Most Valuable Player

Keswick Ridge Rural School in 1979 had a grand total of 253 children, spanning grades one through nine. A classic red-brick pound of butter-shaped structure, it still sits starkly and, depending on your age, forebodingly in a gravelly lot at the junction of Highway 105 and McKeen’s Corner Road.

I can’t say that I enjoyed my time there. An outsider; my parents were not farmers or mechanics, but teachers. My pudgy frame and overzealous vocabulary inevitably placed me in the middle of a circle of jeering boys, being shoved around until I finally just crouched to the ground with my hands protecting the back of my neck, as if waiting for a bear attack, listening for the merciful ring of the bell that would put us all back behind our old wooden flip-top desks.

One of the worst things that children are subjected to in elementary school is gym class. Whoever decided that square dancing was something young people ought to engage in was sick in the head, and the eugenic fascists who came up with the “Canada Fitness Test” have rooms reserved in hell, to be sure. As a stumpy, unattractive nerd with about as much interest in athletics as in creamed herring, I was relegated to dancing with the ugly girls, and was consistently awarded the “Participation” patch (read: “Nice Try, Loser”) from the good folks at CFT.

One bright spot was ball hockey. Not that I was any good at it, mind you, but with a total of sixteen kids in grade nine – only eight boys – I was guaranteed to at least get to play. (don’t get me started on the vicious schoolyard practice of picking teams). Our gym teacher, Mr. LeBlanc, bless his D-contract, twice a week heart, thought it might be spiriting to form a Keswick Ridge Grade 9 Intramural Ball Hockey Team, the idea being to at least put some kind of collective, competitive school spark into our lonely educational outpost.

We practiced twice a week, flailing around the mint-green cinder block gymnasium, hacking joyfully away. I don’t think Mr. LeBlanc actually knew the rules. Or perhaps he was just happy to sneak out back for a smoke, I don’t know. Either way, when he announced, towards the end of the year, that we were to actually play a game against another school, we were excited, but unspeakably unprepared.

George Street Junior High is in downtown Fredericton, about twenty-five kilometers away. For most of the kids at KRS, it might as well have been New York City. When their shiny school bus (ours broke down regularly, and the parent phone tree on bitter winter mornings was the only thing that kept us from frostbite, waiting for a bus driver who was taking a blow torch to the engine block) pulled into the school yard, we looked on in awe, as the George Street Junior High Varsity Ball Hockey Team sauntered out with clean sneakers, matching shorts and shirts, and hockey bags.

By the end of the first period, the score was eleven to nothing. I think Mr. LeBlanc started drinking about then, as his counterpart’s be-smirked face gazed at him over his haughtily folded arms.

Sometimes, when a team loses badly, people will say they were “outclassed”. I’ve been searching for over thirty years to find a still kind, but stronger word to describe our performance. It’s not “outclassed” that’s for sure.

Of the myriad problems, the main one being a total lack of knowledge of the game in any respect, we were also further handicapped by the fact that only six of the boys in the class had showed up, which meant we had no substitutes. Compounding this, Keith Gordon, who’s dad had a dairy farm over in Scotch Lake, became quite angry at the situation, and would simply walk up and smack whichever George Street player was in reach, and was sent to the penalty box (well, the penalty “wall” I suppose). Problem was, they’d let him out, and he’d just run up and smack another one. We were a man down virtually the entire time.

At the end of the second period, the score was seventeen to zero. Our goalie, Steven Jewett, whose dad was a Ferrier, lacked any equipment at all save a stick, yet played valiantly. But if you don’t know how to swim, valiance doesn’t count for much in the deep end of the pool. The George Street Goalie took pity on him and actually leant him a glove before the third period. Myself, I had convinced my mother earlier in the week that I should have knee pads (mainly because I thought they would look cool) and I ended up lending the left one to Brent Spinney, whose dad was in jail.

For some god-be-known reason (Mr. LeBlanc was starting to wobble, I think) we started the third period with me playing centre.

Now, you have to understand the thoroughness of our ignorance. After George Street’s twentieth goal, I finally realized why I was quite happily winning every face-off. You see, the idea is to get the ball behind you; not just hit it first. Armed with this sudden light bulb, and because the George Street centre had simply decided to let me go ahead and give the ball away, when I actually scooped the ball back to Darren Reynolds, whose dad repaired small engines, they were both equally surprised, but for different reasons. Darren, snapping out of his deer-in-the-headlights trance, shot the ball across the court.

I won’t try and make something up here about how I ended up running towards the George Street net with the ball on my stick. To be honest, I don’t remember. But, like the proverbial roomful of monkeys, we had finally made a play.

In life, you have moments that crystallize into a series of sharp Kodachrome postcards in your head. The stunned look on the George Street Goalie’s face, as the orange ball sailed over his right shoulder and thunked against the upturned crash mat behind him is one of them. It was the first time I had ever lifted the ball off the floor with a wrist shot.

We celebrated for a good ten minutes.

With a final score of twenty-two to one, we shook hands with a dejected George Street Junior High Varsity Ball Hockey Team, and pranced our way to Mr. Holyoke’s decrepit school bus like triumphant Centurions.

On the last day of the school year, because there was no work left to be done, we would assemble in the gym to hear the principal talk about summer responsibilities, to hear the choir sing their last, and hopefully best rendition of “Day by Day” and to fidget with the anticipation of frog ponds, bicycle races and penny candy.

Mr. LeBlanc spoke of basketball, soccer, and badminton. Then, in a short speech that to this day I wonder if he actually worked on, he said, in so many words, “the first ever Keswick Ridge Ball Hockey Team had only one game this year, and one player stood out.”

As I walked through the space between the cross-legged kids towards a smiling Mr. LeBlanc, who was holding out a red, white and blue ribbon with a small, cheap medal on it depicting an ice hockey player in full dress, on my last day at this place that had been such daily torture for what seemed like forever, I couldn’t help but be a little sad there wasn’t just one more year.