Béliveau!

   For the better part of the last fifty years, I have hated the Montreal Canadiens.
   I have admired them for the wonderful teams they produced and I have envied them for all the records they hold. At the same time, though, I have hated them for the roadblock they always presented to just about any and every team I had pledged my allegiance to.

Béliveau and his favourite accessory.

   For the first decade or so of that fifty years, the player that personified the Canadiens mystique was Jean Béliveau, a center and captain of the team. Both in stature and playing ability, he stood the tallest among a team of very talented and driven players. In this way, he could and should have been the lightning rod for all my distaste and anger. It was, however, impossible to hate the man.
   I, begrudgingly, adored Jean Béliveau. He was the epitome of grace, style, ability and quiet leadership both on the ice and off. It was hard to see him almost perennially lifting the Stanley Cup and not think to yourself that this was simply the way it was meant to be.

Two of my faves--Béliveau and Sawchuk, the goalie!

   As Canadian hockey legends go, none stood much taller than Jean Béliveau. On December 2, however, Le Gros Bill, as he was known in Quebec, passed away. Most Canadian hockey fans went into a variety of forms of mourning with his passing and nowhere was there heard a negative word, indicative of our admiration for both the hockey player and the man. Such was his stature that a state funeral was held for him in Montreal. The city was in the middle of a blizzard the day of the funeral and yet there was still an overflow crowd. Many dignitaries attended, including the Prime Minister of Canada, the premier of Quebec and the mayor of Montreal along with many former and current players.

Béliveau---at center one final time.

   The pallbearers were all former Canadiens players and I was reminded of the Crash Test Dummies video for "Superman's Song", wherein all of Superman's pallbearers were aging super heroes. Beliveau was as close to a super hero as you might come in the real world.
   I am one of the fortunate ones who are able to say that they saw Jean Béliveau play. A younger generation than mine might compare him to Mario Lemieux---the size, the reach and the stick-handling ability were similar. Béliveau also had the ability to take younger players under his wing.
   Part of his mystique was that he was revered by anglophone and francophone alike and, in the dressing room, he could get his message across well in both languages. Invariably, his message centered around the players' duty to themselves but, much more importantly, also their duty to the Montreal Canadiens and all the former greats who'd played before them.
   Béliveau was worth buying a whole league to the Canadiens. In the fifties, he played in the Quebec Senior Hockey League, an amateur league, and was quite content to do so, having no great interest in playing in the NHL. The Canadiens had tried to sign him to a pro contract as a teenager but his family balked at this idea. Instead, they signed him to a a contract stating that, should he ever turn professional, he would then be the property of the Montreal Canadiens. Montreal then bought the Quebec Senior league and turned it and all of its players into professionals! At this point, they were then able to sign the young Béliveau.
   In his professional career, Jean Béliveau won the Hart Trophy (MVP) twice and the Art Ross Trophy (scoring leader) once. Along the way, he won the Stanley Cup (league champions) 10 times. As an executive with the team, his name was engraved on the Cup another 7 seven times for an astonishing total of 17 times, a record. He played on the All Star team 10 times and was the first recipient of the Conn Smythe Trophy for MVP in the playoffs. The year after he retired in 1971 he was inducted into the NHL Hall of Fame.
   An ardent family man, Beliveau graciously turned down offers to sit in the Senate and be considered for Governor-General of Canada after his playing days, so that he could be with his family.
   It is sometimes hard to explain to non-Canadians the hold that hockey seems to have on us. America has its football, basketball and baseball and much of the rest of the world has its soccer and I suppose those sports are held in a similar regard. The thing those other sports have in common, though, is that they involve having their players firmly grounded, on grass or a court somewhere. Hockey is played on ice, for goodness'sake, and its players are only connected to this ice by narrow, almost razor-sharp strips of steel. We are the best in the world at this sport and Jean Béliveau was one of our best, both as a man and a hockey player. There will almost certainly never be another one like him.

                                                                                                     

   

   
    
   

Welts

   I discovered this evening, as I was perusing the fairly pristine parts of my body visible in the bathroom mirror, that I miss welts.
   It has been the longest time since I was able to glory in the puffy purple raised redness of a good welt. I used to get them all the time when I was playing ball hockey and was quite happy to bring them home, roll up a pant leg in the living room and say to Doralyn so do you wanna see something...?
   She would always wrinkle her brow and say something like oh, Sweetie, why do you do that? and I never really had an answer for her, at least not one she'd be able to relate to.
   I used to feel the same way about black eyes, deep lacerations, sprained ankles and dislocated fingers---they were all bodily abominations I was happy to put on display for the world's amazement and tacit approval.
   

Black eyes were really the best. Nothing about a black eye truly looked accidental, I think every one's first assumption was that you'd perhaps been engaged in fisticuffs somewhere, more than likely in a bar brawl. This, of course, was never how I got my black eyes. My shiners were invariably the result of random balls or elbows or sticks and, for the most part, were accidental. One of the best parts about a black eye was that you never had to go out of your way to show it off to someone---they were always just there, like a neon sign in the middle of your face. Of course you were just dying for someone to make a comment and when they did you always made it sound as though you'd almost forgotten it was pasted to the middle of your noggin, like you were so damn tough it had actually slipped your mind.
   Lacerations and cuts  were always good, too. Granted, they tended to be messier than bruises and the showoff appeal didn't last as long because, necessarily, bandages needed to be applied.

   I ran into a birdbath once while using a neighbour's yard as an endzone. It was one of those plastic birdbaths and, as I was looking backward for a pass (football was the game at the time) I ran into it and it shattered. This left a foot-long elongated and bloody "s" on the inside of my right thigh. It wasn't deep enough for stitches but was deep enough to scar me for life. And I loved it.
   At the ripe old age of sixty-one, I am still attempting to get back into ball hockey. The running I've been doing the last couple of years has convinced me that I can keep up with the youngsters and I have no doubt, emotionally, that I could still play. Intellectually, though, ageism has provided me with some doubt---it doesn't make common sense that I should be able to do something like that. I guess.
   I will, however, play ball hockey again. The ball will go into the corner of the rink and I will follow it there and run into two or three other players and sticks and elbows will fly and I will possibly come out of all that nicked. Someone from the other team will wind up to take a slapshot at our goal and I will race out to him and throw myself into the path of a hard plastic ball travelling at about ninety miles an hour. 
   I will have welts from all of this and I will be a happy man!
    

Gordie: Part Two

   If you should happen to do a Google Images search on old-time NHL player Lou Fontinato of the New York Rangers, the chances are the most prevalent and striking image you are going to see is that of a hockey player whose face is pointed south while his nose is most definitely pointed west. And bloody.
   Such was the damage inflicted on Fontinato in a fight with the Red Wings' Gordie Howe on Feb. 1, 1959 that it has lived on in hockey lore and was one of the recollections people spoke about recently as Howe was recovering from his stroke. It was said at the time that the other players nearby could hear something break with pretty well every one of Gordie's punches during this fight.

Fontinato--facing two directions at the same time

   Howe, during his long NHL career, was regarded as the toughest and meanest player in the league. His elbows were legendary and he was also not shy about "laying on the lumber", if the circumstances warranted it.
   A few short years later, though, Fontinato suffered a career-ending neck injury while playing for the Montreal Canadiens. He, in fact, was paralyzed for over a month before finally recovering. Howe was one of the first people to offer well-wishes.
   This then was the dichotomy Gordie represented---he was a mean s.o.b. on the ice but one of the nicest men you'd want to meet off of it.
   Long before Howe suffered this recent stroke (he has been plagued with smaller ones in the past little while) I already knew that I wanted to do a blog post about him. On top of the strokes, Gordie has also been suffering with Alzheimer's disease.
   I have, and always have had, an image in my mind of Gordie Howe. Some of that image is as a hockey player, albeit with streaks of grey around his temples. Much of it is as an older gentleman, surrounded by those who respected and/or idolized him. Any image I have of him is as a vital and strong person. To hear that he has been struggling with Alzheimer's and to hear how this has affected him is distressing.
   Recently, Gordie was viewing some Red Wing related coverage on the T.V. and afterwards commented that he really wanted to connect with his old friend and former teammate, Sid Abel. Sadly, Sid Abel has been dead for almost fifteen years. At some point, Gordie obviously knew this but had been robbed of this information by the Alzheimer's. I can only assume that he has both his good and his bad days coping with the disease but this is totally at odds with how I remember him to be.

Howe and Richard

   I am not so naive to believe that celebrities and sports heroes should be immune from all that ails us. I do find it interesting, though, how easily we fashion a place for them in our minds (and hearts) which finds them exempt from old age, illness and infirmity. I tried to imagine Gordie Howe struggling to speak, walk and remember and I found this almost impossible to do.
   A few years ago, another famous Number 9 in hockey, Maurice "Rocket" Richard, also found himself struggling with both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I recall that, as journalists would quiz him about his playing career, he would reply that he couldn't comment on things he simply no longer remembered. At that point, we found ourselves remembering for him.
   

Gordie Howe lives on and may be with us for some time to come. Such is his place in some of our lives that it may not be  necessary to think of him as he is now but only to remember what it is he has meant to us over all these years. I do find myself occasionally at odds with the mortality of people who have been important in my life, whether they be people I know or whether they be people we all know and hold in some form of high esteem. I think there are those who we hold as constants in our lives. Sometimes they are friends and family, sometimes they are people who have the power to move us through music, art, written words or film. Occasionally they are sports heroes, those who have demonstrated physical skills and a type of determination we ourselves can only aspire to. Gordie Howe is that kind of constant in my life.   
   

Gordie: Part One

   All-time National Hockey League great, Gordie Howe, suffered a debilitating stroke recently. This unfortunate event brought on an outpouring of well-wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery, all directed Gordie's way.
   It also prompted those who remembered his playing days to share their fondest memories of a player who was simply known as "Mr. Hockey".

This about says it all!

