Let’s start with the pain. Where it all began. Literally trying to stand upright on skates. January, 2011. (Some would say nothing has really changed) That was the first line of my first ever nickdoeshockey blog, way back in January, 2011. So it’s right that it be the first line of this, Blog no. 257, and the last. Of course, the line remains true. Tonight I’m going to attempt to play hockey for the first time in months, wondering if a sore knee and a sore shoulder will cope. Read it before? Me too, which is why I’m calling time on the blog. I set out to chart my unlikely adventure from havi ..read more

What the cool kids are wearing. Well, the old dog hockey players, anyway. I have learned to respect pain. I don’t like it but I understand that I should listen to my body when the pain level ramps up. My wife has a theory that I’m not truly happy unless I’m carrying some kind of injury, because she believes if I’m not hurting from some contact sport mishap, I don’t feel like I’m young/active/alive. She may or may not have a point. What I do know is that there are aches and there is pain. I know the difference. This is not my first rodeo, as they say. I spent the last month moving office. Cle ..read more

Oh man, what a day. First, Sergio Garcia finally wins the Masters, at his 73rd attempt at winning a major. Then comes news that John Clarke, one of the greatest comedians ever produced by New Zealand/Australia and a local of my hood, passed away while hiking in the Grampians on the weekend. And all this while I was watching the last ever Detroit Red Wings game at the Joe Louis Arena. This last one was going to be enough to unravel me on its own, even without Clarke’s unexpected passing, or feeling happy for the Spanish golfer who burst onto the scene years ago as a wunderkind who was going to ..read more

My mother’s middle name is Hope. It was my Nan’s doing. She told me many times that she gave it to Mum because, ‘If nothing else, she’ll always have hope.’ As The Beatles never sang: All you need is hope. I’m currently doing a major clean out of endless boxes of memorabilia and sometimes junk at my office and on Friday I found a Tattslotto ticket. Well, actually, it was the master ticket, that you hand over each week so you can play the same numbers. I don’t know what the technical name for it is; I gave up on Tattslotto long ago, working on my old maths teacher’s theory that lotto is just a ..read more

I’d never had to do The Double. I’d seen plenty do it, including my Cherokees teammate, Burty, earlier this season when he went to the wrong rink and had to race to Oakleigh. Even better, I once sat laughing as a goalie arrived triumphantly mid-warm-up, in full kit, to the undying relief of his teammates, as he desperately Doubled (see video at bottom). Through the Goalposts: Driving across the Bolte Bridge, en route from Docklands to Oakleigh. Pic: Big Cat Place But I’d never before found myself with a hockey schedule that demanded attendance at both of Melbourne’s rinks, Icy O’Briens and O ..read more

I’m not sure, in all 250-plus blog posts, that I’ve ever adequately addressed the delicate subject of Hockey Smell. Put it this way: it’s fucking appalling. Or to put it another way: things that probably smell better than sweaty hockey gear: – an animal carcass in the hot sun, – a municipal tip, – off eggs that are, like, two weeks ‘off’, – the Werribee sewerage farm on a bad day. A constant, hopefully downwind sight in my pokey backyard: the big dry. Or to put it another way: I was lucky enough to play in a social game on Sunday, to celebrate the engagement of two local hockey stars, Christ ..read more

#Batlyfe Heading to Icy O’Briens on Monday night for a death slot 10.30 pm game, against the Wolverines, I was blown away by the number of bats in the post-dusk sky above me. I’ve always loved bats and have even tried to write them into poems, without any kind of publishable success. For years, I’ve sat on balconies around Fitzroy or Fitzroy North and watched them flapping determinedly to the west, deep in the gloaming, so sure of where they’re going while it sometimes feels like I lurch along underneath their flight path. I’m so happy that they’re around in such numbers this year and decide ..read more

The lucky mo. Deep in Movember. It was halfway through November that it occurred to me. Ever since I had shaved off my beard and started growing an unsightly trucker moustache, for Movember, I had scored a point or even points in every hockey game I’d played. A couple of goals and a few assists for the Cherokees, goals or assists in every development league outing on a Tuesday night… I suddenly thought: is this a thing? And the moment I thought that, then, yes, this was now a thing. A magical moustache. Hockey, like most sports, lends itself to superstitions. As the feeling took hold that my ..read more

Lids and bottles ready: Big Cat and Nicko side-by-side. I started hockey more than six years ago largely as an act of escapism. There was a woman involved, of course. Or, more specifically, the fading ghost of a woman I’d loved, and taking up hockey, without having ever skated, seemed like a great idea at that moment. Smashing repeatedly and painfully into hard ice is a good, immediate way to take your mind off a bruised heart. For the duration of a hockey class, at least. Miraculously, it worked and I healed and I got to play hockey with both my boys, if too briefly with Mackqvist. Big Cat ..read more

How it looked last time I shaved down to a mo … This is kind of like a ‘commercial ad break’, as NHL TV likes to call it. But for a good cause… I’m doing Movember this year, to help raise money for men’s health. I recently interviewed one of the founders of Movember, Trav Garone, and the people who actually make sure the money goes to good causes – which it really does ($A850 million and counting, when I spoke to them …) and it made me realise that I had to stomp on my ego and rejoin, after a break of a few years. Trav Garone, founder of Movember and a good guy … Pic: Royal Auto The break ..read more