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TOC
		Girls Against the Boys		contents
		by Nelson L. Eshleman
		_____If I didn't play left wing every Wednesday night for the last seven years with Melvin Turner, who drives the zamboni up at Father David Bauer, and if he hadn't been a distant cousin of Cassie Campbell's, it never would have happened. _____A singular debate rages in the mind of every beer-league hall-of-famer, from the musty taverns in Lac La Biche to the hotel pubs of Waskesiu, a solitary question every stone-handed grinder who ever rode the pines forever ponders, that is; how would my squad stack up against the Canadian women's Olympic hockey team? _____"You're in La La Land, if you think you could ever beat those ladies," Melvin chortled, "You sad, sorry puck hog." He'd seen enough to know. _____"Yeah, but hockey's my game." Which was true enough. I'm stymied in soccer, hooped at hoops and golf is a perpetual misery. But in certain small towns in the rural north, hockey comes second nature to a boy and I've stayed late skating on outdoor rinks until long after I had to go but couldn't hold it and shit my pants and froze my toes. _____I was never big enough for the show. Thinking back, I wasn't exceptionally fast and didn't score very often either. I played net in Pee Wee's, until a fateful provincial final when my team scored fourteen goals, but we still lost 14-17 in that drubbing down in Battleford. _____Regrettably, some people never recognize their own limitations and every generation needs a new Billie Jean King. _____Melvin arranged it all. Of course they kept it hush hush. Hockey Canada coaches won't risk their number one draft-picks getting injured in a meaningless clash against C-division cowboys, so a secret match was set up between the players for midnight on a Sunday in September, just after the arena's regular day-time scheduling normally came to a close. _____To this day, if you ask them, the Canadian women will deny that any such event ever took place. Our boys, not surprisingly, don't talk much about it either and but for the contents of a little used utility shed in the back of the rink up near the U of C, there'd be no evidence at all. _____I shook hands with Hayley Wickenheiser at centre ice to start the game. She's got a firm grip, but the reason why I swallowed hard and blinked was that at eye level, I was staring straight into her mouthguard. The girl stands six feet tall on skates. _____"Let's make it interesting," I blustered. "Losers buy first round at the Bull & Finch after the game." _____"We don't play for nachos," Wickenheiser spat. "How about jockstraps." _____"Fair enough," my teammates heard me say, and so we squared off. _____Chalk it up to chivalry, they won the first draw and popped the puck up along the right wing boards to an ex-captain of the Dartmouth College women's varsity club. She was already in full stride and cutting hard to the net. _____Caught flatfooted in his double XXL Philadelphia Flyers jersey, our brawny defenceman John looked much less a Broadstreet Bully than he did a big, bright orange pylon. _____They scored three times in the first forty seconds and that's when Guy, our goaltender, smashed his stick into splinters on the cross bar. He's never been one to hide his frustration. _____From there on in, we took pride in winning the smaller battles. Blocking a pass. Clearing the zone. A shot on net. Coming off the ice without getting scored on. We tried playing physical, there was no referee, but they gave it right back to us. At one point I crashed the net and purposely fell on their goalie to spark our bench. As fast as you can say "facewash," I took a crosscheck to the kidney from a red-faced defencewoman who looked like she might have been Don Cherry's mother. _____It always used to amaze me as a fifteen year old playing in men's rec' leagues when some old guy on our bench would give up his turn and breathlessly wave me back out, "No, you go ahead." _____Tonight I understood why, because it was me pulling twenty second shifts and keeping our younger guys on to save my wind. By the third period, I was limping heavily after taking a Cassie Campbell slapshot to the knee through a cracked CCM shinpad I'd worn ever since Midgets. _____Things were pretty quiet in our dressing room at the end of the game and much quieter still when I announced it was time to "pay up." _____"Here's your bounty," I offered to a chorus of raucous, female laughter, laying a towel full of jockstraps at the door to their changing area." _____But it was Wickenheiser who hollered out into the hallway, "We sure the hell don't want 'em in here. Melvin'll show you where they go." _____Which he did. Melvin lead me outside to a padlocked utility shed at the back of the rink. When he swung open the door, despite the frigid temperature, I was hit by the unmistakable whiff of athletic endeavour. _____A flick of the light switch revealed a globular sphere as tall as a man, situated prominently in the centre of the shed. Stretching from wall to wall and nearly to the height of the low ceiling, it looked like a gigantic ball of string you'd see in the Guinness Book of World Records. As wide as a Swedish hatchback. But to my surprise, it was composed entirely of crusty, frozen jockstraps. Apparently they'd played this game before. _____It was an evening of illumination. I'd been stripped this night of my preconceived notions, false illusions and carefully guarded chestnuts. And it wasn't so much about big-boned girls or girls who loved girls as it was about smart girls with healthy smiles from Saskatchewan who when given the opportunity and proper coaching, could stand among the best in the world, men or women. _____"And the first step, is to stop calling them girls," Melvin growled. _____He was right of course. Nothing was holding them back, except for outdated collective attitudes and stultifying stereotypes that stunk ever as much as a room full of frozen jockstraps.
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