   As someone who was born in the early fifties, the name "Gordie Howe" entered my consciousness before I was even really a hockey fan or understood clearly what hockey was all about or even how it was played.
   I am sure I can thank my father for this. I think he spoke about Gordie with a reverence normally reserved for saints and I think he did this constantly, in passing, and without even thinking about it. Because of this, Gordie Howe was the first hockey player I had ever heard of and, because of this again, "hockey" and "Howe" became synonymous for me.
   I think there was also something about the name "Gordie"---rather than the more formal "Gordon"--that helped reinforce his legend status. "Gordie" sounded more like the neighbourhood kid everyone knew, the kid everyone liked and remembered long after you'd moved away from that same neighbourhood. He was everybody's friend.
   By the time I was old enough to become an actual hockey fan, most of Gordie's best days were behind him. I never got to see him raise the Stanley Cup or win a scoring title. Thanks, though, to his utterly amazing longevity, I was able to see him play.
   

The man with the moves.

Gordie retired from the NHL in 1971 at the age of 43. Circuitously, after joining the newly-established World Hockey Association so that he might have the opportunity to play pro hockey with his sons and then having that league eventually merge with the NHL, Gordie found himself back in the NHL, now at the age of 51. At this time he was playing for the Hartford Whalers and I can clearly recollect watching the Whalers play the Leafs one Saturday night on Hockey Night in Canada. At one point in the game, Gordie had the puck in the Leafs zone and a hapless Leaf defender skated right up to him, intent on relieving him of the puck. Gordie simply shifted through him, appearing on the other side, still with the puck. I think my jaw kind of dropped and I had one of those wow moments, not so much because I had never seen a similar play but because I'd never seen a guy in his fifties do it to a guy in his twenties! This then, became my favourite Howe story and one I fondly recalled as others were doing the same, in the wake of Gordie's recent illness.

Mr. Howe

   At this point, it's difficult to say how much longer Gordie Howe will be with us. The initial fears, after the stroke, seem to have somewhat subsided. Howe was always known as one of the toughest men in hockey and there was a bit of a consensus that if anyone might survive and, hopefully, at least partially recover, it might be him. So far, so good!
      
   

Just A Guy, Lookin' For A Team...

   I was walking through our garage the other day when I looked off to the right, at a variety of different things we have hanging on hooks just inside the garage door. My hockey bag, the one with all my goalie equipment in it, has been hanging there, in the exact same spot, in the exact same position as I left it in, after the last time I played about two years ago. This what it looked like:

Yes, those are cobwebs....

   We have several things in our garage which likely have not been touched or moved in the last couple of years either but my hockey equipment is the only thing which seems to have gathered cobwebs.
   At this point, I can't tell you how hard I'm trying to ignore the implicit symbolism going on here!
   For the last little while, I have been battling a couple of different minor physical ailments, both of which have limited my involvement in sports. For this reason, my ball hockey career has been on the shelf.
   Now, though, I feel almost a hundred per cent. The legs, thanks to all the extra running I've been doing, are actually more muscular than they have ever been and I have this itch to play again.
   Alas, but no team to play on!
   For the past week or so, I have been contacting guys I know who run teams in the London Ball Hockey Association. This is a league I played in back in its original incarnation in the early seventies. I, up until a couple of years ago, had played in its present form for the last 12 to 13 years.
   The problem here is that I am old. I am sixty-one, I look like I am too old to play and I am actually older than I look. But I can still play. I know I can still play.
   As I've contacted guys I know in the league, I have actually almost begged them for a chance to play, told them I'd pay full price for just a three or four game tryout. So far, no dice.
   It actually seems incomprehensible to me that I am not playing somewhere. I just feel so full of ball hockey....ENERGY! As old as I am, I have never been the slowest guy on any team I've played on.
   Now, the fact of the matter is that my goalie days are probably over, the last few times I played, I embarrassed myself greatly and I have no great need to do that again. But I can still play forward or defence as well as a lot of guys I've played against in the past.
   At this point, I am on the waiting list for a spot on a team. Dick Price, the LBHA commissioner has promised to play the "wily veteran" card the next time some team is looking for a player. And, in the meantime, I'm gonna pester a few more guys....

  

Boston

   The Boston Marathon bombings are now a week old. In the interim, the bombers have apparently been captured and /or killed and, apart from possibly coming up with a motive or other co-conspirators , the case has been resolved.
   The criminal part of it has been resolved, perhaps. As with most events such as this, it is almost impossible to comprehend the impact it has had on the injured, their families, the other spectators and, essentially, the world in general. Once again, we are starkly reminded of how instantaneously the darkness can descend over the commonplace and joyful.

