by Dave Hill
Of course, with all my tireless hockey research, it didn’t take me long to figure out that—at the ripe old age of eleven—I was getting an extremely late start in the game. Most of the pros I’d read about had a hockey stick shoved into their hands as soon as the placenta was hosed off them. I resented my parents for not doing the same with me. Gretzky was drafted by the pros at the age of sixteen. Sixteen.
“I’ve got a lot of catching up to do in the next five years,” I thought. “From now on, it will be all hockey all the time, dammit.”
To that end, I decided to take things to the next logical and manly step by signing up to play ice hockey in the local youth league. I wasn’t particularly athletic, or even all that interested in sports for that matter, but as unpopular as hockey was in Cleveland at the time, I figured it made me a trailblazer of sorts. And perhaps best of all, playing hockey seemed like the most Canadian thing I could possibly do, so I was certain it would further ingratiate me with my grandfather. It would basically be the opposite of telling him to go screw himself.
I made my auspicious hockey debut by joining the pee-wee league in Cleveland Heights, the next town over. The league was comprised mostly of eleven- and twelve-year-old boys. There were a handful of girls in the league, too, but I tried to ignore that fact since most of them were better than me. My team was called the “white team,” after the color of our jerseys. I didn’t think it was possible to have a lamer name than our rivals, the “red team” and the “blue team,” but somehow we nailed it.
To prepare me for the beating I was about to receive on the ice, my dad took me to the sporting goods store near our house and got me outfitted in hockey equipment from head-to-toe, including a combination cup and jockstrap. It was the first time in my life my testicles required formal protection and it made me feel like a man, a man with near-microscopic, prepubescent external genitalia, but a man just the same.
As I hit the ice for the first time, covered to the point of being unrecognizable in my sparkling new pads like some pathetic gladiator who would only be called to combat once everyone else had been killed, I was certain every parent in the stands would quickly take notice of the new kid and his uncanny natural ability to work magic with a hockey stick. Sure, my skating hadn’t really improved all that much since the age of three and, yeah, I fell down just about every other time I tried to shoot the puck, but I was still convinced my raw talent was impossible to miss. It would be like the first time Streisand stepped in front of a microphone to sing, only slightly more butch. As I skated down the ice, I pictured someone in the stands secretly videotaping the whole thing for later use in a documentary about my unstoppable hockey career.
“There he is—Dave Hill,” I imagined a baritone-voiced sports announcer saying over grainy footage of me doing my damnedest not to fall down. “Just eleven years old here, but clearly a hockey god in the making.”
Despite my fearless efforts, however, my inaugural hockey season came and went without much fanfare. My team almost always lost and the most attention I ever got at the rink came after my family’s golden retriever bit me in the face the night before a game.1 Still, I had my eye on the prize, so I spent the following summer working on my ice-skating and playing street hockey all by myself in my family’s driveway while all the other kids went swimming. Fortunately, my parents were extremely patient and barely complained when I figured out how to shoot the puck high enough to break all the windows on the garage doors. The first time it was an accident. But once I realized I wasn’t going to get in trouble for it, I didn’t exactly try to avoid having it happen. That summer, the sound of breaking glass was like hearing thousands of fans cheering for me on the ice. I was devastated when there were no windows left to break and my dad simply boarded them up rather than replace the glass and risk having me break them all over again.
Given the fact that hockey was the only sport I was ever any good at, my skill at it seemed more like a form of autism than actual athleticism. Much to even my own surprise, I managed to improve enough before my triumphant return to the ice the following season that it seemed like a reasonable enough idea to try out for the travel team, the one all the really good kids played on. Not only did they play teams in other cities, but they had cooler jerseys than all the other teams at the rink, were more handsome, and even had cooler names than everybody else, too—like Kip, Trip, and Torch, names that I’d never even heard of before but still sounded awesome to my impressionable young ears. The kids on the travel teams were usually dicks to all the players on the non-travel teams (or “house teams” as they were not-so-glamorously called), but I felt like they had somehow earned the right. I wanted to be one of them so badly my pancreas hurt. Despite making it past the first round of cuts for the team, I was still back on the house team in the end.
“You really impressed me out there, Hill,” said the travel team coach, a guy with a thick mane of red hair and a much cooler outfit than any of the house team coaches ever wore, told me after I’d been cut. “You keep working hard and I think you’ll have a real good shot at making the team next year.”
“Really, coach?” I asked, beaming up at him. “Really?”
“I mean, sure. Uh, why not?”
I have no idea if he actually meant it or if he just felt obligated to say something nice to me so he could pass me in the hallway outside the locker room without things being too awkward, but either way I was pumped. Even with that mini-motivational speech, the house team is where I would stay for the next two years until it was time for high school. It was a long, cold two years, too—no cool jerseys, no trips to faraway cities to play other more handsome kids who probably had really cool names, too, no nothing.
