During one of his son’s hockey games, Nick Paumgarten watches as his eight-year-old is hit from behind, only to rise to his feet and use his stick to hit the side of his opponent’s head. Alongside his concern for his son’s head and neck, Paumgarten, who has written about his own hockey-related concussions, rapidly processes the outcomes of the exchange: a game-deciding penalty, his own reflexive rationalization, and the evaluation of other parents who “held me in some way responsible, as both father and coach, for the violence and loss of self-control.” Paumgarten’s essay is rich with such moments of parent-coach double-consciousness, and sensitive to the numerous ways, some of them awful, in which those two identities intrude upon each other.
That Sunday, it wasn’t yet 8 A.M. when a Rye player shoved James from behind into the boards. James went down awkwardly and stayed prone a moment, then leaped up and, with an implausible ferocity, cross-checked the other kid in the ear. The Rye boy collapsed to the ice, and the other kids poured in and began grappling with one another, while parents shouted and pointed. Soon there was a pile of mites, with the two referees pulling players off and flinging them aside like puppies. Through the windows, you could see that the sun had risen over the Long Island Sound. I thought of my son’s fellow second graders back in the city, likely still asleep or watching cartoons in their pajamas or getting dressed for church or whatever the unrinked got up to on weekend mornings, but here at Playland my boy had instigated a munchkin brawl.
Tales from the ice
A Hockey Dad, a Cartel, and a $12 Million Fraud
“Kota Youngblood told his neighbors there were hits out on their lives — and only he could save them.”
Fighting With Their Fists to Put a Period in a Basket
“Hockey has no reason for being. Rather, hockey’s one of those things that give reason to being.”
The Once Unthinkable Revolution Coming to Figure Skating
“Is the sport ready? Some of its biggest stars think so.”
