After having played three sets of music Friday night and having sat through a dinner on a Saturday afternoon for my grandfather’s 90th birthday, where my dad still asked me who my barber was in order to get a cheap laugh, I set out to play five Hockey games between 9pm Saturday night and 5:30am Sunday morning.
Big Sexy called me the week before and asked me if I would be interested in entering a team in the first annual iron man hockey tournament on a Saturday night. It took me two seconds to answer.
“Hell yes…”
After committing, it became necessary to amass the correct five players and a goalie to effectively tread water in such a tournament. I started calling and sent around my text messages until I had my team. I received a text message during my grandfather’s birthday celebration from Big Sexy that read;
“DON’T FUCKING CHICKEN OUT, CALAHAN… WE’RE COUNTING ON YOUR TEAM TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN…”
While eating my scallops and spinach, I had to listen to my dad tell my kids, what an asshole I looked like as a teenager. I smiled politely and listened to the story I had already heard at least a dozen times before. Now mind you, my father had had a nip of something before replaying this story. My kids enjoyed the story. Kids always like hearing stories no matter how old they get.
“Your dad looked like a fucking idiot… Pardon my French. He wore combat boots, camouflaged pants, T shits that said everything under the sun and a Mohawk hair cut… Now look at him, he still has a bad barber. Poor bastard still can’t catch a break.”
This was coming from a Vietnam Veteran that went from looking like Charles Manson to Beetlejuice. I smiled politely while being roasted by my father and responded to Big Sexy in a text message.
“WE’LL BE THERE WITH BELLS ON…”
Big Sexy owns a pro shop inside a municipal rink and he and the park district guys who ran the rink, decided to host a tournament where by each team could only have five skaters and a goalie. There were no substitutions allowed. No line changes. Whistles for icing and penalties were penalty shots. I gathered up my team based on good feeling, comedy and talent.
My best friend and confidant was my first choice. I’d give you his name but he’s shy. His nickname is Butterball and it’s not because he’s fat. We were once playing a pick up hockey game where a loud mouthed guy from Boston kept chirping on the bench. We got tired of listening to his goofy Bostonian accent and my best friend made a comment to the guy who acted as if he invented the sport of ice hockey from Boston, a rotund figure with mediocre abilities at best.
“HEY BUDDAH-BAWL… WHY DON’T YOU GET ON THE ICE AND PLAY SOME FWUCKING HAWKEE AND SHUT THE FWUCK UP…”
Since that day my dear friend goes by the name Butterball or Buttah-bawl. Now Butterball is poor as a church mouse as the saying goes. Butterball had a job with a railroad company and he was let off of work some eight months ago. He now has created a landscape company and has some accounts of well to-do people who refuse to use their leisure time to manicure their lawns. Butterball hired my son to help him. He didn’t have money to play but I spotted him and he accepted. All the others were without out a cent and so I spotted them all too.
My son and his life long hockey companion decided to play along with this tournament instead of attending a party of someone who knew someone who knew someone who was having a party or just going to any drinking establishment on a Saturday night. I had to explain to both these young men of twenty two years of age, what kind of tournament we were playing. The concept was not sinking in readily. They both pledged to play in the tournament for me.
My son Quinn and his friend Tim both had been playing minor league hockey up until six months ago when the team they were playing for, suddenly folded due to lack of money. Both came home and resumed their lives doing odd jobs, drinking and hanging out. Neither of them was going to do much of anything on a Saturday night and so they decided to play in the tournament.
I needed one more skater and a goalie and so I called Andras who was the younger brother of the two South African brothers from my Canada story previously. Andras had been playing division III hockey with another lad whom I had coached when they were in high school. Frostie was the goalie.
As you all know who know the sport of ice hockey; it takes a special mindset to want to have people fire pucks at you while you’re dressed like the guy from the movie, The Hurt Locker. When I coached Frostie, he was five feet tall and looked to be eight years old. He was a Darren Pang type of goalie and was very good for his height. I had not seen Frostie for two years and he suddenly was seven inches taller and went from having a buzz cut to really long hair and looking like one of the brothers in the boy group called The Hansons (not to be mistaken for the brothers in the movie Slapshot).
