MEMOIR
My Dad Didn’t Love Hockey, But He Must Have Loved Me
To celebrate my late father’s memory, I’m going to lace on my skates and play hockey
My father, Thomas A. Gruley, would have turned 93 today.
Dad never played the game I’ve loved most of my life. He thought of hockey as a bunch of ruffians knocking each other around, and occasionally putting a puck in the net (not all that inaccurate a description in the 1970s). The game Dad loved, and occasionally loathed, was golf. But he went along with my playing hockey. That was a gift I didn’t yet appreciate.
The few times I saw Dad on the ice, he wore racing skates with those hilariously long blades that make the tight turns and quick stops of hockey nearly impossible. We glided through the glow of floodlamps on the big rink in Rouge Park in Detroit. I chased a puck around the rutted ice surface with a straight-bladed stick on white figure skates handed down by a cousin. The best part of those evenings was the hot cocoa and chocolate chip cookies we dug into from the back of our station wagon.
I played on the rink in our next-door neighbor’s backyard, the sheet of ice on the tennis court at the park down the street, and in the street itself when the winter snow was packed down enough to be slick. Our nets, like so many in the northern states and Canada, were framed by piles of ice or a stray pair of boots. We argued more than once when a breakaway was interrupted by a passing car.
Dad finally built a rink in our backyard. It was a beauty. Dad was an engineer and, when it came to projects, a perfectionist. He had my two brothers and I crisscross the yard, tamping down the snow, then watered it with a lawn sprinkler like he was tending a rose garden. Half of our yard was ringed with cyclone fence; Dad bought slatted construction fence to frame the other half, so we had boards. He built nets from two-by-twos and chicken wire. Kids hiked from more than a mile away, skates dangling over their shoulders, to pretend they were National Hockey League legends Gordie Howe and Bobby Orr, in our backyard.
I’m pretty sure my first season of organized hockey annoyed the hell out of Dad. I can’t say I blame him. Now he had to get up from dinner, pack me and my gear into the car, and then stand outside in the January dark while I played hapless goaltender for a team that didn’t win a game (and persuaded me to give up goaltending for good).
He preferred to watch me play Little League baseball and, especially, football. He loved hearing my coach yell, “Way to go, Gruley!” when I made a tackle. At the age of 13, I thought football was the sport I’d play as long as I could, and I knew that made Dad happy.
He left his office early one afternoon in the fall of 1971 to watch my first game of freshman football for Detroit Catholic Central, a Michigan football power. He stood on the sideline waiting to see me block and tackle but never did because, for the first time in my football career, I didn’t go in for a single play. I was crushed and I suspect he was, too, but as we walked to his car afterward, he told me things would get better. He was right.
By season’s end, I was a starting offensive guard and captain of the “Gruley’s Guerillas” kickoff team. But my passion for football was ebbing. The coaches and their long, tedious practices made it feel more like a job than a game.
I made CC’s freshman hockey team on the last day of tryouts. Every Friday afternoon, we loaded our equipment into a blue school bus and rumbled into Canada for practice at a rickety old arena south of Windsor. Those practices were a blast. We had a good season, falling just short of a state title. But it was the bus rides, the chirping and storytelling and ball-busting with my buddies, that sold me on hockey. When football practice started the next summer, I was a no-show.
A year-and-a-half later, we were making another championship run. One of our home goal judges was Dad. He had no particular qualifications for the job, but somebody had to do it, and Dad preferred standing alone behind a goal net to sitting in the stands with the other parents.
“How come they all have Gordie Howes for sons and I don’t?” he used to ask me.
It was a little joke between us, a comment not on me but on the moms and dads who thought their sons were headed for NHL careers (none were, as it turned out).
Dad fancied himself as a bit of a loner — or, as he sometimes put it, a “violator.” The kind of guy who took pride in wearing his belt a certain way nobody else did. Fed up with bosses, he started his own engineering business in the 1960s and, though he had golf and bowling buddies, always felt more comfortable with immediate family than with people who weren’t.
So of course he didn’t mind watching my games from his solitary vantage behind the net. Yet, standing so close, Dad could also see us for the sweaty, profane, sometimes nasty boys we were. He delighted in being privy to our pregame cheer — “Fuck ’em up, blue, fuck ’em up, blue!” In a way, he was more one of us than one of the parents, a distinction that never went away.
Before a crucial state playoff game, Dad told me he would buy pizza and drinks at his favorite haunt, Capraro’s, for anyone who attended the game. Word got around, and the stands were packed with howling CC faithful. We beat our archrivals in double overtime. Capraro’s that night was packed too. Dad had to have dropped many hundreds of dollars. He did it again when we won the state title that weekend.
I was a father myself by the time Dad confided how disappointed he was when I quit football to play hockey. It surprised me to hear that. I asked why he hadn’t said anything way back when. He shrugged. He just wanted me to do what I thought was best. His forbearance prepared me for the moment when my own son, Joel, decided to stop playing football just before his senior year in high school. Just like that, I was in Dad’s shoes: It broke my heart even as it made me proud that Joel was his own man.
Dad never developed any real affection for the game of hockey, but he came to dearly love my high school teammates. Summer after summer, he welcomed them to our family cottage in northern Michigan for a golf-beer-euchre-and-bullshit weekend we call the Pistachio Open. He became one of the boys, no longer Mr. Gruley but “TAG,” for his initials. Those boys, now old men, are my best friends in the world. Dad, going back more than 50 years, played a role in making that so.
Countless mothers and fathers make sacrifices so their children can pursue what they love. Dad’s was as profound as it was simple. When he died in 2011, three days short of his 80th birthday, hockey pals from Detroit, Chicago, and Boston showed up to mourn. Dad would have loved to hang around trading stories with them. And maybe he would’ve picked up the tab for pizza and beer. RIP TAG.
