The hockey game I will always remember

OK, I’ve had a few beers, eh?  So go easy.  But stick an expat Canadian in a hockey game – a Canadian who’s been marooned on the frigid shores of northern Germany for going on two decades -  and 45 years of puck-whacking start to flood back.

Times we’d set out rocks for goalposts 15 yards apart on a road, play street hockey and pretend we were Jean Belliveau, Guy Lafleur, Guy Lapointe…  Can you tell I was a Montreal fan before the Vancouver Canucks finally made it to the NHL?

This is the game I will always remember -  only a part of it, but it’s enough.

A nothing game, the playoffs already decided, the Canucks eliminated weeks before in a badly losing season, their second in the NHL 1971-72 when they finished dead last in the league.

Dad’s office at the copper mine had season’s tickets.  Section 10, Row 15, Seats 9 and 10 in what they used to call the Pacific Mausoleum, a crowd so quiet you could hear The Queen fart.  The seats were divvied up among the office employees and Dad got four games a year.  Our seats were right behind the goalie, and in those days you had to keep awake or get a puck in the chops.  Screw the lawsuits, life was too simple back then.

So it’s late in the third period, game tied 2-2 in a tight contest against the Buffalo Sabres.  For those old enough to remember, the Buffalo Sabres were the Canucks’ main rival because Buffalo and Vancouver ascended to the NHL together the season before.  This is why it was so important, even though both teams had already been eliminated from playoff contention.

The game was tied 1-1 until six minutes left in the third period when Buffalo scores, sending many to the exits as it was obviously going to be just another loss.  Then the Canucks tied it up with about 2 minutes left and those on the way out are rushing back to their seats.   It’s fierce action and it goes down to the final 14 seconds with a stoppage in play.  There’s a face-off near the Sabres’ goal way down across the ice at the far end.

Much like the face-off we saw tonight:

That was taken two hours ago when Canada’s national team defeated Germany’s 4-1 in Hamburg!  It was a lot of fun…. More on that game later.

Back to the game 38 years ago.

This is the scene that is burned in my mind forever:

André Boudrias wins the face-off and the puck goes back to the right point to Jocelyn Guevremont.

They say that every time your mind replays a memory the subsequent memory is changed a tiny fraction, so that what you saw in real life is altered each time you recall it.  Sooner or later, what you retain as a memory has been changed beyond all resemblance to reality.

That may be true for some things, but this is exactly what happened.  It will never change.  It’s in the books.  It really happened.

Guevremont, a defenceman known for his incredibly hard shot from the point, takes aim as the puck approaches. The crowd of 15,000 holds its breath as he  pulls his stick back and, without even stopping the puck, sends it flying up through a half-dozen bodies, sticks and legs to the far corner, over the shoulder of the Sabres’ goalie Roger Crozier and into the back of the net.  I’ll never forget the sight of the net rippling from so far away across the arena.

There were 11 seconds left on the clock and the Pacific Mausoleum erupted in pandemonium as the red light went on.

I’m 11 years old, and all around me people are jumping on top of their seats, they’re screaming, they’re going crazy, they’re throwing drinks and junk onto the ice, they keep screaming, you think it’s going to stop and they keep on, it seems to last forever, like an encore call that won’t quit until the band finally gets back on stage, until one guy takes a thermos – it was probably filled with whiskey until half-way through the second period – and he hand-grenades it from the second tier.  I can see it now, sailing through the air right in front of me, end over end, a slow loop-de-loop arc, and when it hits the ice, the interior shatters in a spray of glass all over our end of the ice.

The crowd goes whoa!

Silence.

It takes them 10 minutes to sweep the ice clean so they can finally play out the last 11 seconds.

All this before the eyes of an 11-year-old from the sticks. It was the first time I was in a crowd that went absolutely crazy.  I loved it.

It was tribal, I guess.  I miss that.

That’s why tonight’s game was so much fun. The chance to get together with some Canadians to see some of Canada’s best players playing the game we love best.

Thanks for jogging my memory, guys.

A chance to play hockey: this time, I hope to not break my nose

I’m bubbling in my skin, jumpy with excitement and anticipation at what I’m doing this coming Tuesday morning.

For the first time in ages – 32 years actually – I’m going to play hockey!  On ice!  With a real puck, helmet and even a stick!   Yaaaahooo!  I’ve been looking around for a chance to play hockey for ages.

Hanging out on the same forum where I stumbled upon a chance to play fake American pizza baker, I found a query about where to play ice hockey in Hamburg.  A couple of messages and phone calls later, I’m set up to go Tuesday morning at 8.

Good thing I’ve learned to skate since the last time.

Back then, a friend coaxed me into joining him at a weekly game.

“C’mon man,” he said. “You can ski like a pro, and anyone who can ski like you do can skate.”

So we jumped into a van to a rink 50km away, where I borrowed skates, pads, helmet and stick, skated onto the ice, and within five seconds slammed flat on the ice.

