I Am Nobody Page 2

  Despite having only a Grade Eight education, he was far smarter than many people I went to school with or later worked with. And that is something I have always carried with me. It’s always a fifty-fifty chance whether the people leading the meeting are any smarter than the people who will come in hours later to clean up the offices after them. I’ve seen this firsthand over and over again during my career. But I went to school and worked with many who seemed to view themselves as better than others. No one should ever presume they are smarter or know more than anybody else. No one.

  My mom was a high school graduate and thus the educated one in the family. She went on to work as a lab technician, earning a certificate but never completing a university degree. She was naturally bright and had been very attractive in her day, though the title of Miss Pense, Saskatchewan, which she earned one year at the town’s summer fair, may not have been the most hotly contested pageant. Her sense of humor showed itself every once in a while, but for the most part she carried with her a darkness that suggested she had seen a bit too much of the world to ever be truly happy. She never seemed to be present in the moment but instead always had her eye on something that could or was about to go wrong. Picnics were always on the verge of being infested by bugs, candy was just about to be choked on, rain was just about ready to fall.

  Our family struggled financially. Mom and Dad hid it very well, but I would sometimes take phone messages from collection agencies and would see bills that were long overdue. We were by no means destitute and always had the basics, but I know that it must have been tough for my parents. I remember having to get up from the old beaten-up piano I loved so much so that it could be taken away and sold for money we needed to get me a new pair of skates. And, when I finally became a lawyer and applied for a credit card, I was initially refused because Amex thought I was my father, who had numerous unpaid debts.

  Sports had been a way of life for the Gilhooly family for several generations. My grandfather and great-uncles played professional football and hockey. My father grew up playing hockey in the Regina Pats organization, right beside future NHL stars like Bill Hicke and Red Berenson. One of my dad’s favorite possessions was a team picture from when he was an assistant captain. He has blood all down the front of his jersey and is smiling, just behind a young Berenson, whom he protected. In short, my dad followed in the Gilhooly tradition and loved my mom, hockey, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders, although not necessarily in that order.

  So it was not surprising that I started skating just before my fourth birthday and was participating in local organized hockey by the time I was five. I started my hockey life as a very large forward. I was so big for my age that I stuck out in the crowd. At the local park I was once mistaken for being a somewhat slow pre-teen when in fact I was only five or six. I was a very good skater, given my early start, and that combination of size and ability was a recipe for a disaster in the early 1970s, when kids of all ages, shapes, and sizes were still body-checking each other. And that’s where the story really begins, when I became a goalie not by choice but as a result of an incident at an outdoor rink that showed both the good and the bad in my father.

  We played most of our hockey at outdoor rinks. My local community club was Heritage-Victoria, and that’s where I was first signed up to play. It’s in the west end of Winnipeg, in the center of a group of very modest suburban homes built near the end of the baby boom. Outdoor hockey in the winter meant kids played while parents huddled on snowbanks, shifting their weight from one foot to the other to keep their feet from freezing. Even back then the parents were at least as engaged as the kids playing, if not more so. The problem is that when they’re young, kids can be of wildly different sizes and abilities, and that can impact a parent’s state of mind, especially if your kid isn’t as big as or as good as somebody else’s and you’re the type who wishes otherwise.

  At one of the games I inadvertently checked a boy on the other team. At least, I’m pretty sure my bodycheck wasn’t intentional, but since I was only six or seven years old I can’t in all honesty be sure. Afterward, his mother spat on me as I came off the ice.

  When my dad saw it happen, he froze. He later told me that the others who saw it all froze too, as if what had just happened was beyond comprehension. There I was, a little kid all bundled up to play hockey outside in the freezing cold, coming off the ice to walk through the snow and into the clubhouse to warm up and take my skates off and get my boots on and go home, with half-frozen spit all down the front of my hockey sweater.

  In the aftermath, my dad showed both the best and worst in him. The best was that he immediately de-escalated the situation. The worst was that he didn’t stand up for me but instead more passively worked toward a less confrontational resolution that was not in my best interests. He immediately grabbed my arm and walked me into the dressing room, where he took off my skates, warmed my feet, and kept telling me how well I had played. Then he took me straight to the car and we went home. I didn’t know what to think of what the woman had done to me, but I remember that my dad made me feel good. By the time we were home it felt as if nothing had happened. He did an amazing job. But at the same time he kind of didn’t.

  Today there would be lawsuits, calls for suspensions, and media coverage. Back then there was nothing. And my dad’s next step prevented the situation from ever happening to me again. Maybe, he suggested, I would like to try being a goalie? Maybe I could try it out next time?

