Handing down the hockey habit doesn’t always stick

Despite his best efforts, columnist’s children have no desire to hit the ice

My kids hate hockey and it’s all my fault.

The NHL season recently got underway and there’s plenty of Stanley Cup buzz surrounding the Toronto Maple Leafs while the Montreal Canadiens — my team of choice — look to be a upstart underdog. And yet my two daughters couldn’t pick star players like Auston Mathews or Carey Price out of a lineup.

My own roots in the game go back, quite literally, to my earliest days.

My dad loves to tell the story of me watching the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and Russia, rivetted by the fuzzy black and white images coming across the TV screen. I was five months old.

From that moment on, I’ve been involved in the game in some capacity or other, as a player, referee, play-by-play man and author, but especially as a fan.

And I tried to get my kids on board, I really did. One of the first things I ever bought my firstborn child was a Canadiens jersey 11 sizes too big. But when it came to cement whatever early interest there might have been, my efforts fell completely flat.

Well, actually my daughter fell flat. Over and over and over again.

When she was four, we signed her up for skating school and went about gathering some pintsized equipment. We strapped it on in the living room and proceeded to seriously threaten the remaining breakables with stick swingings. Things were looking good.

The big day came, we headed down to the rink and got suited up. She stepped onto the ice and proceeded to fall flat on her behind. Hard. She got up and fell again. And again. And again. She finally crawled off the ice.

There was crying. There was complaining. There was a seriously runny nose. Though I eventually coaxed her back out for the last part of the 50-minute session, she was clearly nonplussed by the experience.

The following week, she simply refused to go on the ice. There wasn’t a kicking, screaming and wailing meltdown, just a firm, unwavering resolve that she preferred to watch and not participate. I must have asked a thousand times if she just wanted to try. The answer was always a quiet “Daddy, I don’t want to.”

She made it clear over the next few days that she wasn’t interested in going back. My wife and I considered making her go: she had made a commitment, after all. But there are so many things a kid has to do — go to school, brush teeth, eat veggies, go to bed — that surely there should be some choice in what they do for recreation.

My second child showed even less interest in hockey. Between the two of them, they’ve been involved in plenty of other things — dance, karate, soccer, piano, art class, ultimate Frisbee, basketball, volleyball — but nothing involving sticks and blades.

So I’ve come to grips with the fact that my kids won’t love hockey as much as I once did. While I still watch from time to time — particularly when my dad and brothers are around — I’ve learned to enjoy what my kids enjoy.

As a result, they’ve agreed they’ll never do the only thing they could do that would truly disappoint me: become Leafs fans.