Battle of the Blades

I like the CBC television program, Battle of the Blades, in which ex-NHL hockey players are paired with world class figure skaters and compete in weekly pairs competition eliminations. It brings together many aspects of what I have loved through different stages of my life.

My mother (and you'd have to know my mother to really appreciate the subtleties in this comment) used to say that I was not graceful with shoes on but put skates on me and I transformed. I do know that skating was freedom for me as a child. I was the ultimate in self-consciousness, which meant that off-ice I lived in my brain, without mind/body/soul integration so perhaps there was an element of truth in what my mother said. My brothers played hockey; I figure skated, and a large part of our family life centered on the trips to the outdoor rink where we trained and competed. The road to the rink was circuitous, hilly and dark, the kind of road that was rife for nightmares. In my memory, even those moments of worry were positive as they meant I was going skating.

Activity was an escape from dysfunction inside the house, so I would join my brothers and practice wrist shots and slap shots on the driveway. A few years later, that practice came in handy when I was in the first class of girls attending a prep school that had been all boys for the previous 100 years. There were a number of figure skaters among us and we would spin and jump on the limited ice time allotted. We compared our amount of practice time to those of the hockey players, and formulated a plan. We would form an ice hockey team. Recruiting players was easy, and one of the coaches agreed to help us. Our first game was against the freshman boys. I recall the fans leaning against boards cheering but I do not remember the score. I believe we played that first game in figure skates and were then told that if we wanted to play again, we would need to be in hockey skates.

The transition from figure skates to hockey skates is not as challenging as the opposite. No toe pick but a slightly different balance point. I became a hockey player and a figure skater, a pioneer of sorts, doing anything for ice time. At university several years later, the same principle held true. Hockey was the way to ice time. It was the mid '70s and women's hockey was just emerging. There was no official team, but enough women came together to create a league. The pictures from that time are amusing...helmets, gloves, jerseys, and shin pads layered over tight blue jeans. I continued to wear my figure skates to open ice every Friday afternoon, and still have those well worn skates. The padding on the tongue is dry and the leather full of scratches. I prefer them still to my new skates. Those old skates helped shape who I am.

Watching The Battle of the Blades hockey players trip over their toe picks and laughing as they joke about making fools of themselves on national television is a good lesson for us amateur athletes. It is a joy to see seasoned professionals learning something new. They are like the rest of us. They fall, they laugh, and they get up. They have fear but it's not stopping them. It is also a joy to see these strong and capable women teaching the hockey players the sport they love. The addition of music to movement frees up some of the athletes; constrains others. Choreography - training the body to respond in certain ways time after time - is new to most of the men.

The initial segment highlighted some of the back stories of the athletes, reinforcing that the images we see on Olympic or NHL arenas are only part of the person. The story of Theo Fleury's past addictions, the story of Russ Courtnall's father's depression and suicide, and tapes of Ekaterina Gordeeva's youthful exuberance eating an ice cream cone after an Olympic win and then skating alone without a partner, when her husband and partner, Sergei Grinkov, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 28, all shift our perceptions of professional athletes. With their stories, they again are like us. They have pain and challenge but they go on.

I love sport for its inherent life lessons. I love sport because it reveals greatness in ordinary people, and when two of my favorites sports are combined into one corny but incredibly fun television show, I am happy.