Mom enrolled my brother and I in the Fort Garry Hockey League at a young age. We all loved hockey. I’d play in the leagues from age 7 to 12 before I moved on to other organized sports. We’d continue to play hockey in pick up games till late teens. Then again I’d play “old timer leagues” in my thirties. I think Canada and Hockey are like butter and bread. The last time I was on skates was a decade ago for an LGBT Recovery fund raiser event. My friend Brian, the forester convinced me to come out. Not surprisingly one of the gay fellows was a magnificent skater who had performed in the Ice Capades. A lesbian girl was also semi pro. The two of them stole the show. Brian and I by comparison, now in our 50’s made tottering rounds of the rink proud that we’d not fallen over. I even skated backwards all the while these two young wonders were twirling and leaping like they were ballet dancers. I never skated like that.
As a kid I needed my hockey stick as a crutch tripod to maintain my upright balance. I was 16 when I was telling a girlfriend about my great hockey playing years.
“I”ve got movies,” my Dad surprised us. He must have overhead us in the living room then was all a bustle to put up his screen and bring out the projector. He loved an opportunity to show off the home movies. The girl was delighted. I would soon be mortified.
In my memory I’m Billy Hay of the Chicago Black Hawks. I’m Rocket Richard. I’m in the NHL. I’d played on the big rinks. In my mind’s eye I was a star. Our hockey games especially with the feats of Boris Tyzek, our local star, should have been on national tv.
Now my father provided ‘fact’. I can understand why the postmodernist irrational emotional generation of today doesn’t subscribe to fact. I definitely preferred my memory and the story I had been telling to the visual evidence provided by father. There on the screen was me with at least one or two yards distance between his skates holding desperately to the hockey stick while slowly, ever so slowly, weaving backwards before the onslaught of a very slow moving Boris Tyzek, the terror of the Fort Garry rinks of the day. Boris is bearing down on me while I’m eying him. A couple of slow moving dwarfs bundled to the max in oversized parkas, togues, scarves and mittens. You wouldn’t know it was Boris if you hadn’t been me and seen the steely terrifying eyes as he bore down on me preparing at any moment to deak about me and score on the goalie behind me. There is the move. He goes one way. I go the other. Definitely a ‘ice snake’ grabbed my skate that day. I fall over like a sated bunny. Boris skated around me. He shoots! He scores.! It helped that the goalie was out of his net getting gum from another kid in the stands. My girlfriend couldn’t help giggling.
The film has raced on through several years of family events. Dad, being Scottish, cheap, and not quite grasping the concept of moving pictures, having just switched from photography, used the movie camera like a prolonged snap shot. One film lasted a year and everyone’s birthday, vacations and the antics of the dog. The clip of midget me on the ice falling over was probably one of his longest shots.
Most of our games occurred weeknights. The play offs occurred on Saturday which was why dad was able to be there.
“Why can’t Dad come to our hockey games,” I’d whine to our mother. We’d go out, Mom, Ron and I leaving Dad and the dog at home. “He works all day so we can have a house and you can have skates and play hockey. Don’t you ever criticize your father. He loves you very much. He just can’t be at home all the time because he’s working very hard to make money to pay for all the things you kids just take for granted.”
There was never a time when I was growing up that each of my parents didn’t defend and promote the other. They were an unassailable wall that stood against the kids. Even as a teen when I was trying to stay out later by asking one then the other what time I had to be home, they’d ask ‘what did your mother, or what did your father say’ then agree. I tried. God knows I tried but I could never get a wedge between them so I could be in charge and dominate the parents. They were indomitable.
In the dark of the Winnipeg winter nights with snow falling and wind chill making the temperatures 20 degrees below zero we’d trudge to the Fort Gary Community Club. If it was 40 below the game would be called off. Then the rink was outdoors but there was a shack with a wood stove. It was hot in that shack. We’d put on our skates there. I’d need mom’s help. We’d play and then my brother’s team would play or vice versa. There may have been two rinks too. I remember watching my brother play hockey and thinking he was the greatest because he really could skate and stick handle. At 8 these were still developing skills for me. Staying upright on skates and walking to the rink, then stepping over the wood edge onto the rink, that was an accomplishment. Not alone many a kid at my age including myself wiped out as we passed through the gate onto the rink. Ice snakes waited to trip you up there.
