Jan 20 2009
C’mon man! No raisies
I’m not too sure you can still do this today in Toronto what with all the buildings and lights and stuff. It doesn’t seem to get cold enough for natural ice rinks anymore.
We used to dress up in our hockey gear at home. Some were more fortunate than others. They had shin pads and some guys even had real hockey pants. Then you’d take your old worn and chewed up skates and line ‘em up side by side and spear the blade of your stick through the opening of those tube blades that some players today only know from old hockey footage.
Then you’d sling the whole mess over your shoulders like Freddy the Freeloader from the Red Skelton show. You’d truck 10 or 20 blocks to a local park and slide down the hill to join the game in the open air natural rink that they made each winter. Sometimes you even took the bus. You were on a road trip. You’d put your skates on in the local building or outside the rectangular boards that surrounded the hockey rink. You just threw your boots somewhere near the boards and hoped you’d remember where you put them.
You never worried much about the puck not being frozen. Wait long enough and mother nature took care of that and a lot of your various body parts. The game would go much like it did in “You wanna’ play in or out? ” except now we’ve got blades on. And usually a lot more Johnnies show up. Fifteen a side, no problem. Nobody rides the bench. Most of the time we played under the lights and the only reason we would stop is that somebody would turn off the lights. Otherwise, nobody would know to stop. We all would have ended up being human popsicles.
Every so often the game would stop because the puck was getting stuck in the two or three inches of snow that we would build up on the not-so-even ice surface. Everyone would jam their sticks into the the nearest snowbank (another puck eater) and we would all start a new game—the human Zamboni. Everyone would find a shovel or the big scraper blades that the municipality would provide. Sometimes it took two Johnnies to push that big blade. We were all one team now.
And if we were really lucky, the local custodian would come out and give the surface a flood with a big fire hose. No problem, we just moved to the pleasure skating rink right next to the boarded rink. You had to jam your stick into the snowbank again because no sticks or pucks were allowed on that rink. You’d practice skating backwards where most of us looked like stumbling giraffes and windmilling stuffed bears. Some guys wore way too much stuff.
And after a bit, we’d all assemble at the edge of the opening at the end of the boards where the big tractor could drive through and wait for the custodian to say “OK boys the ice is OK now.” I think he got to the second K before he was surrounded by a whole bunch of Johnnies doing their warmup.
And then everybody would take a spot on the same teams we had before and two guys would be Davey Keon and Henri Richard. Another Johnny would act as temporary referee and get ready to drop the puck but either Davey or Henri would stand erect and say “Just a sec. I gotta’ shift my cup”. He’d dig down deep like a junior Al Bundy and take care of business and bend over centre ice. Johnny 3 would drop the puck and the game would continue.
And there would always be one bozo in the group that broke the golden rule—no raisies. He would say I was going for the top corner while the poor guy he just fired the frozen black thing into was rolling around in pain screaming “Ow Ow Ow” like some sort of vocal machine gun. There was no top corner. The posts were usually two of the rubber boots that were left on the outside of the boards.
It was always a guy who didn’t have shin pads on. The one’s we could afford always went flat because they more like pressed cardboad over felt.
And the one guy would apologize to the other and say “Sorry man, I won’t do that again. Are you OK. I didn’t mean it”. And the other guy would say “That’s OK, I’m much better now” Especially after both of them rubbed the wound to “make it better”.
And it would start all over again, but not until one guy says, you guessed it.
“Just a sec. I gotta’ shift my cup.”
I never knew that Johnny Carson was a writer for the Red Skelton show. It never ceases to amaze me what you can learn by poking around in the Internet.