  And with that suggestion—though I had no concept of this at the time—the worst in him came through, his passivity in the face of another’s wrong. Why did he think that I needed to make a change? Why wasn’t I free to play hockey without having to change positions? Did I deserve to have an adult spit on me? Had I somehow done something wrong? Are adults allowed to do things like that to kids?

  But at the time, the proposition of changing positions seemed like an opportunity. As a kid, there was nothing more exciting than putting on all of that cool goalie equipment, so I didn’t exactly feel as if I was missing out on anything, and I probably thought this might actually be even more fun. The fact that I could skate well gave me an advantage in the position, and kids like to do things they are good at. So just like that, I was a goalie. And looking back on it, I guess it would have been difficult for my dad to be among the other parents while his ginormous kid on the ice was with the other kids, knocking them around, skating circles around them. Now that I know more about my dad, I believe that pulling me—and himself—out of that spotlight and not being the center of that ongoing conflict would have suited him just fine.

  And he couldn’t have predicted what would happen next, when things really started to happen. Because I could skate and was large for my age at a time when the worst skater usually became goalie, I had that incredible advantage in the position. Nobody figured out until years later that given the importance of the position, the better athletes should be made goalies. I moved up a year to play with older boys and then was advanced even further to our area hockey team. As far as I was concerned, it was as if the spitting had never happened, and I couldn’t have been happier with my new place in hockey. It’s only when I look back on it that I wish my dad had stood up for me and my right to play the game in whichever position I wanted.

  HOCKEY’S PLACE IN Canadian society has been well documented. My first real brush with that zeitgeist was while playing for Heritage-Victoria at age nine in a league that featured several boys who went on to become professional players. Playing in the area league championship gave us two chances to defeat our bitter rivals, Kirkfield-Westwood. I know how funny that sounds, having a bitter rival at age nine, but at the time we were living the dream and hockey was everything to us. Spring was coming and there was that certain smell in the humid air, a smell that means two things in Canada: summer is coming and playoff hockey is upon us. This was back when most hockey was still played outside, so because the ice was starting to melt during the day, our games were scheduled long
after the sun had gone down at times that seemed ridiculously late in the evening given our ages. If we won the first game, it was over—we were champions. If we lost, we still had a chance the next night to win in a winner-take-all game.

  All I can remember is the last part of the first game, a game we lost. Do I remember anything at all about the second game, the game we won to advance to the Winnipeg finals, the celebration, the awards, the party afterwards? No. The only thing I remember is that we lost the first game on a very controversial late goal. And the only reason I remember that is because of what the adults did.

  There was a play around my net. The referee blew his whistle and then pandemonium erupted—screaming, yelling, allegations that the referee was blind, a complete idiot. The game was stopped, but then everything quieted down after the referee went to the benches and explained to the coaches what had happened. The goal was finally counted and put on the scoresheet, a face-off took place at center ice, and shortly after that the whistle was blown to end the game. We had lost and had to play another game. To everybody watching outside that cool spring night, it looked like we had been ripped off. Except there were two people who knew for sure that our bitter rivals had scored on us—me and the referee. Because I told him.

  The shot had come in hard and off the ice. It looked like I had made a great save, blocking it with my glove and then smothering it. Except that when I went down to smother it in the crush of players crashing in around the net (maybe crashing the net is bit of an overstatement, since we were just little kids, but it remains epic in my mind), I nudged the puck over the line as I covered it. Even the other team didn’t know they had scored. But the referee, standing in perfect position, thought he had seen what I knew had happened. He skated over to me to get the puck and said he couldn’t see for sure and asked me if the puck had gone in. I told him it had. And with that, he signaled a goal and a face-off at center ice. And in doing so, it was if he had started a war.

  Now, understand what was at stake here. We’re talking the highest level of competitive hockey for nine- and ten-year-olds, so of course that meant hockey scholarships, agents, pro hockey careers, entire futures, right? You would have thought so given how the adults acted. In the midst of the outrage, the referee skated over and told both coaches that the goalie had told him it was a goal. All the other players on the benches heard this, and all the players on the ice who had followed the referee looking for an explanation heard this. I only found this out after the game. I was not a popular person. And on the way home in the car, my dad and I had a conversation that I didn’t understand.

  “Nice game. Are you tired?”

  “No. Why is everybody mad at me? Why don’t they like me anymore?”

  “Well, you’re at an age now and you’re playing at a level where it wasn’t up to you to do the referee’s job for him. You don’t have to tell him that the puck went in if he asks you.”

