Dad 1, Refs 0

As with many of the blogs on FanSided.com today, I’m taking a time-out from my regular coverage to address a more important issue: Fathers’ Day.

Now, lots of kids who grew up in the cold and snow and ice of the Canadian Prairies have tales about sharing their love of hockey with their dads – about long early-morning drives to practices or games, about backyard rinks, about dad teaching them the backhand or the saucer pass or coaching them on their first championship team. I don’t have any of those.

My dad is from England, and while he was surprisingly proficient on skates considering he didn’t even own a pair until he was in his mid-20s, hockey was far from his first love. He had embraced the Prairie passion for curling, and we had certainly watched Hockey Night in Canada together when I was young, but his interest in the game was largely an intellectual one; it hadn’t gotten into his blood the way it had mine. (Mom tells a story of how she would come home when Dad had been “babysitting” me as a toddler to find him asleep on the couch while I sat mesmerized a few feet from the flickering black-and-white TV screen, blissfully enthralled by a Leafs-Habs game.)

Dad didn’t attend a lot of my games as I grew up – he was a busy guy, lots of work commitments, it was hard for him to get away from the office in time to watch me. (Indeed, one of my strongest hockey-related memories growing up was when I accidentally shot a small rock through a basement window while playing an imaginary game on the backyard patio – Dad made me pay for the replacement window from the glass company where he worked, a convenient intersection of his work and my play, since it saved me a lot of money to be able to right my wrong at wholesale prices!) I was never bothered much that Dad wasn’t at the games – after all, I was playing with my friends, I was outdoors in the fresh air (yes, I’m old enough that we still played or games on outdoor rinks up until I was eight years old), and anyway, I always felt a weird sense of pressure an expectation when I knew Dad was there that tended to bring my game down a self-conscious notch or two.

Like a lot of kids in Canada’s pressurized hockey environment, I was squeezed out of the game when I was about 10 – the time commitment had become too great, my skating was too poor, I wanted time and freedom to enjoy a host of other sports that also interested me, and hockey – at least in the organized, several-practices-and-games-a-week format – dropped off the list of priorities. I spent the next 10 years playing shinny on the rink at the end of the street once or twice a week, but nothing more serious.

In university, when I decided to take up organized hockey again and signed up for an intramural league, Dad enthusiastically asked if he could come watch a playoff game. I think he sensed we’d missed out on a Canadian father-son tradition, and he wanted to grab a bit of it, albeit somewhat late in the day. Sure, I said; might be kind of fun for both of us.

Of course, I hadn’t realized that the game he chose would be the ugliest game in which I’ve ever played. The refs utterly lost control of the contest, which got chippier and chippier until it culminated in a brawl involving everyone n the ice and a couple of guys off each bench. I think we finished the game with only four skaters (the other guys had maybe six), after all the game misconducts. At the final buzzer, I made a beeline over to the refs to verbally tear them new orifices, declaring in a loud, profanity-laced tirade that they were embarrassing excuses for refs and that this was going to cost them their jobs, literally taking their names down so I could demand their asses on a platter frm their bosses. (I had no such authority to actually DO any of this, but whatever – I was mad.)

I skated away and looked up in the stands; Dad was still sitting there. Oh, God, I thought, the one game he comes to and this is how we act – how I act. Violent, childish, foul-mouthed, little respect for authority. I could already imagine the conversation he was going to have with me; “I’m disappointed in you” was sure to come out of his mouth early on.

I quickly changed and went out to meet him in the arena foyer, ready to face the music. I was rehearsing my apology the whole way. But before I opened my mouth, Dad said:

“Those refs were idiots. They were a disgrace.”

That said more to me about what I had learned from my dad – and from hockey – than anything else. Winning isn’t everything, but it matters. You can respect authority, but still challenge it when it’s abused. Play hard, work hard, don’t give up, don’t give in. Always stay committed to your family, your team – they matter above all else.

You don’t have to have grown up on the ice to learn all that. But either way, I’m glad I did.

Happy Fathers’ Day, everyone.