Scott Hill, Founder and Director, Hockey Night in Canada's Play On!
So as many of you are aware, we’ve been running a little contest on our Facebook page, inviting all to submit a short blog entry highlighting their greatest road hockey memory. Reading these entries has been -- in a word – entertaining. For example, while reading one such entry, I laughed so hard I couldn’t stop. You hear about people laughing themselves right out of a chair. Well, it happened here. Without exaggeration, a couple of the guys had to come into my office to check on me. I’m laughing hard out loud again now just thinking about it.
So having appreciated a bit of everyone’s road hockey nostalgia, and looking for something to write about as we launch playon.ca for 2012, I figured I ought to take a moment and share my own greatest road hockey memory.
First, a little background.
Redwood Road, the street I grew up on, is part of a little residential neighbourhood almost exactly halfway between Kingsville and Leamington, in the Southern-most part of Ontario (also the most Southern part of Canada). The road runs North to South, and if it continued for another 50 or so yards it would hit sand on the beach of Lake Erie. It was nice to live by the lake and all, but no one dared do much in the lake in those days. Lake Erie didn’t even freeze over too well in the winter, so everyone still had backyard rinks. Anyways, the lake was just there, and not really a part of our lives.
The homes on the street are now all about fifty years old; all similarly simple. No one there really had much money. I remember some of the other families on the street – one neighbour was a high school teacher and the other worked at the Heinz ketchup factory (Leamington is also known as the tomato capital of Canada). All the Moms were just that - Moms. Several other Dads on our street, like my own Father, worked in the auto industry in Windsor. Parents worked, kids went to school, and we all just lived and breathed hockey.
Notwithstanding our enthusiasm for the game, we were far better hockey fans than players. Just like today, there were many more kids in our neighbourhood that didn’t play ice hockey than actually did. The area had (still has) very strong Italian, Portuguese, and Lebanese communities. Many of these families were first generation in the country and couldn’t afford to put their kids into hockey, even if they could skate, which they couldn't. (Side note – now they are all rich, having mastered the art of farming greenhouse tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers). But the fact that most couldn’t play ice hockey one bit didn’t matter when it came to having an understanding and passion for the game.
Let me attempt to illustrate that passion by talking about what it was like in our high school. Hockey, and in particular the Red Wings vs. Maple Leafs rivalry, was inseparably connected to our psyche. Let’s just say that insulting the Maple Leafs (if you were a Wings fan) or insulting the Red Wings (if you weren’t) was seriously enough to start a real fight between whole ethnicities. Everybody knew that if you were going to make fun of the other guy's team, you’d better not be alone. I'm not kidding about this. I remember the first round of the 1993 playoffs, Leafs vs. Wings, which was one of, if not the greatest playoff series in the history of hockey. When the Wings won games #1 and #2, 50% of our high school wore Detroit Red Wings jerseys the next morning. There were like three fights on the bus on the way to school. Then when the Leafs won games #3 - #5, the other 50% wore Leafs jerseys. For those few days we had sanctioned, pre-scheduled, brawls at lunchtime.
Hockey was that personal for everyone. Well the Leafs eventually won that series (on that amazing Game #7 Nikolai Borschevsky deflection in overtime!!!!) and many of the Wings fans (including at least 4 teachers that I can currently recall) didn’t even bother showing up for school the next day.
Leafs fans were celebrating. Wings fans were all in mourning. Such was the importance of hockey to our lives.
Reflecting broadly on that small town of Kingsville... we weren’t good at much of anything. Our greatest success story was probably Brian’s Custom Goalie Equipment, which only employed about 20 people. Our high school sports teams were - at best - average (trust me I played on all of them) and so were our community hockey teams. But when it came to road hockey, everyone in Kingsville and Leamington had game.
Redwood road was typical of all the streets in that area. It was barely wide enough for two cars to pass. There’s no way that it could handle a modern day Play On! event - simply because the street is far too narrow. But at the time it seemed just fine for us, and those narrow streets can explain why everyone in our neighbourhood seemingly had the skills to dangle in a phone booth. In addition to those tight conditions, the asphalt was also pretty rough, making ball control especially difficult since it (we used an old tennis ball back then) would hop all over. The result was that, by necessity, every kid developed reflexes and eye-hand coordination like a mongoose.
We played road hockey, without exaggeration, every... single... day.
