I’m always fascinated to watch our sports editor Sarah Simpson put together her stories in time for deadline day each week.
Sarah certainly knows her stuff when covering sports and understands every detail and rules around each game, and she’s also tasked with knowing the players in each sport and their statistics, which always amazes me.
While I’ve always enjoyed skiing, kayaking and other individual sports, organized team playing has never been of much interest to me.
Most, if not all, of my friends through my life always enjoyed playing sports and watching them on television.
I would attend game nights at their homes where we’d gather with pizzas and beer to watch some team or another play some sport or another.
I couldn't care less about the games, but I was always fascinated by how absurd my friends got during them, and the way they would literally leap out of their chairs if their team scored a goal or gained a point, and had the knowledge to spew out the statistics of the player who was successful for them.
I never understood why they were so enraptured with the games, but I went to these game nights anyway because I thought their reactions were hilarious.
Other than the fact that I just don’t play well with others, I suspect one good reason why I never took to organized sports probably has to do with the fact that the schools I attended when I was a kid didn’t have sports teams in the traditional sense.
That’s likely due to the fact that the school system in the city where I grew up had no funding for anything but academics at the time (and hardly enough for even that).
In fact, most of the elementary schools I attended had no gyms anyway.
I didn’t see any organized sports in school until I reached the higher grades and attended secondary schools that had sports programs, but by then, what little interest I had in joining any teams had waned considerably, mainly because I had virtually no exposure to them in my more formative years.
Mind you, three of my four older brothers did take a liking to hockey, and they joined teams that were organized by various groups and businesses at the community’s arena.
Practices were always at about 5 a.m. so my mother would haul me (who was just a child at the time) out of my warm bed, bundle me up in blankets and sweaters and head out to the car in the dark and cold mornings, with at least one of my brothers in tow with their hockey equipment, and head to the arena for hockey practice.
These were also the days before arenas were heated to room temperature so it was just as cold, or even colder, than it was outdoors, and it was always very frigid in the winter time on the east coast.
Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly fond of this and, as young as I was, I still remember sitting and watching the practices as I slowly froze to death wondering what I had done to deserve this torture several mornings each week.
So when I got old enough to join a hockey team and my parents asked if I wanted to get on the ice and learn how to play the sport, I balked at the suggestion and told them if I never walked into a hockey arena again, it would be too soon.
They obviously had no idea of how much they turned me off having anything to do with hockey after all those freezing mornings in the arena when I would have given anything just to be anywhere else where it was warm.
I became so averse to hockey that I never even learned how to skate properly and, to this day, I still have to bang into the boards at the side of ice rinks just to stop, and I discovered the hard way that this is not something that you’d want any potential girlfriend to witness.
Anyway, it’s hard to be so disinterested in hockey in a hockey nation like Canada where the sport is revered.
The lyrics in that old upbeat song 'Fireworks' by the popular Canadian band Tragically Hip pretty much sums it up; “You said you didn’t give a f*** about hockey; I never heard anyone say that before.”
I guess I'm a bit of an oddity.
