Hockey a Religion to Some

Hockey

To some sports are an escape; an ability to leave the world around you. It’s a chance to be a part of a community where the spirit carries over to before and after the games are played. A hockey rink is to hockey players what church is to the religious. There is a reverence upon entering and a litany of rituals that seem foolish out of context. Hockey is a niche sport as compared to the American classics such as Baseball and Football, but there’s pride in that fact. There’s pride that not just every athlete who can stick handle can walk onto the ice and perform. In other sports everyone can run, in hockey not everyone can naturally skate. You have to learn a skill before being able to perform in the sport. It separates itself in this way. Nevertheless hockey lends itself to the ultimate escape. The world it exists in; a dry almost entirely white cold alien tundra of ice, is so far separated from the grassy fields.

Its roots run deep in North American history as well. The contemporary history that’s well known is the formation of the game we recognize through the late 1800’s. The story of the first official game having a fight, from eleven members on the ice at once to the six including the goaltender today. The story most don’t know is how much further back the origin of the sport travels. Imagine living in the Iroquois nation and as winter comes you dig out the old whale bones that have been sharpened to a point running lengthwise along the bone. You strap them to the bottom of your moccasins and take the old lacrosse stick, remove the netting from summer and hit the ice with it to test the solidity. As your friends join you knocking rocks along the ice you push your way on your whalebone skates clearing the snow from the playing surface. The word hockey may have come from European settlers, but the game we know and love on the pond as shinny came from the Native Tribes all over the northern region of North America.

There has been a resurgence to come back to this form of Hockey or shinny in recent years. As the ice depletes through a changing climate the nostalgia of hot cocoa warming hands, long johns trying to cut the howling wind, beards freezing to icicles and warming huts housing the only reprieve from the burrowing cold for months has been skirted to a couple of weeks of winter enjoyment and rosy cheeked merriment. Indeed, this very writer has fond memories of playing on the frozen flooded field across the street from early December to the two-week February break in high school to the current state of trying to get onto a pond before late January as ultimately the ice will be gone by then.

When I was growing up as a third-generation goaltender between my two families; I would stare at this painting belonging to the patriarch of my family of goaltenders, Papa. It was a depiction of the war of 1812 the naval battle fought on Lake Champlain. It’s the basis to the working title of this idea that I desperately want to take shape; “Battle on Lake Champlain.” Unlike those old wooden naval ships that sit at the bottom of the lake this battle would take place on the frozen water. A strong allusion to the tribal battles that featured more hand to hand combat such as we see in hockey than the industrialized bombing raids and automatic machine guns pecking down the enemy with efficient speed.

On the pond is where the nifty plays, the slick stick handling, mastery of edgework and in the past, where little brother would hone his goaltending skills with old household pillows duct taped to his legs. This is where the love is born with the game. These simple truths that every hockey player knows, the history they’ve been taught, culminates in a late-night flooding of a rink. This is the reason the Battle on Lake Champlain needs to happen. To bring this entrenched rivalry between the US and Canada in hockey back to the roots and connect it to even the historic battles fought on the lake between the basis of Canada and a young United States.

That maybe the biggest advantage of this border battle between the US and Canada that Canada has; the longer periods of cold ripe for outdoor rinks and frozen ponds. This has forced the American kids and program to creatively find outlets on the streets on roller blades, extra ice time in the man-made rinks and traveling for those outdoor rink experiences when possible. I won more Stanley cups with a longer summer season playing roller hockey on my suburban street than on the flooded field or frozen ponds around my neighborhood.

This may seem an overly romanticized version of the game of hockey, but it’s representative in my own passion for the game. I’m not the only one who thinks this way. You hang around any rink for long enough and you see dads asking for broken hockey sticks to make furniture, kids throwing tantrums when being dragged from the pond back to the car, and come rinks flooded with players who have spent their entire day at the rink embolizing the rink rat culture. I’ve been called out on this romanticized version before in my writing, I dropped the class. This passion exists on both sides of the border. Hockey is a fraternity. The following pages lay out the research and the diligent work put in to truly ensure this is an original idea.

#organization #deskspace