i play ice hockey

I play ice hockey.  Just being able to say that means so much to me.  I’m no athlete.  I picked up the game late in life.  I was never very good at it, but I was good enough.  It was fun.  Really fun.  I frankly would never have guessed I would be able to say those words past the age of 60, but here I am.  I play ice hockey.

Or more accurately, I played ice hockey until the pandemic happened.  Since then I’ve skated at 3 practice sessions, all in October, where we skate around in full gear with 10 or so others and each of us grab a puck for ourselves while avoiding everyone on the ice.  That gets boring pretty quickly so eventually a few of us start playing a scrimmage game until most of the others join in.  The competitive juices start flowing and we start bumping each other and it’s a lot of fun, but it doesn’t seem safe to me in these times, so after those 3 sessions I haven’t skated again.  

And maybe I never will.  Did I mention I’m past 60?  This isn’t necessarily an impediment to playing the game of hockey.  In the league I was playing in there are a few players older than me.  In the pro leagues there are several players who continued their careers far beyond what you would see in most pro team sports.  45 year old football players?  I don’t think so.  And yet ice hockey has a few, in spite of being a very brutal and demanding sport at the pro level.  But it is also a graceful and flowing sport.  Skating is not like running.  You don’t pound your joints.  You glide.  And you glide much faster than you can run.  That’s what appealed to me about hockey when I watched it on tv at an early age.  The speed of the players within a much smaller space than other team sports immediately grabbed my attention.  Even on an old, small, black and white tv in the 1960’s I could see this game was way more interesting to me than football or baseball.  

But no one in my extended family had any interest in hockey at that time, so I watched those few games on tv alone.  About the time I got my driver’s license I decided to try to play this game.  I lived in Phoenix AZ which in the early 70’s you wouldn’t think had much hockey, but there were ice rinks everywhere.  What better escape from the extreme desert heat, not to mention the fact that I was part of a mass migration of northeasterners into the southwest at that time, and we brought our ice rinks with us.  I had one friend at that time that also skated.  I don’t remember if he played hockey, but my own self taught skills got me far enough to play some pick-up games.  I never joined a league because I was soon off to college.  I kept my gear.

30 years later I still had that gear in my closet.  Since then I had moved from Phoenix to San Francisco.  In that time, I would skate about once a year, without gear, just to prove to myself that I still could, but at the age of 45 I decided if I ever was going to play this game of hockey again, I’d better do something about it now.  As luck would have it, there was a beautiful, nearly brand spanking new state of the art gorgeous ice rink right across the street from the condo I lived in.  I took some beginner hockey classes and met a skater in the condo who invited me to join his team.  This was the lowest level league at the rink.  I had no idea then how competitive this “low level” league would be.  I was in way over my head.  But I didn’t realize it, and I loved the game, and I had enough “friends” around me that the fact that I sucked didn’t get me kicked out.  I got better.  I even scored a hat trick once.  I’ll never forget that.  I was playing in 3 different leagues at different rinks at the same time.  That’s one game three times a week.  I must have been in great shape for a guy in his 50’s.  Well, not really.  My game had started to level off.  I never did score another hat trick.  Then I wasn’t scoring much at all.  Then I actually DID get kicked out of a league.  I was a little pissed off about that since I was an original founding member  of that league.  But I understood it.  There are a lot of people that want to play this game and not a lot of ice time available.  Even less now that two of the rinks I skated at have closed down for good.  But, thanks to another good hockey friend I was able to join his league, and this one was way more suited to my style of play, which is very non-competitive fun.  Eventually it was the only league I was skating in, so I went pretty quickly from 3 games a week to just 1.  And as a major point of pride in my 60’s, I could still say I play ice hockey.

But now I’m not so sure.  This pandemic year of almost no skating is going to make it very hard to start up again.  And it’s no joke to say that it actually might kill me.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we start hearing about old guys dying trying to resume their activities as the pandemic restrictions go away.  Even before the pandemic I was getting shit from my cardiologist and a small number of my non-hockey playing friends telling me to stop playing.  Thankfully my wife has been very supportive, although she never comes to watch a game … way too stressful for her.  I’m sure if she did come, that would be the game where I get seriously injured, so better that she doesn’t.  

It is hard for me to believe that I’ve been playing this game for almost 20 years without a serious injury.  I pulled my groin once.  That was pretty bad actually, but it eventually healed completely and I missed less than two months of playing.  Even after my heart surgery I was playing again in about 2 months.  Looking back at those years now, I guess my picking up the game at age 45 was a kind of mid-life crisis act, or middle aged bucket list achievement.  I know I didn’t think of it like that at the time of course.  It was just something I really wanted to do for a long time and finally got around to doing it.  It was fun.  And I still like saying I Play Ice Hockey.