SAINT BLAISE CONVERTS MOTHER TUCKER AT AN ICE RINK OFF I-95. (OR, WHAT WOULD YOUR LIFE BE LIKE IF YOUR WIFE AND YOUR DAUGHTER PLAYED HOCKEY?)

It took awhile for my wife to warm to hockey. She began to hate it because of me and refused to even step on the ice to skate with our kids to remain untainted by the most “odious and odoriferous” sport.

More than a decade into our mixed marriage (I: Polish-American Catholic carnivore from Michigan, and she: cradle southern Baptist turned Buddhist vegetarian), my wife announced that she wanted to play hockey. (To protect my wife’s privacy, let’s call her Tucker. Actually, Tucker is her name, but no one ever believes that. Her name has been mangled as Ticker, Hunter and Tuckle.)

I thought a couple things about Tucker’s suspicious transformation: First, she had had an affair with one of the hockey coaches, or hockey parents and she thinks this is the only way to buy my forgiveness or mask her infidelity. Second, I figured it might be some mild identity disorder caused by the deterioration of her Southern cultural life. Third, and most disturbing, I wondered who was going to stay home with the kids on Tuesday nights during adult league hockey games if both of us were playing hockey.

This was the truly terrifying prospect. Who would wear the hockey pants in my family?

How did this metamorphosis happen? Was it real? What in the world was I going to do about it? I take pride that so far I’ve never said: "Honey, if grown women of your striking beauty were meant to play the rough and tumble game of hockey, don=t you think they Mattel, Inc. would have made a Hockey Barbie by now?"

Both of my children, a 10-year-old girl named WJ, and an 8-year-old boy nicknamed Leelo, play hockey too. (My daughter, the only girl on the team, ran up more penalty minutes than all the other boys on her Squirt team combined. My son only took two penalties all season. What does this say about our parenting?)

My wife decided to play hockey after resisting the sport her kids and husband so loved, after she watched my son’s then 9-year-old teammate with dwarfism play the game. Her heart started to soften on a trip to Fredericksburg, Virginia where my son played in an end-of-season tournament with his Mite team (6 to 8-years-old).

When we first discussed whether she was going to the tournament, she balked. “Why would I drive four hours to a dingy, stinky hockey rink so a six-year-old can play hockey?” “He’s your son”, I responded, a bit self-righteously. “And he really wants to play,” I added.

I couldn’t go because on that same weekend, I was set to help coach my daughter’s hockey team for a tournament in Winston-Salem. “It won’t be any fun for me,” she said. “You love hockey, and you want to do it. It’s just work for me.”
I gently suggested she might surprise herself and have fun, visit a few Civil War sites, but it was up to her.

She relented, and her life will never be the same. Life never is the same anyway.
The ice rink in Fredericksburg has a mezzanine area about ten feet above the bench enclosures of both teams. The parents can hear every cuss word that comes out of the mouths of the coaches, as well as the criticism and praise directed at their own offspring.

What did Tucker hear? She heard hockey strategy, and slowly, painfully, like underarm chafing only apparent later, she began to understand the game she had so far resisted. More importantly, Tucker saw the zeal of Blaise.

Blaise didn’t have the longest legs, or the longest arms or the longest stick of the boys on the ice, but he had something physical dimensions can’t stop -- hockey reach -- the desire to get to puck no matter what is in the way. Blaise had a love and knowledge of hockey far beyond his size and age.

The kid hustled. He made body-on-the-ice, puck-blocking saves to stop the puck. He willed his body to go faster than seemed possible. And he scored on a diving, shape-shifting, contortionist’s shot. It was that shot, and the ensuing grin of ecstatic, otherworldly pleasure, that pierced the hockey-hating heart of my wife that day.

She had watched Blaise many times before, at practice at the Triangle Sportsplex, and at other games closer to home. Did her Confederate ancestors put a curse on her for marrying a Northerner, and force her to live as one for all time?
Something surprising and mysterious happened that day as Tucker looked down from her spy-in-the-sky spot over the Hillsborough Sharks’ bench area and saw Blaise’s “I just scored a goal” grin. She wanted to feel that way. After her youth spent in Raleigh, N.C., swimming, playing tennis and basketball, she wanted to get out on the ice.

I thank Saint Blaise of Oxford, N.C. for converting my wife to the sport of hockey in that faraway rink in Virginia, a few miles off of Interstate 95 and a world away from the ghosts of Dixie.

Of course, I’m not surprised that a boy-saint was responsible for this miracle. We Roman Catholics have a lot of saints, almost one for every occasion.

The official Saint Blaise, who died in 316, is invoked for serious, life threatening neck conditions, goiters, and diseases of the throat. According to ourcatechism.com, St. Blaise was persecuted for his faith and to punish him, he was thrown into a lake. Blaise did not sink, but instead stood on the water. No mention is made of ice in this miraculous event. After he returned to the shore, he was martyred after being beaten, his skin was torn off with wool combs, and finally, he was beheaded.

I’m pretty sure our young Blaise wears Kevlar neck protection (as all hockey players should) against the potentially fatal though, rare, accidental slash from razor sharp skate blades. So far, the U.S.A. Hockey organization and the Vatican take no official position on this.

Our St. Blaise is the patron saint of quick-acting hockey conversions during a tournament road trip. Within a month of that Fredericksburg tournament, we went to a public skating session and we skated as a family. Dad, mom, daughter and son skated together for the first time ever. I’d been skating with the kids since before they turned three-years-old. The boycott had ended.

Skating together as a family led to Tucker taking skating lessons, and later Learn to Play Hockey classes. Tucker quickly went from hockey classes to playing in our rinks’ developmental hockey league – D League. She played for the mighty Pylons, with their blaze orange jerseys. Tucker wore my first league jersey from the days when I played for the Pylons. Number 5. Red Wings defenseman Nick Nidstrom’s number. Leelo’s number as well.

Now Tucker plays in a women’s league. How were we to know that my wife started playing hockey at the right point in our nation’s history, a time when being a Hockey Mom became political? There were a lot of things that year we couldn’t have known, like how girls’ hockey would save the world.

To be continued . . .