The Washington Capitals brought dozens of floor hockey sticks with them to an area middle school this week to introduce a youthful student body to hockey. When I read the media advisory for it I knew I’d want to write something about it, for while I wasn’t fortunate enough to have two of the planet’s finest hockey performers tutor me in 1970s D.C. when I was introduced to that version of the sport, it was hockey’s most basic version, played only in sneakers with a stick in hand, that got me hooked on hockey. For life.
I remember being in grade three, being no more than seven or eight years old, and back then my elementary school in Rockville, Md., had no gymnasium. One spring day we boarded the school bus and headed out onto Montrose Rd. and rode for about 10 minutes toward west Rockville to another Catholic parish with a gym. I remember riding the bus that day with an uncertainty about what form of recreation awaited us. We were field-tripping toward a nearby gym for an extended period of play, which for athletically inclined me was a treat of the grandest kind.
I remember entering the gym and seeing the plastic sticks packed like toothpicks in a bin. I don’t remember receiving much in the way of instruction for the new game. Our gym teacher may well have just dropped a floor hockey puck among us and left us to figure it all out. The next thing I remember is our co-ed game crammed with 30 pursuing a single puck, and my having it a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if two or three of us boys ordered two sturdily built girls into the goals. That was a kind of authority boys had over girls at that stage of life. That soon waned.
In that first game I remember fantastic frenzy, thick packs of poking sticks, a sudden burst from the horde by a single gleeful puck possessor, and joyful shrieks and screams from the boys and the girls.
I remember riding the bus back to school that day feverishly wondering if we’d return for floor hockey the following week. We didn’t, and for the remainder of that school year I missed hockey.
Floor hockey came back into my life in a big way in college. Our Midwest campus had an old gym that by virtue of its age and condition was suitable only for intramural athletics. No intramural sport was as popular on campus as floor hockey. It was literally the case that hundreds of students would arrive at the gym before 8:00 on registration morning to ensure their roster submission was accepted, which if you recall the hours that undergraduates keep, was testament to devotion indeed. There were two separate leagues for floor hockey on campus, one for fraternities and one for the general student body. I competed in both, and over four years I never missed a game.
Floor hockey in college was so much more elaborate than in grade school. We played in confining boundaries forged by high-stacked wrestling mats and even partition boards on one side and the face of a stage on another. I remember lively corner and boards work from those leagues those years.
I also remember wildly creative and crude names for the teams in the general division. I’m not able to repeat my ten favorite for you in this forum, but buttonhole me at Verizon Center tomorrow night and I’ll rattle them off for you with appropriate discretion. There was something appropriately hockey about them, I remember.
My fraternity was very much a hockey one. We didn’t just love to watch and follow hockey but we were the school’s varsity hockey players. And so when it came to floor hockey in the Greek division we were very, very good. There were a lot of good hockey players in that division, but we were beastly. We’d win games occasionally by like scores of 21-2. We lost three games in the entirety of my four years there, and in all three we were without our goalie. He liked beer a bit more than the rest of our beer-loving team, I recall. We had to play without a netminder (our AWOL backstopper had the goalie gear). One of those losses, I remember, came in overtime.
It occurs to me that right at this point in the calendar there’s a fresh set of five hundred or a thousand students at my alma mater readying themselves for the start of the winter semester’s great recreational sweat, in wide smiles. How often do we in middle age pine for a return to campus, to go back in time to campus Friday nights to relive that setting’s mischief? Oh, there are a few re-dos from Frat Row I’d like to pursue, but just as much I’d like, in a flat belly, to pull low over my eyes a set of floor hockey goggles and get back at that warp-speed game of rough-and-tumble run and gun.