   I am always on the lookout for something to write about here and the bombings fairly screamed at me. I hesitated, though, and I'm not sure why. Very quickly, there was a plethora of very eloquent essays and blogs on the internet and in the papers and it just didn't seem as though I had much to add.
   I couldn't even really decide which of my two blogs I would use, when and if the time came. My other blog, "Strides", is dedicated to running and it seemed to make some sense to post it there. On the other hand, the bombings didn't seem to have been aimed at running, per se, they seemed to be aimed more simply at a large gathering of people where there was also a strong media presence.
   Make no mistake, though, the bombings affected runners.
   Runners are a strongly linked community and it was difficult not to feel targeted. It was also hard not to wonder why us? As much as running can be a social event it is essentially a solitary form of endeavour, impacting only the participant so why on earth would anyone want to disrupt that?
   What we have ended up doing is trying to make sense out of the senseless and random. We wonder what we should do, or could have done, differently.
   I'm sure some runners may never enter a similar event again. I also suspect that somewhere there is a runner who has stopped running.
   My sense, though, is that in most cases the opposite has happened. I suspect that runners are now even more resolved to continue running. I wouldn't even be surprised if someone actually took up running, inspired by something they might have seen or a story they might have heard of from last week in Boston.
   I ran in a 5K race this past weekend in Uxbridge, Ontario. Before the event started, there was a singing of the national anthem. Due to the events in Boston, it was decided to sing the American national anthem as well. It was an emotional few moments, as you can imagine, and you could sense the solidarity that existed. During the awards ceremony, the emcee asked if there was anyone there who had actually run in the Marathon in Boston. One young lady had been there, had finished the race and was in her hotel room when the bombs went off. She echoed the general chaos and horror of that day and received a huge ovation from the people gathered there. Nowhere did I perceive any indication that the events in Boston had dampened any runner's resolve.
   As I rooted around the internet last week, looking for coverage from Boston, I ran into streams of discussions all over the place as to who was responsible, how they should be punished and how this reflected on our place in the world.
   There was much anger and much placing of blame. Al Qaeda was fingered. The U.S. government was accused of conspiracy. People made outrageous statements, in their zeal, and then were angrily denounced by others. There was racism and name-calling. The point was made by some that there are parts of the world where incidents like this are a daily occurrence and that results are quite often much worse. Some people did not want to be reminded of this. It was not hard to see the vitriol being passed around and realize how much latent anger there is in the world, just waiting to be vented. At times, the anger demonstrated by people talking about the bombings was almost as scary as the bombings themselves.

These will go on.

   More than anything, though, people pulled together. Those that died, heart-breakingly, were all young with bright futures. They, along with the wounded and maimed, will all have special places in our hearts and minds. Many of us will think of Boston every time we run. Some of us will run as respite from the memory.
  
  

What, They're Playing Again...?

   It looks as though there will be NHL hockey soon. The league's players have been locked out for the past 113 days and there has been a fair bit of mutual acrimony. After much wrangling, however, it sounds as though both sides have come to their senses.
   The fans, of course, have not been amused. Particularly in these times, it is difficult to watch billionaires and millionaires fight over how to get even richer, out our expense.
   The most consistent reaction to hockey resuming in the near future is that perhaps the fans should now do their own version of a "lockout" and just not attend or watch the first few games.
   Were I a regular fan or viewer, I would be happy to do that. I would also find it pretty easy to do as I've simply not missed the NHL while it has been inactive. There has been and always will be a plethora of other sports to watch or follow in some way and the fact of the matter is that I don't watch much sports anymore. Period.
   This has all led me to contemplate the importance of sports in people's lives.
   At the end of the day, many of us turn to a local newscast. What we get is a bit of the world, local and national news. This is significant, I guess, because it seems important to know what's going on in the world around us. Then we get the weather forecast. Particularly in Canada, it is essential, to a point, to have an idea what the environment around us might bring on a daily basis. Then, however, we get the sports.
   Out of all the things which could be presented to us on an evening newscast, sports is what we get. We could get ten minutes worth of issues around spirituality, finances, education, child-rearing, home improvement or a whole wide variety of topics. What we get, though, is a recap of the sporting news.

Possibly the most disliked man in sports...?

   I wonder quite often why the importance of sports? I myself am not immune to its attraction, the first part of the morning paper I go to, barring some calamity on the front page, is the sports section. From there, it's on to the obits. It should be sex and death but, no, it's sports and death.
   So what do I find tantalizing about sports? Part of it, I think, is that it's safe. Very little that happens in the sporting world has a deep impact on my life. It will not affect future earnings and it will not affect my health. It will have no effect on my loved ones' well-being. There is an aura of mindlessness about it that is comforting, there is no need to have to analyze or figure anything out, what you see is what you get.
   More viscerally, however, sports has a hold on many of us. Along with whatever else we were learning as we grew up, sports were omnipresent. What began as play, perhaps even in our cribs with our fingers and toes, eventually became more structured and then became sports. We began using our legs and arms and hearts. Depending on just how much all of this remained fun, we developed our relationship with sports.
   For many of us, the relationship became lifelong. We played until we couldn't possibly play any more and then we continued to be fans. There are not many of us who, at some point in our lives, did not play some version of what is a major professional sport. Because of this, we were able to relate to sports we watched. We knew how amazing some of the feats we watched were because we ourselves had participated and knew their difficulty. We lived vicariously through our favourite teams. Some of us were fortunate enough to be fans of teams which won constantly or at least were in the running. Some of us were not so fortunate but were just as loyal.
   The fact that the NHL lockout has now ended and that soon we will be able to view top calibre hockey again is both a relief and, contradictorily, a ho-hum matter to many. I am looking forward to watching hockey again and yet if there were no hockey it wouldn't bother me in the slightest. There is hockey all around I can watch for free, being played by spirited athletes who earn, and will likely always earn, absolutely nothing for their efforts. So why not watch them instead?
   In its purest form, sports also provides life lessons and things we can apply to our daily lives. Things such as hard work, determination, and resiliency. This has always been part of the appeal for sports for me, watching individual athletes or teams prevail under difficult circumstances. There have always been noble moments in sports that you could somehow apply to your own life in a positive manner. Watching wealthy athletes and owners fight over how to become even richer is not a life lesson to emulate.
   The fact that sports is also a business and has been for a long time is not lost on any of us. As a society, we are used to being abused by banks, oil companies and huge corporations principally because they provide services which we either need or think we need. As fans, we have now been abused and taken for granted by the players and owners of the NHL once again. Theirs, however, is not a service we actually need and they would do well to remember and heed this.
  
