Ice Hockey: My Favorite Team

Anyone who has ever coached any sport can tell a story about a team or a player or a particular game that stands out enough to be worthy of a story. I have several. One was a mite AA team that I coached that only had six skaters; a good goalie, one fantastic scoring forward that scored 80% of our goals and a tiny Filipino girl that was talked into playing on the team by my daughter so that I could alternate the players off of the ice to get a breather and a squirt of water. The team lost in the playoffs and received a standing ovation by the opposing team’s parents when our undermanned team lost in over time. The little Filipino girl , who didn’t even know how to skate very well, happened to blindly center in a pass from the boards for an assist. She had to explain to her dad that the assist was as valuable as the goal. The dad had never wanted to watch a hockey game before watching his daughter, who was dressed in my older son’s old equipment, tottering around on the ice. The mites were a cute story of note but not the one that really touched my soul as a parent, a man, someone who played the sport and as a coach of ice hockey.

The director of the youth club in Evanston, Illinois, asked me if I would be interested in forming and coaching the first midget AA team for the club. In years past, nobody involved in the club’s board, was interested in losing Evanston High School players to a midget team. The goal was to pull in players from mostly Chicago high schools that did not have a high school hockey team. In August, it was looking like it was not going to be possible. I had six skaters and no goalie. The director had heard of a program on the west side of Chicago where some guys had volunteered their time to teach inner city African-American kids to play roller hockey and ice hockey. The director had been approached about taking three skaters and a goalie. A man that was hired to round up the four players and bring them to Evanston three times a week for practice, found a job at a nursing home and so my job as a coach became to also round up four different players at four different locations on the west side of Chicago and transport them to practice. I would then conduct the practice, load them up and hit a fast food restaurant on the way home since they would not have otherwise had anything to eat. I would then get home and lay out all their equipment in my garage floor and try to unwind at home at about 1am.

At the time that I committed to coaching this particular midget team, I had separated and gotten divorced. My son at the time was playing midget AAA for the Chicago Young Americans and my daughter was still playing with the boys in Evanston on the other team I was coaching which was a bantam AA team. I moved out and my daughter opted to move with me, leaving my older child, a son, to stay with his mother. My days consisted of getting my daughter to school, working out, going to play pick up hockey at Johnny’s Ice House in downtown Chicago, and working at my hockey pro shop in the afternoons and evenings (when I wasn’t coaching). My daughter was with me every afternoon and evening and in fact she had her own following at the shop of customers that liked the way she sharpened hockey skates at the ripe age of thirteen. My coaching two teams and running the store left me very little time to watch my son practice or play. His mother went with him to Detroit every other weekend and all the tournaments in Ontario. My son’s diminished playing time and role on his team seemed to coincide with the break up of our familiy. My problem was that with coaching two teams and running my own store, I did not have the flexibility to travel with my son and stay in touch the way I should have as a father. It got so that he was ready to quit the highest level of hockey possible in Illinois for a boy his age. Many young guys my son was playing with at the time, were scoping out junior programs and my son was ready to hang it up.

I asked my son to come out and help me with practices with the midget AA players that I was coaching. The boys were all his age but not quite his caliber. Most of the players respected my son’s speed, his shot and his exceptional hands. One of the black players did not outright. I will call him Richard since I did not ask him ahead of time if was cool with me using his real name.

