No skates - no hockey

It was in the fall of 1958 that my name appeared in the sports section of the Cape Breton Post. I’d gone three for five with three RBI’s against a team from Glace Bay in the Babe Ruth League semi-finals. Our manager, Joe Scott, who worked at the government store, was an hour late for the game. Must have been payday. And, he forgot to have someone bring the gear and the team from the Bay was insisting that the umpire award the game to them by default. They refused to let us use pretend balls or bats.

Roddy Tobin saved our ass. He ran home and came back with enough equipment to let us start the game. I played the first three innings with Roddy’s left-handed catchers mitt (I was right-handed) and a 40 pound catcher’s mask last used by Roddy’s grandfather sometime in the 1800’s.

We taped the bat handle up real good so the umpire couldn’t see the cracks and some old guy (he must have been at least thirty) in the stands went to the co-op and bought us a brand new Rawlings baseball.

We lost. That was the last year I’d play any organized baseball. In ’59, I joined the Bras D’Or West End Arrows in the men’s softball league.

No. No. I’m taking about baseball here, dumb-ass.

In hockey, you score goals, get assists, bruised shins, black eyes and learn to swear. Besides, I never played hockey because I never learned to skate. Yes, the bog which served as the local hockey rink was right at my back door, but we couldn’t afford new CCM’s and I had no older brother to pass his down to me. Neither did my younger brother, Tom. Well, of course he had an older brother; what he didn’t have was an older brother with a pair of skates to pass down.

I almost had a pair of skates once. My buddy’s older sister, Dorothy, gave me a pair of CCM’s that actually fit pretty good. (My God. I just had a belated revelation. Her feet must have been big; perhaps even in direct proportion to her bra size. Strange; I never paid any attention to the size of her feet back then.)

Anyway, she was kind enough to offer her old skates. She had no younger sisters to pass them on to; her sisters Ethel and Mary both being older. They were white figure skates with a furry fringe on the top of the boot. Embarrassing!

So, I scuffed the leather up, applied several layers of boot black and used an old straight razor of the old mans to shave the furry white stuff off. But I was always too embarrassed to wear them to the bog until after dark. By then, everyone had gone home, so I never did learn to skate.

But, there were times when I was just as happy that I hadn’t learned to skate. For example, the winter of ’58-’59, the year we almost lost the Crow.

A bunch of the guys were playing hockey on that part of the bog just behind Mikey LeBlancs. Jimmy “Crow” Walsh had just broken up a play and the guys had turned to skate back in the other direction. Somebody turned around to wait for a pass from the Crow . . . but he was nowhere in sight. While everyone was focused on the bull rushes thinking he might have taken a header, Crow’s head bobbed up out of the ice, er . . . water, with Crow stammering, “Ge . . . ge . . . get me outta here, it’s fu . . . fu . . . freezing.

Did I mention that Crow stuttered.

To be sure, it was not a funny state of affairs. But, yes, some of us began to laugh before we realized the gravity of the situation. “Heh-heh. What the fu . . . Oh, shit.”

Some of the older guys had already started a line to form a human chain, but someone (I think it might have been Ricky Vickers) remembered the ladder behind LeBlanc’s barn and raced to get it. He damn near took a tumble himself when, skating like a madman, he ran out of ice. But, they had the ladder on the ice, and Crow out of the water, in a matter of minutes.

Just as well too; we needed him at third base in the summer of ’59.