  
  

Jocks: Part Two

   In the previous post, I began to describe to you how I was initiated into the world of jocks. I purposely attempted to keep the tone light and hopefully somewhat amusing. The longer I wrote, however, the more there seemed to be to write about and I realized that not much about it was light and amusing. So I saved it for today.
   If you have spent any appreciable amount of time being around jocks for whatever reason then you've probably seen something ugly. This has probably happened on a team you've played for, on another team you played against, as a spectator or perhaps as a friend or relative of someone on a team somewhere.
   The ugly thing you saw was an athlete or possibly even a fan who simply forgot who, what or where they were and acted reprehensibly. They shouted an insult, they made an obscene gesture, they physically assaulted someone. Subconsciously, they reasoned that their mere presence at a sporting event gave them licence to act in a manner that, if it had occurred almost anywhere else in public, would have gotten them totally ostracized, fired or thrown in jail. If you have been lucky enough to have avoided any of this personally then it is still more than likely that you've seen an example of it on t.v., in the newspapers, or on the internet.

   I have spent about fifty years being involved in sports one way or another, as a parent, as a viewer or as an active participant. It is clearly the jock mentality occasionally rearing its ugly head that is my least favourite aspect of having been involved for so long.
   It is probably unnecessary to spend a lot of time here analyzing why the jock/violence mentality exists. It is a very multi-faceted issue involving, I believe, psychology, sociology, economics, and even sexuality. Regardless of the reasons for their existence, it still bugs me that I run into these knobs or am assailed in other ways by their mindless antics.
   In the blog previous to this, I talked about my trials and tribulations with the jocks at Oakridge, my high school. In a blog I posted back in early May, entitled "Bullies", I described an experience I had as a hockey parent many years ago. I had been with my sons in a dressing room after a game and one of the mothers was frantically trying not to be the last parent left in the dressing room. The reason for her fear was that her estranged and physically abusive husband was in the arena and she was terrified at the prospect of possibly ending up being alone with him at some point. What I didn't mention was that the abusive husband had also been on the Oakridge high school hockey team during my tenure there. He wasn't someone I knew personally but, at the same time, it was disturbing to think that a high school contemporary of mine had gone on to this kind of a relationship with the mother of his children. It was also hard to disassociate this man from the sports environment, the only environment in which I was familiar with him.
   Obviously, sports is not the reason why people abuse. Just as often, I suspect, sports plays a role in stopping abuse. It`s just that I have personally seen some of the nicest, most mild-mannered people go all gonzo once you get them into a sports setting.
   I play a lot of ball hockey. We pay to play, there are no salaries involved, and there is no fame resting on the results of games. And yet there is still belligerence and ugliness. There are players out there who will berate you for every little mistake. There are also players who have invested way too much of their manhood into the outcomes of even small little battles, let alone the outcomes of games or seasons. I was involved in a game once and one of our players and one of their players got into a minor altercation in the corner. The rest of the play headed towards the other end but these two guys walked back, jawing at each other. In a classic prelude to a hockey fight, one guy`s glove "facewashes" the other guy and this is reciprocated. Before you know it, fists are flying. Their guy is about three inches taller and forty pounds (all muscle) heavier and the fight is over very quickly, with their guy on the floor on top of our guy. At this point, the ref jumps in and basically grabs their guy. While being grabbed by the ref, their guy still manages to haul our guy up of the floor and then starts kneeing him in the head! To our league's credit, their guy was suspended for about a year and a half for this. This is better than time in jail, which is really what should have happened.
   I tell my wife, Doralyn, about stuff like this and she then needs me to explain it to her. She wants to know why it happens. It is hard to come up with a plausible explanation. As close as I can come is that I think sports is sometimes an arena wherein you can revisit your lost hopes and dreams. In an effort to live up to those lost hopes and dreams some over-compensation occurs. If, as growing up, you never won a game,  you never were able to play your best or make it to the big leagues, then making a mark for yourself in a municipal hockey league or recreational baseball or some other amateur sporting endeavour is really all you have left. Unfortunately, sometimes the easiest way to do this is by picking a fight, shouting out a slur or putting your fist through a window.

   I occasionally wonder what happened to the other jocks at high school. I do know that they are not all still alive. I also know that the vast majority of them probably ended up with decent jobs, raised great families, and suffered their own triumphs and the usual amount of tragedies. If somehow or other they provided roadblocks to me or anyone else over forty years ago I'm pretty sure they were unaware of it. I'm also pretty sure they had their own insecurities, high school is like that. It is sometimes difficult, however, not to lump all of them in together. I myself played on a handful of sports teams, perhaps someone out there thinks I'm a jock, perhaps I impacted some one's life in a way I'll never know about or understand. In the previous blog I talked about having a crush on the same cheerleader who was the girlfriend of the captain of the football team. Well, maybe that cheerleader liked me...
      
