The family that body-checks together stays together

I was in a true no-win situation yesterday. Though it's the depth of spring in the birthplace and natural home of ice hockey, here in the southern hemisphere we are just kicking the season off. It’s early days; we are still sorting out the lines, getting our game fitness back and remembering how to zing those slap-shots. I grew up in western Canada where there really was never an option as to whether you play, or at least try to play hockey. I spent the better part of my youth kicking around chilly ice rinks playing more games then I could care to count. Hell, my first job at the age of 13 was teaching younger kids how to play hockey at a summer hockey-school. So 3 or 4 years back I became re-aquatinted with the beautiful game. I hadn’t laced up the skates in a decade but after 10minutes on the ice it all came back. I’ve been playing weekly ever since and loving every minute of it. The year before last my wife Sophie decided to give the game a go. Good on her too, in Australia they don’t play a hell of a lot of hockey – she’d only known the game since hanging around with me. She caught on fast.

Yesterday, I was in a tournament playing on the Queenstown team and I came face to face with every hockey player’s worst nightmare. What do you do when you are playing against your wife and she’s standing between you and the goal? Sophie is playing on the Queenstown ladies team and they wanted to have some stiff competition to get them ready for the nationals at the end of the season so they entered the men’s tournament that my team was in. Yesterday at 2.30pm I faced off against my Mrs. As I was saying it was a no-win situation. If we lose, we lose. If we win by heaps of goals, we were running up the score. If we win by only a goal or two, we were holding back. Don’t get me wrong I’m no misogynist, these girls are some of the best female players in the country, but our team is filled with some great players who’ve been playing hockey for all their lives.

So what happened? Well the fella’s won – by many, many goals. I thought for certain I was on the couch until next season but I was quite surprised and a little inspired by what Soph said to me after the game. I asked her how she thought it went and she said, “Great! We had a great team game and improved every shift out there. We all had heaps of fun and didn’t really care what the final score was.”

I was pretty put in my place by that one. Though my team had a great time at the tournament, when we lost our other match our attitude certainly wasn’t as enlightened as the ladies’ was. Them girls are smart, us fella’s could learn a lot from ‘em.

S.