LIVING THE DREAM
A few weeks after graduating from high school, I went up to my varsity goalie coach to talk about where I could play next season. He was standing by the glass at the ice rink, watching another up-and-coming goalie, a sophomore who could potentially make the varsity team next year. He saw me in the corner of his eye, and I awkwardly put my hands into my pocket and approached.
“Hey coach,” I said. “Got a second?”
“Sure,” he said, still watching the sophomore practice. “What’s on your mind?”
“I was just wondering if…you know…you had any suggestions of where I could play next year?”
My former goalie coach turned away from the glass and looked to see if I was kidding. Pitifully, he saw I wasn’t. “You can always try the community college team. I hear they’re bringing the program back around.”
“I mean, I can go anywhere, right? What teams should I try out for?”
He turned back to watching the sophomore. “You played four games last year, Robert. Not a lot of teams had a good look at you, or even know who you are. I’d say the beer leagues are a great place to start.”
At the time, I thought that his answer was dismissive. However, from the vantage of my mid-thirties and looking back at my 18-year-old self that had just completed his first year of competitive hockey, this answer was gracious in hindsight. My former coach knew my story. He knew I started playing ice hockey three years before and started taking goalie lessons only a year after I had begun. He knew my knowledge about travel hockey was next to nil.
It was a gracious answer because he didn’t tell me the truth—which was that I was a dreamer who had no idea what the road to pro hockey looked like.
My former goalie coach was Carl Howell, a former pro goaltender who played minor league hockey. Carl played goalie in an era when wearing a thin layer of molded fiberglass over your face was the best protection available—you know, the “Jason” mask from the film Friday the 13th.
His career ended when scrambling in his goal crease for a loose puck, and a stick struck him in the eye, plucking it out of the socket. This was also the era where dirty tactics were the norm. Many forwards pounded a nail into the top of the blade of their hockey sticks, which made it all the easier to hook a guy and cut him open in the process (because if you’re going to get a 2-minute penalty for hooking, you might as well cut an incision big enough for a surgeon on your way to the penalty box).
Scrambling in the crease, a nail stuck into his eye and pulled the eye clean out of his face.
The eye was saved and reinserted into the socket, but my former coach lost most of his depth perception, which made stopping pucks nearly impossible, thereby ending his career. He might have played in the NHL full time had he had better fortune.
“Ok,” I answered my goalie coach after he told me to play in the beer leagues. “Do you know which one I should join?”
He smiled, a brimming, knowing smile full of hockey knowledge I could never know or understand. “They’ll find you if they want you. Keep your phone on.”
It took years to realize that, no, I wasn’t going to be scouted to play pro hockey. I had a dream when I started playing, and only years after that did the bigger picture of the pro hockey life start to dawn on me.
All I had was a dream and I thought it was enough to make the NHL.
I’ve always pondered the phrase “Living the Dream”. To me, the phrase meant to have the ideal life where one was doing the work they loved, the kind where real struggle and toil were nonexistent. While watching the 2022 World Junior Hockey Championship over the last week, I discovered a vastly different view form what it means to live the dream.
Many of the players participating in the 2022 World Junior Hockey Championship are living the dream. To be chosen to represent your country is indication that you are the best of your age group. You see the names that have made previous Canadian or US World Junior teams and many have become stars in the NHL. To assume these young players are on a path to greatness seems logical. Aren’t these players living the dream?
Not exactly.
To have arrived at the World Junior stage, these players have grown up with a constant pressure to perform since they’ve put on a pair of skates and shown superior skills compared to everyone else their age. With these superior skills came a caravan of interested parties: parents, coaches, scouts, former pros, and everyone else who saw the potential of someone who, one day, could have his name on the back of a NHL jersey. All these young players had to leave their families to play in the top Junior Leagues in the country, living with host families in place of their own, devoting their whole life to playing the game they hope will lead to becoming a professional.
The 2022 World Junior Championship is just a steppingstone along the way to being a professional. It’s another measuring station to prove that these prospects are on task and exceeding even greater expectations. There’s no downtime. These players are still required to produce, to keep separating themselves from the competition, to put up the best numbers of their careers in their draft year just to move up a few spots into the coveted Top 5 of the NHL Draft.
These players know the road to pro hockey by 17-years-old because it has been instilled into their belief system since they started. They are the future, and they play every shift like it, too.
And after watching a few games of these future stars, I thought back to when I was 17-years-old with the dream of becoming one of them.
I can laugh at how absurd that dream was.
A year before talking with my varsity goalie coach, I was at my neighborhood park on a cement rink with a painted goalie crease and undersized net, donning plastic-shelled street hockey goalie gear. I spent nights duct-taping the goalie pads back together after they had disintegrated from the last time of sliding across the cement crease. A group of five of us played along with whichever neighborhood kids came around, ranging from elementary to high schoolers. Most everyone ran in tennis shoes or didn’t own a pair of rollerblades. Hardly any wore hockey gloves and had blisters on their hands after a few hours of shooting with old wooden hockey sticks.