My all-boy Catholic high school, Saint Ignatius, had its own hockey team, which felt like worlds colliding—my secret hockey world and the one my friends at school actually knew about. I figured I would finally be recognized among my peers as the best (if only) hockey player in our immediate social group and that felt great. I still wasn’t quite one of the greatest hockey players of all-time or even in my town for that matter, but I had at least gotten good enough by then that I ended up being one of only three freshmen to make the varsity team. The fact that the team was absolutely abysmal definitely helped matters, but it remains my greatest and perhaps only real athletic achievement to this day.
This is the sixteen-year-old me trying to look as athletic as possible in my high school hockey uniform. I feel like I really nailed it.
The Saint Ignatius team practiced before school, requiring me to get up at 4:30 A.M. and usually making me late for first period.
“And why are you late again today, Mr. Hill?” my Latin teacher would ask me.
“Because I’m a fucking champion,” I wanted to tell him instead of just shrugging and collapsing into my desk as I did most days.
I was thrilled to finally be able to play hockey with guys I went to school with, and maybe even people besides the players’ parents would show up to games, like girls, for example. But I quickly learned that being a freshman on a team full of juniors and seniors almost twice my size was like being in a really bad after-school special. Not only was I a hairless, hundred-pound doormat, but I had little in common with the other guys on the team aside from being a suburban white teenager. They were mostly jocks who also played football, baseball, and whatever else didn’t conflict with the hockey season. And I was a shy, anxious semiloner who was obsessed with the electric guitar but still happened to play one sport and one sport only when he wasn’t practicing scales in his bedroom or hanging out in a friend’s basement listening to Led Zeppelin records. I might as well have gone ahead and taped a KICK ME sign directly to my crotch.
One day, I walked proudly into the locker room wearing a really tight, colorful sweater that I was certain made me look like Cheap Trick guitar player Rick Nielsen, one of my idols. It seemed like a really great idea at the time. My teammates, however, thought otherwise.
“Hill, you fucking pu
ssy,” one of them said. “How fucking gay is that sweater?”
It sounded like a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer.
“Does your mom know you wear her clothes?” another player asked.
I couldn’t figure out why these guys weren’t into what I was pretty sure was a totally awesome rock look. I also made a mental note to maybe not wear that sweater to the rink anymore.
Giving me shit about my fashion decisions was just the beginning of my hazing. As situations involving a bunch of young men coming to terms with an influx of testosterone tend to go, all three of us freshmen on the team were on the receiving end of a healthy share of abuse. And given my oddball status, I usually got it the worst. On more than one occasion, I’d close my eyes to rinse the shampoo out of my hair in the shower after practice only to notice a stream of warm water hitting me from somewhere other than the showerhead I was standing under. I’d open my eyes to discover one of my upperclassmen teammates urinating on me with a big smile on his face. I’d usually jump out of the way and punch him in the arm, sending myself bouncing off him and skidding across the shower room floor in the process. Since I was barely a hundred pounds, my punches were mostly symbolic gestures causing no actual pain to the recipient. But I felt it was important to send a message loud and clear that while I might very well tolerate being urinated on by just about anyone who tried, I didn’t have to like it. It felt like the least I could do.
“Ha ha, Hill!” one of the other guys in the shower at the time would howl. “You got pissed on!”
Since he was merely stating facts, I rarely had a comeback.
In addition to the urinating, there was also a fair amount of towel snapping and other standard locker-room shenanigans. Occasionally, an upperclassman would use a freshman’s towel to wipe his ass and then leave it on the towel rack in hopes that the freshman would dry himself off before discovering it (and now he) was covered in shit. Somehow I escaped ever having that bit of nastiness pulled on me, but I saw it happen to other guys. At the time it all seemed just really mean and gross, but looking back on it, it was also more than a little bit homoerotic. I guess I’m just lucky no one tried to make out with me or anything.
While it was practically raining men most days in the locker room, things were balanced out a bit by the drives home from practice on days we didn’t have school afterward. I carpooled with a few of the upperclassmen and they would regularly threaten to drag me into strip joints or try to get me to proposition a hooker as we drove through Cleveland’s seedier neighborhoods on our way back to the relatively whore-free suburbs. I was still a few years away from recognizing the entertainment value in that sort of thing, so I was terrified.
“What about her?” one of the guys would say, waving at a hooker as we rolled up to a red light. “Would you do it with her?”
“Please don’t come over to the car, please don’t come over to the car,” I’d think to myself over and over as I prayed for the light to turn green before some woman wearing just a trench coat and underwear walked over to the passenger seat window.
“How much pussy do you get, Hill?” was another question I often fielded in the locker room.
“Um, what?” I’d reply. I knew there were probably other guys my age somewhere on the planet with active sex lives, but I was fourteen and still spent most of my weekends hanging out with my parents or watching a PG-13 movie in my friend Andrew’s basement. Besides my sisters, I didn’t really even know any girls. Eventually I realized the guys on my team were just messing with me, mostly just out of plain old teenage obligation, but at the time I was convinced I was a total weirdo for being a virgin who didn’t occasionally hit the local strip joint or chat up a hooker whenever the opportunity arose.
