I wouldn’t like me if I met me

The Fall season of our All-Sort-of-Sport league launched on Tuesday, and it’s a pretty busy time, what with all the kicking ass and taking names. Sport One was floor hockey, which I went from dreading, to being ambivalent to, to anticipating, and then (after we won our back-to-back games) totally loving. The first team was good, and they owned us in the beginning until we got our act together. The second team was really quite terrible--to the point where every member of our team got a goal, even yours truly. After wiping the floor with team two for the first short while, I think we did a very good job of letting them sneak in a few goals without letting them know we were letting them sneak in a few goals. It was 20 – 10 by the end, so kudos to us.

Two observations I come away with from that game:

• I’m a wuss – At the onset I thought everyone was being hyper-aggressive. I remember thinking, “Geez, guys—dial it down a notch!” As the game went by, the feeling totally disappeared, even though the level of play was about the same. Reflecting on it during a break, I realized that it was the noise that freaked me out. Floor hockey is noisy as shit, with your plastics sticks, and your gym floor, and your squeaking, slidey shoes. But until I got accustomed to it, my default was to boo-hoo about it.
  

• Skillz – The difference between being truly terrible at floor hockey and being not terrible at all is so minor. Here’s the key: don’t let the other guy do what he wants to do. It's a good rule for pretty much every sport, but I definitely saw it in action on Tuesday. In the first game, no one on the opposing team was a superstar, but the players on defense were on top of us the whole time. You really had to work to get a shot off or complete a pass. Cut to game two where the other team's defense gave you distance. And I mean distance. I remember being close to their net, and being up by about six goals at that point, so really taking my time, doing this big elaborate turn and thinking that someone would steal the ball in the fifteen seconds it took me to complete this turn. But when I finally faced the goal again, the guy covering was about eight feet to the right of me. Just ... waiting. I couldn't not score, you know. Don't let the other guy do what he wants to do. True for floor hockey, true for soccer, true for Ultimate Fighting. Just true.

I have pretty vivid memories of floor hockey in high school. I hated it with the intensity of a thousand suns. Nine of ten guys at my school played hockey, and had been playing it since they were wee. And I sucked so bad then. They put me in net because I couldn't do anything else, and I remember literally diving out of the way if the ball rose off the ground on its way towards me. I also remember being the ref for a gym class game and, not knowing shit about shit, calling a penalty every time some one brought their stick more than eight inches off the ground, or every time someone's stick collided with someone else stick, until the entire class pretty much started ignoring my whistle outright. And I was so mad at the time, but in retrospect, if I was a slightly smarter or sportier kid who'd known me back then, I probably would have kicked the shit outta me.