I got up, tried to balance – blood splotching the ice – flopped onto the boards, and struggled to the bench.

A guy looked over at me and says: Hey buddy, yer nose is bleed’n’ sump’n’ broodle.

Turns out I actually broke it, but didn’t realise it until eight years later at a routine medical exam.

10 things I learned about skating in Holland

1. The whole of Holland is crazy about skating.   You could be forgiven for thinking that every citizen of the Netherlands who wasn’t on life support or lying flat in the morgue was out on the ice this past weekend.   Tens of thousands of people, streaming by at the rate of dozens a minute, in pairs, groups or, like me, all by themselves.

Who can blame them?

The last time they had ice in Holland like this was a dozen years ago when it was so cold for so long, they even opened up the Elfstedentocht, a 200-km tour through lakes and canals linking 11 cities, first undertaken exactly 100 years ago by a man who just wanted to see if he could do it.  The last time it was run in 1997 the winner completed the tour in less than seven hours, for an average of just under 30 km per hour.

Conditions this past weekend were also ideal.   Sunny, below freezing but not too cold, no wind, thick frost covering the trees and reeds.

2. The Dutch have managed to keep this madness in check by organising canal skating into carefully planned and laid-out tours, complete with signposts, colour-coded arrows, and for a few bucks, cute little cards which you get stamped at cute little booths set up every few miles. 

Waiting in line for your stamp is a great opportunity to adjust your laces, chat with your friend or neighbour, breathe in the aroma of coffee, hot chocolate or traditional pea soup and – I hate to say it – call someone on your cellphone and ask them what, are you on life support or lying in the morgue?  Get the hell out here.

3. Only Canadians who spontaneously decide to drive more than 500 km in from another country wear hockey skates in Holland.  That was the first thing I noticed.  Nearly everyone skates with those long-bladed speed skates.  Occasionally you see a young girl or teenager on figure skates, but the speed skaters must out-number the others a thousand to one.   And it’s no wonder they use speed skates to cover those long stretches.  I’d be moving along at  a pretty good clip only to have skaters silently overtake me with what seemed like half the effort I was putting out.   Someone even asked as I was lacing up at the start of the 40-km tour Saturday whether I was really going to be doing such a long tour in those skates.

The hockey blades did come in handy Sunday morning though.  All alone on a backwater at sunrise I did a few turns with the stick and puck, stopping long enough to set up a self-timer shot.

But since playing hockey, like life I guess, gets old pretty soon if you don’t have someone to pass the puck to -  or at least bash into the boards – I went back to the car and put them away.  Besides, I didn’t like the idea of carrying that stick for dozens of miles.

4. Speed and hockey skates aren’t the only things that help you slide over the ice.  I stopped to look at one little boy who was flying along wearing nothing more on his feet than gumboots and skates that, had they looked weather-beaten, would have been well-placed in a museum.  I asked his mother if she’d fished them out of the attic, and she said yes – they were at least 60 years old.  Her husband had learned to skate on them after they were handed down from his father.

Another man used what I’ll call, um… Swedish strap-ons, because – strictly taking his word for it -  he said they were invented in Sweden for alternating between hiking through forests and skating over lakes.

5. Speaking of switching back and forth, if you’re doing a skating tour in Holland it’s absolutely essential to bring along a pair of blade protectors, because you’re not just gliding blissfully all day from one end of the country to the next without interruption.   At times, just when you’re getting into it and you feel you could go for another few miles without a break, you HAVE to take a break.   Why?

To get to the next canal.   After a while the ice you’re on just runs out, so you slip on the rubber or plastic blade protectors, climb up onto the road, and walk through town.  There’s even a word in Dutch for it: Klunen.  The awkward dance of balancing yourself at the edge of the canal to  get on and off the ice is also a rare opportunity to lose your balance and make groping bodily contact with someone in lycra tights, if that’s your thing.

Sometimes a bridge will get in the way.  For that, you can go through the hassle of putting on those blade protectors once again, or just crawl under.

6. The Dutch are really friendly when they’re out on the ice, and you don’t have to have skates to have fun.  Neighbourhood kids squealing with delight as they make a train out of sleds, couples out walking the dog, kids on bicycles, moms and dads pushing baby buggies or hauling sleighs – they’re all out there on the ice.  With hundreds of miles of track there’s room for most everyone.

7. This is something I’d forgotten: the ice makes noise.  Sometimes you’ll be booting along and all of a sudden you’ll hear a resounding BONGGGGGGGG and for a second you’ll think oh shit we’re doomed but then you tell yourself it’s just the normal process of the ice settling and it will ultimately make the track safer as long as the temperature stays the same.  Or so I’ve heard.

8. If you’re not careful, you can fall flat on your butt.  This has to be the biggest downside of having a hundred thousand skates and skaters on the same patch of ice every day.  The ice develops a few cracks which turn into deep gouges.

If you happen to be skating along a stretch that hasn’t been cleaned off by a Dutch Zamboni….

