The Legacy Arrived (Eventually)..

  I’m a proud hockey dad to my 12-year-old daughter, but I always feel like a phony. I don’t know the offside rule, am constantly surprised when ‘icing’ is called, and often sit near other more knowledgeable parents so I can overhear their advice and parrot it back for my daughter after the game. 

My excuse is that I never played hockey when I was growing up, a combination of feeling like the sport was too competitive for me and also because I was very tall at an early age, and putting me on ice skates was not dissimilar to trying to balance a Grandfather clock on a set of dinner knives in an earthquake. 

I much preferred basketball instead, which was to the (not terribly) secret shame of my father.  He had played hockey as a boy and had built, I think, a version in his head of us spending winters on the ice, possibly culminating in a future where I eventually joined the NHL and allowed him to retire early in life, spending his later years being asked by reporters just ‘where’ I had obtained by superior skills, where he could reply demurely ‘I taught him everything he knows.’ 

But instead, I chose basketball, a sport which I enjoyed a lot more, if not being any more skilled at, in all honesty.   But, to his eternal credit, he put the imaginary vision of future NHL glory on the shelf, and, after an appraisal of my skills on the basketball team, I think he also put ‘future NBA star’ on the shelf next to it. 

What followed was several years where I gainfully attempted to do my best on various school teams, and he and my mother continued to offer support.   But I always suspected that the hockey fantasy stayed within his mental reach, something to be picked up and dusted off occasionally. 

Flashing forward many years, my father has passed on, I’m now a father as well, and my daughter, from a very early age, expressed a strong desire to play hockey.  From seemingly out of nowhere, she’s chosen this as her sport and continues to challenge herself to advance.   Today, she had her first game on a more competitive team, one that she’s really pushing herself to keep up with, and she donned a brand new jersey as she skated onto the ice, one that had ‘CUNNINGHAM’ in big block letters across the shoulders. 

As I looked at those letters on her shoulders, I realized the 'hockey fantasy' my dad kept on the shelf didn't just stay there—it just waited for someone with a better center of gravity to claim it. My daughter is doing what I wouldn’t (or maybe couldn’t) by participating in Canada’s game, which means I’ve officially inherited my father’s old job. I am now the guy in the stands, pretending to understand the mechanics of a sport that looks like chaos, just so I can be the first person she sees when she looks at the glass. 

I sort of  think he’s somewhere up there, finally getting to see someone in his family playing the game he loved—and laughing his head off that I still don't know what icing is.