Finnie Walsh Read Online Free Page B

brothers and their friends. Usually Frank Hawthorne played goal, but he was grounded a lot, so sometimes they substituted Finnie. None of the other kids had goalie equipment and neither Frank nor Finnie was willing to loan his out. I was invited because Finnie refused to play unless I did.
    They were absolutely brutal games and if I hadn’t been so bored with just playing against Finnie, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I did go, though, and tried my best not to make a fool of myself when the older boys whizzed slapshots at the net, more interested in seeing if they could kill or maim Finnie than in scoring. Every so often, Finnie would stop a shot with some particularly vulnerable part of his anatomy and it would take him a while to get back up, but he never let them see how much it hurt and he certainly never stopped playing on account of injury.
    They didn’t play a full rink in the schoolyard. Because of a shortage of space and people, they played four to a side with one goalie. When the defending team got the ball, they had to clear it past a centre line, then bring it back toward the goal. This made it possible to play with fewer people and less running. Because I was younger and less skilful than the older kids, I was never picked for a team. I just stayed in front of the net, perpetually on defence, doing my best to protect Finnie. I ended up blocking a lot of shots myself, accidentally, and once I got hit so hard in the stomach that I actually threw up. As soon as I was finished retching my guts out, I got back out there though, because if Finnie wasn’t going to break, then neither was I. This was an attitude that would resurface time and time again as we grew up; without Finnie, I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to do half of the things I did.
    There was no such thing as a penalty in these games. Kirby Walsh, the youngest of Finnie’s three older brothers, was by far the chippiest and meanest player of the group. His favourite trick was to come at you from behind, put his stick between your legs and then pull back, sending the blade into your crotch. He called this “harpooning the whale.” “Watch out for Ahab,” he’d cry just before yanking his stick back. Apparently he had read
Moby Dick
at the Portsmouth Boys’ School. I rather suspect, because of what happens to Ahab at the end and because of the type of boy that Kirby Walsh was, that he read only the first part of the book. Probably never got much past “Call me Ishmael.”
    It did not take many harpoonings before I learned to be aware of more than what was directly in front of me. It was necessary to develop a sort of sixth sense. Watching out for Ahab was also useful in other areas of defensive play; I was able to anticipate plays before they unfolded and had a much better chance of breaking them up.
    Gerry Walsh, older than Finnie and Kirby but younger than Patrick, was one of the best stickhandlers I would ever encounter. He was able to move the ball around on his stick with extraordinary precision and was the first person I ever played against who used his feet to manoeuvre the ball, dropping it back and kicking it up onto his stick at will. He played cheaply when he didn’t have the puck; although he never “harpooned the whale,” he was fond of using his elbows and wouldn’t hesitate to trip you from behind. Once, when I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, he hooked the hood with his stick and clotheslined me, which hurt like hell.
    Jim Stockdale was a terrific passer, accurate to within inches. He couldn’t shoot though, and he couldn’t take a pass very well. He was easy to cover because you always knew exactly what he was going to do, but he was just so damn good with his passes that there was no stopping them. I won’t even get into Patrick Walsh’s slapshot; it just plain hurt.
    One day, over Christmas holidays, just before the end of 1980, Finnie and I were playing in my driveway, not having been asked to play in the