I was never really bullied in elementary school, so I didn’t understand why I had suddenly become the target of nonstop abuse. “Have I been a total punching bag my whole life and these guys are just the first ones willing to point it out to me?” I wondered.
But in spite of all the hazing and my teammates’ frequent suggestions that I spend my allowance on sex, I still loved playing hockey, so I just did my best to ignore all of it. And, as cliché as it sounds, I knew that quitting would probably give my teammates too much satisfaction, so I refused.
“How was practice today?” my dad would ask.
“It was really fun,” I’d lie, trying to save face. “My teammates are really nice guys. You’d like them.”
Between the stress of his law practice and raising five kids, I decided hearing his son had gotten pissed on that day was something my dad probably didn’t need. And, to their credit (I guess), my older teammates rarely gave me shit outside of the locker room or carpool. At school I was one of them, so while they weren’t overtly friendly to me, they never tried to wipe their feces on me or anything, so I was still really proud to be a part of the team. Besides, those guys all graduated after a couple of years and before I knew it, it was my turn to be an unfathomable asshole to the younger players. But by then, I was too into the guitar to have more than a passing interest in urinating on anybody. And I knew at least one or two girls by then, too, which seemed like the greatest thing that had ever happened ever.
“Dave, look at Chris’s retarded haircut,” one of my fellow upperclassmen on the team might say in reference to one of the younger players.
“I’ve seen better, but it’s not bad,” I’d reply, unable to muster the necessary strength to ruin the kid’s day.
My high school hockey career concluded with just slightly more fanfare than that first season I played back when I was eleven. I saw a lot of “ice time” (hockey lingo for getting to play in the game a lot), got a cool varsity letterman jacket, and even briefly had an actual girlfriend who would sit in the stands during games and occasionally agree to make out with me later that night. It was incredible.
I continued my unstoppable hockey career in college, albeit briefly. A couple games into my sophomore season, I realized it was interfering with my drinking too much, so I decided to pack it in. The coach was a little bummed to lose me but my roommates were thrilled because it meant I would no longer be stinking up our dorm room with my sweaty, moldy equipment. I didn’t play hockey for several years after that. And during that time, it was hard to even watch hockey games on television. Sure, the integrity of the game probably remained intact after my retirement, but I still felt a little guilty about it since less than a decade earlier I was convinced the ice was my natural habitat.
Some years later though, with my grandfather in that great big Maple Leaf Gardens2 in the sky, my half-Canadian mother managed to coax me back onto the ice again.
“I know a man named Paul who runs the men’s hockey league down at the rink,” she said to me sometime after my twenty-seventh birthday. “He said you could play on his team.”
It sounded suspicious to me that my mom might “know a man” like that, but the prospect of coming out of retirement was too intriguing to let that distract me from the matter at hand. I had been away from the game awhile and was hungry for action.
“Oh yeah?” I said coyly. “What would I have to do?”
“Just call him. He said they could use an extra player.”
I called Paul the next day and joined his team, the “yellow team,” the following week. We played our games on the same ice I had started playing hockey on back when I was a promising yet delusional eleven-year-old, often at midnight or so, the time usually reserved for old men whose hockey dreams had been dashed by age, life changes, or just plain sucking long ago. The players ranged in age from their mid-twenties to at least one seventy-year-old. About half of the men had grown up playing the game and the rest picked it up as adults (you could usually spot them by how they had really new equipment and also fell down a lot).
After being away for so long, it was good to be back on the ice. Still, all that time away had left me beyond rusty. My brain would send a message to my body to do all sorts of really cool hockey moves li
ke skating circles around my opponent, rifling the puck past the goalie, and other stuff I’d put on my imaginary highlights reel, but my body, nearly paralyzed from a decade’s worth of beer and chicken wing intake, would rarely come close to getting it right. It was still a lot of fun though, so between that and the after-game binge drinking my new teammates and I would get up to, it was enough to keep me coming back each week.
Somewhere toward the second season after my triumphant return, the yellow team was playing our archrivals, the blue team, whose scrappy, middle-age brand of ice hockey was legendary among the three other teams in the league. Early in the game, one of the blue team players began repeatedly hitting me in the legs with his stick, an illegal move known as slashing, every time we came near each other. I ignored it the first couple times it happened, but after he did it a third time I decided to let him know who was boss, so I punched him in the face, sending him crashing to the ice with a flabby, fortysomething thud. Since everyone in our league wore helmets, face masks, and heavily padded gloves, punches were more a nuisance than actually painful. Still, he was pissed and came back for more. By then, the referee had blown his whistle to break up the fight, so we just wrestled each other for a few seconds before everyone else pulled us apart. Somehow during all the mayhem, however, the mask on my helmet unfastened, leaving my face wide open for pummelling. To his credit, my scrappy opponent managed to pull an arm free from whoever was restraining him and punch me directly in the face. Of course, I normally would have destroyed him after that, but my arms were being gently held back by the seventy-year-old I mentioned earlier, so there was nothing I could do. The fight was over and I was the only guy left with anything more than emotional wounds.