Gus Nyquist – nick does hockey

Finding meaning on the radio

So I found myself on the wireless yesterday. Richard Stubbs, on 774, was having Lliam Webster (currently in the role of Australian men’s team captain) as a guest and asked if I’d come in as his ‘hockey expert’, which is a pretty loose definition of that job description.

Great moments of Australian radio: Richard Stubbs, Lliam Webster and Nicko Place, in the 774 studio.

Richard and I have been mates since we worked together on some TV shows at Channel Seven a long time ago, and in fact he is responsible for this blog. When I mentioned over coffee more than three years ago that I was intending to take up hockey, it was he who asked: ‘Can you skate?’

‘Never been on skates,’ I said.

We quietly sipped our coffee. His partner used to play and so he has some idea of the realities of hockey, and knowing Kim, she would have been a bad-ass player, desperate to play checking league only. In the silence, Richard must have been mentally framing what I can only imagine he saw as his last words of advice before the inevitable visit to my hospital bed.

‘You simply have to blog this,’ he finally said, and I almost gasped. It hadn’t occurred to me at all to chart the journey, but within a month I had not only started my first skating lessons, but had registered the name, nickdoeshockey, and started this whole thing up. (See blog post No. 1: ‘Setting the scene’, Jan 2011* where I honestly wonder if the entire adventure will last days or weeks?)

The rest, as they say, is:

a) history?

b) a giant time waste?

c) madness?

d) all of the above?

So, anyway, Richard has not unreasonably derived a great deal of enjoyment ever since in following my injuries, my inability to skate, my occasional successes, and so on.

Yesterday, I found myself hustled into my headphones and thrown on air before Lliam had even turned up, and it was to discuss parenthood. Richard didn’t want to talk hockey at all, really. Instead, he was running a conversation about how to stay in touch with your kids after they leave school and start to naturally kick away from you, into their own independent lives. He was asking how people retain meaningful relationships with these 20-something no-longer-children, aside from the occasional dinner together? Some idiot non-skater taking up hockey in his mid-40s, along with a teenage son, illustrated either how to do it or not to do it, depending on your survival instincts.

It was a great discussion and really brought me back to the point of my whole hockey adventure – well, a big part of it. (Let’s be honest: I do, selfishly, play for the sheer fucking fun of it, as well. As I should. Because it’s the most enjoyable sport I’ve ever participated in.)

Not a Warhol: MRI cross-sections of my car crash neck.

But lately I’ve been dealing with a nasty neck injury, which I have barely mentioned on the blog because I was so sick of whingeing about my busted knee for months. I went and saw the osteo, Magic Enzo, yesterday, armed with some MRI results, and he said the good news was that I didn’t have a tumor messing things up in the nerves around my spine, but it did look a lot like I’d hurt my neck in a car crash. Except I don’t think I’ve been in a car crash severe enough to cause that damage, or a hockey collision huge enough to compare. But apparently, somewhere along the way, I have hurt myself that badly without noticing.

Either way, the neck has been nasty painful, and so it’s been easy to lose sight of the bigger picture: that my eldest son, Will (aka Big Cat or Kittens), and I have now spent years mutually savouring and sharing our love of hockey; be it the Red Wings plugging away in Detroit (and breathtakingly still in the playoff race right now for a 23^rd straight year, despite EVERYTHING that has happened to them this season), or watching the Melbourne Ice’s three-peat, or all the endless shared general skates, training sessions, dev league games, summer league games and other on-ice shenanigans, and off-ice adventures, like visiting the Joe Louis Arena. Amen.

Darren Helm shows standard Red Wing desperation, crashing the Tampa Bay net. Pic: Detroit News

Darren Helm shows standard Red Wing desperation, crashing the Tampa Bay net on Sunday. The Wings got the points. Pic: Detroit News

People comment all the time about how well Kittens and I work together on the ice, with that tuned knowledge of where the other will be. His broken ankle meant we barely skated together for the Cherokees over summer, and I loved that he was just as keen as I was to play again next summer and have at least one last season of tearing up the ice as teammates. … before he heads off to be a real player in winter or whatever, and I find out if I’m like the Bluesmobile when Jake and Elwood finally get to Chicago. (This clip, 53 seconds in.)

Yesterday’s radio discussion got me thinking about how much Kittens’ off-ice life has shifted in that time. He’s started to shift emotionally and physically since we huddled around pre-NHL Gamecenter online feeds of Wings games six years or more ago. Back then, he was a school kid. Now, he’s at uni, and doesn’t live at my house much anymore, and has different groups of friends, and is listening to different music to me (not always – happily, our tastes still cross) and is struggling to balance all the demands of uni, work for money, work for passion, hockey, hockey, hockey, friends, etc.