All of us, that is, except for Damian. Now a couple of the guys on our particular street, like me, had played some level of ice hockey. But Damian was self-proclaimed, next-generation-Gordie Howe, Mr. God’s-great-gift-to-ice hockey. Not the sharpest intellectual, but to his credit he actually was a pretty good hockey player. A year older than I, he was big and strong enough that he looked like he could have been playing in the NHL when he was still in high school. Now we’ve all seen the hockey types (this includes parents) that take themselves way too seriously. Two or three chains always hung around his neck, each chain holding a silver stick. Even in early June he’d still wear his Triple-A hockey jacket. I remember when he was in public school, his Dad set-up a home gym so he could hit the weights every day after school. Then in the summer, it’d be dry-land training on the front lawn. His Dad brought in these ex-NHLers to coach him on the duck walk. Damian was in power skating and two or three different hockey camps at all times throughout the year.
Anyways, I didn’t particularly like him for all the reasons listed above. Truth be told, he also kind of scared me. I mean, he probably had about 6 inches and 70lbs on the rest of us.
But most of all, I didn’t like Damian because he was a Red Wings fan.
Usually Damian was too busy with his hockey training to play road hockey with the rest of the kids on the street. But one day, we invited him out and he came. He probably wouldn’t have come, except that he had a few of his dry-land training buddies over, and they evidently had nothing better to do. Of course, they all showed up with at least three sticks in a stick bag, hockey gloves with the wrists cut back, their triple-A hockey jackets, of course the gold chains, and those freakin’ Red Wings hats. One of the guys had his full-blown goalie gear. One of the guys made a comment under his breath that we all heard. They made it perfectly clear that they were about to teach the rest of us the greatest lesson in hockey ever delivered.
Anyways, their trash talking kind of fired me up. The trash talking was what it was, but I probably wouldn’t have cared as much about it if they would have been wearing something other than those Red Wings hats. This was the enemy, and we were on. I was not backing down from this. I decided to run home and came back a few minutes later wearing my Wendel Clark jersey.
Anyways, this particular game was moved from our usual spot on Redwood Road to the driveway of one of the guys on the street, Troy. Troy’s folks had just invested heavily in a brand new super-smooth black asphalt driveway, the kind that allows the ball to roll true. We were pretty pumped about our new surface, which was even a little wider than the street. We moved the car, closed the garage, and game on.
Teams were four on four, including the goalie, the way of course that road hockey was meant to be played. There was never any discussion; it was us against them. Leafs vs Wings. No one would have considered it any other way.
So the game began and we scored quickly. At first, they didn’t get too rattled, though a couple of their guys switched sticks, and the goalie adjusted the straps on his helmet.
The game seemed to go one for a long time. When we went up 3-0, it got out of control. Troy started it with the taunts of Stevie “Yzerwoman” and things I can’t repeat here about Bob Probert and Joey Kocur. Down three goals, Damian and his boys were already seriously irritated, but Troy’s crossing of the ‘now you’re making-fun-of-the-Wings’ line was the moment when the game escalated to becoming what I will call the most intense road hockey game that was ever played. Damian and his boys had seen enough of our winning and heard enough of our chirping and started getting physical. I got laid out on the grass pretty good. Our goalie got ran over hard. Troy took a nasty cross check across the back, and fell hard into the handle of the garage door, cutting his face above the eyebrow. For a few minutes, we were intimidated, and shortly thereafter, the game was 3-3.
In typical fashion, Troy’s Mother kept an eye on things through the front window. She wasn’t so happy with what was clearly developing. Still, not wanting to embarass her bleeding teenage son, she called out the front door and proclaimed that the game was over, it was time for supper, or whatever. It was in fact starting to get dark. But supper was going to wait, since all the boys agreed that this game was not going to end in a tie.
A man walking his dog had stopped to watch. Troy’s Mom got impatient but kept watching from the window. Next goal was going to win.
I pretty much remember everything about my winning goal. I somehow got possession, took it to the outside, put it over Damian’s stick, across through the defender’s legs, and then while falling down shot back to the near side in the top corner above the goalie’s glove. It was OVER!
I remember being happy that I scored the goal. I ran across the lawn and jumped into a big soft evergreen tree to celebrate. All my team mates piled on. The guy with the dog started applauding. Troy’s Mom just smiled. Our celebration wrecked a whole bunch of branches that left one side of that tree bare for several years.
But more importantly than scoring the goal and winning the game, that was the goal that proved, in my own little world, that Wendel Clark and the Leafs were still better than the Red Wings.
It was not only my greatest road hockey memory. It was the greatest moment of my entire youth. The greatest goal I ever scored, and, with hindsight, one of the first in a series of moments that resulted in the creation of Hockey Night in Canada's Play On!
And for those that are wondering... Damian's hockey career never developed. He ended up having a very poor relationship with his Father, and he currently works as a mechanic (granted, a really good one).
Still wears his freakin' Red Wings hat.
Want to share your favorite road hockey memory? I want to read it. If it makes me laugh, I may just include it in an upcoming blog post for the rest of the country to see. Send it to me: london@playon.ca
Play On!
