man-child - An adult male who still possesses psychological traits of a child. Traits include, but are not necessarily limited to:
- whining
- pettiness
- trying to pass the blame for their own underdeveloped judgement
- not "stepping up to the plate" when it's their role to
- not to mention an overall insecurity in who he is as a man, from which similar traits sprout
On Thursday November 22nd 2019, around 10:30pm, two teams of grown men stepped on the ice for an evening of so-called adult hockey, or ‘beer league’, as it was once appropriately called. We’ll get to that in a bit. This in itself is not an uncommon sight, but what happens next is something which has been misunderstood, or at the very least, not fully analyzed, for quite some time. Shortly after the drop of the puck; odd, infantile, and puerile behavior unleashed itself across the arena – the sad curse of the man-child came down upon the frozen surface.
That was my best attempt to replicate an introduction worthy of Malcolm Gladwell’s penmanship, the kind you find in any of his highly acclaimed and fascinating reads. Unlike Gladwell though, this story does not apply the same rigorous intellectual reflection nor does it wrestle with scientific facts or academic research. This is not because I am not brain savvy enough to engage in such rigour (That’s what I keep telling myself). It is simply because there is no research around the subject. This is so, since no one is senseless enough to be exposed to this kind of behavior at midnight on a week day. Unlike me (okay...well maybe not so brain savvy). On the other hand, boy o boy does this ludicrous choice of mine put me in a perfect position to write about it. This story is very much a first-hand account of a sociological phenomenon named, not officially, but quite appropriately, the curse of the man-child, the curse of the bucket head or even the curse of the grown man who failed aspects of his life and so to make himself feel better during his midlife crisis he joins a hockey league to tell himself that he could still become who he wanted to be but ends up being a petty, whiny, despicable no good asshole who is just sad and pathetic.
(That last one is very rarely used – like the full title of Marat/Sade)
(This is a cultural reference – please look up when you’re done reading this story)
Before we dive into this piece of social satire, let me begin by sharing a bit of my background and how my point of view of this curse is shaped. I understand hockey, okay? I literally grew up in it – and I am literally using the word literally literally. I’m not talking about the ‘I am a relentless super fan of a mediocre team so I understand everything about professional sports’ kind of understanding. No, my father was a professional hockey player and coach for over 30 years. He played in Canada, the US, Switzerland, Germany, and France. He played during the 1988 Calgary Olympics and he was the assistant coach for the French National team on two separate occasions. I understand the sport. I played throughout my childhood and I referee to this day. I know what it is and how it works. I also stopped playing hockey when I realized that I was not good enough to pursue a career in it. So to say that I am well placed to investigate this curse is an understatement.
Like anything, I have seen some real highs and lows on the ice. I’ve witnessed broken legs, skated-over thighs (that’s right, someone skated over a goalie’s exposed back thigh and cut it open), and nasty parents – but nothing is ever as disturbing as the grown men whose childhood dreams crumbled 20 years earlier and are now showing up once a week to lace ye old skates and play the good old hockey game.
To fully appreciate the evolution of this curse, it is important to understand that it does not strike its recipient in a sharp and quick manner, it is a slow burner which starts at a young age when these men, or man-babies, are introduced to hockey as children. To simplify things, I’ve broken this evolution down into three key periods.
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(1) Childhood – the dreams
What’s not to love about playing hockey as a child? You get to see your friends on weekends (unfortunately, sometimes, a little too early on Sunday mornings), you exercise, you have fun, you fully try to reproduce things you saw on the TV the night before when your favourite player scored a hell of a goal. If you’re lucky, the coach or the parent acting as coach has something valuable to impart. Hockey lessons that more often than not translate into life lessons, in moments you’d least expect. Like the time your coach told you that one shot equaled two chances to score. The show and the rebound – I’ll let you figure that one out. Most importantly, it’s your time to dream. Your time to, well for those who want to, imagine yourself on a path to greatness, on a path to the NHL, or even better, on a path to being one of the players on the cover of EA Sport’s NHL 2037. NHL 2001 still remains my favourite sports video game right ahead of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. We should never underestimate the power of dreaming, of thinking big, especially if it creates a work ethic and a real desire to better yourself, especially in children. Of course, there comes a point where reality starts to seep in and learning to know yourself becomes one of life’s great challenges. That reality can be rewarding, eye opening, and even life-changing, but it can also have drastic consequences. Consequences that will lead you to meet me 20 years later, late at night, in the middle of winter, to tell me that I ‘fucking suck’.
