Ball Hockey
Although I spent a lot of time in small towns when I was younger I never became part of the machine known as organized sports. We moved too often and budgets were too limited. It cost a great deal of money to get equipped to play hockey on a small team. So we did the obvious thing we played road hockey. Or ball hockey if you want to give it a seasonal name. Usually we gathered in the parking lot of the local food store where things emptied out quickly at the end of the day and we could have a lovely flat surface to ourselves. We even developed a way to get the ball back when somebody shot it up under the roof. We had learned how to climb up the posts at the back of the lot and get onto the roof roof surface and rescue our precious tennis ball. None of us played tennis of course. Playing ball hockey required a minimum investment. Usually a hockey stick that had been broken and rescued from the local arena. Tennis balls could be head of the dollar store. And so we headed out every evening after supper until it became too cold to stay out any longer. We formed teams on the goal and we played for the fun of it. There were no trophies ever. We tried to follow the rules but in the absence of proper referees we winged that too. I never received a penalty nor a penalty shot. Then playing outside meant that we became instant stars adopting the names of people we knew from TV. Do I miss it? It has been a very long time so no. What I can tell you is that you either played properly or you did not play at all. If you were a brute you were not invited back and cheap shots with a cheap hockey stick could see you end up in a proper fight. We became very sportsmanlike and we develop skills that served us much later in life. Nothing to do with hockey. We understood that the people that we played with might have been on the opposing team but they were still our friends. Our buddies if you will. Hardly no girls ever joined those games because even though it was ball hockey on a parking lot it could get rough. You learn to sort that part out too.