Richard was a tall and wiry kid who smiled even when there was nothing to smile about. His house was the only house on the block. All other structures had been long since demolished. He had fourteen brothers and sisters and his mother was two years younger than me. At the time, I was 38 years old. A woman of 36 years of age hand fourteen children and the oldest was 21 years old at the time. Richard never complained about life nor was he angry at the world for the hand he was dealt. Richard was low keyed off off of the ice and stood by listening more than talking with a smile. Richard had the speed of a wide receiver and the ability to check like a safety hits in football. Richard’s claim to fame was his perfect timing of the lost art of the hip check. Many a player cart wheeled from his hip checks. In fact Richard had clipped my son in a scrimmage while my son was trying to beat him up the boards. My son later lined Richard up and sent the snot flying around his helmet and mutual respect was born. My son gave me one word answers and chose not to look at me too much back then and it was understandable. From his point of view, I not only left him at a time in his youth when he needed me most, I took his little sister with me. My son was not very verbal about how he felt but it reflected in the types of fights and penalties that he was drawing at his games. The players that I was coaching didn’t understand why my son was so angry and surly. Most probably never figured it out to this day. To my players, I was an involved coach who was still capable of keeping up with them in scrimmages and could execute what I expected of them as well as a surrogate father.

Now the six white kids had come from broken homes too for the most part. One child had a mom and never knew his father and was told that she had sex with a man casually for the purpose of having a child. That boy tortured his mom after receiving that information. He was bounced from two high schools and was forced to clean up his own shit in a stairwell at a hotel by the Toronto Police for a prank that involved defecating over a railing from eleven stories up. Shoplifting and small time dealing of pot were also things that caused his mother much grief. I told his mother that he would grow out of it. I hope he did. There was another young man who had the Goth look and resembled Johnny Depp in the movie Edward Scissorhands. The kids on the team all called him Eddy even though it was something else. Eddy’s mom was a trust fund baby that looked like Cruella Deville in the movie 101 Dalmations and even smoked cigarettes from a holder. That boy’s father split some years back and the mom was trying to keep him in hockey and from quitting school. Another player was the son of a union electrical worker that was injured and out of work indefinitely. He hated his dad for being a blue collar, lazy, television watching, opinionated asshole. I thought the dad was an asshole but never told my player this. I just told him that I still hated my dad and the he many not ever grow to love his dad either. That gave him some solace.

Another caucasian player moved from western Michigan with his mother who decided to get braces on her teeth and go to art school in her mid thirties with a son in high school. This poor kid also had no dad and felt like his mother was too flighty to be left to her own devices. He was forever calling home to make sure that his mother arrived home okay from school or dates. They were supported by his maternal grandfather and so the mother never grew up and the son became a worrier. My last two white players had a mother and a father and came from a family of twelve. They immigrated to Germany from South Africa and then onto to America. Benedict was what Hitler may have had in mind for his master race. He was tall and strong and blonde. On more than one occasion, Benedict took an opposing player out of the game with a strong, well timed check. Benedict played defense with his younger brother Stefan and Edward Scissorhands. Benedict yelled at his little brother on the ice in Afrikaans when they were defensive partners and directed Eddy in English.

I had an unconventional team and I think that I was an unconventional coach. I did not believe in getting to the rink an hour ahead of game time in matching warm-ups or a shirt and tie for all of the players. The kids on my team had sagging jeans with boxers showing and looked like they were on work release from prison. I thought that element would scare the hell out of the opposing team’s mothers and leave the opposing coaches to think that we were completely disorganized. Well we were off the ice but on the ice, we trapped beautifully. We ran a 1-2-2 and forced most teams to whip the puck all over the ice. Most midget teams carried between 16 and 20 skaters. My team had nine. There were many times that Benedict and Stefan or Eddy, had to skate the entire game on defense because we only would up with seven or eight skaters.

The state tournament came around around and we had become a solid team that understood we had to conserve. We dumped until we had a power play and trapped religiously. Our team of nine skaters finished fourth in the state of Illinois in 2004. I had promised the boys all season long that we would take a trip to Toronto to play in a tournament in the spring if they could stick to academics and stay out of problems with the law.

One of my black players whom I will call Bam, lived in a home for boys in the west part of the downtown section of Chicago not far from where the Blackhawks plays. Bam was told by his caretakers at the home that he lived at that he could go to Canada with me and the team if he raised his grades at St. Gregory High School in Chicago. Bam had been cutting school and failing all year. The caretakers had known that going to Toronto meant so much to him that they put the task before him. In six months, Bam received recognition from the school principal as the most improved student in the entire school.

