Hockey Dad by Bob Mckenzie Read Free Book Online

opening and I was, to put it mildly, eager for Mike to get it. But there was competition from some other talented seven-year-olds, as well as the eight-year-olds, so it was far from a slam dunk. It all came down to the finally tryout. It looked to me like the third seven-year-old spot was going to go to either Mike or a boy named Brandon Davis.
    I kind of thought Mike had the edge going into the finally try-out, just as I'm sure Brandon's dad, Scott, figure d his son would get it.
    On the day of the finally tryout, which was scheduled for 5 p.m. at Iroquois Park Arena, Mike came home from school at lunch and complained of a tummy ache. Before long, it was worse than that. Diarrhea. He had really bad stomach cramps. Poop. Literally.
    Mike said he didn't think he could go back to school because he was afraid he might get caught short, if you know what I mean. I didn't like where this was headed.
    "But you'll be okay for hockey tryouts, won't you, Mike?" I said plaintively.
    "No," he said. "I can't go. My tummy hurts. I might have to go to the bathroom."
    Aw, crap.
    "Oh, you'll be fine ," I said, but he wasn't.
    It was all over but the crying. And it was me who felt like crying.
    So while Liam Reddox, Steven Seedhouse and Brandon Davis were the three '86s who played up on the minor novice AA team that season, Mike was left to play house league and select. Whatever my initial disappointment at Mike not being on the AA team, it passed quickly, because for all my faults, and I have many, I tend to believe everything happens for a reason. And besides, I do firm ly believe that kids find their own level and, generally speaking, it's better to play and play well against kids your own age than to be less of a factor against older kids. Now, if the powers that be had come along and said Mike could play up on the AA team, we'd have been gone so fast it would make your head spin.
    This was the season when Mike actually started to wear glasses when he played hockey. Up until then, even though he had been wearing glasses for almost three years, he hadn't been wearing them for sports, but the truth is he couldn't see very well without them. I'm not sure why we allowed him to not wear glasses when he played hockey or lacrosse as a six-year-old, but it probably had a little to do with vanity-we, I mean I, didn't like how it would look under his face mask-and a lot to do with safety. We weren't keen on him wearing his conventional gold, wire-rimmed glasses with glass lenses-think Harry Potter-in a contact sport and we had not yet found sport glasses that would fi t a boy that young.
    I finally located a pair of sport glasses that looked as though they might do the trick. They were a little on the large side, rather heavy looking but with thick, clear plastic frames with large and fairly thick plastic lenses, the same sort of shape as aviator sunglasses. I think they were designed for racquetball or squash. I'm not sure words do this picture justice. Just think of a seven-year-old Kurt Rambis. Or maybe even a young Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys. (Sorry about that one, Mike.)
    Hey, he could see. They were safe. They fi t, barely, under his cage, it's not a frickin' beauty contest. He may have looked a little, or a lot, like a nerd that season but he didn't play like one.
    With his uncle Johnny as the head coach and me helping out, Mike ripped it up in the seven-year-old house league. He would score more games than not and it wasn't unusual for him to get two, three, four, or sometimes even five or six goals a game. Regardless of how many he did or didn't score, I was preaching to him the value of consistency-play hard every shift, don't take shifts off, give it your all, all the time. Lest you get the wrong idea, I was also stressing to him the importance of passing the puck, helping his teammates score goals. And I was also telling him he should skate as hard on the backcheck as he did to score a goal.
    Honestly, even now, I'm a little conflict