was not ready to live in a world where my hockey and school peers were all older and more emotionally mature.
Because of my size, I wasn’t exactly a normal-looking kid. I was the one in the center of the back row in all the school pictures, the kid with his head sticking up while his neck sits next to the smiling faces on either side of him. Everywhere I went I felt as if I didn’t belong, and that was imprinted on me at a very early age. Emotionally, I was a gentle soul, very much like my dad in that regard, though fortunately I had also acquired my mom’s aggression, which gave me a drive he never had. Emotionally and socially I was a late bloomer. Although physically large, I was very late to reach puberty. And because I was already finding it difficult to fit in, the last thing I wanted was to look different, to actually be different. Yet I was different. I kept growing and growing, I started stumbling over my limbs, I started to gain weight as my body anticipated a puberty that just never seemed to kick in. It was a very difficult time for me. I was a giant with the voice of a choir boy and an athlete who was now bumbling and having to work hard just to keep up at the back of the pack while running laps or doing other training drills that I had once led.
After having started out as very athletic and extremely coordinated, I went through several years of being very tall but also chubby and somewhat uncoordinated. I struggled to keep pace with my height and lingering fat, and had a body composition I thought would never change. Yet, while I was tripping over my own legs, I was still able to fight through the extra weight and keep succeeding at hockey at the highest levels as patient coaches could see in me both my natural talent and my willingness to work at least as hard as the hardest worker on the team.
By age fourteen I was again truly becoming an athlete. I was active in football and other sports besides hockey and had no difficulty excelling at school while keeping up an extensive list of extracurricular activities.
But a disconnect between the reality of who I was and who I thought I was had been cemented. The negative image I had of myself from those difficult times stayed with me longer than it should have. Further, that image, formed by others too, probably stayed with them longer than it should have.
I had just turned fourteen and was away at a hockey tournament in Thunder Bay, Ontario. One afternoon, we had nothing to do between games and were hanging around in one of our hotel rooms. Somebody came up with the idea of having a push-up contest. There had been a time, when I was ten or eleven, when doing even just a handful of push-ups would have been difficult, if not impossible. I tried my best to get out of it, to hide, but when you’re my size (I was by then well over six feet tall) there is nowhere to hide. Eventually, near the end, I was called forward and forced to do my push-ups. To this day, I remember how shocked we all were when I finished second to Scotty Allan, a physical specimen of perfection.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, as I’d been quietly working very hard downstairs at home by myself to get my body into shape.
Less than a year later, our team was in Bloomington, Minnesota, for a tournament, and one of the billets we were staying with had a weight room set up in his basement. A couple of guys on our team who were there couldn’t believe it when I went over to the weight bench and effortlessly pressed the entire set. And the thing is, they were shocked that I even went over to the bench, let alone pushed the weights with ease.
Barry Melville, one of our hockey coaches when I was eleven and twelve, later saw me at one of my football games and didn’t realize it was me. Once he found out, all he could comment on was my changed shape. He had been so patient with me, so encouraging, so dedicated to helping me improve, and I felt proud to make him smile at the athlete I had become.
I was also lucky to have had a remarkable gym teacher, Mr. Warkentin, in Grades Seven through Nine at Ness Junior High School. He was always so kind, patient, and supportive of me as I grew into my body. There was nobody happier than he was as I went from being a kid who couldn’t hold myself up to the chinning bar to one who excelled at the flexed arm hang, a rite of passage for all Canadian kids of a certain vintage who had to complete the Canada Fitness Test.
When I look at pictures of me from back then, the change in my physical makeup through those early years was dramatic, more dramatic than I realized. But the image of that eleven- and twelve-year-old heavy, uncoordinated boy persisted with all of us, myself included, despite my new body. We saw only what we had once seen, not what was really there.
I SEEMED TO have it all. I was a star student, an athlete, and a nice, friendly kid. Athletic success came easily. When I played baseball, I was a pitcher, and I threw harder than the other kids the very first time I tried without knowing a thing about baseball. When I played football, I was voted one of the captains. I didn’t know it, but I was in the process of becoming me. Yet, I was different from my athletic peers because school was even more important to me than sports. I liked sports but I loved school, always in that order. Kids like what they are best at, and no matter how good I was at sports, I was always even better at school. I was, in effect, a teenager cast as a jock among the geeks and a geek among the jocks. But underneath it all, I was a jock who hadn’t always been physically solid, who was in many ways anything but.
And if you dug just a bit deeper into my family situation, you would also have seen something that was different from what it likely seemed to be. Families are like that, and mine was no different.
My mom, as much as she appeared to be loving and caring, and as much as she was loved by others outside our home, was incredibly cold and demanding. She was a closet alcoholic, one only we could see. She most definitely was not a happy drunk. She scowled at us, snapped insults, always had a demeaning comment about how we could be doing more or doing better than we were. I grew up thinking that white Bacardi rum was a cleaning supply because I always found bottles of it under our sink—and that’s what my mom told me it was when I was little and asked her what was in the bottle and, well, she was my mom, so I believed her.
Somewhere along the way, somebody or something had taken away her sense of life and fun. The joyful mother she appears to have been in a journal she kept after my birth quickly gave way to an overwhelmed mother of three who struggled to cope. Drunk and belligerent at dinner, or passed out on the couch after drinking to try to escape, life was just too much for her.
That made her incredibly difficult to live with. The sad thing is that every once in a while, maybe twice, three times a year, she would become the person we didn’t usually see, happy, carefree, laughing, and just really cool to be around. I remember her helping me build a crystal ball radio, just the two us, and it was as if she was a different person as we bantered back and forth until we sorted everything out. She joked that if we could figure this out then we could probably build a television and maybe we should just get rid of ours so that we would have to get right onto that next project. It was such a simple moment, yet because such moments rarely happened with her, that conversation is etched in my memory. And those few moments of joy with my mom kind of made it worse, because after seeing her so full of life, it hurt even more to see her the way she usually was around us.
At her funeral, I heard all about the person she had been before life got the better of her. It was like listening to stories about a complete stranger. I wished that the woman who others had seen had been my mom—someone warm, kind, open with her emotions, helpful, encouraging.
And I know this is awful to say, but I never believed she really loved me. I mean, of course a mother loves her child, and of course I must have memories of loving moments stored somewhere, right? But even as I write this I struggle to find memories of any loving moments. The truth is, I have none. She wasn’t wired that way. Maybe she was a product of her generation, maybe a product of her stern farm upbringing, maybe a product of her alcoholism, but whatever it was, she could not show love.
Of course, if anybody outside the family had said, or were ever to say, a bad thing about my mom, I would be livid. That’s
