Читать книгу I Am Nobody. Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole My Life онлайн

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So it was not surprising that I started skating just before my fourth birthday and was participating in local organized hockey by the time I was five. I started my hockey life as a very large forward. I was so big for my age that I stuck out in the crowd. At the local park I was once mistaken for being a somewhat slow pre-teen when in fact I was only five or six. I was a very good skater, given my early start, and that combination of size and ability was a recipe for a disaster in the early 1970s, when kids of all ages, shapes, and sizes were still body-checking each other. And that’s where the story really begins, when I became a goalie not by choice but as a result of an incident at an outdoor rink that showed both the good and the bad in my father.

We played most of our hockey at outdoor rinks. My local community club was Heritage-Victoria, and that’s where I was first signed up to play. It’s in the west end of Winnipeg, in the center of a group of very modest suburban homes built near the end of the baby boom. Outdoor hockey in the winter meant kids played while parents huddled on snowbanks, shifting their weight from one foot to the other to keep their feet from freezing. Even back then the parents were at least as engaged as the kids playing, if not more so. The problem is that when they’re young, kids can be of wildly different sizes and abilities, and that can impact a parent’s state of mind, especially if your kid isn’t as big as or as good as somebody else’s and you’re the type who wishes otherwise.