My Road Hockey Obsession
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You hear professional athletes say the key to becoming a pro is hard work and a love of the game. I had both, but when you don’t have any direction and you only play one year of organized ice hockey, suiting up for an NHL team will always be a dream, no matter how much you love to play. So my game was road hockey. From the age of 10 when the silver ballet was first introduced to me, until the end of high school, all I did was play road hockey and plan to play more road hockey.
Fortunately, the guys I hung out with were great guys and they all wanted to do the same thing I did. We all loved road hockey. There was a core of us, my five best friends that spent so much time playing road hockey we never got into the bad stuff a lot of unfortunate teens get into. Why would we want to do drugs or smoke? That would affect our game, not to mention take precious minutes away from the black ice. School already took so much time away from our games; getting mixed up in troubles away from the asphalt was a distraction we never gave a second thought to. From grade 6 to grade 13, it was road hockey and it was the best time of my life.
The second game was perhaps our most enjoyable game in any tournament we ever played under the name Brantford Blackbears. Joel went in net for this one and here is where Joel cemented his name as a money goalie. While Venkman struggled in goal in past tournaments, he was still regarded as the top goalie during regular street hockey games. From this moment on though, Joel was the best guy in goal when it counted. The team we played was very similar to ours. You could tell they were not a bunch of ice hockey players, trying to pound our inexperience. It was a close contest with the teams trading goals until it was tied at two. Joel had played well to this point but it was a save with less than five minutes to go that I’ll never forget. The opposition had this one Spanish guy that was very muscular and very fast. He was probably a running back for his high school football team. I remember him getting the ball and just taking off. I was in hot pursuit, but could stop him. He was a right hand shot and he moved with such speed that Joel couldn’t backup as quickly as he would have most of the time. This guy deaked to his right and he looked like he had Joel beat to the glove side. But Joel dove back, reaching with full extension to lay the glove down and take away a sure goal. I can still see how he did it and it was perhaps the biggest save I ever saw. It was certainly the save of the tournament. Moments later, Venkman received a penalty for slashing, but in this tournament, the player sat off for two minutes instead of giving up a penalty shot. While shorthanded, I managed to steal the ball as the D-men played catch at the line. I was all alone with time on my side. I never like to deak much because there’s always that possibility of losing the ball and besides, I trusted my shot. I ran down the left wing and from 10 feet out, zipped a wrister into the far side top corner. I didn’t stop to shoot and just kept going after scoring. I ran back to centre in celebration. That shorty proved to be the winner in a 3-2 win, our first win ever.
Our joy was dimmed by news of our next opponent. Playing a team full of Midget “AAA” players we knew from school and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy winning a second game. But Joel was the story again. The shots must have been a 15:1 ratio, we were so outplayed it was a joke, but Joel wasn’t giving them anything and you could see it was affecting them. I remember talking to one of their players when we were both on the sidelines and said, “Are you going to stop toying with us and score already?” He replied, “We’re trying! Your goalie is stopping everything we can throw at him.” Eventually Joel wore down and gave up a couple goals. We lost 4-1, but it should’ve much worse if not for Joel’s heroics. No one can ever take away what Joel did that day. For all the saves Venkman made on me during our lives and for all the games I watched him win playing on Dante and White Owl, Joel’s performance here was the best I think any of us had ever seen.
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About the Book
The whole world knows how much hockey is a vital part of Canadian culture. The cold winters, old rinks, and frozen ponds are ubiquitous to millions of Canadians and contextual for countless more across the world. Even for those who didn’t play ice hockey, the game still became palpable. In My Road Hockey Obsession, author Curt Solomon tells the story of a group of young friends building their lives, friendships, and adolescence around road hockey.
For Solomon, road hockey was much, much more than a pastime. It was the only pastime. When he started playing road hockey, he knew he had found the city of gold, and there was no use looking for or pursuing any other activity. In this unique story built entirely around ball hockey, Solomon shares how he and his friends transformed a simple pastime into the most bonding and durable period of their lives. Road hockey was how they grew up, how they communicated, how they thought, and how they forged life-long memories.
My Road Hockey Obsession narrates a joyous story that sparks nostalgia—the days of orange balls, plastic blades, and the hollow sound of wooden sticks on asphalt.About the Author
Curt Solomon is obsessed with hockey. After graduating from college with a diploma in broadcast journalism, Solomon fulfilled his dream by earning a career doing junior hockey play- by-play in Manitoba. He and his family have lived in four different provinces and currently reside in Ontario.