I had rented two full sized vans to make the trip from Chicago to Toronto. I was getting ready to gather up the west side guys for the trip when I got a call from one of the night caretakers of they boy’s home that Bam lived at. He called to tell me that Bam could not go on the trip because he had attacked another caretaker during a pick up basketball game in the gym at the home. I had notarized permission from the director of the home and did not feel that a bad day should preclude Bam from six months of hard work. I argued with the caretaker and was finally told that if I attempted to cross the border at Detroit/Windsor with him, I would be arrested. Being a single guy, I was willing to take the risk.

I picked up three of the players at Richard’s house. Bam was holding his ribs and wincing as he got in the van. I asked him what happened several times and finally he told me that while he was waiting for me to pick them up, two Chicago cops asked why he was standing on the corner. He told them he was waiting for his ice hockey coach to pick him up and take him to Canada. The police thought he was being smart and so they got out of the car and worked him over a little with their night sticks. I offered to leave Bam behind and he told me he was going with even if he couldn’t play.

While I was on my way to pick up the fourth black player from his grandmother’s home on the far west side of the city, I noticed three Chicago Police vehicles parked in front of the house. Bam recognized one of the caretakers standing with the police and as the car was rolling at ten miles an hour, he jumped out of the back door of the van and scampered away. We told him to wait in the alley and that we would come back to get him. When I pulled up, the caretaker reiterated that I would be arrested for transporting Bam to Canada and then demanded that the police search the van. I promised the caretaker that if I ever saw him anywhere on the street that I was going to beat him unmercifully for interfering with the trip for Bam. I still have not crossed paths again but if I do, a promise is a promise.

The Chicago Police and the caretaker followed me to the Indiana border. Bam had to stay back in Chicago since we could not pick him up. Bam hooked up with friends from his old neighborhood where he lived with his mother, before he had become ward of the state and held someone up at gun point. Because of his age, he was sent to Cook County Jail and served close to a year. I made a point of letting the the director know that one man’s quest to punish a child, brought about the crime that was committed. Had Bam gone to Canada, he would have played in the games, swam in pool, watched cable television in bed and played video games, gone to Wayne Gretsky’s Restaurant and visited the hockey hall of fame. Instead he stayed home and got busted for armed robbery. Was it bound to happen? Possibly but it would not have happened that weekend.

The rest of the boys with my son included, won the entire tournament as the only American team in an all Canadian tournament. The boys skated around with the three foot trophy like it was the Stanley Cup. It was our last game together as a team. Our success as a team caused the Evanston youth hockey board to dismantle the team and petition the state hockey board to assimilate any and all high school players without a school hockey team to play for Evanston High School. The state board did not want a civil rights case on their hands and so they made the exception for my players to play for the high school team.

I was exhausted from driving twenty hours in a weekend, coaching six games in three days and then driving back home. All of the boys loved the trip including my surly son. Nearly all had never been to Canada and some had never left Chicago. Seeing the Ice Hockey hall of fame and taking a picture with the Stanley Cup in an old bank vault next to two armed guards was like a pilgrimage to Mecca. The boys mostly slept on the way home but I noticed Richard out of the rear view mirror. He looked out of the van window in deep thought. When I dropped him off at his home that was the only house on the block as the spring sun was about to rise over the shores of Lake Michigan, Richard began to cry. Like most men crying in front of other men, we turned our heads away as we both fought off tears to the point of having a lump in our throats. We hugged each other without saying anything. I walked back to the van full of sleeping people and nobody saw the tears streaming down my cheeks. Nobody who knew me had any idea what that team meant to me and what that team meant to every boy boy played both black and white. All of the boys could have made a turn for the worse that year and could have wound up dropping out of school or going to jail. They all finished the season and were rewarded with a first place victory on the only vacation many of them ever had. When people ask if coaching is worth it, I don’t go into detail about that season because most wouldn’t understand. I answer with a yes. There is little in life that beats running into a former players who greets you with a hug and a smile. The players make an impact on a coach’s life and a coach makes a strong impact in the lives of their players. We shared something that will live with all of us forever.

