The Most Important Lesson I Learned Playing Hockey

It wasn't the value of hard work. I know it should have been. But I didn't work hard growing up. I didn't skip practices or cheat at drills. I did the minimum required. Any off-season training was coincidence. I played a lot of road hockey. I amused myself by tying pillows to my legs with my Dad's seldom used ties and threw a rubber ball against our living room wall. I played goal with myself. It wasn't a strategy. I didn't have a gaming system or cable t.v. and lived in a small Vancouver Island town. It was teenage survival in a media barren landscape.

It wasn't the importance of team work or teammates. I was a goalie. Teammates had no context for what I did. I didn’t share their hockey concerns. I liked them. Some of them I loved. A few I still do. I think of all of them fondly. But goaltending is a solitary position in a decidedly team experience. Teammates were potential screens, not shot blockers. I viewed most as liabilities. I'm sure most viewed me the same. Hockey did act as a catalyst for growing up. And those teammates were amongst the protagonists in my coming of age story. But it wasn't because of hockey. It could have been basketball, or wrestling, or drama club. Anything that forces young boys together over time will be a crucible of friendship.

It wasn't hard lessons about winning and losing. I learned them. But the odd thing about a team game is the randomness of the outcome compared to personal performances. I've won a lot games when I was terrible. I've lost games and played great. The difference between those performances is small. It's a little luck, good or bad. It's a puck that squeezes through the five hole and goes wide. It's a misplayed puck that results in a goal, or doesn't. From what I've seen, the NHL is still like that. The narrative of each game turns on a few flukes of physics.

It wasn't leadership. Captains were either the best player on the team, or the coaches son. Sometimes, that Venn diagram overlapped. Sometimes it didn't. Instead of leadership, I learned the importance of networks. Who you were, where you were from and what you've done before played a disproportionate role in the selection of travel teams. As boys and young men we didn't try and stand out. We strove for that impossible place of unique sameness. We wanted to be special and different, without separating ourselves from the crowd. Leadership is stuff of the grown up world. 

The most important lesson I learned playing hockey is how to see the world. There is a tongue-in-cheek saying about two types of people in the world--those who split the world into two types and those who don't. In that dichotomy, I do. I separate people by those who compare themselves to their betters and those who don’t. In this blunt evaluation I see people that do as seekers, explorers and friends. I see those that don't as delusional justifiers who over-estimate their importance, intelligence and skills. I realize that's harsh and a bit prickish, but it's my experience.

Playing hockey I learned to compare myself to better players. As a young kid I compared myself to the less skilled and less successful. That was an exercise of ego. I never thought I was good. When I tell people I won provincial championships, played Junior B and on a university team they think I was good. I think about how far I was from my dreams. As I grew up around hockey I learned to compare myself to those who made the show, or should have. I do this in all aspects of life now.

Forget hard work, team work, teammates, wins, losses and leadership. Hockey taught me I'm not good enough. I wasn't genetically gifted. I am short, and have mediocre reflexes. I can't overcome that. Even Ron Maclean's poetic vignettes-as-life-lessons he uses as nostalgic Vaseline to soften the hard focus of Don Cherry's scatter-shot rage did not help. Sometimes the lesson is you can't do it. I learned about hard work in a grocery store, at a fish cannery and in grad school. Now, I recognize it in my youth. I learned about team work and teammates playing Nintendo Ice hockey and watching the NHL. Through those I understood the subtle differences that teammates brought to a game, and the importance of various roles on outcomes. The only lessons I learned about wins and losses sucked. Sometimes I feel good in defeat. Sometimes I feel awful in victory. The difference is random and small and seldom in our control. Leadership I learned from Harrison Ford movies and politics. Only those reluctantly dragged to the front should be followed. If you seek power and leadership, you are not to be trusted. 

I continue to compare myself to those who are smarter, work harder, have more skill and are more successful. I spend my days working at the rink, writing a dissertation, renovating my home, exploring my faults, writing blogs and lectures for university classes, and working hard to raise my children right. I know I'll fail at all of these things, compared to those I wish to be like. But, I'll work hard and get help and I'll accomplish my goals as much as life's constraints allow. 

Maybe I learned more than I thought.