a real hope I wouldn't end up making a complete arse of myself in front of a crowd that with my luck would include most of the people I worked with. Besides, if they played like they just had, Red Army wouldn't know what had hit them.

The Choppers made a real game of it that first playoff. Red Army had no answer for the juggernaut that was Craig Young. He scored three goals last week, all unassisted, two of them pretty, one bullheaded. That's Craig's game: two parts finesse (at blinding speed) to one part sheer iron will. Unfortunately, there was only one Craig on the team: they lost 5-3, setting up my floor hockey debut last night.

Can I tell you, dear reader, that I woke up threatening to throw up yesterday morning? That two-plus decades of not having so much as held a hockey stick was weighing on me like an entire changeroom of smelly hockey bags? I mean, hell, I should be old enough not to care what people think, right? What can I say? Sometimes I'm not. Memories of my one floor hockey experience from grade five crowded in. I played goal that game and to this day I remember making a spectacular save right off my head, only to have the puck shoot right between my legs ten seconds later. That's me in a nutshell: often the hard stuff comes easy and the easy stuff never comes at all.

Justin, who is that rarest of things, a great player and a great coach, had me come to the arena an hour beforehand to practice. He did some passing drills with me, and taught me (FINALLY!) the mechanics of a wrist shot, which had eluded me all my life. I couldn't get much velocity on my shot, but at least the damn ball went somewhere relatively close to where I was firing it. I began to think that maybe I could survive a few minutes without scoring on myself six or seven times. Then the ball would get in my feet and I'd go head over heels trying to kick it up to my stick. And thud went the spud.

The Choppers and Whalers took the floor for the warm up. I circled around, firing a few shots at Corey Simmonds, the Choppers' world-class goalie. To my utter amazement, one of them actually beat him. "Hey, Kenny", called Jamie, "we could have used you all season, man!" That felt good. Really quite astonishingly good...good enough that it put something in my eye, not sure what.

Then the horn went and I found myself wishing I could go over to the timekeeper's bench and take my proper place. I don't belong out here. I belong at the console. See, I should be hitting GAME TIME 1 5 ENTER ENTER ENTER PERIOD 1 ENT--

The ball dropped. Time slowed. Craig chipped the ball over to me--holy crap, I got it--and I ran towards the first defender. I stutter-stepped. He hardly moved, certainly didn't try to poke the ball away or anything you'd naturally expect a defender to do. At that instant, I felt a mix of emotions the likes of which I've never felt before and quite honestly hope I never feel again.

They're going to let me score.

What a beautiful thing to do.

They're going to let me score.

What a perfectly shitty thing to do.

I was so shook up by blended love and hate, pride and self-loathing, elation and embarrassment, that my shot went five feet wide. I run back up the floor and wonder of wonders, found myself in possession again.

An entire Reader's Digest article went through my head as I dipsy-doodled around, meeting not the slightest bit of resistance as I made my way towards the goal. I can't find the thing online, and it must be eight or nine years since I read it, but it was about a mentally handicapped kid who would longingly watch all the other kids in his neighbourhood play baseball. One day they invited him to join in. With the boy's father looking on behind the backstop, the pitcher came in to within ten feet and lobbed the ball off the bat. The other kids all made a big show of bobbling the ball and throwing it everywhere but where they were supposed to as the mentally challenged boy gleefully ran the bases and collected his "home run". His dad was in tears, and said it was the nicest thing any kid had ever did for his son. I was in tears reading it--that really was a hell of a nice thing to do.

Wasn't it?

How nice would it be if the retarded kid--that's you, by the way, Ken, in case you didn't notice--isn't quite retarded enough to accept his sudden good fortune?

So help me, I actually thought that. Justin had, with the best of intentions and completely unwittingly, wounded me. I, with the crappiest of intentions and quite knowingly, had let myself be wounded. That I was, as always, ultimately to blame for these hateful hurtful thoughts only mortified me further. Just score the damn goal per this script and get the hell off the floor, I thought.

I almost couldn't do it. At the last second I tripped over the fucking ball again, deflecting a shot off my stick towards the net at about half the speed of smell. The goalie, quite obligingly, let the thing dribble through his legs and into the net. Not that I saw any of this, mind you--the spud had gone thud again.

"Great goal! You want me to sign that?" Ernie called over. I didn't hear any mockery in his voice, and so I invented it. I stumbled off the floor to get a drink--everybody had let me have my way and I was still so winded my vision was blurry, and wasn't that proof of what a loser I was? I went off to get a drink before I assumed my place behind the timekeeper's bench and collected my thoughts. There were a hell of a lot of them to collect.

The Choppers won 3-1 despite having--never mind a short bench--no bench at all. All five guys played the whole game (except for my two minutes of fame at the beginning). By the time the game was over, I had come to a few conclusions.

One, none of these kids really knew me, not even Justin. They couldn't possibly have known me well enough to even suspect my nasty reaction to what was, really, a beautiful thing they'd all done.

Two--and as if I didn't already know this--emotions are choices. So you feel like you're accepting charity? Why don't you see what these kids did as the selfless and heartwarming act it was? I mean, hell, none of the Whalers would recognize me if they ran into me on the street; they did this entirely on Justin's say-so, and he must have really talked me up to elicit that.

Three--let's face it, despite the fact I just got finished saying, in this blog, that I often feel like I'm 18...I'm 38. And I don't play floor hockey. Ever. I was going up against people in the absolute peak of their physical condition, almost all of them fantastic players and the least of them worlds better than I...and with less than an hour of experience to boot. Was I really so arrogant as to think I could do anything on that floor without their express permission? Of course they let me score....that'd be the only way I could. They let me score because Justin wanted me to score.

Isn't that amazing? Isn't that just the most awesome thing?

Most of this had filtered through my thick skull by the time Red Army took the floor against the Hornets for the final (although, as usual, it first came out fully articulate over the last twenty minutes). That last game was a thriller. The Hornets took a 3-1 lead in the second half, and we were all afraid the Army--who took the game very seriously--would get chippy. That didn't happen. Instead they chipped away on the scoreboard, tying the game with 1:06 left...and we all awaiting the shootout, some of us (like the Red Army goalie) perhaps a little more anxiously than others.

As I said, the Army worked like its namesake: a well-oiled machine with a defense right out of the Stalingrad campaign. Their only weak point was in net...and in a shootout that's not a weak point you want to have. But lo and behold, the goalie stood tall and won the game for them, triggering a madhouse of a celebration to rival anything seen in Chicago this past June.

I want to extend heartfelt thanks to Justin. For so many things. For asking me to timekeep, and for not sniggering when I put a two second penalty or a phantom goal up on the board. For giving me an opportunity to play. For taking time out of an insanely busy schedule to try to teach an old dog new tricks. For granting me the opportunity to score a goal, and for the lessons I learned doing so...lessons I sorely needed to learn.

I want to thank the Chopper team, who made me feel like I was a part of them even before I was a part of them. Congratulations to the Red Army, who inspired me with their passion and intensity, their cohesiveness and skill. To the Hornets, for their valiant play in the final. And to the Whalers for their astonishing act of pure selflessness, thank you so much.

I'll timekeep next year, Justin, if you'll have me. But next year I'll be 39 and I'll be leaving the actual playing to you young bucks, okay?

Thanks, man. A lot.