My senior year of high school ice hockey was played in a rage, scoring goals, knocking people down, knocking people out, fights. One day my brother told me, "They're all afraid of you." This came as a complete shock because for the prior three years I'd been the skinny kid who was afraid of just about everyone. I'd always played as hard as I could. Now the results were different.
The fights became legendary. Decades later people were still asking our cousins if they were related to us and then telling the story about the night my little brother took on the entire Long Beach High team and I had to rescue him.
Bill O'Reilly of Fox TV fame was our goalie. He got there by chance. Our starting and only goalie came down with hepatitis and was out for the season. Our league was only a few years removed from sending Joe Mullen to Boston College and the NHL. Who wanted to be goalie? Do slap shots cause hepatitis? O'Reilly volunteered. It was a good move for him since he did not skate well (that's a generous way of putting it). He traded getting hit by blistering slap shots for playing time.
O'Reilly was non-stop talk (maybe it helped him not think about getting hit with slap shots). Most of it was annoying. Finally I'd had enough. I turned around, skated over to him and hit him as hard as I could in the pads with my stick. "Next time I'm aiming higher." He was a lot quieter after that.
I spend most of my time now playing tennis with my daughter and working with my son on his two-seam fastball, change-up and quadratic equations. He was wants to be a major league baseball player. I ask him what his backup plan is, hoping he'll say engineer of some kind. But nooo... the backup plan is ESPN. That might be a realistic possibility. He talks non-stop and is often annoying.
