It is a scene you will see all across Canada as the snow flies and settles in for the rest of the winter. From coast to coast, houses will feature a single unmistakeable outdoor accessory – a tubed frame with mesh netting. Despite biting cold and howling winds, you will see kids and often even adults gathered around it.
Many, many, many years ago, my young buddies and I found infinite hours of pleasure with one of those makeshift rink accessories out in the coldest winters of Winnipeg. We used the net when we played street hockey.
I’m not sure now if it was just that we were simply young and eager then, but there really didn’t seem to be a thermometer reading cold enough to prevent the gang of us from hitting the back lane on any given day after school. We’d play until it was too dark to see the frozen tennis ball we used as a puck, or one of our parents hollered, insisting that it was time to come into the house and do our homework.
For some reason (money, time, lack of skill?), I never did get to play proper organized hockey, with ice skates and real hockey equipment. My skating skills to this day are entirely un-Canadian. Queen Elizabeth probably skates better than I do. The moose depicted on our quarters might skate better as well.
But in heavy winter boots, we could be surprisingly nimble when it came to deking out a defender and scoring that game-winning goal in our imaginary Stanley Cup final.
Back in those early ’70s days, there were no big box sporting goods stores offering a wide selection of Wayne Gretzky-approved street hockey apparel. You either had to buy official hockey equipment or you had to improvise. I was most often the goalie – Ken Dryden, leaning on my broken goal stick, tending net in an oversized green parka and wearing a borrowed back-catcher’s mask, with a regular baseball mitt over my heavy wool glove.
One of my buddies was Bobby Orr in a pair of ski pants, a heavy suede winter jacket and thick horn-rimmed glasses. The neighbour kid from two doors down at least had a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, stretched over his heavy coat. For us Canadiens fans though, that was just a blue target.
Why we used tennis balls back then was anybody’s guess. You could buy fake pucks made from much softer rubber than the real ones. Maybe it was easier to stickhandle over the snowy ruts in the back lane that filled in for Madison Square Garden, who knows? But man, could you get one of those things whistling with a proper windup!
It’s a wonder really that any of us grew up to have families after so many tennis balls found a way to “say hello” in tender places, even through ski pants, briefs and a pair of long underwear. One proper piece of equipment we all eventually owned was a protective cup.
We also learned hasty surgical procedures, as safety features like face visors or helmets were mostly entirely ignored, aside from whoever was the goalie. Welts were a symbol of young adulthood I suppose. Sprains were bragging rights for days. And the same freckled little kid that cried whenever somebody stole his lunch at school got a huge kick out of picking a couple of his own teeth out of the snow.
One thing about ice and snow, it really does slow down blood flow!
Like the professional hockey players of today, even as kids back then we had aspirations to win the Stanley Cup. Although in our case, the cup looked an awful lot like one of my Dad’s mag wheel rims.
And again like those very same professional hockey players, we even got locked out one year.
The latch to my backyard gate froze shut.
Humour columnist and author Dan St. Yves was licensed with Royal LePage Kelowna for 11 years. Check out his website at danstyves.com.
