Practice makes perfect. Almost

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/02/2024 (596 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I am sitting by the little light, under the clock that’s never right.

It may sound as if I’ve been possessed by the spirit of Dr. Seuss, but what I’m really doing is examining the parameters.

Walking the perimeters. Checking the locks and the latches. Managing the order of things.

Under the clock, by the light, near the second-floor front window where the dogs being walked on the street outside are busy halloing their haroos. (Don’t take that apart for spelling or grammar, just roll with it.)

Halloing their haroos to the other dogs, who understand each other absolutely and completely.

They understand because they live there every day. Day after day. Because they walk the dog walk.

Because they’ve put the time in, with padding feet and pulling leashes and smartphone-distracted owners.

I knew a guy when I was in high school. (“Knowing a guy” is proof of nothing unless it’s true, which, this time, it is.) A guy who would go on the ice in a completely empty barn of a hockey rink with almost none of the lights on, just one rank or maybe two of the big old incandescent bulbs inside their puck-proof cages and green-painted hat-like hoods. He’d skate tight rinkside loops up to the opposing blue line and unleash a slapshot that only counted if he hit both the crossbar and the post at exactly the same time, with the puck ending up in the net. You could sit in the near-dark on the splintery wooden benches and watch him do it, over and over and over again.

No one but him, the dry cut of the skates into the hard ice, the flat metal sound of post and crossbar. So all-encompassed in what he was doing that he probably wouldn’t even know that you were there.

An hour or so in, he’d drop his stick over the boards and pick up the big shovel. He’d circle the rink again, shovel on an angle, scraping the ice, cutting the skate snow in long lines before shovelling it off the ice at the back.

Then, he’d take off his skates, put on his winter boots, and, unrolling the fire hose from the heated utility room, flood the ice. Making that one magic sheet for the next person, the one magic sheet you have to experience by stepping through the gate and letting your front skate carve a long, single white line for as long as possible, the drag of friction in that water-pressure-ice calculus barely an afterthought.

He had the skill, and with it the humble, to be the almost perfect hockey package and even that was not enough.

His first name was Robert.

He was not enough to shoulder past everyone else looking for a spot in professional hockey — not enough to be the slightly bigger size, the slightly faster skater — that he would have to have been.

He had heart in spades. The deck was still stacked against him.

I am sure, even though decades have passed, if we met again in a hockey rink, he’d be able to bend fast around the south-end net, head north towards the other end, wind up on the fly and hit the post and the crossbar without even breaking his stride.

I hope Robert finds satisfaction in that, because, for all his work, he couldn’t get to that next level. And he worked. Hard.

We seem to have come to a time where practice, where experience and expertise — two words, one root — mean nothing. Where doctors are wrong because you don’t happen to agree with them. Where vaccines are poison, until your kids get brain damage from measles. Where politicians are crooks, because they don’t do what you want. Where journalists are bought-and-paid-for, because people have no idea what it takes to prove the accuracy of something.

It’s like an alternate universe where you could just pick up a violin and play it every bit as well as a virtuoso who has held an instrument so long their fingers need no advice whatsoever on movement from their conscious brain. Cast that against the fact many journalists, me among them, have worked for decades to develop specialized skills in everything from persuasive commentary to investigative analysis.

This is a complicated way of reacting to someone who called me a few weeks ago to say how mainstream journalism was failing because we weren’t “connecting the dots,” when the dots were as random as the words “taxi,” “jello” and “hammertime.”

I can connect all sorts of random dots to make a picture of a star. Of a giraffe. Of a unicorn.

But I don’t.

I am not in the dot business.

To reiterate.

Me. Light. Clock that’s never right.

Haroo.

That’s what I do. Maybe you get it. Maybe you don’t.

But don’t call to tell me my job when you don’t even have an inkling of what it is, or what it takes or how it works.

Puck, metal, net — and you couldn’t fathom how he managed to do it so many times in a row.

But he did.

Thanks, Robert. For the example.

Russell Wangersky is the comment editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca