i grew up playing hockey in massachusetts, and at some point ended up with a trio of books that, based on a quick search just now, no one has heard of unless they grew up playing hockey in massachusetts. they were written by mark fidler, who i'm having trouble finding records of online because it seems like there are a handful of mark fidlers and none of them are particularly well known. i assume he's the one who played hockey for boston university at some point.
anyway, each of the books is about a kid who plays hockey and is encountering an adverse circumstance. one is about a kid whose family moves out to the middle of nowhere and has to learn how to play hockey on a pond instead of in a rink. one is about a kid who's bullied because his dad is the zamboni driver (as a side note, this one seems unrealistic because everyone loves zambonis? "wow your dad gets paid to drive an extremely cool machine. you're such a loser" ???). both of these were fine. i read each of them once or twice. but i read the third one a lot more times. please bear with me because i do have a copy of this book somewhere but i don't know where and it's been a while since i actually read it. partway through writing this post i found it and have rewritten the rest of this post while rereading it.
two-faced forward, published in 2005, is about a young boy who gets a very bad concussion and is told by his doctor that he has to give up hockey for at least a year--boys' hockey allows checking, and would be extremely dangerous for him. (for those of you who didn't grow up playing hockey, checking is when you ram another player into the boards.) as a kid who loves his sport, as many sports-playing children do, he's devastated. he considers playing in a rec league, but his friend points out that he'd be going from playing with A teams to playing with people who simply aren't that good at hockey. when his friend leaves. he thinks:
Why was it that all the no-check leagues were jokes? If you want to play serious hockey, and you are twelve years old, you have to check. If you're a boy, anyway. Why couldn't I be a girl? Girls aren't allowed to check at any level, even in college or the Olympics. If I were a girl, I could play hockey at the highest level, and not worry about a killer check.
he decides that, since he's small for his age and hasn't yet gone through puberty, he can pass as a girl with a little bit of effort as long as no one he knows sees him. with the help of a friend posing as his father on the phone, he's able to get a spot on the local girls team. The first time he skates with them, one of the girls introduces herself and he notes how good she is as practice goes on.
And then I realized how great it felt to be back on skates. Suddenly, I was no longer a boy disguised as a girl, skating with a bunch of girls. I could tell by the way these girls skated that they were hockey players. I was on the ice with hockey players. I was a hockey player. I was doing what I was born to do. And after three weeks of unspeakable torture, building houses of cards and trying not to think about the game I loved, the world was right again.
obviously, there are problems. he has to find a way to pay for his place on the team and attend practices and games without his parents finding out, and he has to keep his two identities separate. but he's able to play and make friends with the team, and over time he starts to think of himself as one of the girls. and the team is good; they qualify for nationals. but actually attending requires a birth certificate, and while he does make a fake one, he can't bring himself to give it to his coach. his coach drives to the house he gave as his address to try to get it before the deadline, and everything unravels. his closest friend on the team confronts him; he confesses to her and she freaks out at how he's lied to her and the team. his parents respond more calmly, and they take him to apologize to the team.
the team and coaches are upset that they're now disqualified from going to nationals, but they otherwise don't take it too badly aside from his closest friend. the resolution of the scandal is that most people forgot about it by summer; "The big hockey magazines had stories about me, but they talked about my accident, and made people mostly feel sorry for me." in the last chapter, he plays pick-up hockey with the girl who was his closest friend on the team; she says that this is hard for her and she needs some time but they can probably someday be friends again. on the ice, they play together in perfect sync.
i don't have a good way to end this post. but i keep thinking about this book. rereading it now, it's kind of wishy-washy; you can read it as "this kid did something bad because of his circumstances, but he's forgiven because he did it for pure love of hockey" and that's probably the intended reading. but when i was a kid, all i understood was that he loved hockey, and the only way he could play it was to lie; the problem was not that he lied, but that he had no other choice.
i wish, now, having just reread it, that the book had explicitly come to the conclusion that segregating hockey by gender rather than by checking versus non-checking leagues was itself the problem, but even with my bad experiences on boys teams and much better experiences on girls teams, i was still able to reach that conclusion as a child because of this book. i firmly believed that without question someone in this circumstance should be allowed to play on a girls team, and therefore anyone willing to be one of the girls should be allowed to openly play on a girls team. it would still be several years before i learned about transgender people existing. in a way, you could call this book my introduction to the idea, and despite its flaws, i think it did a pretty good job. who cares about someone's gender? their love of hockey should be all that matters.
