Forget Your Equipment-Pay the Price

Last week I had a game in one of the leagues I play in, and I was going to the arena right after my kid's practice. For those of you new to this site, I coach hockey to 13 and 14 year old boys. My kid Sam is also a goalie (God help him), and I've been coaching on his teams for the past nine seasons.

Obviously, nobody in our association knows about my hobby of writing the smut that you read here, otherwise I'd be out on my ass. So let's just keep that our little secret, okay? But I really enjoy coaching- most of the kids are terrific, and really want to learn the game. I'm getting too old to play this shit, but I can certainly still teach it.

Anyway, I got to the rink about twenty minutes before gametime, and discovered that I had left my goalie skates in my coaching bag. I live about a half hour away from the arena, so there was no way I could get home and back, or even call my adorable wife and ask her to bring them to me.

This usually happens about once a year. I'll either forget an an article of equipment, or something will fall out of my bag when I hang my stuff up in the garage to air out. Trust me- you don't want to be anywhere near my garage when my gear is in there, especially during the summer. It smells like the fuckin' monkey house at the zoo.

But this was twice in the past month that I had something important come up missing when I got to my game. Three weeks ago, it was my nut cup. I ended up borrowing one from a very hesitant teammate, promising that: a) I wouldn't wear it against my bare skin, and b) I would have it sandblasted before I gave it back to him. So I placed it on the outside of my sweatpants, and it ended up rolling around inside my breezers the whole game. Because it moved around so much, it actually spent more time covering my butthole than my fellas. I wasn't real worried about it- I have four kids and a vasectomy, so I don't have that much use for my gonads anymore.

Not having skates was a whole other animal, though. It's not like my teammates had an extra pair bouncing around in their bag, and even if they did, goalie skates are different than regular ones. For those of you who don't know, the blade is a lot longer, and there is a plastic shell on the outside of the boot to protect the foot if the puck hits the skate.

So what was I going to do? I went to the guy at the front counter, and asked without much hope if by any chance they had some goalie skates I could borrow. He said he thought maybe they had some in their equipment room, and I could go back and take a look.

It turned out unbelievably that they had two pairs back there. I hoped that one of the pairs was somewhere near my size. I wear an eight, which is pretty small for an adult. Oh, and you can just save the small foot/dick jokes, thank you very much. My wife assures me it's much more important what you do with it. She always stifles laughter and looks away when she says that, but still...

I checked out the first pair, and I think both of my feet could have fit inside one skate. Not good. I crossed my fingers, and went to the other pair. They were a lot closer, so I tried them on. They were still too big, but I thought if I tied them as tight as possible, I could make do. It was 15 minutes until game time- beggars can't be choosers, right?

So I went back to the locker room, and absorbed the requisite amount of shit from my teammates for leaving my skates in my other bag. After taking just a quick moment to show everyone my middle finger, I started strapping my gear on. The holes were different from mine between the skate blade and the bottom of the boot, so I had to thread the straps a little bit differently. No problem.

I stood up with my pads on, and my feet were moving around inside the skate a little bit, but I tightened them so much, it wasn't too bad. No problem.

Then after the Zamboni got off the ice, I set foot onto the surface for the five minute warmup before our game. I took that first stride, and my right skate slid out from under me, like I still had the skate guards on. Then I took a stride on the other foot, and the exact same thing happened. I went to my knees, reached back, and ran my finger over the blades, expecting to remove some tape or other debris that might have gotten on the edges. It was then that I discovered that neither skate had any inside edge. I couldn't have sliced fuckin' butter with either blade.

Now we had ourselves a little problem. It was five minutes to gametime, and I had no way to put my weight on the inside edges of my skates. And for those of you who know nothing about playing goalie, you spend an enormous amount of time on your inside edges. You need them to push off to move from side to side across the goal crease, and move off your goal line to cut the angle from a shooter.

I thought to myself, "Who the fuck uses these skates?". They were sitting next to a set of pads that were still wet, so they must have been worn pretty recently. I supposed that it must be some dude that plays the game a whole bunch differently than I do.

But I had no choice. I had to try and make do with what I had, because we were out of time, and I had no other options. I very gingerly went over to our bench and told my teammates the problem, and warned them to look out for anything because I could barely stand up. One of them said, "How will we know the difference from usual, Al?" I won't tell you what I said in response, but it involved asking him to wrap his lips around a certain part of my anatomy.

So I skated back to my crease, almost falling twice on the trip. I could feel it- this was going to be the longest hour and a half of my life. Even longer than when I watched The Bounty Hunter with Jennifer Aniston. Holy shit, was that a bad movie. But I digress...

Anyway, I've thought about it a lot, and it took awhile, but I finally figured the best way to describe how I looked during the game.

Imagine a walrus with Muscular Dystrophy. One of "Jerry's Walruses", if you will. Well, I wasn't quite that graceful.

Sweet dancin' Jehovah, was I bad. In that league, I'm used to letting in just over two goals per game. It's an Over-40 league, so the level of play isn't real fast. My biggest concern normally is being patient, and waiting for the slower shots to get to me, and not overreacting.

But kids, that night I allowed a half dozen goals. And at least five were shots I would have stopped easily any other night. The worst one was a little wrist shot from the damn blue line. I tried to push off to just stick it off into the corner, but my skate went out from under me, the puck hit the heel of my stick, and went in. Kids, I've let in some fugly goals before, but this might be the biggest howler of my life.

Now, there are two silver linings to my evening from hell. First, I'm so fucking old, I'm not capable of being embarrassed anymore. The fact that I'm even writing about this debacle proves my point. Besides, there are a bunch of people out there with many more problems than letting in shitty goals. That includes a few of my Dawgs brothers that are going through some serious health problems- I'm pretty good these days about keeping things in perspective.

And second, we won the goddamn game. My mates put up seven for me, so at least I didn't bring down the entire team with my stupidity. What should have been a blowout win turned into a tight game, so I guess in the big picture, I helped make things more exciting. You're welcome.

Also, I've learned something. From now on, I will turn on the lights in my stinky garage, and make sure all my equipment is in my bag before I take off for the game. I'm already getting forgetful in my old age- it feels like I'm on a one way train bound for Senility City. Taking an extra minute may save me some future problems, or at least keep my teammates from killing me after a game.