Hockey From Above
The knot in my stomach now felt big enough to consume me entirely, and the tears in my eyes stung like a thousand bees. There was no way I could do this.
BY RYAN BLACK
IMAGE BY MARTIN REISCH/UNSPLASH.COM
My passion for ice hockey began when I was a young child. I spent cold, wintery nights glued to the box television in my living room, watching Toronto Maple Leafs stars Mats Sundin and Tomáš Kaberle whizzing around the ice at a breakneck pace, sniping pucks past a comparatively sloth-like goaltender.
I lived for Saturday nights. It was Hockey Night in Canada, a night I dedicated to watching the Toronto Maple Leafs and nothing else.
My family wasn’t nearly as into hockey as I was.
Downstairs, they would be gathered on the couch eating popcorn and watching classic Disney movies like The Little Mermaid on the VCR. While they begged for me to join them, I was perfectly content upstairs by myself, watching my team with Cheeto-stained fingers and snuggled up with my warm and fuzzy beige Sherpa blanket.
As I grew up, so too did my love for hockey. I spent sunny afternoons after school playing road hockey with the neighbourhood kids until our mothers came to drag us inside for dinner. At that point, out of breath and exhausted, I walked the five minutes back to my house, stick in hand, wondering what I would be having for dinner that night and eager to drink as much cold water as humanly possible.
After years of road hockey games, I finally got to try my hand at skating—a necessary component of ice hockey, something that my favourite players seemed to do so effortlessly. I quickly learned it wasn’t my strong suit. More accurately, I was quite terrible at it, noticeably and embarrassingly worse than kids half my age. Frustrated and defeated, I glumly expressed my desire to be a better skater to my sympathetic parents. I was searching for comfort and reassurance.
Eager to fuel my passion, they enrolled me in power skating classes, a boot camp intended to whip me into a half-decent skater, but to no avail. Even after several outings, my skating ability remained virtually unchanged. My parents, in an attempt to reassure me, said that I had flat feet and that these other kids, the ones who whizzed around the rink like my idols did, started much younger and that’s why they were so much better. While true, it was no comfort to a boy whose only desire in his life was to be a good enough skater to play the sport he’d become obsessed with.
I spent years clumsily stumbling around rinks during public skating times and begrudgingly accepted that I would never improve and was not destined to play in a league with other kids my age. Despite that acknowledgement, my passion for the sport remained the same, and I needed to find a way of satisfying it. My parents and I looked for other ways to feed this growing obsession, and I was soon enrolled in a ball hockey league. I remember having fun, and felt that my skills gained from countless hours of road hockey were on full display, but I knew deep inside that I wasn’t playing the true hockey that I loved. I welcomingly allowed cynicism to creep in. This wasn’t hockey. This was a watered-down, less exciting, unauthentic version of the game that I loved.
I played ball hockey for one year before deciding that I wanted to give ice hockey a go for the 2008/2009 season—despite my limited skating ability. My family and I huddled around the leather-covered wooden desk in our basement and logged on to our iMac. We all took a deep breath as we clicked “enroll,” and I felt a wave of excitement and nervousness wash over me as I began to realize the gravity of what I’d just done. Almost immediately, I began to feel doubtful of my ability to complete a season and a gnawing awareness of how I would be judged at the mandatory tryout.
The tryout would prove to be a series of shooting and skating drills designed so that the league could make the teams as fair and equal in skill as possible. The routine drills were stomach-churning–incredibly daunting for a beginner. The date of the tryout loomed like a dark cloud until finally, the fateful day arrived. My parents helped me load up my bright-red hockey bag with my blue and white composite stick and all my equipment, and then my mom drove me to the arena.
We arrived fifteen minutes later and briefly sat in silence. The knot in my stomach now felt big enough to consume me entirely, and the tears in my eyes stung like a thousand bees. There was no way I could do this. I watched all the other kids stroll into the arena, confidently smiling with chests seemingly puffed out. I knew they didn’t feel an ounce of the doubt and nervousness that plagued me at that moment. I knew this more than anything I’d ever known in my entire life. It was a certainty.
Unsurprisingly, it was my mom who broke the silence.
She hugged me tightly and told me how proud she was of me for doing this. After collecting myself as much as possible, we both walked into the arena. I got changed and shakily stepped out onto the ice surface littered with orange plastic cones that would be used in our drills. I instantly realized everyone on the ice was a much better skater than me. They zipped around effortlessly, stopping and starting at will and executing skillful maneuvers that I could never dream of doing.
Me? I still had no clue how to stop. I relied on slow, arcing turns to begin going in another direction.
At first, I felt utterly embarrassed, like I had been caught red-handed doing something I shouldn’t have been. My skill level was so far beneath these kids, and I knew it with every fibre of my being. Though as time went on, I began to worry less about the skill discrepancy and instead focused on the fact that I was playing my favourite sport in the world.
After what seemed like an eternity, the coaches blew their whistles–the shrill noise reverberating around the arena, signifying the end of the tryout. I left the ice, got changed and met my mom in the waiting area. Tears in her eyes, she rushed up to me and gave me a huge hug. Now that it was over, I allowed my chest to puff out a little and felt a sense of immense pride at what I was able to accomplish.
A couple of weeks later, my parents informed me that I’d been placed on a team filled with the best players I’d seen at the tryout—no surprise there. The average skill level needed to be evened out to make the league as fair as possible. The following months flew by, and so too did the season. While other players focused on scoring more goals than they did the last game and mirroring the plays of their hockey idols, I focused on keeping up as best I could, winning the occasional faceoff and celebrating internally when I managed to muster a weak shot on net.
I took great satisfaction in the fact that there was at least one other kid on the team who wasn’t an all-out superstar like the rest seemed to be. But then, one game, he tipped a puck into the net, leaving me the only player on my team who finished the season without a goal. Even still, my coaches were kind enough to award me the MVP puck—an honour I knew I didn’t deserve, but still felt grateful to receive nonetheless.
Looking back, that tryout was instrumental in shaping my confidence on and off the ice. Even though I wasn’t as skilled as the others, I had a great time and made a commitment to continue playing the sport I loved. As my elementary years passed and I began high school, I attended as many public skating sessions as possible and eventually became decent enough to stop on my own, an accomplishment I excitedly shared with everyone I knew. Soon after, I began playing shinny with my friends at a rink fifteen minutes from my house.
Just like the tryout and hockey season, my friends’ skating ability far exceeded mine; this time, though, I didn’t care nearly as much. I just focused on doing my best and having a good time with my friends. To this day, I still go to the local rink to work on my skating by myself. I realize that it makes me feel amazing, so I continue to practice and remind myself how far I’ve come. I know that if I had never gone to that tryout and given it my best shot, I always would have regretted it, and my current passion and child-like excitement for hockey and the Toronto Maple Leafs would have become a hazy memory and relic of my past.
Ryan Black is a Toronto-based writer who recently completed Humber’s Professional Writing and Communications program. He is finishing up a mystery novel and continues to seek new experiences to inform his writing. When he isn’t putting pen to paper, he’s playing the guitar and piano.
Image: Hockey From Above (Martin Reisch/Unsplash.com)
Edited for publication by Séamus Easton, as part of the Creative Book Publishing program.
HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Humber’s Office of Research & Innovation.