What Hockey Taught Me About My Life and My Career (Bonus: Broadswords)

“This is hockey, OK? It’s not rocket surgery.” – Mystery, Alaska

“You da goalie, not Yoda® goalie.”  I have to get my hearing checked.

When I was in middle school, one week we played hockey for P.E.  Where I grew up it was certainly cold enough for water to freeze – but we didn’t have any water, it being nearly a desert and all.  A typical backyard mud puddle in Midwestia is bigger than things we called “lakes” growing up, and you could wade across the local river at flood stage and not get your pants wet.  We did, however, have a gym and roller skates.

A group of uncoordinated seventh graders attempting to roller skate on a gym floor for the first time probably looked like a gaggle of hippos juggling wet sheepdogs.  I wouldn’t know exactly what we looked like, I was busy studying the wood grain of the floor by repeatedly falling onto the free throw line as my skates stubbornly refused to stay underneath me.  The nearly frictionless wheels kept twisting my legs at angles only experienced by crash test dummies, Thanksgiving turkeys, and a stoned Elon Musk.

Why were we so pathetic?

The nearest roller rink was 30 miles away, and what passed for concrete in town was concrete in concept only, with the newest patches of sidewalk having been put down personally by President Roosevelt as he raced Hitler in a sidewalk building contest to determine who had to have Italy on their side.  Anyway, what concrete existed in town was broken, jagged, and was used by NASA to simulate walking on the Moon because it was so rough and powdery.  If we wanted to skate that left skating in actual dirt, because skating on the highway was illegal in every state in the nation until Virginia just recently legalized 30^th trimester abortions.

I got to be team captain, and no one really argued when I picked goalie as my position.  In two teams of horrible skaters, I was the worst.  Being goalie didn’t require much skating, just being quick and a lot of intentional falling.  As I could fall unintentionally, intentional falling was even easier.  The puck was a hollow plastic disk that weighed next to nothing, and I was quick enough to stop nearly every shot.

It didn’t hurt my goal-tending streak that this was the first time that any of us had ever played hockey and everyone was a horrible shot. I’m pretty sure that our P.E. instructor had only the vaguest idea of what the rules were since he informed us that in order to start the game we had to sacrifice the smallest and weakest player in the middle of the gym for the strength of the tribe while drinking Moosehead® beer.  Since we were underage, he drank all our beers for us.

We’ll all miss Benji.

As I grew older, there was a period of a few years where I watched actual NHL® professional hockey, until they just stopped showing it on any network I could find.  But watching hockey was different than watching other sports – in an average game the players are (at times) going 25-27 miles per hour, and the puck itself is often moving in excess of 100 miles per hour.  In the NFL®, the top receivers run about 20 miles per hour for short bursts, but average much less.

Because of the increased speed in hockey, minor differences in starting position resulted in big separations between players as they accelerated across the ice.  The importance of that separation is the same in all sports, but I really was able to see it when it came to hockey due to the faster speeds.  What’s really important is time and space.  With enough time and space, a hockey player can break away from the crowd and attack the goalie one on one.  With enough time and space, players can be where the action will be five seconds from now.

The same principle holds in football.  With enough time and space, a wide receiver can break away from the defense and score.  I think it holds true in soccer as well, but too often the players are just sitting on the field knitting and drinking brightly colored cocktails with whimsical umbrellas and chunks of fruit before they go shoe shopping.  I think soccer would be much more interesting if they gave the players broadswords with no real rules or guidance on how they are to be used in the game.

Now, imagine with swords.  See?  Better already.

But what happens in sports also happens in real life, minus my really cool broadsword idea.  The analogy of time and space is incredibly important to people who are trapped on mountains as the storm comes in, or the logistics in supporting an army in the field, or even the position of the individual units in a battle.  Put 5,000 men in the right place and the right time and almost any battle in history swaps winners.  Heck, 300 Spartans (plus 700 Thespians) changed the course of history and saved Western Civilization.  Tell me that Xerxes wouldn’t love to have that one back – lose to the Greeks just the one time and you never hear the end of it.

If only they had compromised, imagine how we’d remember them.

To “maximize” your financial potential, you should use your time and space to be where the action is.  Sadly, for my career the right place is bigger cities – huge cities, with populations of millions of people.  A bigger city would be okay, but from what I’ve seen of cities, most of those millions of people I won’t like.  They just seem to be in the way when I try to drive on the congested roads.  Broadswords would be helpful here, too.  The city is filled with activities, though.  Activities that I really don’t want to do – except for nice restaurants and museums, and getting to a big city four or five times a year is necessary, mainly to remind me of all the reasons why I don’t want to move back to a big city.

Thankfully, though, I don’t need to maximize my financial potential – the mortgage that I pay here in Modern Mayberry is less than 27% of the cost for an apartment in San Francisco, and on a per square foot basis?  My cost is 5% (that’s not a misprint) of what I’d pay per square foot in ‘Frisco (the locals love it when you call it that, I hear).  That 5% number just includes house square footage, and doesn’t include the 10 acres the house is on.

With life, time is still time, and space is still space.  And during a career, money is space AND time.  If you only have enough money for this month, you have that much time.  If you have years of money saved up, you have that much time (and more).  Savings is opportunity.  Savings provides options – and those options expand your opportunities.  Enough money gives you time and space – time and space to try things, risky things that have higher rewards.  Or?  Give you time and space to just do what you want.

Which for me is not hockey.  I’ve seen enough gym floors, thank you.

But . . . hear me out . . . how about hockey with broadswords??