Sledhead
When I made my first donation to CAN Fund, the athlete I was told received my money was a sledge hockey player named Billy Bridges. I hadn’t heard of him at the time, mostly because I hadn’t heard much about sledge hockey at the time. I knew Paralympians competed in hockey, I just had never witnessed a game either in person or on television, and so I’m sure I must have thought it would be equivalent to wheelchair basketball—the same sport but in wheelchairs or, in this case, a sled.
But each Paralympic sport (including wheelchair basketball), although based on conventional able-bodied sport categories, is in many ways an entirely new sport, or at least another distinct version of the game. If sport were a language—and it might be—we might call these versions dialects.
I was excited to meet Billy, who I now thought of as one of my athletes, and when we were introduced, we immediately hit it off. Billy loves writing and literature, and he proceeded to shoot question after question at me about my favourite authors and books, about studying literature at university (Billy is enrolled at the University of Toronto, taking a course or two a year while he competes in hockey—he’s even a member of a frat), and about creative writing. I shot question after question at him about sledge hockey. Billy was born with spina bifida and his parents were told that he would never lead an active life. At fourteen, he became the youngest hockey player ever appointed to Team Canada. He has competed in three Paralympic games, and probably has at least two more games in him. He has one of the fastest shots in the world. (Oh, and he’s also won a ton of national medals in wheelchair basketball.)
Last fall, he told me about a film called Sledhead, by David Mcllvride, a documentary following Billy and a handful of other players through their journey to the World Championships, that was showing during a Toronto film festival highlighting representations of disability. My partner Chris and I attended the screening. And we were amazed.
Sledge hockey is a very different game than stand-up hockey (as it is called among Paralympic athletes). Yes, the rules for scoring are the same. And most of the rules regarding penalties, off-sides, icing, and face-offs are the same. But these athletes play strapped into sledges, lightweight titanium sleds with skate blades underneath, and they move about the rink by utilizing two short hockey sticks with shooting blades on one end and picks on the other.
OK, so what does that mean, besides that they utilize a different mode of transport on the rink? It means that when they hit each other against the boards, one, they are hitting each other with their entire bodies, and two, they are hitting each other on the part of the boards where there is zero give whatsoever. The picks are violent weapons that the players are not shy to use on each other when they get into a scuffle or when they are fighting for the puck along the boards. At one point in the film, a player lifts his jersey so the camera can capture the multitude of jabs he has suffered during the game—his entire torso littered with bleeding or scabbing puncture holes. It also means, if you’re a goalie, that almost every shot is aimed at your face. Paul Rosen, the goalie, claims Billy has knocked out a least a dozen of his teeth, just in practice. And I know that Billy’s fiancée, Sami Jo Small, a two-time Olympic gold-medallist and one-time silver-medallist women’s hockey goalie, has found that aspect of the sport a little hard to get used to as she sometimes straps on the sled and her goalie mask for the Ontario guys if they can’t train with their team goalies.
These men are a lot tougher than the majority of NHL players. And they want to win just as badly, if not more. For many of them, the game is their life, their entry into a life, away from being “physically-challenged” persons to persons who physically challenge themselves. And they are challenged in ways that, even with a disabled father, I had never considered. Perhaps the most haunting scene in Sledhead is watching Team Canada navigate a German airport (I believe it’s Frankfurt) where there is no wheelchair accessibility available to them for their flight transfer. Men who can piggyback each other through the terminal and then to their airplane seats. Others slide across floors and up stairs on their knees, some carrying their wheelchairs in one hand. Billy tells me this happens all the time. It’s what they go through to compete.
I’m very much looking forward to today’s rounds of sledge hockey, which will mark the first time I’ve ever gone to a live game, and so the first time I’ve ever seen Billy play. I urge you to watch a game, if you can, and to rent Sledhead. I assure you, no matter how much you think you know about hockey, you will be astonished.