  
  

Jocks

My least favourite kind of jock...

   I encountered jocks for the first time back in high school. I'm guessing that this is where most of us begin our relationships with jocks. Actually, before I continue, I should clarify that when I say "jock" I am not referring to the article of athletic apparel but more directly to the athlete himself. I have never had a problem with the jock you wear, in fact it is one of my favourite pieces of athletic clothing. Unfortunately, it was a different story with the human variety.

My favourite kind of jock...

   Generally, you run into your first jocks in gym class. They're the kids who, although only in Grade 9, already seem to have known the phys ed teacher their whole lives. They joke with him, talk sports with him and are physically able to do almost whatever he asks them to do.
   That was never me. In the first place, I've pretty well always been more comfortable around women and, secondly, for a variety of reasons there were many aspects of phys ed I either didn't get or simply couldn't perform. For the life of me. Rope climbing was one, but that's probably a blog unto itself.
   I began to inhabit that middle ground between the land of the jocks and the land of the nerds. With my friends in the neighbourhood, I was always playing one sport or another and was actually quite adept. This never translated too well in school, however. The little bit of athletic ability I did have managed to elevate me a touch above nerdism but never even came close to making me a jock. Which was fine. I flirted enough around the edges of jockism to find myself on the junior football team, the senior basketball team and the senior volleyball team at Oakridge. These associations had me rubbing shoulders with jocks on a regular basis (what was I thinking?) and they and I very quickly realized just how out-of-place I actually was. More than anything, I guess, I got in their way. They'd go in for a lay-up and, when they came down, I, for some reason, would be right underneath them. This apparently made made me a dip-stick once when it happened to the star of the team, right from the star's mouth. It was hard to run plays in practice because I, knowing where the ball was going, always got in the way of it. This did not elicit a positive response from a couple of the jocks on the team. They'd pass around orange slices at half time of a football game and give me a hard time if I took one because I hadn't played much, if at all.

   I actually got cut from both the football team and the basketball team but ended back on both of them, for different reasons and miraculously. Apparently I didn't get the hint. For whatever reason, this enabled me to continue my square-peg-in-a-round-hole experience with high school sports and the world of jocks.
   Fortunately, this experience never actually included any form of physical confrontation with any of the jocks I ran across, I always tried pretty hard to stay under the radar. At the same time, they had other ways of making my life miserable.
   Round about Grade 10, I fell in love with a cheerleader. I didn't fall in love with her because she was a cheerleader, I just fell in love with her. She, however, was relegated to the category of all-time-stereotypical-jock-gets-what-he-doesn't-deserve-just-like-in-a-teen-movie as she, of course, was the girlfriend of the captain of the senior football team. So, due to this jock I didn't even know, my life was ruined, at least for a month or so.

   About the same time I was in love with the cheerleader, I was also in love with my Spanish teacher (yes, I really had enough love to spread around back in those days) and I truly felt there was something special between us. I felt this way right up to the Xmas break. Upon returning from the break, we were all informed that she had, in the meantime, gotten married. Not only had she been stolen from me, she had been stolen from me by.....my gym teacher! This made a low moment even that much lower.
   Eventually, I continued to fall in love with a different girl every couple of months or so and the pain of these two losses slowly diminished. In Grades 12 and 13, I ended up on the volleyball team. The Oakridge volleyball team is much storied and has a history of being one of the top volleyball powers in the province. And all this started just after I played for them. In my day with the team, we were pretty well a bunch of nerds dressed up as athletes. We did not win a game in the year previous to my starting to play and we did not win a game in the two years I was on the team. There was absolutely no jockism on the team, we stole no one's girlfriend, we intimidated no one and I'm pretty sure no one looked up to us. We did have some fun and actually came close to winning once or twice in my final year. I spent my last year on the team as captain and MVP and at the year-end awards banquet found myself up there with all the other jocks, accepting my award. The irony was not lost on me!

     
  
  
  

Yearn-to-Run: Part Two

   Well, I have finished my first road race! This morning I ran in my running group's target race, the Gobbler Gallop. I ran the 3K distance, as did most of us, and came in with a time of 23:33. I am told this is not bad but, at the same time, I was pretty near the back of the pack. More or less, this was kind of what I was expecting.


Our Learn-to-Run group. L-R Kathryn(fearless leader), little Nick, Mary, big Nick, Catherine, Kelcey, Peter, Pauline and myself

   It was a good day for running, dry and cool, and a great place to run, through Springbank Park. Springbank is such a popular place for runners that, unless you were wearing a race bib, it was hard to tell who was racing and who was just out for their regular run.
   Nothing much about the course surprised me, the first half is essentially flat but the second half has a couple of hills, one going down and one coming back up. Fortunately the longer and steeper of the two was the one going down but the second one, going back up, was a demoralizer. I walked it, only because I knew by the time I got to the top of it I would be near the homestretch and I really wanted to have enough left to kick it up a notch. I was able to kick it up a little and passed three or four people in the process. What I wasn't expecting however was the slight little incline up to the castle at Storybook Gardens. This began only about a hundred yards away from the finish line and I almost had to walk it as well, right in front of family and friends. Did manage to finish it, running, but Doralyn managed to get a picture of me as I was crossing the finish line and it wasn't pretty.


