The late afternoon was sunny, and crisp, and begging for shinny.
This is our first winter in a new town, and my nine year-old boy had been asking me for weeks to find him an outdoor rink.
I hadn't, and for that, like Denis Lemieux, I feel shame. Between the boy's rep hockey, his two sisters' dance classes, swimming lessons, Mom's yoga, and Dad spending all his nights asking other men in make-up if Lecavalier should be traded, there never seems to be time to find a patch of ice. And just...play.
But last Monday after school, all the daytimers were magically clear. So when the kid next door came calling, stick and skates in hand, saying there was a dandy full-size rink at a school just a few blocks away, we were in toques and longjohns at Usain Bolt-speed.
My boy asked if he should bring his helmet, and I gave him that annoying, fatherly, "What do you think?" stare. He didn't argue.
...Until we got to the rink.
I was dumbfounded. There must have been 20 kids on the ice, playing two separate games. The youngest was probably eight or nine, the oldest well into his teens. And not a single one was wearing a helmet.
"See Dad, why can't I just wear my hat?"
I'm not sure I even answered. All I could think about was Wheels.
Nicholas "Wheels" Lambden was a 10 year-old dynamo of a hockey player from Guelph, Ontario. He had blond hair and a wide grin that belonged in a milk commercial. The nickname, of course, came from his speed. No matter what the sport, the boy could fly.
Two winters ago, Nick was playing shinny on a rink in a park near his house. He was digging a puck out of a snowbank when a shot from a nearby game struck him in the head.
It was a million-to-one accident. And it killed him.
"You have a heartbeat, so you keep living, but I miss him every moment," says Andrew Lambden, Nick's father, as the family approaches the two-year anniversary of Nick's death. "I see him, hear him, touch him in my imagination. The sadness is completely overwhelming."
I had thought of Nick often over the past two years. I still have the black armband one of his teammates handed me after I came to watch them play a few weeks later. And I remember the unspeakable heartbreak in his Mom Susan's voice when I spoke with her the night after his passing. Between the tears, she asked me for one thing: to tell all parents to make sure their kids wear helmets whenever they play hockey.
That wish became part of the Lambden's focus in keeping Nick's memory alive. They created a foundation in his honour, and have pushed for laws to make helmets mandatory on outdoor rinks. Nick's foundation donated 18-inch high nets, to help keep shots low, and the City of Guelph legislated that they be the only kind used on the ice in their parks. But mandatory helmets have been a trickier issue in this country.
"It's unbelievable that many kids still aren't wearing them," says Andrew Lambden. "My greatest fear is that it will happen to someone else. To think that it is preventable and yet we're doing very little about it is troubling. No one would ever allow their kids to play without a helmet indoors, and yet outdoors we seem to say 'It's Canada, it's our national pastime, there is ice everywhere, and we can't control it."
"I know why Nick didn't have his on that day," says Susan Lambden. "It was freezing out, just like today, and he wanted his hat on to keep his ears warm. With Nick's foundation, we've been working on finding liners that work under helmets to keep you warm. That would help. But no matter what, kids just have to put the helmets on. I just wish everyone could understand that...everything can change in a split second."
We all loved the feeling of skating without the burden of that cumbersome lid. Growing up, we played shinny every night in the backyard of my friend Sylvain's house in Blackburn Hamlet. I don't think we ever wore helmets. Then again, we never wore them riding bikes either.
Do we overprotect our kids today? Absolutely. But it beats the hell out of the alternative. Ask the Lambdens. Even a million-to-one chance is too big a risk.
I didn't say anything to the other kids at the rink that afternoon. Didn't want to be the preachy stranger. I just sat my boy down on the snow bank, and reminded him of Nick's story. "I'm almost as old as he was," was his only response.
He quietly slipped on the helmet, and asked me to do up the snaps. Then he skated off into the fading afternoon light, with puck and stick, and infinite possibilities.
http://tsn.ca/columnists/james_duthie/?id=263827