This is also true of my younger son, Mackquist, who finished school last year and is now 18 and therefore discovering establishments that will serve you beer and other wickedness. Mack is thrashing his way into the real world, into life beyond school; learning to swim in the waters of job-finding, and job-keeping, and tax file numbers, and so on. I think we have lost him to the world of playing hockey, meaning the famous Podium Line of Places will most likely never again leap over the boards to terrify an opposition defence, but that’s ok. He and I love scuba diving together, among other things, and can hang out together in that world, as well as the more day-to-day.

One of so many face-offs with Kittens and I working together. Circa 2012.

One of so many face-offs with Kittens (left) and I working together. Circa 2012.

My life has shifted too. When we all started watching the Wings, I was living alone, but now I’m not, and there’s a crazy, intense five-year-old boy in my life, as well as a beautiful partner who rocks my world, and a cat we rescued and, of course, beautiful, ageing Fly Dog The Magnificent who struggles to walk sometimes in a mirror of my struggle to skate. Away from the ice, I’m under the pressure to follow up my novel, ‘Roll With It’, with a sequel that isn’t a pale imitation and my actual work life remains stressful, and there are all the other adult things that occupy your mind and energy, like the welfare of my parents, struggling or soaring friends, and so on. I celebrate all of this: it’s living. It’s the adventure. But it would be easy to realize the boys and I haven’t gotten around to actually crossing paths much, all unconsciously running wide of one another.

I’m so grateful to Richard for bringing me back to a deliberate consideration of Will and my relationship, through hockey. I haven’t physically seen Will since mid-last week, but there have been endless texts, celebrating the Wings and the continuing hot streak of Gus Nyquist, and discussion of video games, and other matters. It occurred to me that we have been in tune despite physical distance. And usually are.

I’m incredibly lucky that we, and Macka, retain such a close link, despite all our individual waters of life that don’t necessarily run in the same direction from here. Or maybe it’s not luck. Maybe this is what the whole hockey adventure has been about, away from the sheer fun and frustration of trying to sprint on thin blades of steel, reaching with an elongated piece of taped-carbon fibre for that small circle of rubber scooting, bouncing and gliding across the ice.

My sons and I are more than just occasional dinner companions, struggling to find conversation. Richard Stubbs was right: that is a major gift at this stage of things.

A creaky knee, a car crash neck and a continuing inability to find a reliable outside edge are but a small price to pay.

PS: Richard Stubbs’ main guest on yesterday’s show, the bearded wonder, Lliam Webster, is an even better example of what I’m talking about, with both his parents deeply involved in hockey and the Melbourne Ice teams. Lliam is playing for Australia in exhibition games against the Mustangs on Thursday night at the Icehouse, and then against his own team, the Ice (which will be kind of weird) on Saturday. If you’re kicking around, try to get down there to lend support.

PPS: * Post 5 of nickdoeshockey featured a current pic, back then, of a clean-shaven Lliam Webster. Time has certainly passed since I dived into this crazy world.

Watching my garden grow

Gardening and I have never been friends. A dozen years ago, I was living in an awesome house in Fairfield, surrounded by a rich, dense garden. It was a cool house with unofficially renovated windows letting light and unexpected views of the garden into most rooms. The bathroom was even built around the garden, so that the shower was embedded among actual dirt and ferns.

This is pretty much what will happen any time I’m left in charge of a garden. Pic: Flickr

All of which was fantastic except that such a lush garden meant there were also a lot of weeds, and pruning, and all the other stuff that gardens require to look neat and beautiful and enticing, rather than impenetrable jungle.

This was bad news for my then-wife, Anna, who found herself gardening a lot, while I sat in front of my computer. ‘Come help?’ she would not unreasonably demand.

‘Can’t. Sorry. Working on a novel,’ I would reply.

A novel. Sure you are.

You can’t believe how relieved I was when ‘The Kazillion Wish’ was accepted to be published, giving me a gardening ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card that I could never have hoped for. ‘See,’ I told poor, long-suffering Anna, ‘I WASN’T being self-indulgent/wasting my time.’

Which was a total lie.

Like I said, lucky.

Taking a face-off for The Braves. Pic Luke Milkovic.

A few years later, I was living in Fern Cottage, Freeman Street, Fitzroy North, which fast became an ironically-named house as the backyard became nothing but weeds. Some were literally higher than my head. I’m not sure when the word ‘weed’ becomes ‘tree’, but this must have been close.

Occasionally I’d hire someone to nuke the entire backyard, ripping out everything but the few battered, half-strangled bushes that were clearly meant to be there. Pleasingly now mostly concrete, the backyard would immediately start to mutate again as I put my Jedi Non-Gardening Powers to use, writing or watching hockey on TV.

All of this meant my partner now, Chloe, was quite reasonably nervous at raising the idea of installing planter boxes on the deck of our new house. I did my bit by swearing a lot and sweating, while lugging two huge wooden boxes up the steep stairs to the rooftop deck, dodgy knee and all. I helped lug soil up the same stairs and then poured it all into the boxes.

