Practice still makes perfect, eh

I came close to scoring a go-ahead goal yesterday. If it had been the winner it would have erased the sting of coughing up a puck earlier in the game, a cough that 10 seconds later resulted in my team dropping behind 3 - 1.

But when a good opportunity presented itself to me, room in the slot was tight, and I couldn’t stretch my stick far enough behind me to put maximum power into my shot. Had it been a bullet - I’m capable of firing the occasional bullet - the goalie would not have grabbed it one millisecond before it reached the top right corner.

Back on the bench I cursed my luck. I thought about practicing my wrist shot on a regular basis as I did when I was as a young boy. Next a sharp memory of a singular incident came to mind.


["Ready for practice": GH circe 1960]

I was taking part in morning hockey practice at the Norwich arena. I was on the ice and firing wrist shots at the side boards. Bang. I collected the puck, making sure I didn’t get whacked by someone else’s shot. Again, bang.

Norwich was and still is a small village with a population of about 1,600 people. As I recall, the number 1,600, painted on signs located at the village boundaries, did not change for decades. The commonly-held belief - back when I was a boy - was that when a baby was born someone would soon die (usually an old person), and visa versa, so the population remained the same year after year.

With only 1,600 people to draw from, most of them adults with jobs and kids with chores, Norwich didn’t usually produce hockey teams that exhibited tons of flash or won many games each season. Not that I felt our teams were made up of left-overs, but after my Bantam team got walloped 20 - 1 by Simcoe, I knew something was out of whack. As well, our coaches didn’t come with years of deep experience or the ability to inspire a bench load of energetic boys with meaningful chalkboard diagrams.

One coach, however, left me with a good lesson.

Bang. I collected the puck.

“Sweep the puck from back here, Gordie,” said coach Dave Moore (a man who, I later learned, was friends with Bobby Hull).

He demonstrated his own wrist shot. Boom. He swept the puck from behind his trailing leg. Boom.

“Reach farther back. That’s it. Let it go,” he said.

Boom.

Inspired, I found a way to practice my wrist shot at home. I put a few boards in our driveway and fired pucks through the barn door and at the inside wall. My shot improved with practice. I started scoring goals from farther out. My confidence grew.

Too bad I didn’t. I would have loved an NHL career and collecting 7 million bananas a year. And too bad my dad’s chicken coop was on the other side of the barn wall I fired pucks at, because I ended up scaring his hens out of their wits and egg production dropped off. I soon had to practice elsewhere, not as close to home as my own backyard.

What about now?

The barn in Norwich is gone. I don’t even have a garage here in the city. The basement is carpet and drywall. And though the back laneway might do, good plywood is a 50 bucks a sheet.

Still, I’ll come up with something. The game must go on.

***

Please click here to read a related matter at Fun and Fitness

.