CALL ME SNAKE

The other day I was talking to a guy at the Y about–what else?–playing handball. He was about my age, and in pretty good shape, having taken up basketball some years before at the age of 48. He used to play hockey but gave it up because of injuries. I told him a friend of mine (now 50) had just taken up the sport and was trying to drag me into it as well. “Don’t do it,” this guy advised. “There are too many ways to hurt yourself in hockey. Ways you haven’t even thought about.”

Ironically, my other friend (the current hockey player, as opposed to former hockey player) invited our family to join his at the Cambridge Skating Club’s outdoor rink that very night. The back portion of the rink is set aside for a “casual” game of hockey, as they use a tennis ball rather than puck to lessen the chance of someone getting hurt. I didn’t join in at first, preferring to skate with my kids. But as they were content with their friends, and didn’t really need me (or necessarily want me hanging around), I joined the pickup hockey game.

It started off pretty casually, with some fairly young players mixing in with the teens and adults but by the end it was my friend and I and a bunch of 16-year-old hockey nuts.I was a bit rusty, having played just two times in the last 40 years, but I kept up with the kids pretty well.

Until one of them raised his hockey stick and smashed it into my face, cutting me on the forehead, eye, and side of the eye. “How do you feel?” the kid asked.
“I feel like I got hit in the face with a hockey stick,” I replied.
The kid didn’t apologize. He just told me: “You should have been wearing a helmet.”

At that moment, I knew why so many fights break out in hockey. But I walked away as I was bleeding pretty bad–on my forehead and side of the eye–and making a general mess of things. As I was sitting in the warming hut with some ice packs and paper towels on my face, I thought of the prophetic line I’d heard earlier that day: “There are a lot of ways to hurt yourself…”