We stepped out on the ice with two college players and two minor league players and lost to a bunch of slow footed, once a week players by the score of 3-2. In the locker room, there was a lot of finger pointing and animosity. I summed it up as best as I could with an analogy they could all understand.
“It was like challenging your father to a fist fight and knowing that you are stronger and faster, took him for granted and he stepped up and handed you your ass…”
They all thought about it and agreed I had hit it on the head. I gave them the best advice any coach could ever give a player. It was probably what Mike Babcock said to the Detroit Red Wings after a humiliating loss in Detroit on a Sunday when they could have won their playoff series and moved on;
“Quit fucking around with the puck and just fucking shoot it… There’s no reason to be the fucking Harlem Globetrotters with fancy fucking passes. Use their defensemen as screens and just fire the fucking thing.”
This discussion went on at a TGIFridays restaurant while we drank ice water and ate nacho chips with salsa in our hockey equipment. Frostie the goalie wore everything except his helmet, catcher, blocker and chest and arm protector. He walked into a restaurant with skates and leg pads on and they sat us in a corner where nobody could smell us. We discussed the whole rabbit and tortoise thing and we’re ready for the rest of the evening. We only had four more games ahead of us.
The second game was against a team full of beginners. We were leading the game five to nothing with only three minutes into the game. I had to rein the boys in and tell them to play keep away until the end of the game. We fired blistering slap shots over the head of the goalie and wide just to not insult the other team entirely. Next we then took on the hosts of the tournament who came in stacked. We came from a 2-0 deficit to win the game 3-2. My son in the whole process had almost gotten into two fights and trashed talked from beginning to end. He still has not figured out that rough play against him is more a sign of respect than intent to injure. We then went on to face a team of mostly blue collar cop/firemen/Italian players that thrived on extra curricular activity. Within two minutes, a small Italian cop with an attitude a several beers in him, put the body on my son and got the stick up high. The rest of the game, my son said things personally to get under the skin of the man with a Napoleon complex. Things such as, you suck, you’re old, on my worst day I never was as bad as you and so on. We beat that team 4-0 and nearly had a full team on team fight when one of their guys slew foot Butterball in front of our net. Butterball, for as even tempered as he was, was going to beat down the man who swept his feet from behind and caused his head to bounce like a bowling ball inside his helmet on the ice. I tried to be the voice of reason with the other team.
“Boys… You’re just upset because you lost and lost even though you tried to cheap shot us the whole fucking game. Go get a beer and watch us in the final…”
My mother was verbally assaulted and I was invited to have sex with myself and so on. I smiled and went to the locker room to sip on some water and have a snack until the Zamboni had cleaned the ice for the grand finale.
At five in the morning after having had played four games and having sat around wearing smelly hockey equipment for eight hours, after having watched highlights of professional hockey games and baseball games on ESPN, the final came. We promptly scored three quick goals. My son got into it verbally with a young guy with an ample amount of testosterone on the opposing team and they took to playing bull and matador with each other throughout the course of the game. When the dust settled, we had won the match 3-2.
So there we were, five skaters and a goalie sipping cheap beer in a smelly locker room littered with tape and other debris on the floor as the sun was beginning to light the eastern sky, minutes before the figure skaters would be diligently stretching out in the lobby and taking the ice. We had won the championship of a tournament where by we won nothing more than embroidered fleece sweatshirts and free pass to the next tournament, while the rink workers were cleaning up all evidence of the hockey tournament. I said nothing sappy or nostalgic to any of the boys in the room. I thought to myself that at a point in my life where I was younger, I was the coach of the goalie and three out of the four other players besides myself and Butterball. We were able to have fun and win on a meaningless tournament in a suburb of a big city in North America on a Saturday while people in the world starved, hunted for fresh water and tried to avoid being killed in the cross fire of war. The hectic pace of life and necessity of having to slog through the day to day world of working and making ends meet, will take precedence an importance over a ice hockey tournament on a Saturday night. Someday I will run into all of them even though it may never happen collectively again the way it was last night and we will reminisce about our championship victory. We will laugh about the things we said in the locker room to one another and going to a restaurant with all our gear on and how we walked to our cars as champions as the sun was coming up and birds were chirping on a spring morning. Guys never say to other guys that things such as a tournament make life more worth living. They just ask… “When are we playing again?”