Rink on Catfish Pond in Rennie Park.Jaime Sugiyama
Jaime Sugiyama is a writer based in Toronto.
I am only writing about the secret hockey rink on Catfish Pond knowing that, by the time anyone reads this, winter will be over and I won’t be rolling out a doormat to a city of ice-starved hockey junkies or Toronto police.
Hopefully, by next winter, the conditions that make Catfish a hidden hockey oasis will have disappeared entirely with the vaccination of our city and the reopening of our rinks. Hopefully by then, the city won’t be enforcing a no-shinny rule and the downtown barns won’t be locking their doors to keep a pandemic out. Hopefully, we will have awoken from our brief hockey nightmare, and the hard ice of sleep will become water once more.
But it’s only partly out of deference to the Rennie Park community – a place of palatial houses and affluent young families that I’m not a member of – that I held off on reporting my findings. Beyond a sense of miserly need to keep more of this frozen gold for my own four edges, Catfish Pond forced me to diligently reflect on something that I’ve long skated with: At a time when COVID-19 effectively outlawed hockey in many corners, skating here even once made me feel as though I was trespassing on something that wasn’t mine.
This feeling of trespass wasn’t new. It’s a guilt that’s as real as it is illegitimate, like being in the liquor store in your 30s and still worrying whether your ID is going to be deemed fake. If you are a visible minority in Canada’s game – as I am, the fourth-generation son of parents of Japanese and Italian ethnicity, and a hockey player since I was 5 – there is a part of you, quiet or loud, that knows what I am talking about.
Like many Torontonians this winter, I had resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t be stepping onto the ice with a stick and puck. So I took up walking, a poor facsimile for the steel-edged grind of a crossover on ice. But it was exercise all the same, and I mapped every street, back alley, park and ravine within five kilometres of my home with my boots. I circumnavigated around social distances, crossed streets to avoid families, turned down less populated paths and avoided major thoroughfares. But by midwinter, I had exhausted every nook and cranny my west-end neighbourhood had to offer, and my restlessness pushed me into higher and higher orbits away from home.
It had been on one of these marathon treks that I discovered Catfish. At first, it seemed to be a mirage, and I moved toward it slowly and carefully like a hypnotized Fox Mulder walking toward a glow in the forest. There it was, at the southern base of Ellis Avenue connected to Rennie Park: a beautiful narrow sliver of pond. About 20 different families were skating, silhouetted by the western setting sun. But amid the relief of their flailing shapes was something vaunted and spectacular standing heroically still: the rounded square frames of a red heavy iron hockey net. The adults had shovelled bubbles of rinks across the pond – about 10 in all – and the kids were playing distanced games of puck. It was a hockey speakeasy for the community.
In this bucolic Norman Rockwell scene in the middle of a pandemic, it was as if a bygone era had opened itself up to me: a place where kids and adults played hockey while other parents drank coffee on the snowy hills surrounded by pine and spruce.
But the sun was setting. I was an hour away from home, and I didn’t have my skates. I felt the special mix of hockey and privation that filled Roch Carrier’s short stories – a biblical longing that mixed sacrament and skating.
So I vowed to return, with a stick and a puck, before spring did.
By pure etymological accident, “playing hooky” and “playing hockey” are near-homophones. But the two expressions feel like fraternal twins in Canada, a place where blowing off work to skate is a wink and a nod away from civic acceptability.
And so less than a week later, on a perfect Thursday morning in February, I was back at Catfish Pond. All the families were working and homeschooling, so the pond was clear and the COVID-19 risk was low. The blue sky gave texture to the grey ice, now chewed up, pebbly and streaked with thin shovel lines of snow and a week’s worth of skate etchings.
Three old men passed a puck around on the north end of the pond. Like well-fed bears, they seemed both acutely aware of and unbothered by my presence.
I flicked my puck onto one of the clearings and chased it.
Putting on skates has always felt mythological to me – Perseus borrowing Hermes’s winged shoes, flying through the air plucking golden apples from the gods’ trees – and it felt even more so now, in this time of prohibition. Of course, the ancient Greeks never knew the unexpected hardness of natural ice, the thrill of real spontaneous speed or the warmth created by skating that makes you immune to winter long after you’re done. As I raced toward the puck, I felt a rush of innocent joy as pure as anything I had felt in the last year.
After a winter off my skates, my feet barked as if it was my first time in them. But I took my parka off and kept going, donning my beer-league hockey jersey: a garish purple and gold sweater emblazoned with the head of a horse and in a heroic font, “the Dead Horses of North York” – as in, you can’t beat us.
At that moment, I decided to take a photo of the rink and send it to my friend, Ehsan Mofidi. He’s an Iranian-Canadian who was born in Tehran, and despite the two of us sharing zero ethnic overlap, Ehsan and I look as if we belong to the same race. He plays left wing for the Dead Horses, and so he’s my teammate and, in this way, my brother-in-arms.
“Where are you?” he replied. Without thinking, I told him all about Catfish Pond.
After a pause: “We should arrange something.”
I put my phone away, an uneasiness suddenly hanging in the air.
Wearing my jersey, a 76 on my back, somehow made me more myself than I had been in a year, as if pulling out a passport for a nation I had temporarily forgotten. My jersey number came from a house-league pinny assigned to me at the novice age group, the kind they hand out every game before the real jerseys arrive. It’s been my favourite number ever since. To share it with P.K. Subban, one of the game’s greatest defencemen of colour, was an accident. But being the same age, I always liked to think that the two of us discovered the mysterious magic of 76 at the same time.
When he first emerged for the Canadian Junior team, I fell in love with his game. I loved how he roved into the play, joining the rush seemingly every shift. I loved the brash smile on his brown face. When he showed up on the Montreal Canadiens blue line wearing number 76, he became my favourite player, in spite of every bone in my Leafs-fan body. He was electric. But even as questions of him “playing the game the right way” dogged him his entire career, he didn’t seem to discuss racism in the game of hockey often, even when confronting it in the media.
