Goal tender

Paul Kandarian

It’s not exactly the dissolution of a halfcentury marriage, even if all 50 years were mostly happy. But it still hurts, because you spend so much time loving something and when it’s gone, there’s an aching void that can never be filled. Thing is… I’ve quit hockey. For good. Sorry for the drama, but honestly, when you do something that long that you thoroughly enjoy, and when your body betrays you and time not only marches on, it stomps the hell out of you, it really makes you sad.

I’ve been an ice hockey goalie for the vast majority of those 50 years, starting at age 19. I played on and off, mostly on – save for the years when family and work pre-empted hockey fun. And for the last 25 years, I was playing every Friday morning, sometimes more, with a core group of guys in Hingham.

It amazes me to think I started there when I was 44. Looking back, I realize it really was the prime of my life (physically, anyway). For 25 years, I’d get up before 5 a.m., drag myself out of bed, pound down coffee and, depending on the period of my life, smoke up to three or more cigarettes on the 45-minute ride to the rink (I quit again six years ago, hopefully for good), where I’d slap on 40 pounds of exceptionally stinky hockey gear and have at it. Seriously, ask any hockey player (or hockey mom). The gear has a ripeness all its own. It’s indescribable and painfully acute, but only to non-hockey players. We tend to get used to it.

But for the last couple of years, arthritis was doing a number on me that at various times left my knees and shoulders feeling like an alligator was inside my ravaged joints gnawing its way out, only to go back in and start over.

Arthritis is brutal and unavoidable, especially when you’ve led an active life, which luckily I have – from football in high school to skiing tons in my youth, to a half century of flopping around a frozen surface wearing the “Tools of Ignorance” as the late Hall-of-Famer Gump Worsley called them. I’ve enjoyed every moment, but the second I hit 65, still feeling fit and young, my body said, “Not so fast there, Skippy. We’d like a word.”

And that word is “pain.” Things hurt like hell and unlike our younger days, didn’t go away in a day or two. Pain as one approaches 70 tends to linger and remind you of the abuse you’ve put your one and only body through for the past several decades.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: we as a species were not meant to live this long. Not terribly far into our past, we were born and if we lived past puberty, we’d have children, see them to early adulthood and then die, job done and left to our kin to keep things going.

But over the last century, and mostly since the mid-20th, scientific advancements have led to us living much, much longer than our bodies were designed for. And unable to keep up, evolution has left many of us crippled and old and broken to the point that if we were a horse, they’d shoot us.

So in January, I’d called out of my usual Friday hour because of work, not paid. I’d gotten acting jobs two weeks in a row and the guy running the hour, who always got annoyed when I did that because the goalie slot is notoriously hard to fill on short notice, got really angry this time.

“Maybe it’s time to retire,” he said in a text. I thought long and hard about it. Actually, all of about three seconds. I texted back: “You’re right. I’m done.” And that was that. After 50 years of doing something I love so much – something that’s right near the top of a long list of things I love that includes family, acting, cooking, travel, photography, all the good stuff – it was time to let the ice melt from under me and call it quits. It wasn’t as hard as I thought, really. I the hell out of the joking around in the locker room before and after the game, on the ice, at the coffee table of morning hockey later. I miss it all, going way back to college hockey, when in our first year of NCAA Div. 3 status at then Southeastern Massachusetts University (now UMass-Dartmouth), we got our collective ass kicked wherever we went and I rode the bench as backup goalie until we were so far behind it couldn’t hurt to finally put me in. paul k a N daria N is a lifelong area resident and, since 1982, has been a profession writer, columnist, and contributor in national magazines, websites, and other publications.

After that, I played all through the 70s, into the 80s, three, four, five or more times a week, league play all over the South Coast and beyond. I played sporadically when family came along, and not at all for a few years, but then got back into it. I played less in later years, but religiously for the last 25 with the boys up in Hingham once a week, sometimes more.

And now it’s gone. Hockey is one of those sports that when you put it to rest, you can’t fill with anything else – because nothing else is like hockey. Nothing else is having the game in your hands and either winning it and being the hero or coughing up a softie and being the chump.

But after the game, always, there was laughter and friendship and talk of how great the game was. And that included telling each other how great we never were back in the day, and not believing any of it but believing it with all your heart.

Hockey is a great game, one of the rare sports that not a lot of people can do. And now, for me, it’s done. I’m facing replacement surgery on both shoulders and quite likely both knees and even if that all goes well, it’ll take a few years and I’m not screwing it up by playing hockey again. It’s time to go.

But it still has a tight hold on me. It always will. I will always wish to still be playing and miss it terribly. Because the thing is: you spend a half century gripping a hockey stick and it turns out it was the other way around the whole time.

Paul Kandarian is a lifelong area resident and, since 1982, has been a profession writer, columnist, and contributor in national magazines, websites, and other publications.