Archives for February 2018

“Tenacity is a gift.”

A wise man I know said this to me not long after I first met him. And this phrase kept popping in my head as the Olympic gold medal game between the American and Canadian teams drew ever closer and my anxiety about it all spiked. I was nervous, truly, because four years before I had not been.

At that time, I devoured every televised Olympic hockey game from Sochi, whether the United States was playing in it or not. What I couldn’t watch in real time, I dutifully taped. And the women amazed me.

I had seen one woman play before, the only woman in a twice-weekly game that was essentially a beer league with guys who had played their entire lives and often later on college scholarship. In other words, they were a very good beer league, and she more than held her own with them.

Seeing women on teams playing against each other was a revelation. Because the rules for body contact in women’s hockey are different—hitting technically is not allowed, although contact by accident is often unavoidable and sometimes deliberate—the women’s game seemed so much faster, the flow smoother, the women more focused and graceful. In other words, they were fierce—and I was hooked.

Everybody at the office knew about my hockey fixation, and my increasingly bleary-eyed arrivals courtesy of the never-ending Olympic hockey broadcasting underscored my commitment. So, I was not surprised when a co-worker asked me: “So, did you watch the women’s gold medal game yet?”

He seemed uncharacteristically solemn when he asked me this, something I only really noted after he changed his manner in response to my breathlessly excited response, “No! I taped it. I am going home now. I CANNOT WAIT!”

“Oh,” he said with a forced smile. “Then enjoy the game. Talk to you tomorrow.”

As I drove home, I wondered a bit what he knew that I did not. However, doubt dissipated as I settled in with the critters and watched the United States control the play and head toward a certain gold medal. They owned the ice. They had it.

Until they didn’t. I wish I could have explained to my confused animals why so many people on the television and the lone human in the room were crying. I was stunned and numb for days. My co-worker offered heartfelt and awkward commiseration.

With that inexplicable game never far from my mind, I watched the Americans lose in their first 2018 Olympic meet-up with Canada. Others in the room were less concerned. As we planned the viewing party for the gold medal game, I was having flashbacks to 2014. My fellow hockey enthusiasts’ emotions ran the gamut from nervous breakdown to cool confidence. My mom stayed up to watch.

On a conference call early in the day, I told new co-workers: “Tonight the game starts at 11 p.m. But you should watch it anyway. It will be one for the ages.”

And, it was.

For what I didn’t fully realize about tenacity being a gift is that being able to persevere through failures, setbacks, and disappointments often does come from an otherworldly source outside the possessor, a sense of peace and confidence that hard work and fortitude support, but do not create. When tenacious, an individual is tapping into a determination that seems innate, a blessing, a gift so big that it springs forth naturally and without question.

But the gift is even bigger. For seeing the tenacious persevere, witnessing the bereft rise above pure devastation gives to the rest of us an idea that it can be done and sometimes, if we are really paying attention, even the way to do it.

 

“So, to be clear, if I am terrified, I am doing it right?”

He laughed, “Yes.”

We had a substitute teacher today, and he was showing us very nonchalantly the one skating move that has kept me awake at night, that I have done my best to forget, that I had prayed for some magical ability to accomplish whenever the time came.

But I was not ready. Not even close. Yet here we were: the dreaded crossover. And here he was in his hockey skates, breaking it all down as if it were possible, and we could do this without dying. He might as well have asked me to fly a plane.

For those unfamiliar with skating terminology, the “crossover” is exactly what it sounds like: as you move, you place one foot over the other and use that shift to propel yourself. You might see someone do one or several, forward or backward. We were just doing the forward ones. It was one of the few things I had seen skaters do that I could not even begin to fathom, despite my continued forward progress through Kettler’s adult skating program.

And, it threw me a bit that unlike our usual teacher, our substitute teacher was wearing hockey skates. I was becoming comfortable with the idea of sticking to figure skates for good. My love of hockey itself had not diminished—if anything, I was becoming a huge Caps fan, regularly attending games and watching everything I could about hockey on TV. But, truth be told, my confidence in my ability to ever play that game was not high.

However, skating itself made sense to me, felt good to me, and my improvement remained steady. My hockey skates now glowered at me accusingly from a basement corner, and I did my best to ignore them. Now here was hockey guy to shake me out of my figure skating stupor with his sassy skates and insouciant attitude toward my private terror.

As I have found with pretty much all hockey players I have ever met, I instantly liked this guy—and I wanted to impress him. I was old enough to be his mother, but I sure as hell was going to give it a shot, the potential painful spill be damned. Many in the group were murmuring out-loud trepidation that I also felt. So I asked the obvious question and accepted his unsurprising answer.

For you see, to do crossovers, you have to suspend many things—disbelief, gravity, safety, your other foot—because for a very brief moment you are not touching the ice, you are shifting your weight, you are finding your balance, you are becoming more than you ever thought possible and changing your mind about what your possible really is.