As a hockey dad, my heart is broken

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/04/2018 (2765 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I still had the stale, damp stench of the rink in my nostrils when I felt my heart shatter into a million pieces.

It was Friday evening, two hours after I had refereed a hockey game and one hour after I had a beer with the head coach of a junior B team in British Columbia I had gotten to know recently. In town to visit family, he had grown up, played, managed and coached teams in both the Saskatchewan Junior A loop and the Western Hockey League. The laughter and the stories were still fresh in my mind when he sent me a text.

“Humboldt bus T-boned by semi,” the text began. “Seven dead.”

I sat silently in my car, the cold grip of fear tightening around my heart.

I have a 17-old-son who is graduating from high school this year and wants to test his mettle in junior hockey at some level. Earlier that day, I had talked to him about the sacrifices necessary to succeed in junior hockey, the challenges of being away from the safety net of family and friends, the experience of riding buses and suddenly being responsible for managing his own life.

As the details of the tragedy began to light up the screen of my smartphone — and we learned the death toll had increased to 15 — I thought about all of my friends with sons the same age who had already left home to play junior hockey. I imagined all those families, and the ones I had never met whose sons played for Humboldt, having the same conversations with their sons before they became Broncos.

I kept telling myself the story wasn’t about hockey: it’s about the horrible loss of young lives. But as the tears welled up in my eyes and my hands began to shake, I knew this tragedy could not be separated from the game.

If you have kids in hockey, or any serious sport, you have probably had the conversation about how we encourage them to play not because it is life, but because it prepares them for life. When it is good, it helps them face and overcome adversity. It cultivates resilience and confidence. It prepares them to be successful in whatever they do.

But we also have to make sure they know it’s not a life-or-death scenario. If they don’t succeed, it doesn’t mean they can’t be good at something else. Being a parent means walking that line between all the good that sports can do in building a successful person and ensuring they know failure is not the end of the world.

Ah, but it’s so much harder to be that objective about hockey, a sport that is forever included in the sequence of our national DNA.

We metaphorically live and die with our kids as they navigate their way through the game. If they rise to the point of playing serious hockey, we hold our breath as the speed and ferocity of the game increases. For those who go on to play at the highest levels of amateur hockey, we then have to stand by and watch our not-quite-fully formed kids leave home to pursue a dream that only a precious few ever achieve.

And while promising young athletes and families across the country make all kinds of sacrifices in pursuit of their dreams, few other sports in this country expect so much of kids at such an early age.

In Western Canada, players are drafted into the Western Hockey League pipeline at 14, the youngest junior hockey draft in the country. Although only a handful of those draftees ever make it to the “Dub,” most of them will at some point move away from home to play at a lower level of junior hockey.

My B.C. coach friend reminded me of an alarming statistic: only 25 per cent of all the kids playing junior hockey at all levels in B.C. are from B.C. The rest come from across the country, lured by the prospect of playing in a league renowned for exposing players to scouts from U.S. colleges. That means teens as young as 15 living their lives in rinks, billets and buses a long way from home.

That image plays heavily into the Humboldt story. As the identities of all of the players who were killed become known, we add another small, horrible chapter to a uniquely Canadian story. The way they were adopted by their billet families, the friendships they forged and the plans they had for life after hockey.

Stories such as that, shared by so many other Canadians, expose the depth of the grip this game has on our hearts. It explains to some extent why, when tragedy strikes the game, it cuts us particularly deep.

As I sat wet-eyed and shaking in my car, I found myself searching my phone for one of my favourite passages from Ken Dryden’s seminal book, The Game. Dryden was talking about how hockey has worked its way deep into the psyche of the nation through the lens of our childhoods.

“Nothing is as good as it used to be, and it never was,” Dryden wrote. “The ‘golden age of sports,’ the golden age of anything, is the age of everyone’s childhood.”

I started the car and drove to a nearby rink where I knew my son was refereeing a game. I rushed in and saw that the Zamboni was cleaning the ice between the second and third periods. I quickly made my way to the ref room and poked my head in.

My son looked at me with that mix of shock and amusement that teenagers reserve just for parents.

“Hey,” I said, a silly grin plastered to my face. “Good luck in the third period.”

Then, I closed the door, and standing at very back at the rink where no one could see me, I watched the perfect, glossy wake of the Zamboni slowly dry into smooth, clean ice. A new beginning.

And I cried again.

I cried because my son was safe.

And I cried because as much as they loved and sacrificed for the game, the Humboldt Broncos who died Friday on a Saskatchewan highway would never grow old enough to celebrate their golden age.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca