The Littlest Hockey Player by Glenn Parker

Author:Glenn Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookwhirl.com
Published: 2014-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When the hockey season finally rolled around, I was more than ready to play. Even though I wouldn’t have John on my line, I knew I would still succeed with whoever I played with. I had that much confidence in my game.

Grandpa was able to make it out to a lot of my games when he hadn’t been able to before. The reason was that he had gone to the doctor and been fitted with a knee brace that helped him get around better. My mom had been badgering him for years to do something about his leg, but Grandpa had a deep suspicion of doctors. He called them “witch- doctors” and “pill-pushers” and “saw-bones”, which I found most amusing. Now that he was able to get around easier, my Mom started giving him a bad time about doctors and how helpful they could be, but he still maintained that they were “a necessary evil.”

I was having a good year hockey-wise and scored even more goals than I had scored the previous year. I enjoyed having my Grandpa and Mom come to most of my home games. I always waved to them when I saw them sitting in the crowd and was never nervous because they were watching me. Some of the players on our team didn’t like their parents being at the game because of the expectation that they would do well, and when they didn’t, it was always a big letdown.

Mom was disappointed that I finally gave up on my music lessons. She had carried the notion that I was going to be a concert pianist one day for so long that having to let that go was difficult for her. I still enjoyed playing the piano, but I was as good as I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be a professional musician. My brothers had teased me about it for so long, I guess I associated that with the piano and got turned off.

Our team, the Fighting Tigers, was doing well. We were leading the league and winning almost all of our games. My new line mates were both excellent players and I was able to be the playmaker while they scored most of the goals. It was strange how my role had changed over the year. My initial desire was to go out and score as many goals as I could, but I soon found out that my real talent lay in being able to set the table for other players, especially John who was a proficient goal-scorer. Last year when Coach Conrad had emphasized that getting an assist was equally important as scoring goals, my game underwent a drastic change. I stopped trying so hard to score goals and found that I enjoyed getting assists just as much or more. Maybe I was turning into a Gretzky after all. I hoped so.

The worst thing that occurred that year was that just before the playoffs, John was badly injured. He was body checked

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