(2) Adolescence – the purgatory
Adolescence is a strange beast. Once again, there’s no Malcolm Gladwell research to back me up on this one, other than the fact that I was an adolescent, and that it was a strange beast. Teenage hood is where life starts to make sense, or make no sense at all, depending on how you look at it. It’s a time where you’re confronted with crucial decisions while balancing the burning desire to go after the dreams you’ve had since you were a child. That’s the reason I call this time purgatory. It’s all about reflection, critical reflection, about yourself, about your life. A teenager also has to have fun. They are required to release all those pressures of life, of the changes they experience, whether they are mental or physical ones. For that, hockey is still an option, of course. If you worked hard and wanted it, you would try-out for rep hockey. If, on the other hand, you still wanted to have fun, expend a little energy and use hockey as way to unleash some of the struggles of life through body checking and spewing all kinds of things about your opponent’s mother, then house hockey was also there for you.
Somewhere in the middle of those two examples lies the boy who would become the man-child of this story. You see, if you were good enough, you would now be faced with decisions that would impact how you would move forward through your teens. If you were good, you would be paying rep hockey, you would be working many more hours a week at the sport, but you would also be introduced to philosophies and approaches to the game that would require some real thought and integrity. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t one day get a little too physical and fight someone, or say something slightly homophobic to an opponent, but you would be reprimanded and take that lesson with you as you grew older.
Oddly enough, it is the same thing for those who were at the opposite end of that spectrum. Those who wanted to play hockey to sweat out pubescent hormones and the shame that comes along with them could do so. House hockey is relaxed - it’s recreational. Sure it can be competitive, but in all likelihood, those teens probably don’t think much of it. They go home, secretly smoke some weed and on the weekend, they get drunk with their friends inside of dimly lit basement suites. In a few years, the thought of graduating from high school and moving on to university would become rude awakenings. Causing these teens to stow away any memories of hockey games, transforming earlier dreams of video game covers into rational professional life directions and allowing said teenager to find amusement and entertainment through other things. Gyms, friends, sex – usually not culture… Several years later, in their newly found career, when they least expect it, they would also be faced with a situation which would require the use of those lessons your friend Brendan’s dad taught you during practice. One shot equals two chances to score, boys. Thanks Mr. Fielder, I’m still thinking about that one.
The young man stuck in the middle - he wants to follow his dreams, but adolescence dished out a tough hand. He’s not good enough to be in rep hockey, or he is but not enough to be the best. He’s so focused on wanting to be great, that school goes on the back burner. He’s still doing adolescent things; the drinking, the weed, but he has trouble letting go of the failure, so little bouts of bad behavior and violence creep in. He’s proud, tough, toxic. The feelings that he’s experiencing don’t come out, they are not talked about, everything slowly starts to fall apart. Then it’s the end of the hockey career and the beginning of catching up with life. None of those hockey/life lessons are taken to heart because they were rejected since they bear the weight of bad memories and the failure in achieving what had been set out in childhood. The goals weren’t re-focused into other ones. Which is the one thing that I can sympathize with the most. That’s tough. It’s a different kind of purgatory, one where you had put all your eggs in one basket and then that basket is taken away from you and you’re left with nothing. It’s as if you realized that your favourite band was in town, doing a surprise secret gig, so you show up at the venue, without a ticket, hoping that there would be a returns queue. When you get there, there’s already a line of 39 people with the same exact thought, and after waiting three and a half hours, you are told that there are only 38 tickets left. So then it’s too late. Then, it’s a 9 to 5 life and all the clichés that go with it. Then 20 years later, we meet, and you tell me to ‘go fuck myself you piece of shit’.