The "unpretty" picture I was telling you about...

   So the Learn-to-Run clinic and the target race is done and under my belt. I've more or less decided to keep on running on some kind of regular basis but likely will not join the 5K clinic, although I am under some pressure to do so by the people in the rest of my group.
   I must admit that running in a group has its advantages, there were a few Saturday mornings when, if I'd been all by my lonesome, that I might have just packed it in early. There's something to be said for peer pressure and I hope I don't miss it by running on my own.

   My main motivation at this point is that I feel better since I started running three times a week and I wouldn't want to miss that feeling. I will try and keep this up and perhaps even increase it.

   Tomorrow they're calling for an extensive frost. Winter is around the corner so I guess it's time to bring out the layers and the long johns and the toques. I've never run in the winter before and I'm thinking I might just try and find an indoor track somewhere...

Yearn-to-Run

jet propulsion

   Back on Father's Day, I was surprised by Doralyn and the boys with the gift of a Running Room Learn-to-Run clinic membership. These clinics are designed for people who are interested in entering the "running life" or at least testing the waters. As added incentive and moral support, she also signed herself up!
   We showed up together at the Running Room store in downtown London in early August and met Kathryn, our instructor, and a handful of other "newbies". The structure of these clinics is that you receive in-store instruction for the first half hour or so and then you actually get out and run. You run in increments; run a minute, walk a minute up to a total of twenty minutes and then, the following week, you run two minutes and walk one minute up to twenty and so on, over consecutive weeks. Eventually, you end up walking one minute and running ten and, at this point, you have finished the Learn-to-Run clinic.
   They actually teach you how to run properly; what part of your foot needs to land first, how high the knees should be, how long the stride, where your head should point, even what direction your thumbs should face. Apparently all these things make a difference.
   For me, the toughest thing to learn was not to have your heel land first. We were taught what they call a "mid-foot strike", where your foot lands much closer to your toes than your heels. This felt very unnatural to me until I got used to it. Now, it feels unnatural to do it the old way.

I will need different motivation, however

   Right at the moment, we are at the end of the clinic and are looking towards out target race. It is called the "Gobbler Gallop" and most of us are entered in the 3K race. The in-store teaching session this week touched on race strategy and etiquette. My strategy is to not drop dead and to be polite while I am not doing that!
   Doralyn, by the way, was amazing in the way she supported me in this. We went to the first two or three sessions together and then would go out on regular training runs in our neighbourhood. Quickly, though, she developed shin splints and this greatly decreased her ability to both run and get any enjoyment out of it. She plugged on, even through all that, like a trooper. Eventually, though, it didn't make much sense to continue if all it was going to do was cause pain. So I have continued on my own, with her encouraging me from afar.

What MOST of the "Gobbler Gallopers" will see...

   Where I go from the "Gobbler Gallop" is any body's guess. I've been asked to join the 5K clinic which seems to be the natural progression from the Learn-to-Run. This, however, will take me right into the winter and I'm not sure I'm quite ready for snow and ice yet. Something about broken legs... On top of everything else, ball hockey will start soon and many nights it would conflict with the running. So I don't know, we'll see. I'm not sure if eventually I will wind up being one of those guys who needs to get and run three or four times a week, or not. I suspect not but, once again, we'll see.


...but what I hope at least ONE "Gobbler Galloper" will see.

   Whether I become a runner or not, the idea of being in a race (though it'll be more like a fun run) is kind of intriguing, though. I hadn't even thought about it (or signed up, for that matter) until we started talking strategy this week. We're not talking huge strategy, if you must know, more like "don't run too fast at the beginning or you'll die near the start line instead of the finish line". Not much but enough to fuel the little bit of competitive spirit in me. Right now, I'm imagining being right at the back of the pack with about half a kilometer to go. And then passing one person...
  
    
  

Steamboats (As A Unit Of Time)

   I imagine that when most of you think of "steamboats" you are taken back to the glory days of side wheelers plowing down the Mississippi or perhaps even the Great Lakes waters, maybe even the coastal and inland waters of B.C.
   To me, however, "steamboat" is a unit of time. It is a unit of time closely approximating one second once you have taken the time to say the word "steamboat" out loud, in normal cadence. As a proviso, you must also add a number to this, as in "one steamboat" or "two steamboats".
   "Steamboats" is the classic method for denoting how long the defence in a game of touch football must wait, after the ball has been snapped, before it is allowed to rush the opposing quarterback. The reason this is used is primarily to allow the offence time to complete some kind of play. In normal football, the offensive players would be able to block the defensive ones, thereby giving the quarterback a little time to run a play. In touch football, though, there is no blocking allowed. This, then, is why "steamboats" are employed.
   It works like this. Before the start of the game, the two teams decide how many "steamboats" will be counted off after the snap of the ball. It will be the job of one of the defensive players to stand there and count the "steamboats" out loud. When he has reached the allotted number of "steamboats", he or anyone else on his team is allowed the rush the quarterback. So what you end up with is one guy standing there, going "one steamboat, two steamboats, three steamboats...etc", while all around him all hell is breaking loose, guys are criss-crossing all over the place, yelling for the ball, cursing and the like.
   I have no idea why the word "steamboat" was chosen. As a spoken unit of time, the number "one thousand" is also used, along with its ascending number ie. one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand and so on. Ironically, so is the word "Mississippi" (one mississippi, two mississippi,...) so maybe this is where steamboats came from?
   Generally in a game of touch football you don't go much higher than about eight steamboats. This is probably good, as my experience using steamboats as units of time in other endeavours eg. run/walk intervals, is that "steamboats" becomes a bit of a tongue-twister the higher up you go. I actually did a comparison the other evening as Doralyn, my wife, and I were out doing a training run. I compared "steamboats" with the"one-one thousand" method and found the latter to actually be more precise. Of course, at the same time my heart was beating outside my chest so it was a very subjective kind of test!
   So that's the story on steamboats. It's probably been about 45 years since I've played touch football of the schoolyard variety so have had little opportunity to be on a field counting out steamboats. I'm not even a hundred percent sure that anyone even uses "steamboats" any more. It could very well be they have gone the way of......well.....steamboats...now that I think about it!

