When goalies didn’t wear masks, nobody wore helmets, sticks were made of wood and pucks were retrieved from snowbanks, I played hockey.
I didn’t make it to teenage hockey. There were only four of us in my community, so we had to transfer to a team in the next neighbourhood. Only three transfers were allowed. I was number four, the only time I could’ve been confused with Bobby Orr. What’s more, I was something of a hockey pacifist. Body checking meant looking for teenage pimples or looking at pretty girls.
I did make a comeback of sorts, as an old-timer. That lasted until a “friendly” tournament when I found myself looking up at the face of a meaner, aggressive opponent who had left me horizontal. A generation later, our elder son had just moved into what was then called Bantam hockey, where bodychecking was permitted, and after the first practice he asked: “Can we get our [registration] money back?”
The point is, bone-crushing bodychecks have never been in this family’s hockey DNA. As a prototype Canadian hockey fan, I’m a failure.
This brings me to women’s hockey.
When I “played,” no women did. Toronto’s Abigail Hoffman became a trailblazer, as a nine-year-old, by cutting her hair to play as a boy until she made an all-star team and everybody discovered she really wasn’t the “Ab” they’d thought he was. It became scandalous.
After watching more women’s hockey during the Olympics than I had expected, I realized women play the game as it should be played. For me. This is not about gender equality, nor bowing to female dominance, nor being another prototype failure. It’s about being entertained, that’s all.
My appreciation for their game has roots in my first hockey beat. For two seasons, I covered Canada’s National Team, called the Nationals a few years before there was a Team Canada. The Nats played the Russians, Czechs and Swedes primarily, in an international game that was on larger ice, more wide open, and with the emphasis on skating, passing and shooting—the three essentials skills that make hockey such a great game.
Women’s hockey has just enough hitting while displaying world-class talent in skating, passing and shooting. They may have the occasional fight, and some stickwork, but far less than men. Women will never match the speed of the men, even though Canada has a forward appropriately named Fast. She’d be a natural for the late sports columnist Jim Coleman, who loved it when players names meshed with their sport.
I can hear people saying, “Where have you been for the last quarter century, as the women’s game began making inroads into a sport dominated by men?” Well, for traditional sports fans there are only so many hours available for watching hockey, and the men always came first.
Women will never have the skill-and-speed combination that makes the National Hockey League the best league in the world—i.e., the PWHL isn’t going to equal the NHL. And they will never be as physical, for physiological reasons alone, for which we pacifists are grateful.
The women’s game still needs a taste of parity, internationally, but clearly it is coming. That’s when more dinosaurs like this one will realize how entertaining it is.