  I was confused by everything I had seen that night, by how the adults had carried on at the rink, by what my dad had told me on our way home. And that’s all that I would have taken with me from that year of hockey, that would be all I would have remembered from the glorious Heritage-Victoria Olympic Nines of 1972–73, except that something else happened later that night. After I had gone to bed, and while I was lying there alone in the almost dark, looking at the shadows of my hockey posters and thinking about the game, trying but failing to fall asleep, I heard my dad’s footsteps come down the stairs toward my room. He knocked at the door, opened it a bit, and stuck his head in.

  “Greg, are you still up?” he whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “You did the right thing tonight telling the ref. I’m proud ofyou.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK. Goodnight. Good game. Goodnight.”

  He closed my bedroom door and went back upstairs. That’s the last thing I remember about that night, and the only thing I remember about that entire year of hockey.

  I CONTINUED TO progress quickly in hockey. By 1975, when I was eleven, I began playing for the St. James Canadians at what today would be considered the AAA level. I eventually became one of a small group of players in the city who played at that level in every year of eligibility without ever being cut. I was usually at or near the top of our league statistically in “goals against average” while playing on a team that often finished only in the middle of the standings. As I moved through the ranks of age-group hockey, I was becoming known outside of my local area and was being scouted and recruited for both junior and college hockey teams.

  But I wasn’t close to being the best athlete in my family. My brother, Doug, was blessed with a remarkable physical make-up and coordination, the kind of guy who later in life could pick up a set of golf clubs after not having played in a year or two and score in the mid-70s. And my sister, Dawn, blew us both away by becoming a nationally ranked swimmer, a national age group record holder, and later a champion triathlete.

  Yet, while all three of us seemingly had a common bond through sports, something that would connect us and bring out all of the emotional support that a functioning family needs to provide its members, that wasn’t the case. I was always on my own as the eldest, while Dawn and Doug were more of a team. They were simply naturally more comfortable with each other, they were more fun to be around, and they were cooler kids at school. Unlike me, they had many friends. Me, when I was young I was always a little different, off by myself, intellectually a bit older than my peers and with different interests.

  All three of us were always straight-A students, but I wasn’t just a straight-A student, I was a straight-A-virtually-perfect student. I could tell that I was ahead of the rest when my kindergarten teacher let me lead the flashcard vocabulary program. She had figured out on the first day that I could read all of the words, pronounce them correctly, and give their proper meanings.

  Not only that, but I completely kicked ass at nap time.

  The next year I was dragged out of my class to perform a reading test for another teacher who had heard about me. I became a bit of a circus act, and I was increasingly asked to solve puzzles or answer questions on command for others to show just how smart I was. But I also had a most amazing teacher, Ms. Belding, who always made time for me. She took me aside and set me up with my own academic program. That elementary school of mine—Arthur Oliver—is long gone, but I hope she isn’t.

  Ms. Belding was the perfect teacher for me because she kept challenging me while encouraging me. She started giving me my own schoolwork during class. I loved it. I was getting from her what I wasn’t getting at home: somebody who understood me and my need for more. And while schools now rarely advance young children ahead of their natural grade because they better understand the social and psychological risks this presents to students not old enough to interact appropriately with older classmates, she and the rest of the staff at my school only ever did what everyone thought at that time was best for me.

  It wasn’t long before external educators were showing up at school and I was being pulled out of class to be tested by strangers.

  “Greg, today we have something special set up. Don’t worry. It will be fun. Here, come with me, we’re going down to the office to meet somebody.”

  And with that, I got up and went with Ms. Belding, the class snickering behind us as she held my hand, oblivious to my immense crush on her.

  I was introduced to a woman who was pleasant yet who also seemed overly serious about what we were about to do. I was tested on a set of materials, with blocks, math puzzles, timed tasks to perform, language puzzles, things like that. At one point she broke into a wide smile and thereafter was more akin to a best friend. She told me that I was the first person she had tested who had managed to solve one particular puzzle.

  About a week later, the same scene played out. I asked why I had to do it all over again and was told that they wanted to make sure that my score really was
what it was. All I know is that the next week I was moved up a grade. A week later, I was at the top of that grade too.

  I was “academically gifted,” as they say, and if I in any way make this out to be a potential weakness I also understand how that will come across. I did well at school and was moved up a grade and probably could have been moved up a few more. I was a parent’s dream. I was, to anybody looking at me from the outside, a massive success. How could any of this in any way ever prove to be a problem?

  Today, children are rarely accelerated through the school system ahead of their age group as it is better understood now that school is as much about life as it is about education. School is about learning the basics, learning how to learn, learning how to socialize, and gaining the ability and confidence to facilitate your own development. If you aren’t developing emotionally as well as academically, you’re in a very dangerous place. And with all that was going on, I was in that dangerous place, an isolating place.