Hockey: The Most Difficult Sport to Fake

I have heard that to hit a baseball at the major league level, one must decide to swing or not swing as the pitch is being released by the pitcher and to hit a dipping, curving, sliding baseball traveling ninety miles an hour is difficult if not impossible for most. If it were easy, baseball parks would not be filled with 30,000 people, 162 games per year.
To hit a little golf ball into a little hole takes masterful technique. To hit a jumper from fifteen feet away with a hand in your face takes skill and rhythm. To jump up in the air to grab a high pass while a safety or two drills you in the ribs and then have the foresight to drag you toes in bounds takes uncommon talent. All sports take skill and hard work to become a master. No sport is better than another sport. There are sports that interest those that participate in a sport or are spectators. Any sport that I can think of with the exception of Water polo if you cannot swim can be faked by a participant who is muddling through a first try but ice hockey is not one of them.
With the Chicago Blackhawks doing as well as they have this past year or so, recreational, drop-in players have been coming out of the woodwork in Chicago. You can always spot them as they walk in. They have two composite sticks that cost the equivalent of what it would take Sally Struthers to feed a village in Angola for a week and there is no sign of ripped up tape or slash marks on the shaft. Their bag is new, their socks are matching and have no holes, their skates are the same size as their street shoes, their gloves have palm, their pants are stiff as a board and they usually wear a Patrick Kane jersey from the Winter Classic. Their first act as they are tottering like Bambi is to wind up and take a slap shot at the goal while the goalie is down on his knees stretching out or putting in the pins. To the regulars who wear torn and worn jersey they were lent while filling in at a men’s league game from three years ago, no palm in either their left or right glove, ripped pants, socks with more holes than Swiss Cheese, chopped up holders on the outside of both skates from other skaters running into them in the corners and the smell of cat urine from the younger guys who never take their equipment out of their bags after playing. The regulars who have played all their lives and continue to play for numerous reason, get annoyed with a brand newbians who probably loves the Cubs and Wrigley Field with all his might and during the cold winter months, have heard that there is now a professional hockey team worth watching again since about 1991 and they too want the glory of playing pick up hockey or low level men’s league. Problem is this; if you cannot skate, you cannot play.
For anyone who has ever gone ice skating on a field trip with school or found that Friday nights was where all the other junior high kids hang out, learn to flirt and play tag during public skating, you know that skating is not automatic. It takes time to learn and time to master.
For any hockey skater who has ever laughed at a male for being a figure skater and I am included on this, it is not easy to jump up and spin knowing that you have no hip or tail bone protection. Now try doing all the spinning and jumping with some cute little thing in your arms while her overbearing mother sits with her latte in the stands, complaining how you’re not up to her daughter’s standards. However you feel about figure skating, it is not easy and for as long as I have skated, I have never wanted to attempt a triple toe loop or whatever it is called, for the mere fact that falling and hurting my ass is inevitable and painful.
For the football players, basketball players, baseball players and soccer players who look at Ice Hockey as some hybrid of roller derby and WWF on ice, I can assure you that it is a thinking man’s game.
In basketball, when a team sets up in the other team’s end, it is much like hockey. You have five players passing and getting open. The passing in soccer is much the same. A Drew Brees quarterback in football is like a Nik Lidstrom in ice hockey. They must be able to look up and know all their options and choose the right one before the pass is made. Passes get intercepted in ice hockey and football and that is inevitable. It is the incredible foresight to lace a pass in where it did not look possible that is a thing of beauty.
Now lace up a pair of skates along with fifty pounds of protective gear, take a rubber disc while you skate and try to keep an opponent from taking that disc or knocking off the disc while you keep your head up, not thinking about what your hands or your feet are doing because it is imperative that you make a pass very soon before you are knocked into next week. If you cannot skate, you cannot fake it. You will look like the Johnny-come-lately fans in any city in North America that just so happens to be doing well. Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Ottawa, Vancouver, Boston, Miami ( Miami?!) all have adults male and female that come to know the sport and want to play it too. That is not a negative thing by any means. My point is that before you can speak Portuguese, you have to learn the language and that will take time. You cannot fake Portuguese anymore than you can fake hockey. Until next time… I’ll see you on the ice.