… you won’t see the crack and you’ll be on your ass before you know it.

9. Even if you don’t speak a word of Dutch, you have to check out the Royal Skating Union’s website to get the low-down on where to go.  At top left you’ll find a box to click on for the natural ice tours open.  Be patient.  Google translate actually comes in handy.

10. Near Rotterdam at Kinderdijk you can skate by a cluster of 19 of Holland’s grandest of icons.  They were built around 270 years ago and were still in use until 1950.  It’s now a UNESCO heritage site.  Some are thatched with the reeds that grow nearby, others made of brick or wood.  A couple were even turning, like this one on the Molentocht (Windmill tour):

OK… 11 things…

Skating in Holland can be an incredibly beautiful experience.

Elation, exhilaration, skipping like a puppy and bursting with a whoop of joy merely to be alive as I made those first  strides on a glistening, black surface that seemed to stretch out as far as the horizon.

Trees bristling with frost, every twig enveloped in a bottle-brush of crystal, sparkling in the orange-blue wash of the morning.  And all so still.

You hear a lot about the sweet spot of tennis, how good it feels when you hit the ball exactly the way you should and it lands just where you want it to.  There’s something about that in the rhythmic dance of skating when you hit the right cadence, when you’re cutting through the surface in a complete connection from your temples through your thighs down to the bottom of your feet, feeling the blades as if they were an extension of your bones as they scrape…scrape…scrape, a thousand times effortlessly across the ice.  You get the feeling you’re floating, as if you were falling into a trance.

I felt that at times this weekend.

The eyes that haunt me still

I’m haunted by what happened on this patch of grass nearly a decade ago.

When I fly by there on my bike while out on a long training ride to the west of town I can’t help but think of what happened, but it doesn’t affect me that much.  A pinch of memory, a flash, then it’s over. 

But last night while watching the movie The Namesake on DVD with my wife, the way the Indian characters had been speaking in their sing-song accents, at a sudden turn the story tookit hit me all over again so strongly we had to pause it for a while. 

I looked up and told my wife: I’m thinking of the hockey game.

It happened on a sunny Sunday in July, 2000. 

We were about 10 minutes into a game of grass hockey when all of a sudden there was a stoppage in play for longer than the usual few seconds to retrieve the ball from the side bushes or let a player walk off an injury.

I remember not being too focused on what was going on at first.  I recall swatting aimlessley at the grass with my stick, bending over to adjust my shoelaces, then standing up straight to look over to the far side of the field to see what was holding up play. 

A few from our team were standing around near a player lying on the grass.  I started to walk slowly over, feeling a bit annoyed that a game which up ’til then had been going really well was being held up for so long.

Approaching the other players I looked down at the figure lying flat on his back and got this sickening feeling. 

It was our Indian team-mate, a newcomer who’d only recently moved to Hamburg to work at Airbus and whom I’d gotten to know during post-game drinks the last time out.  A jovial man with a round, softly beared face, I remember how at one point he said to me in his Indian way: My gosh, you run around like a deer out there.  You’re very fit, you know.  Not like me – patting his stomach, smiling and raising his glass.

He was now lying there motionless.  Utterly still.  In a flash I remember thinking: what the hell are you idiots doing standing around like this doing nothing?  

I knelt over him, put my face right close to his, and waited for any sign of breath.  There was none.

This is what haunts me still: the sight of his lifeless eyes staring up at me as I looked into them from inches away.

Almost immediately I pinched his nose, cupped his jaw and started to give him mouth-to-mouth respiration. 

After a few breaths I stopped to give his chest four or five thrusts with one hand over the other, hoping that was the proper way to do it.  When you get your German driver’s license you have to take a course in first aid including CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and I was almost in a panic that I was either doing it wrong or not in a way that would do any good, especially since he wasn’t responding.

Someone else started alternating with the pressure pumps onto the chest while I did the mouth-to-mouth for as long as I could.  I don’t know how long I lasted, but I started to feel sick to my stomach, rolled away and asked someone else to take over.

By now we could hear in the far distance the first siren wailings of the ambulance approaching.

I got up and stumbled away from the scene.  I couldn’t stand to look at what was happening.  That face, so close to mine.   Those eyes, so lifeless.

I walked a few metres more toward the clubhouse, got to the centre of the field, collapsed to my knees, fell with my forehead on the ground, clenched my fists, clenched my jaw, tried to fight it, but I couldn’t help weeping, bawling like a fucking baby as I rubbed my hands over the spikey blades of grass. 

The ambulance seemed to take forever to arrive and even longer to get our teammate onto the stretcher and on his way to hospital.  All in vain, of course.  Although they say he died the next day, I could tell he was probably dead before he hit the grass.  

His family lived in Holland and that’s where they held the funeral, but I don’t think any of us made it.  We sent flowers and a card.  One of the things they said in thanking us is that he died doing what he loved best: playing hockey. 

The sight of those eyes.  It haunts me still.