Unlike P.K. Subban, no one has ever questioned my hockey values, even with my darker skin. I am a 5-foot-7 defenceman – a good skater, but not flashy with the puck. I pass, I take shifts of appropriate lengths and I spend more time preventing goals than scoring them. I’m a believer in this honour code of the game – a kind of hockey subservience that, at least in my mind, lets me earn my seat on the bench.
It’s this type of personality that so many immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants inhabit within hockey: one that obeys the code to respect the game and play the right way. This hockey assimilationism can feel like second nature, in choices made to become handmaidens – and then, sometimes, guardians – of what it means to be Canadian. It’s an easy hockey archetype to play up for those who maintain this pro-actively apologetic mentality at work, at the park, picking up their kids at the neighbours’ place. It’s this constant self-consciousness, this absolute awareness of where I am, that makes me one of the “good ones” to so many people – a person born to integrate. A person born to be accepted by Canada.
Ehsan is not such a player. On the ice, he milks every shift, gets in people’s faces, hunts for glory goals and fetes them with the most gratuitous of celebrations – regardless of our lead. He skates with a self-possessed attitude that seems to flip the bird to expectations. It should be said that the man backchecks, and is a great caring friend who always will offer to drive teammates to games. But the point is: He doesn’t tiptoe around the racial blue line, constantly worrying whether he is offside or not.
I love Ehsan as much as I fret about Ehsan. I worry about what it would be like to bring him here. I imagined droves of brown hockey-playing men falling upon this rink. And despite my code of honour, despite my romance for the game, I realized that I too would be a trespasser. For despite the game’s progress – despite Willie O’Ree, Larry Kwong, Jarome Iginla, Paul Kariya, Nick Suzuki, Wayne Simmonds, Mika Zibanejad, and yes, my numbersake P.K. Subban – I still felt as if I should be grateful for skating onto white Canada’s ice.
The rink is located in the Swansea neighbourhood of Toronto between High Park and the Humber River.Jaime Sugiyama
I looked over at the old men passing the puck, the clap of their sticks the only sound in the silence, calligraphic brush strokes over rice paper.
Finally, I skated over to them.
They were all white men, dressed like the man on the back of Canadian Tire money. I skated over in my bright purple jersey, embellishing my skating competence like a mating dance.
“Guys, would you feel comfortable if I passed the puck around with you? Just to feel what hockey feels like again?”
“Sure, come on over.”
One of the three remaining old timers vacated and went to shovel one of the other pads.
I took his place in the triangle and relayed the passes from one man to the other.
“It’s a beautiful pond,” I said. “It’s like an oasis in a desert.”
The guys laughed. “We know. It’s empty like this, all day. Every day. Except on weekends. Tell no one.”
My guilt flared up, thinking of Ehsan and his gang of shinny-playing riff-raff potentially collapsing upon this Eden any minute.
After a while, they returned to talking among themselves as if I wasn’t there. They caught up on their sons and their jobs. I just relayed the puck, a cycle on a powerplay where the penalty killers were all working from home. I was happy to be part of it.
But the guilt was still there, indicting my decision to send that photo. I imagined the cars arriving, vibrating with music, and pouring out other men of vague ethnicity like me, led by my friend.
Eventually, I took my leave, thanking the men. As I skated away, I still felt like an imposter. Despite the perfection of the day, despite a polite introduction and passing session, hockey couldn’t repair the loneliness of quarantine, or the racial mistrust of the world.
I had one last thought. I skated up to the man shovelling the adjacent pad.
“Hey, man. Can I shovel?”
“If you want. You can do the other half.”
He handed me the shovel and I pushed it, angling it so the buildup would squirt out toward the side that had yet to be shovelled – an instinct honed building my community rink with my dad and brother in North York. I spent the next half hour skating back and forth, cleaning the rink, each shovelful a toll of community.
For the sons and daughters of immigrants and people of colour, respect for the game is something we always get graded on. It’s this mark that gets applied to us more easily than to white hockey players. By having the power to apply this label, it still is white Canada’s game.
I do my work. I say the shibboleths. I don’t bring in the intruders. This is the way you show respect to your local rink.
But these people, these community men, do not own Catfish Pond; they never even made such a claim. They might feel connected to it by skating, shovelling and proximity, but legally, it’s owned by the city. And maybe not even a city, or Canada, or any abstract political entity, can own a paradise such as Catfish. Because hockey isn’t about belonging or ownership. Whether a player is Asian, Middle Eastern, female, male, Black, white, gay, straight or trans, hockey is about not being a coward, about not apologizing. That is what hockey represents, and how, paradoxically, you belong to the game. This is why, despite my passing attempts, Ehsan is more of a hockey player than I will ever be.
Ehsan never made it to Catfish that day and, I have to admit, I was happy about it. But no doubt it would have been better if he had<bold> </bold>shown up. If this west-end rink for white families was overrun by suburban-born immigrant hockey players rather than just me out there, a lone eager-to-please brownish face in the snow. That is how hockey will evolve.
When I was a kid, growing up at Finch and Leslie, my dad, brother and I would help build and maintain our community rink. We would shovel it off until the snowbanks were taller than regulation boards. We played until dark, and afterward we’d begin the bitter work of flooding it with the old fire hose connected to the nearby school.
On many occasions, kids would show up right after we shovelled and take an end, shooting on net or working on their passing. At first, I was angry at these prodigal sons and daughters, these interlopers who reaped the rewards of our shovels. I remember complaining about them to my dad.
“Some people shovel,” he replied. “Some people don’t.” And that was – is – that.
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