Ice Hockey Diary

While eating a drumstick at Boston Market, looking out at the drab, windy Chicago day that felt more like winter than spring, I had no choice but to think since I did not have a newspaper to read. I thought about the fiction stories I post weekly at www.blackhumouristpress.com blog and how all of the stories are mostly fictional accounts of everyday people who have something extraordinary happen in their lives. I thought about how I could incorporate the sport of ice hockey into my fictional writing and somehow came to this; stories about amateur or recreational ice hockey players and situations that transpire on or around the ice. My hope is that it will be interesting to some or most of you. I promise not to write exclusively about myself and what I feel as much as what I observe that I think may be interesting to fellow hockey players both male and female.
Aside from writing humor/social fiction, I play a genre of music called Ska. If you’re not familiar with Ska, take a Reggae album and find an old phonograph and set the 331/3 to 45 revolutions per minute. The Reggae will speed up into what is known as Ska.
Ska was born in Jamaica shortly after independence from England. Local musicians who strained to pick up radio stations from America’s gulf coast, were trying to emulate the Fat’s Domino sound and screwed up the on beat, making it off beat and creating a new sound. The Ska I play with two bands, Skapone of Chicago and Superdot of Detroit, is a hybrid of Rock, Soul and Blues mixed with Reggae. None of this has a thing to do with ice hockey but I will say that a perfect day for me is usually getting up early to play a pick up game at a local rink, get something to eat, grab my bass and amplifier and head off to a gig at night. For me, that makes the fast paced, hectic, Protestant work ethic, life in America, much easier to deal with.
I began ice hockey after figure skating. It wasn’t a choice of mine to figure skate. My paternal grandparents signed me up to learn to skate at a rink that was solely for figure skating. I had black little skates with toe picks that I could not take to the park with me for fear of being beaten or laughed at. My CCM Bobby Hull autographed, synthetic leather skates with metal tube holders, were my first pair of hockey skates. I was given a Northland stick with a right curve even though I shot from the left. I played every day after school and weekends with two French Canadian/Swiss brothers who everyone called the Rothlesburgers. The Rothlesburgers made ice in their backyard and their father maintained it for us. Many days I could remember walking home to dinner after playing for hours and not being able to feel my feet beneath the ankle. I may have played 30,000 pick up and league games since those days but those early days will always stay in my mind. Looking at the school clock slowly pass to 3:00pm so that I could run home and get my equipment and head over to the Rothlesburger’s to play. No matter how much I play, I still never get bored of the sport. Since the days of playing in the Rothlesburger’s backyard, I went on to coach mites through midgets as well as high school. I owned three hockey pro shops in municipal rinks in north suburban Chicago and raised two children that played both Division I and minor league ice hockey. I have many hats that I wear in my life as most people do. My smelly Bauer 5000 helmet is one that I still wear four to five times a week, when I’m not writing or playing music.

This should be enough of an introduction. I leave you with this; The Detroit Red Wings defeated The Vancouver Canucks in overtime this past week with .01 left in the game, off of a back handed goal by Henrik Zetterberg. More astounding was two goals scored within five seconds during that same game by the Detroit Red Wings. Both are things you don’t see every game. See you on the ice.