We played in 90-degree heat. All of us wearing a replica jersey of our favorite NHL teams we had bid on eBay for cheap. We were the neighborhood all-stars without a clue about what it meant to play the pro game, but it didn’t much matter.
I was never going to play at a level remotely close to what the best players in the world could play at age 17. It still doesn’t much matter. I still play hockey even with a worsening arthritic wrist and pinched nerve near a hip flexor that feels like absolute agony after playing all these years.
I’ll keep playing because I’ve decided the dream is to keep it going for as long as possible.
That’s what I share with those 2022 World Junior players—the will to keep living the dream.
It’s not worth losing an eye over, maybe, but for a sore wrist and stiff hip?
I’ll keep my phone on.
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GOODY TWO-SHOES
I struggle to write about movies because they inevitably morph into mini reviews. And truthfully, I don’t want to write reviews on this website. Reviews, and criticism for that matter, revolve around an air of expertise, that because a thing has flaws or was masterful in some way, it means that the reviewer had the pedigree to point out why. A good critic is a fine thing to have in the world (allegedly), but overall, I think an audience knows how they feel about entertainment without someone defining terms.
In the world of entertainment, I’ve seldom found a review useful before experiencing something first.
So, if you haven’t seen Luck, don’t worry—I won’t be reviewing the movie. Instead, I’m interested in the ramifications of the hero of the movie, the aged-out orphan, Sam.
Sam is fascinating because there isn’t much to her character other than the fact that she was an orphan with bad luck and was never adopted. She is good to a fault and wants nothing more than for others to succeed in life. Samrepresents the ideal kind and selfless person, someone willing to sacrifice her own wellbeing for the sake of others. Of course, this goodness leads to her saving the day and everyone lives happily ever after by the end.
Hey, this is a kid’s movie after all—why would everything not work out?
However, it’s the subject matter of the movie that further complicates the character of Sam. The movie is about “bad luck” and its value in the world. Can someone with bad luck still strive to be a good person despite how things have turned out? What would be different about our lives if we had had “good luck” instead of “bad luck”?
These are fun concepts to debate, but let’s think about it in terms of Sam’s character as the ideal selfless giver.
In Luck, the question the film wants us to ask of Sam is, “Will she ever get rid of her bad luck?”
And this was my problem with Sam: I didn’t really care if she got rid of bad luck or not.
Here’s the thing: I want to believe in the characters of the movie. I want to follow and cheer for them when they get what they need. With characters like Sam, however, I found myself rolling my eyes at her selfless acts and goodwill. She was SO GOOD that I began to see this as annoying. I started to feel the gimmick of bad luck following her around all the time was JUSTIFIED.
There’s a name for this wanting someone to have misfortune. No, it’s not schadenfreude, which is pleasure we derive from others’ pain. No, this was more of a feeling of wanting bad things to happen to someone attempting to do “too much” good.
We’ve heard the term before. We call these people who do good without reciprocity a Goody Two-Shoes.
We want a Goody Two-Shoes to fail. They’re the ones who always raise their hand in class because they have the right answer, the ones who always have a compliment or positive thing to say about someone, the ones who pitch in and help clean up a mess they didn’t make. While these are all wonderful qualities, we want terrible things to befall this person.
Why?
Because none of it is justified without acknowledgment of a dark side. Goodness is impressive with 3-dimensional characters, not as a moral set of instructions.
Sam is good for goodness sake (yes, like the Christmas song) and for no other reason that’s given. Perhaps there wasn’t time to further flesh out why she behaves this way, but I had a hard time empathizing with someone passed over for adoption, who certainly suffers from some history of childhood trauma or abandonment issues with no symptoms at age 18. This is someone I’m not rooting for because I don’t understand her.
I’d argue this choice of character doesn’t work. I like goodness, but like love, I want to see it earned. In a romantic comedy, the audience knows the leading man and lady are going to end up together in the end…but the fun of the story is the style and stakes of the obstacles that prevent this.
In Luck, without consequences to Sam’s “bad luck” other than the universe backfiring on her every waking move, there’s very little reason to care.
(Unless you feel the idea of a “good person” is enough…in which case, good for you—two enthusiastic thumbs up.)
Sam isn’t responsible for her misfortune; the universe is.
In other words, Deus Ex Machina, which is why I think the story all falls apart.
Something else influences Sam’s destiny, not her choices.
It’s difficult to root for someone who isn’t in control of their destiny. With Sam, I felt neutral about her misfortunes coming to an end. I liked her, but what else was there?
I wanted to know more about Sam.
I just didn’t get it.
Which is just my luck!
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MY FIRST ESSAY IS OUT NOW!
That’s right, my first full essay was posted last Sunday! It’s about EVO, the Evolution Championship Seriesor the premiere fighting game tournament held in Las Vegas every summer. The tournament has undergone quite a storied couple of years and I wanted to write about my history following the fighting game community during that time. I’m happy with how the essay turned out and will link it below.
I plan on writing more essays like the EVO piece more often. I have a few in the pipeline but I haven’t much else to share right now, so to stay tuned!
Please give EVO: Reunion a read! I’m always looking for feedback and would love to read your thoughts!
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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,