Tether

   This past week, a man named Nik Wallenda tight roped across Niagara Falls, the first person to do so directly over the Falls. He is a member of the Flying Wallenda family, one of the most famous families of circus aerialists in history. He dedicated the feat to his great-grandfather, Karl Wallenda, patriarch of the family.
   One of the Flying Wallendas' claims to fame was doing their performances without the benefit of a safety net. This also has been the source of some family tragedy. In 1962, while performing their famous seven person pyramid on a tightrope, one of their bottom members faltered and the whole pyramid fell. Two family members perished and one was paralyzed from the waist down. Then again in 1963, yet another family member fell and died as the result. Sadly, Karl himself passed away in 1978 after falling from a tightrope stretched between two high rises in Puerto Rico. In this way, the Flying Wallenda legacy is fraught with both tremendous physical accomplishment and horrendous personal grief.

The Flying Wallendas' seven-person pyramid

   All of this led to Nik Wallenda's historic walk across the falls.
   When I heard about this proposed walk, I immediately thought of the danger and the family legacy. I mainly thought of the danger. I thought this would surely be a death-defying feat of the highest order. It would actually define death-defying.
   Except death-defying it wasn't. The reason why it wasn't is because ABC, the American T.V. network which sponsored the walk and agreed to telecast it decided it didn't want to necessarily broadcast the possible demise of someone on live T.V. To this end they forced Nik Wallenda to use a tether, a strap that would connect him to the wire and prevent him from falling to his death should he actually lose his balance and not be able to recover during the walk.
   To his credit (I think), Wallenda was totally against using the tether. It certainly flew in the face of family tradition. I imagine it also went against whatever macho nature he has residing in his daredevil's heart. There was talk that he might even begin the walk with the tether on but then remove it when he was actually on the wire, the agreement being that if he felt the tether itself poised a safety threat he then had this option. As it turned out, however, the tether remained on.
   For many people, this changed the whole mystique around the performance. Suddenly, what once seemed like a once in a lifetime not-to-be missed extravaganza was now a non-event. Rather than the death-defiance, what we got was a long, wet stroll.
   There was a huge crowd in Niagara Falls watching Nik Wallenda's walk, possibly a hundred and ten thousand people. Then again, millions more watched the telecast. I didn't myself but, if I had, I would have watched under the assumption that death was being defied. I wonder how many people made the trek to the Falls under the same assumption and, if they had known about the tether, might not have bothered.
   As it turned out, the safety measure was totally unnecessary-- Nik even ran the last few metres. But, in the end, he'd been robbed of much bravado, strapped up as he was. He even admitted to feeling like a "jackass".

Annie Edson Taylor--first person to conquer the Falls

   I suppose that if Wallenda was somehow robbed then possibly the rest of us were, as well. But robbed of what? What exactly caught our imagination in all this? Was it the Wallenda family name? The mystique of the Falls itself? The opportunity to view the most recent addition to the Falls' long history of daredevil acts which have included men and women going over the precipice in barrels, inner tubes, rubber balls, jet skis and some with only the clothes on their backs? Or is it possible that some of us wanted to see someone actually die on T.V.? Karl Wallenda's life-ending attempt to cross between those two buildings was not televised, that I remember, but was caught on film and is available on YouTube. All at the same time it is both difficult to watch and hard not to watch. Is it possible that some of us, for whatever reason, were out to capture some of this again last week? 

Karl Wallenda's last walk

   I had very little doubt that Nik Wallenda would make the walk successfully. As other-worldly as such tightrope stunts seem to us, to him they are second-nature. This is not to say that he takes them lightly. Far from it, he would point out that complacency is perhaps the biggest danger in undertakings such as this. Indeed, his great-grandfather Karl always thought that safety nets promoted complacency and were a danger in and of themselves. Hence the long history of performing without them.
   Wallenda plans more of the same in the future. Apparently a walk across the Grand Canyon is already in the works. It will be interesting to see what safety measures are employed. I'm sure the subject of the tether will come up once again. Will having used the tether once make it easier for him to agree to use it again? Or will it simply strengthen his resolve to never use it again....?