style="font-size:15px;"> Now, understand what was at stake here. We’re talking the highest level of competitive hockey for nine- and ten-year-olds, so of course that meant hockey scholarships, agents, pro hockey careers, entire futures, right? You would have thought so given how the adults acted. In the midst of the outrage, the referee skated over and told both coaches that the goalie had told him it was a goal. All the other players on the benches heard this, and all the players on the ice who had followed the referee looking for an explanation heard this. I only found this out after the game. I was not a popular person. And on the way home in the car, my dad and I had a conversation that I didn’t understand.
“Nice game. Are you tired?”
“No. Why is everybody mad at me? Why don’t they like me anymore?”
“Well, you’re at an age now and you’re playing at a level where it wasn’t up to you to do the referee’s job for him. You don’t have to tell him that the puck went in if he asks you.”
I was confused by everything I had seen that night, by how the adults had carried on at the rink, by what my dad had told me on our way home. And that’s all that I would have taken with me from that year of hockey, that would be all I would have remembered from the glorious Heritage-Victoria Olympic Nines of 1972–73, except that something else happened later that night. After I had gone to bed, and while I was lying there alone in the almost dark, looking at the shadows of my hockey posters and thinking about the game, trying but failing to fall asleep, I heard my dad’s footsteps come down the stairs toward my room. He knocked at the door, opened it a bit, and stuck his head in.
“Greg, are you still up?” he whispered.
“Yes.”
“You did the right thing tonight telling the ref. I’m proud ofyou.”
“Thanks.”
“You OK?”
“Yeah.”
“OK. Goodnight. Good game. Goodnight.”
He closed my bedroom door and went back upstairs. That’s the last thing I remember about that night, and the only thing I remember about that entire year of hockey.
I CONTINUED TO progress quickly in hockey. By 1975, when I was eleven, I began playing for the St. James Canadians at what today would be considered the AAA level. I eventually became one of a small group of players in the city who played at that level in every year of eligibility without ever being cut. I was usually at or near the top of our league statistically in “goals against average” while playing on a team that often finished only in the middle of the standings. As I moved through the ranks of age-group hockey, I was becoming known outside of my local area and was being scouted and recruited for both junior and college hockey teams.
But I wasn’t close to being the best athlete in my family. My brother, Doug, was blessed with a remarkable physical make-up and coordination, the kind of guy who later in life could pick up a set of golf clubs after not having played in a year or two and score in the mid-70s. And my sister, Dawn, blew us both away by becoming a nationally ranked swimmer, a national age group record holder, and later a champion triathlete.
Yet, while all three of us seemingly had a common bond through sports, something that would connect us and bring out all of the emotional support that a functioning family needs to provide its members, that wasn’t the case. I was always on my own as the eldest, while Dawn and Doug were more of a team. They were simply naturally more comfortable with each other, they were more fun to be around, and they were cooler kids at school. Unlike me, they had many friends. Me, when I was young I was always a little different, off by myself, intellectually a bit older than my peers and with different interests.
All three of us were always straight-A students, but I wasn’t just a straight-A student, I was a straight-A-virtually-perfect student. I could tell that I was ahead of the rest when my kindergarten teacher let me lead the flashcard vocabulary program. She had figured out on the first day that I could read all of the words, pronounce them correctly, and give their proper meanings.
Not only that, but I completely kicked ass at nap time.
The next year I was dragged out of my class to perform a reading test for another teacher who had heard about me. I became a bit of a circus act, and I was increasingly asked to solve puzzles or answer questions on command for others to show just how smart I was. But I also had a most amazing teacher, Ms. Belding, who always made time for me. She took me aside and set me up with my own academic program. That elementary school of mine—Arthur Oliver—is long gone, but I hope she isn’t.
Ms. Belding was the perfect teacher for me because she kept challenging me while encouraging me. She started giving me my own schoolwork during class. I loved it. I was getting from her what I wasn’t getting at home: somebody who understood me and my need for more. And while schools now rarely advance young children ahead of their natural grade because they better understand the social and psychological risks this presents to students not old enough to interact appropriately with older classmates, she and the rest of the staff at my school only ever did what everyone thought at that time was best for me.
It wasn’t long before external educators were showing up at school and I was being pulled out of class to be tested by strangers.
“Greg, today we have something special set up. Don’t worry. It will be fun. Here, come with me, we’re going down to the office to meet somebody.”
And with that, I got up and went with Ms. Belding, the class snickering behind us as she held my hand, oblivious to my immense crush on her.
I was introduced to a woman who was pleasant yet who also seemed overly serious about what we were about to do. I was tested on a set of materials, with blocks, math puzzles, timed tasks to perform, language puzzles, things like that. At one point she broke into a wide smile and thereafter was more akin to a best friend. She told me that I was the first person she had tested who had managed to solve one particular puzzle.
About a week later, the same scene played out. I asked why I had to do it all over again and was told that they wanted to make sure that my score really was what it was. All I know is that the next week I was moved up a grade. A week later, I was at the top of that grade too.
I was “academically gifted,” as they say, and if I in any way make this out to be a potential weakness I also understand how that will come across. I did well at school and was moved up a grade and probably could have been moved up a few more. I was a parent’s dream. I was, to anybody looking at me from the outside, a massive success. How could any of this in any way ever prove to be a problem?
Today, children are rarely accelerated through the school system ahead of their age group as it is better understood now that school is as much about life as it is about education. School is about learning the basics, learning how to learn, learning how to socialize, and gaining the ability and confidence to facilitate your own development. If you aren’t developing emotionally as well as academically, you’re in a very dangerous place. And with all that was going on, I was in that dangerous place, an isolating place.
When I moved ahead in hockey, at least I had my school friends. When everyone figured out I needed more in school, they reasoned I could deal with it because I was already playing sports with older kids. Except, by moving me up a year in school, they took me away from the very group of kids who were keeping me socially integrated at my emotional level. As large as I was physically when I was young, I was
