This Is The New Hip Check (Blogophilia)
Category: Blogging

It's Blogophilia day, and I've got... nothing.  I would need an Einstein-Rosen bridge even to have a chance of turning in anything of any quality on time.  So the question is, what can I talk or write about when I'm exhausted and have nothing to say?  Well, it's either ancient perfume or ice hockey, and my experience has been that fewer eyes glaze when I go with hockey, so let's do that.  Voila, five hockey stories, all true, most documented, some legendary.  Sorry, no purple legwarmers in any of them.

1.  How Not To Load the Vans

We were playing a tournament about a four-hour drive away, so we loaded up into two vans at the crack of dawn.  Now, rumor has it that hockey coaches are omnisicient, precognitive superbeings, and rumor is frequently right, but in this particular case these particular coaches had decided that the fastest way to load the vans was to split the roster down the middle, which meant that all of the forwards were in my van, and all of the defensemen were in the other van.  Why was that a bad plan?  I'll tell you why... around ten, the van I was in stopped at Fresh Choice, and the other van stopped at a Mexican restaurant.  Two hours later, we get to the rink, and my group notices that the other van is conspicuously empty of players and the head coach doesn't look too happy.  Apparently they had to make quite a few stops after their meal, too...

Yes, Montezuma sought revenge on our entire defense, never mind that we never did anything to him.  I won't describe the hilarity which failed to ensue, except to say that some shifts were a lot shorter than others, there were a few very creative penalties taken by guys who had to get off the ice right now, and the forwards were almost as miserable as the guys with stomach cramps because we didn't have any backup.  After a disaster of a first period, the coach started putting some of the forwards on defense, leading to equal or greater disaster in the second and third periods (and the goalie threatening to return from whence he'd defected).  What seemed like years later, we lost the first game by 5 goals, a split far more common in a baseball game, and had to forfeit the second.  The whole ordeal gave new and improved meaning to the phrase "double elimination".  On the bright side, though, we didn't have to listen to a lecture about exactly how much we'd sucked, because the head coach couldn't stay off the toilet long enough to deliver it.

2.  What Coaches Don't See

The worst injury I've ever had, bar none, was an intercostal tear with a couple of cracked ribs on either side, as a result of a highly illegal slam into the boards when the puck was nowhere near me.  Now, I've been told by several neurologists that my tolerance for pain is basically inhuman, but that hurt like hell... nevertheless, it's a point of pride with most players that you don't leave the game unless it's on a stretcher, and I wasn't quite that bad off, mostly because between the adrenaline and the cold, you can skate through almost anything as long as you can stand up, which I could.  It's not until you get back to the locker room where it's warm that everything starts to swell and ache, and there were only about ten minutes left to go, anyway.  So I finished the game, but as soon as I clomped into the locker room my rib muscles puffed up like balloons and I nearly passed out.  They made me go to the doctor, which I hate more than anything, including cracked ribs, and the doctor gave me this sleeveless straightjacket sort of thing and told me I had to wear it for six weeks.  I can't stand tight anything, but I wore it... until I found out during the next practice that as soon as I started panting, I couldn't breathe -- the stupid thing wouldn't let my chest expand.  So I went back into the locker room and took it off, and one of the coaches came in just in time to see me do it. 

The doctor hadn't told me not to skate, because I hadn't bothered to tell him I planned to do it, but he did tell me I had to wear this stupid thing, and it said so on my medical release... and if a player violates a medical release at a privately owned rink and the coach knows it, the rink can lose its insurance, the team can get sanctioned, and the coach can lose his job.  So my coach went totally pale, and screamed at me, "I did NOT see that, and I will NEVER not see that again!"  After that I took the thing off in the truck. 

I didn't find out for a couple of weeks that several of the guys just outside the locker room had heard the coach yell, and speculations were running rampant regarding what it was he hadn't seen...

3.  How To Win A Hockey Game

One of my favorite defensemen, Andrew, liked to skate with his helmet strap really loose, and while I actually understand this, it's not very bright.  The thing is, regulations change all the time for reasons that have everything to do with money, and frequently those regulation changes are a huge pain for the players.  Guys who grew up skating without a helmet don't like to wear them, even though they should, and when they do have to wear them, they frequently wear them loose because they're not used to chin straps.  (For the record, wearing a helmet properly is very important, but then that's easy for me to say because I grew up with chin straps.  When I played for a league that made me wear a face shield, it took my equipment manager 2 hours to jerry-rig the thing so it didn't touch my face, and I still hated it.)  Anyway, Andrew's helmet was loose, and he took a bad hit one night and landed on his head without it.  And didn't get up.

When something like that happens, time seems to stop.  My entire team was skating towards Andrew as fast as we could, but my center, the textbook gentle giant, this very big, very fast, very dumb guy with a heart of gold, got there first.  And even though the rest of us are shrieking at him, "head injury!" he picks Andrew up like a rag doll and shakes him to get him to wake up.  Which, thank god, Andrew did... and then he vomited all over the ice, right in front of the net.

You can imagine what happens when 98.6 degree vomit hits 30 degree ice.  In the big leagues, they'd stop the game and solve this problem with a zamboni, but in real life, there's another game scheduled 15 minutes after yours and time is money, so they solve it with a hose.  Basically, they just washed most of the vomit out of the hole and it was game on... and we had this great big crater in front of our net, with ridges around it where the water from the hose had frozen.  Every time the puck slid toward our net, it bounced back the other way at an angle.  Every time someone lining up a shot skated into the danger zone, he did that thing that cars with no shocks do over potholed roads and landed on his ass.  Our goalie was getting so bored he actually sat down in the net at one point, but the other team still couldn't score.  It was fabulous. 