The coach, who usually did double time as the referee, would then gather the 12 of us kids together and disperse us around the rink in approximately the right places before he’d drop the puck and blow the whistle. This was the cue for several us us, usually myself included, falling down. Getting up again in skates and wrapped in parkas was a challenge that might take long enough for the 3 or 4 upright kids to skate around a bit and score. Then we’d line up again in our designated spaces. I was right defence. I got that place because I was one of the only kids who could skate backwards. My brother taught me and I thought that was so cool.
In addition to the games we’d go to the rink on the weekends and have free skating and pick up games. The girls were dancing about the rink then. They always could skate better than we could doing those twirls and not falling over. We just prided ourselves as guys thinking they probably couldn’t handle the stick or deal with the speed and danger of the puck. They sure could skate though.
Some years when the winds blew the snow away we’d skate for.miles on the Red River. That was the best, skating forever on a Saturday morning.
At the weekday evening games there was almost always just the two coaches twelve kids and Boris Tyzek father and my mother. Rarely another parent would stay. Mostly they’d drop their kids off from their cars and pick them up later. Boris’s father was Ukrainian with a thick accent scream, “Go Boris. Go.” My mother Irish was screaming across the rink from him . “Go Billy Go.” Years later I’d look back and know why Boris became the Rhodes Scholar and one of the most impressive men our my generation. Boris went onto greatness and I stayed out of jail thanks to our parents being at those hockey games.
I don’t think the coaches and parents kept official times. Maybe for my brothers game when it occurred before ours. But not for us. We were on the rink and off the rink in 15 minute stretches. It was just too cold and we were all thoroughly exhausted from falling down and standing up in no time at all. The rink itself was an infinite expanse of ice and I was glad I was defence because I almost never had to skate more than half of it. The centres who were the best players skated the most and the goalie got cold quickest standing around. The kids whose parents bought him the most defensive gear got to be goalie by default. I loved when I got knee pads. My father used to brag , “In my day we just rolled up newspaper and wrapped it around our legs.” I had a blue Toronto Maple Leaf Sweater I pulled on over my parka. My brother had a red Montreal Canadians sweater.
We would have quick intermission and I think our game must have only last three quarter of an hour to an hour. We were never gone from the house more than a couple of hours. I remember my feet always being so cold and crying at times when my mother helped me get my skates off by the fire. Mom was helping other kids get their skates off and I wasn’t the only kid crying. Parents would arrive and pick up the kids while Mom and I and Ron would walk home through the snow drifts down the back lane and across the expanse of the Viscount Alexander playground.
I was so tired slogging behind these two tall people, my perfect super man brother in the lead breaking trail. Mom would pull out a chocolate Wagon Wheel then. I’d walk along in the dark trudging through the snow nibbling on that Chocolate Wagon Wheel held in my mittened fingers following my mother and brother’s trail my stick in my other hand and my skates over my shoulder. Sometimes Mom would carry my skates for me. I still cry remembering those nights knowing my mother was the greatest mother in the world and wondering why the other kids parents didn’t come to their sons hockey games like Boris’s dad and my mom did, night after night throughout the cold winters.
Often the sky was clear and Ron would point up at the Northern Lights or call out that there was a shooting star. I’d look up then from putting one foot after another in the trail and see there was more to the night than that ever so long and cold tired trail home. . When we got home Mom would undress me and I’d go straight to bed. I was never more tired as a kid. The great Arctic expeditions to the Community Club, the powerful masterful unforgettable hockey games and the walk home nibbling on a Chocolate Wagon Wheel treat, sustained me for decades. I cry now remembering my mother’s love.
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