Hockey!
Remember Bowling Alone? The title of a critical book published in 2000, Bowling Alone became a metaphor for social isolation in America. The phrase fairly drips nostalgia for a golden age of face to face engagement, allegedly murdered by television and the Internet.
On the other hand, like tail fins on cars and malted milkshakes, maybe we just don’t care so much anymore for the Lions Club, the VFW, the League of Women Voters – or bowling.
We do like sports. And we like to play, even as adults. Especially as adults. Soccer, softball, touch football, golf…even cricket, for heaven’s sake, a game that would absolutely baffle a local Lion’s Club. We may not bowl together, but there are plenty of coed softball leagues that get all sorts of Americans out of the house and onto the field together.
And then there is Hockey.
There is something unique – or possibly insane – about an athletic contest played out on ice. If, as an adult, you have laced up a pair of skates for the first time in years, or the first time in your life, you have a fresh experience of this. You know just how unnatural it is.
First of all, your reactions are all wrong. You might be standing still in the middle of that big, smooth sheet of ice, trying to stay calm, only to have both feet fly out from under you for no apparent reason. That’s painful.
And, yet – you learn. And you gain confidence. Which is probably a mistake, because you’re in for more painful lessons. But the fact that you can propel yourself across the ice faster than a decent hundred-yard dash, with a few easy strides, is just intoxicating. And learning to stop, where and when you want to, comes like a graduation – a rite of passage.
You can even do it all backward, against all apparent logic.
There is no way to argue that the human body was ever evolved to do this. It can only be a fortuitous accident, a wildly improbable outcome of apes coming down from the trees and learning to walk upright.
Or a gift from the gods.
Nearly as awkward as your first attempt to stay upright on skates, will be your early struggles to launch a puck off the ice with the end of a stick. You can certainly swat the thing across the rink, but it seems held to the surface by some sort of electrostatic attraction. This won’t do, and you know it, but you’re powerless to do anything more than, on occasion, send it tumbling through the air in a waltzing arc, flopping back down just a few yards away.
Pathetic.
But then it happens. The celestial spheres line up at the right moment, and the puck saucers off your stick to smack into the boards with a resounding thunk that echoes across the rink. My god. Did I do that? Did anyone see it? That was a wrist shot!
Then you’ll swing at that puck for hours, uselessly, just for the thrill of the rare occasion when you actually make it work. Slowly, you’ll get the feel of it. And one day, you’ll send two or three, one after another, off the ice and right into the net, and you’ll feel you’ve arrived.
Then you’ll try it with a live goalie and find humility returns with a vengeance!
There is so much more to this game than you ever imagined, and it’s so much more frustrating to learn than you ever thought possible. But the gods of hockey are not completely heartless. They know how to smile. And when they do, it makes the journey well worth your while.
The day will come when you find yourself in a locker room with a bunch of people you barely know, lacing up those skates, pulling up the silly hockey pants, donning the shoulder pads, and heading out on the ice to go head-to-head with another bunch of people who have managed to get through the same journey.
They may be your opponents. But you’ll have a hell of a lot in common.
And it beats bowling.
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