But it was clear that I was not burning to nurture the plants, to be at one with this boxed nature.

Yet here they now sat, little fledgling strawberry plants, lettuce, passionfruit, zucchini, herbs and tomatoes. Being liberally bombed with random water attacks from Melbourne’s weather or maybe an enthusiastic five-year-old, who also considered it necessary to water the dog, the sky (look out below, walkers) and anything else within reach of the hose. And most mornings, the five-year-old would charge to the window and sigh, because giant plants hadn’t magically bloomed overnight. Things grow by increments, which can be a hard concept when you are five, or even when you’re a lot more than five, like me.

I got on with life.

Especially training, where I am finally dangerously close to full health. I’ve been doing Fluid workouts with Lliam, and it rocks. Crazy, diverse training like cracking giant ropes, or throwing sandbag balls to the ground as hard as I can, and endless lunges and squats, hoping my knee will hold (it mostly has). Explosive, intense workouts unlike training I’ve done before and leaving my legs, glutes and guts heavy with exhaustion. You don’t even want to know what The Torsonator is. But believe me, it’s nasty.

The dodgy left knee occasionally yelps when I climb stairs or once during a hockey game, but mostly it’s coping. Every session I complete makes everything around the meniscal tear stronger, and hopefully moves me further away from this injury. Wednesday nights at Dev League, another Lliam client, Jimmy Oliver, and I creak onto the ice, groaning with aching legs and exchanging knowing grimaces and grins before we even start. I love it.

And my back and upper body are getting a whole new workout, along with my skating muscles, which I’m really enjoying. I can feel it all helping my skating, as I gain more and more power in my stride. Not to say I’m not still proppy compared to the dream skaters in summer league’s midst, but at least I’m not hobbled like I was a couple of months ago. Touch wood.

Unfortunately, I’m still not striding like Alfy for the Wings.

My broken toe still can’t kick a footy, which sucks re The Bang, but it’s also definitely on the mend. Closer, ever closer to full health.

Summer league continues and my team, the Cherokees, has strong spirit and a lot of laughter, even if our on-ice results have been less than spectacular. We’re competitive but can’t score enough, and have faced a welter of shots going the other way. As with my skating, I’ve felt my form returning with my health. From barely getting near the puck a few games ago, I’m starting to be competitive – ripped a high shot into the top bar and over (what are the odds of that?) and almost scored on a screened drive from a post-faceoff scramble last weekend. Almost, almost.

Poor Big Cat leans on his crutches, nursing his broken ankle, hating watching his team lose and being unable to help. At least I’m on the ice, even if the results aren’t what we’d all like.

In Detroit, roads are starting to lead to the Winter Classic. Apparently the 24/7 cameras have arrived and I can’t wait for that weekly doco to begin. The Wings hit an incredibly mediocre patch (they seem to have one every year) where they couldn’t score goals and couldn’t close out matches. Finally, Gus Nyquist was brought up from Grand Rapids, along with lectures from everybody involved that he was a kid and not the savior.

Gus Nuyquist, finally where he belongs: wearing the winged wheel and tearing it up at the Joe. Pic Detroit Free Press.

Gus Nyquist, finally where he belongs: wearing the winged wheel and tearing it up at the Joe. Pic Detroit Free Press.

He scored 17 seconds into his first game. And again later, to put the Wings back in front. Hasn’t looked back.

Meanwhile, Pavel Datsyuk got elbowed blatantly in the head during a game and hasn’t played since. No penalty because not a single official saw it. Hmm. Hope 24/7 quietly recorded that hit.

Meanwhile, Darren Helm has gone from strength to strength on his return, but star goaltender Jimmy Howard has hit a strange slump of confidence, replaced for games by The Monster, Jonas Gustavsson, who couldn’t stop a goal at times last year but this season is blitzing. Coach Babs says it’s not a thing, that Jimmy will be fine, that’s there’s nothing to see here. It’s not a thing.

It’s totally a thing. Or maybe he’s right? Babs is about most things. Maybe Jimmy’s struggle is just another of the ups and downs of hockey, and of life.

The flow of action

and moments

and news stories

and highlights

and lowlights,

and injuries,

and comebacks,

and weeds, and snails,

and fresh buds and growing leaves,

and wins,

and losses,

from Detroit

to the Icehouse

to Oakleigh

to a training room in Port Melbourne

to a deck on an old fire station in Fitzroy North,

where two boxes of plants are sprouting and shooting and growing and thriving. Now thick with health and growing fruit, and with just a bit of gardening required, here and there.

We ate lettuce for the first time from our planter boxes last night and I was genuinely excited. I’ve found a form of contained gardening that I can actually enjoy.

Stranger and stranger. Life just keeps evolving. I just keep evolving. There’s your proof.

Finding meaning on the radio

Watching my garden grow

Nicko Place

Instagram

Nickdoestwitter

Nickdoeshockey

Archives