why i quit my d league
I know I’ve been dragging with the posts. Vacation planning, work emergencies, horse shows, and angry D league captains have shortened my stride a bit this week. If you recall my comment during our May 27th game, you will be halfway to understanding how all this idiocy with my D league started and ended. I’ve played hockey with snooty, catty, high-maintenance women who were easier to cope with than the Icehound’s crazed, opinionated, melodramatic captain, “Mr. Price.” The night I was finally starting to overcome my disgust for playing with the anger management poster children team, Mr. Price sent me a scathing e-mail, extolling the virtues of his leadership and the depravity and corruption towards which I was steering his NHL-bound team. This is of course, in reference to my comment in the midst of one of his typical tirades, during which he was telling us the same thing he tells us every week, to skate hard, to shoot, to backcheck. What, pray tell, does he think we’re trying to do, I wonder? Perform a triple Salchow? Get a date with the Zamboni driver? Invent lemon bar recipes on defense? Normally I’d let this go. I’m much too lazy to argue with people these days, even though arguing is normally a favorite hobby of mine. But unfortunately, his e-mail continued on in classic Type A form, suggesting that I take over as team captain if I knew of better things to tell the team. Poor Mr. Price. I could have won us a hockey game for once. I simply would have said, “If you win tonight, I will strip down to my skates and do ten laps in the nude.” Granted, I’d never be allowed to skate at Yerba Buena again, but at least the boys would finally win a game. After all, Mr. Price says “what fun is it if you don’t win?” How odd, I always thought the act of playing hockey was fun, but then, maybe I just have low expectations like that.
I responded to his e-mail with one equally as polite, simultaneously quitting the team and ripping him eleven new ones in the infamous Jess style that may never have technically “won” any arguments, but always resulted in the offending party apologizing. I didn’t expect an apology. I seriously didn’t even expect a phone call. I just felt the need to defend myself after being linguistically assaulted in the comfort of my own home. Mr. Price called me five minutes after I sent the mail, at around 1 a.m., hedging his way into a conversation that he very clearly didn’t know how to start. Every other sentence began with “To be honest…” I don’t think you’re dishonest, Mr. Price. I just think you think hockey is life more so than my bumper sticker does, and I also think you need to lay off the caffeine. It’s making that crease between your brows really noticeable. An hour later, Mr. Price was apparently convinced that he had gotten me to reconsider my decision in spite of our bad blood and the blunt e-mail I had sent to the team mailing list, quitting. I hung up the phone, sighed, and went to bed.
I missed the game last week, citing the need for a “break.” This week Mr. Price didn’t send me his usual evite to the game so he could figure out who was coming. Instead, like the kid who gets a rock in his Trick or Treat bag instead of a Snickers bar, I got mail from Mr. Price saying that he “recommended I don’t return to the team,” and that “the team has accepted my departure.” I nearly snarfed my milk. If you know the Icehounds, you know that the only thing that team accepts is the guarantee that they will be able to go drink beer when the game is over, regardless of the outcome. They try to skate, try to shoot, and sometimes score. If we were doing this for a living we’d all be in the unemployment line, punching each other with our gloves off for the Canadian penny we found on the carpet. The straight facts are that we’re not getting paid to do this, and it dawned on me after his e-mail that I was once again paying to be tortured, just like in college, except in the end, instead of fame and fortune, my reward might be getting boarded by a 250 lb. man who can’t skate, just like what happened to Hattrick.
I didn’t snap back at his last e-mail, although he was begging for it. I just quit. I’m still skating elsewhere about twice a week. Sometimes we don’t even keep score. I know, it’s completely unthinkable.