4.  How To Bleed Like a Pro

Long ago and far away, when you bled on the ice, the blood just froze there and everyone skated over it.  Then, along came HIV, and suddenly, whistles were being blown for microscopic droplets.  This infuriated everyone used to bleeding and skating at the same time and made the coaches totally insane, but again, it's all about insurance.  If the blood stays on you, it's ok.  If it hits the ice, thweeeeeeep, time out.  Until every trace of it is gone and three people have signed off on that.  You have to see it to believe it, it's ridiculous.

So one fine day, our goalie, a living monolith of a guy, took a slapshot straight to the forehead.  Now, I once skated into a slapshot -- by force of habit, because believe me, given time to consider the options, I would not have done that -- and it hit me in the iliac crest, causing me to be unable to bend or straighten up fast and thus to check people with my butt rather than my hip for the entire week following.  I took some serious flack for that.  But those suckers are going about 80 miles an hour, and I don't care how much padding you're wearing, it's like getting shot.  And this guy got hit in the head, and shook it off.  Until an icing call led to a short break before face-off, when he popped his helmet up, because, according to him, it itched.

As it happened, the rivet at the top of the helmet had punched into his flesh, and when he popped the facemask up, it unsealed the wound... and you know how heads bleed.  Whew, it was a gusher, too.  And now, because he knows that the game stops, probably for minutes, if he gets one drop on the ice, and we're ahead and on a roll, our goalie flops down on his knees and does this crazy dance like a charmed snake, trying to keep all of the blood on his jersey while resealing the wound with his helmet.  Blood is running in rivulets down his face and he's frantically trying to cram the helmet back on his head while wiggling madly in the various directions of the flow.  He looked like he had a wasp's nest in his ice pants or something -- even the refs were laughing.  But he did it.  His jersey was totally soaked and splattered, but he didn't get a single drop on the ice.  He stopped the bleeding without stopping the game.  And as we were clomping away victorious, this little kid looked waaaay up at the blood-soaked jersey, and his eyes got huge with hero worship, and he said, "Wooooow!"  The look on the kid's mother's face was one of sheer animal terror... but it was too late.  Another hockey player was born.

5.   Sleeping Arrangements

Sorry, we've covered all the body fluids we're gonna cover, although hockey players are pretty famous for sharing the rest of them as well, and I could tell you stories... but nope, this is a story about sleeping, or trying to, anyway.  We were playing a tournament in Nevada, and none of the tournament people had bothered to let the coaches know that there was a huge international convention in town.  Nearly always, when you book a tournament, you have to get accommodations through the rink that's hosting it, and these are never better than Super-8, and frequently worse, but on this one occasion they were just scary.  Every decent room in the city had been sucked up by the convention.  My team wound up at the city limits in a crack den with barbed wire around the parking lot and a night manager behind bulletproof glass.  Because I'm female, I was always offered a room to myself if I wanted, which I never took (that would have been social suicide), but even if I had usually done that, one look at this place would have changed my mind.  I should have told the coach I wanted to sleep in the van.

But it was freezing outside, literally.  It was like 8 degrees, and all we wanted was to be indoors, even if it meant being indoors in this dump.  So I go upstairs with Matt and Jason, my linesmen, and we're stepping over syringes on the stairs and hearing sounds we really don't like coming from behind the crackerbox plywood doors, and we get to the second floor and discover that our "room for three" was actually designed as an adjoining room for people with kids.  As in, one bed that's about five and a half feet long and four feet wide and a couple of folding cots, plus a door that opens into the next room over and god-knows-whoever's-in-there.  And while Jason's pushing cheap furniture up against that door, like this sorry desk is going to stop anything larger than a four-year-old, Matt's discovering that the thermostat doesn't work.  There's no heat.  Further inspection reveals that the bed and each cot have been equipped with a single, threadbare, stinky blanket... this just can't get worse.  So we decide to take turns getting our body temperatures up in the coffinesque shower, and being the terribly cool guys they are, they insist I go first.  I get in there and the "hot" water, which isn't more than warm, is only warm for about two minutes before it turns into an ice bath.  So I'm the only one who got any kind of warm, and it wasn't much.  And while I was doing this, Matt was busy proving that a guy his size can completely telescope the aluminum legs of a small folding cot, turning it into a twisted piece of wreckage at ground level. 

So I suggested that I take the remaining functional folding cot and they share the bed.  The looks on their faces were priceless, but it was the only solution that made any sense... until I realized that the remaining folding cot appeared to have been peed on more than once.  Hell no, I'd just sleep on the floor... only Matt and Jason wouldn't let me.  After a several minute argument about who was going to sleep on the floor, we stacked all three wafer-thin excuses for blankets, covered those with every towel and piece of clothing we'd packed, and piled into this tiny little bed (which was shorter than both of the guys, but not me, ha ha).  It was right up there with trying to share a phone booth with a couple of gorillas.  And we were so tired, we actually slept totally sardined like that, and no one fell out or got crushed to death.

And then the next morning, our coach bangs on the door to wake us up, and the door opens.  So much for the lock!  So he cruises in, talking on the phone, takes one look at the human dogpile in the bed, and says into the phone, "You think you have problems, my starting line is sleeping together." 

You can imagine how long it took that story to reach the entire league.  Bacteria live longer.  Oh, the joys of hockey.  Game on!

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