(3) Adulthood – the hell
So here we are. Adulthood. You went on to find a job. I don’t want to generalize the categories of work these man-child have (What is the plural for this term? – men-children?), but what I can say for sure is that whatever work they do, there’s not a whole lot of passion going into them. Or it’s a passion solely motivated by money, or power, anything that makes you better than the other guy. You get married, you have kids – that’s a form of control, of power, of knowing you’re right where you are supposed to be in the social ladder. It’s a false sense of security, you’re a hamster in a wheel. You go out after work with your buddies. You’re free men. You’re with the guys. It was all so much easier back in the day. This reminds you of back in the day. The days with the dreams. None of this #metoo, politically correct bullshit. Fuck, some people really are out to get you. You work hard, you provide, you own your truck, you don’t need to pay more taxes for services you ain’t gonna get, you’re just saying out loud all the things that others are afraid to say. FUCK. HEY GUYS WE SHOULD REALLY DO THIS MORE OFTEN, HOW ABOUT JOINING A BEER LEAGUE?
beer league – hockey league for someone who isn't good enough to go to the show, but still thinks he has a chance.
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It’s Thursday November 22nd 2019, 10:30PM. You wobble onto the ice, your skills from adolescence really seem far away. Some other guy from the opposite team has the audacity of being slightly quicker than you, slightly more agile, slightly more skilled. A flip inside of you switches. He becomes your target for tonight. So you go after him. The insults are the same as when you were a teen, but without the innocence they were afforded. You’re an adult now, it’s just irresponsible. You become a little more violent since you can’t keep up, it’s weak, it’s shady, it’s stupid. It’s not what tonight is about. It should be about the sport, about the love of the game - it’s a recreational league. It’s fun. You do something you’re not supposed to do. And there I am. The referee. With my whistle. Paid to babysit you. I see it, I call it. At that moment, all of the injustices of the world have once again been dumped on you. The wrath that ensues is for the benefit of everyone in the arena but it is directed at me. I’m this and I am that. That guy is this and he is that and he started it. There’s no need to qualify or quantify what is said. It is petty, whiny, insecure. Embarrassing. Traumatic.
I used to love refereeing. It was my favourite job growing up. 90% of the time, it’s a riot. Then you have these experiences and, if you’re like me, they tear you down. I have had a few of these critical moments in my hockey related career. It fucking sucks. You lose confidence and you lose control - you are just trying to do your job in a civilised, human manner, but the context, the situation, the environment is not civilized. I’ve got Malcolm Gladwell to thank for teaching me this, in The Tipping Point. That the environment and context of the situation can impact personalities in incredibly dramatic and succinct ways. Desperation, nostalgia, failure; those are the contexts that I am in on those nights.
Those powerful outbursts of insecurity make me lose some of the naïve hope that I have in this fragile humanity. I am not perfect. I have prejudices, like everyone. But I work hard to be a good and decent person, who is curious, invested and open to the lives of others. That’s what makes these events difficult. I would like to reach out, to understand their behavior, to bring them back to reality – especially since I grasp how these violent discharges came to be. But it is overwhelming.
These men on the ice they resemble those men we hear about on the TV. ‘Those men’, just by using those terms I invalidate the experience of so many who have suffered from vulgar displays of toxicity. On a day to day basis, my proximity to these events is superficial which reinforces my ignorance. Confronted with these exchanges on the ice, my relationship to this behavior suddenly becomes intimate. These men, they are numbers on the back of jersey sure, but they are also, more importantly, names in our society, in our community. I realize then and there, the urgency behind the need to change things in the world.
We have a long way to go. We just have to lift the curse.