Chapter 3- A Juggernaut Is Born
As you can see, hockey got into my blood early, what with the weekly visits to the orphanage by many of the lesser Leafs and even by Harold Ballard himself. I can’t be sure, but I always had the feeling that we wee orphans were not the sole reason for their visits. Orphan Jimmy suggested that there might be some courting going on. But he had a welcome propensity for tall tales.
Once a year, usually in March, Uncle Harold used to take selected inmates to skate on the real ice of Trinity Park pond. He would pull up to the orphanage in his big white limo, boldly emblazoned with the Leafs’ logo and with their motto: “A Cup Every Year From Now On”. His trunk would be half filled with old, discarded Leafs equipment from circa 1916. Unfortunately, there was never enough equipment for all us orphans. Although I was a gifted with tremendous hockey talent from age 2 onward, I was too small to battle the older Leviathans from the “Broda”. Consequently, until I was a little older, I was not able to wrestle from the trunk even the crappiest pair of dilapidated skates or a splintered hockey stick.
When I turned 6, I made my first trip to Trinity Park. Earlier in the day, I had managed to grab from Uncle Harold’s trunk half an elbow pad and a rivet from Ike The Spike Tannenbaum’s 1927 practice helmet. I played horribly on the pickup game, even by Gawdawful Gumby’s standards (more about him later). The pickup game also served as the tryout for the orphanage’s tournament team. I did not get chosen to represent our esteemed establishment at the annual Inner City Home For Discarded Kids Hockey Tournament (the renowned “ICHDKHT”). I left my first outing to Trinity Park crestfallen, dejected and nursing a bad case of frostbite which soon cost me half of each of my feet.
I may have been dejected, but I was determined to make the school team the following year. For the next twelve months, I worked daily to improve my strength and agility. Of course, we didn’t have anything as fancy as a training room. I was forced to improvise. I roped off the less dingy part of my refrigerator box/bedroom and turned it into my very own gym. Using as a starting point the cracked rivet from Ike “The Spike’s helmet, I went on to fashion a set of barbells by adding some reworked tuna cans and some discarded hosiery found in the Charm School’s refuse containers. Every day, I exercised relentlessly until I doubled my playing weight to 46 pounds of strapping orphanhood. To increase my agility, I practiced hanging from the top of my bedroom by wetting my fingertips and toetips and placing them gently against the ceiling, thus creating the capillary vacuums needed to stick to the cardboard above my head. It wasn’t my best use of science. But it worked.
As my next outing to the tryouts at Trinity Park approached (age 7), I felt confident I could make it to the ICHDKHT despite having to compete for a place against much bigger and better seasoned orphans than I. My biggest problem would be getting one of the few pairs of rotten skates and some kind of hockey stick from Uncle Harold’s trunk. Even if I were able, by some miracle, to get skates, they probably would not fit for two reasons. Firstly, I was only 7 years old at the time and men’s skates would undoubtedly by way too big for a kid, even a handsome and taut 46 pounder. Secondly, I had suffered from frostbite in the previous year and, if you were to add together what was left of my feet, you have ended up with just the equivalent of one. It looked like old Leafs skates were out of the question.
Well, I could have given up then and there. But I was no quitter. And I had a plan. A good plan. A plan I carried out to perfection. While Uncle Harold’s chauffeur was busy untangling the other orphans, who werebusy beating each other up while fighting in the enormous trunk for hockey equipment, I surreptitiously removed the steel studs from the limo’s tires. Using a jerry-rigged arc welder I fashioned out an old Raid spray can (it’s flammable, you know), I melted down the studs and turned them into makeshift hockey blades which I sharpened with my own teeth. Then, I secured the blades to my half feet by strapping them onto my socks with some barbed wire I had, only hours earlier, stolen off some escape-proof windows at the orphanage.
The stick problem was a little trickier. Luckily, I was able to collect enough wads of previously enjoyed bubblegum from under the baseball bleachers when we got to the park. I warmed up the abandoned rubbery wads to a workable level of malleability by salivating like a rotweiller in a hamburger factory, and then chewing on them quickly. From there, I applied the reworked gum to a couple of birch branches to form a stick. It looked like an awkward version of the Teeter Kennedy Slapper 5000. I reinforced the “blade” with leftover barbed wire and was now ready to show off the fruits of my ingenuity and demanding training regimen.
Now, I know it’s a sin to brag, so I won’t go into a lot of detail about that improbable day on Trinity pond. Suffice it to say that, on the strength of my 132 goals in 32 minutes of playing alone against the seventeen other hopefuls from the “Broda”, I was selected to my orphanage’s team. Sister Schadenfreude, normally taciturn and demurre, was so emotionally overwrought by my performance, that she kissed me on both cheeks and made a gift to me of the moniker I still cherish today: The Little Ice Marshal.
We went on to win the coveted ICHDKHT that year and in every subsequent year of my stay. Often, we played against richer orphanages and even sometimes against teams from well-funded homeless shelters who would bring in ringers from as far away as North Bay and Nipissing Junction. It did not matter. We were a juggernaut: my first but certainly not my last.
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