Greener’s Top 5 Live Hockey Memories Part 1

From time to time I get asked what is my favorite hockey memory.  People expect me to say the first goal I scored or winning a local championship.  The truth is, I have never really played organized hockey or any hockey at all really that requires me to actually skate.  My skating ability would have me getting scratched from a squirt house team.  So, inevitably all of my hockey memories are from the stands.  However, I have a lifetime watching live games and there a number that I will always remember.  Starting today I am going to bring you a five part series listing my top 5 live game memories.  I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I do remembering them. 

1990 High School Hockey Championship –  Lewisporte Vs Twillingate

I grew up in a small town in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador called Lewisporte.  My high school had the Rebels hockey team and for a few years they were damn good.  One year they even won the ‘AAA’ division for the entire province.  But as is the case for many hockey teams there are dry spells as well.  By the year I was to graduate high school, the Rebels had been relegated to a division that included our traditional enemy and rival, the town of Twillingate.

Lewisporte was small enough that there really was no class distinction between the students that we often see today.  Kids were jocks, rockers, geeks and stoners all rolled into one package.  No one got lumped into a clique because there was not enough of us to belong to a specific group.  Due to the fact that a good portion of my friends played on the Rebels I would get to help run the bench from time to time.  In all honesty, I was a lackey.  I got the water bottles filled, closed the gate behind the guys changing the shift, and tried to provide encouragement like telling one of our players the number of the guy he should take a run at.  And the one place I hated to be on the bench during games was Twillingate. 

Twillingate fans would spit on us, throw their drinks on us, and hurl insults and profanities that would make a dead sailor rise from his watery grave to ask if the language could be toned down a little.  It could be a nasty atmosphere.  The arena itself never had Plexiglas around the boards.  To keep the pucks from flying into the stands, the arena installed chicken wire.  The whole place had the appearance of a giant primordial UFC ring where the action was carried out by combatants on skates instead of gladiators with black belts in mixed martial arts.   

The rivalry was as intense as the football clashes in Europe.  And sometimes the bad blood on the ice and the stands spilled onto the streets.  There were episodes where the convoy of school buses carrying the players and fans would be attacked with rocks, snowballs mixed with water to make them as hard as ice, bottles and generally anything people could throw.  This hooligan behaviour manifested itself in both towns.  Lewisporte would attack the Twillingate convoy when it rolled through our town on its way to the arena and Lewisporte could expect to be ambushed when we rolled through enemy territory.  Being situated on a wind-swept portion of the coast, we would refer to Twillingate as “Snotty Rock”.  I have no idea where that particular term of endearment originated from but I am sure that the kind folks of Twillingate had a name or two for the town of Lewisporte as well.  After a full season a real hatred was boiling and as luck would have it, Lewisporte would face Twillingate for the divisional high school championship.

The series was a best of seven and after 6 games both sides had 3 wins a piece.  Game seven would be played on a Friday night in Twillingate.  A few of us piled into a friends car and made the two hour trip down to support our boys.  There was no way I was going to be on the bench that night.  I wanted to be in the stands where the action had the possibility of being as rough as the action on the ice.  With so much on the line and the potential for violence, the arena got divided into two sides, Lewisporte supporters in the east stands and Twillingate fans on the west.  The place had the expectant energy of a powder keg waiting to explode.  To ensure things did not get out of hand members of the RCMP were positioned around the arena to make sure that the hooligan behaviour was held in check.  It was the first time I was in a crowd that needed a police presence. 

The game itself is pretty much a blur.  There were hits, fights and goals.  People cheered and jeered and everyone was drinking the booze they had sneaked past the people on the doors.  While the recollection of the game has diminished over time, it is the outcome that will be forever burned in my memory.   

Twillingate arena never had a Zamboni.  Instead, to resurface the ice between periods they had a small tractor pull a large water bucket/scraper contraption that looked like it was put together by members of the 80′s TV show The A-team on a real bad episode.  As a result, the ice would resemble the surface of the moon by the third period.  The face of a teenager with chronic acne would be smoother to the touch than that playing surface. 

With less than 2 minutes to go in a tied game it looked like overtime was going to be needed to decide who could claim hockey supremacy for the year.  With Lewisporte applying pressure in the Twilligate zone, one of the Snotty Rocker defencemen iced the puck.  The puck was headed towards the Lewisporte goal and the goalie decided to come out and play it.  As the puck neared, he put down his stick but before he could stop it, the puck hit a bump, went over his stick and went directly into the net.  Twilligate fans went crazy while all we could do was stand around look upon the scene unfolding in front of our eyes in shock and despair.  Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now would have felt right at home in amongst the Lewisporte fans that night.  He could have kept repeating “The horror.  The horror” until the cows came home and no one would have stopped him.

The Lewisporte goalie was a good friend of mine and I can picture him today as he reacted to the goal.  Slumped over and on his knees in front of his net with tears streaming down his face.  He had all the weight of all of our town and school’s expectations come crashing down on his shoulders.  That sight would bring a lump to my throat and while chaos broke out around me all I could think was that it was not his fault and I wanted him to know it.  The goal was a fluke.  How was he to know that this time, home-ice advantage really would have meaning?  Never-the-less, the loss was going to be his burden to bear, unfair or not and he knew it.   I never did find out how my friend felt about the whole event.  As far as I know, he would never speak about it to me or anyone ever again.

I would like to say that Lewisporte came back and won the game but they didn’t.  Heartbroken, we filed out of the arena and to our cars to make the 2 hour drive home.  I decided to drink my pain away and got stupid drunk in the backseat on the trip back.  Being a Leafs fan, this would be a pattern I would repeat often in the coming years.  To this day I have never felt that same level of despair after a loss and I hope to the hockey gods I never do.  Even though this is not a happy memory it taught me a very valuable lesson.  While one can love a sport, being fanatical on the outcome of a series or a season benefits no one.  When it is all said and done, hockey is just a game.

Greener