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A sporting life: Grant Lawrence confronts his demons on ice

CBC Radio host reads from his new book at West Vancouver Library
Grant Lawrence
CBC host Grant Lawrence talks about his lifelong love/hate relationship with hockey at the West Vancouver Memorial Library on Sunday, Dec. 15 at 2:30 p.m.

Grant Lawrence reads from The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie at West Vancouver Memorial Library, Sunday, Dec. 15 at 2:30 p.m. For more information visit westvanlibrary.ca.

The bully lines up for the penalty shot, oblivious to the man in the crease.

They knew each other about 20 years ago, but not as friends.

Angus "The Anvil" McFadden had shoulders like cinder blocks back then. Back then, he rolled around in a Chevy Nova with holes punched in the muffler. He's forgotten the goalie, but the goalie remembers everything.

Standing across from each other on a mountaintop ice rink near Penticton, the goalie's mind snaps back two decades. It's an old memory, but the years haven't sapped its potency.

Grant Lawrence is back in West Vancouver again, walking to a high school party in the winter rain again. He hears the Nova's greasy rumble. The tires screech to a stop.

"Where are you headed, hippie?" The muscular skinhead hockey player climbs out of the car. When McFadden climbs back inside, Lawrence is doubled up on the side of the road, beat up and robbed of three Coors Light Silver Bullets he'd stolen from home.

Maybe he would've turned around and headed home, forgotten the party. But there was a girl.

Sheena was a rocker in a Tiger Williams jersey, and she would be there.

If Lawrence hadn't been the leader singer of The Smugglers, she wouldn't "have even exhaled smoke in my direction." But he was the lead singer. And she would be there.

He got up and went to the party.

"Roadhouse Blues" by The Doors was playing as he looked for her.

Sheena was in the basement, lit by the soft glow of the O'Keefe's Extra Old Stock wall lamp.

Angus "The Anvil" McFadden was on top of her.

And then the memory is gone, blotted out by the right now. McFadden is charging. Steam pours from his flaring nostrils into the dry mountain air.

Trying his best to be Grant Fuhr, Lawrence leaves his crease to challenge.

McFadden shoots.

Lawrence stretches.

"Every joint, muscle and tendon in my body felt like it was being elongated by a medieval torture device," he writes.

The puck grazes the tip of his middle finger, deflecting harmlessly over the crossbar.

No goal. The mountaintop encounter is one of the stories in Lawrence's funny and poignant memoir, The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie.

"He had no idea who I was, no idea how momentous that penalty shot was to me, I made no mention of it in the handshake line at the end of the game, but it was one of the greatest sporting moments of my life," Lawrence says.

A booming bodycheck against the boards, the crack of a stick on the ice, the slicing sound of speeding skates and the ping of a puck hitting the post - the sound that strikes a goalie's ears like sweet music- have cast their spell on Lawrence.

But while the CBC host often loved hockey, he has feared, hated and reviled many hockey players.

As a baby he was held in the soft hands of Bobby Orr.

As a child he was tormented by Buck, a hockey playing thug with an Olympian build and a Joey Lawrence bob who used the word 'wimp' with the frequency Australians use 'mate.' Lawrence needed a brace to steady a knee that was prone to dislocation. His stomach was jittery and prone to puking and the "uber geek" wore an E.T. sweatshirt and glasses of Elton Johnian proportions.

He was a target, and over and over again, the people who made him feel small, the ones who made the school locker room feel like Lord of the Flies without the tropical climate, were hockey players.

"I'm not looking for any sympathy, I'm mostly looking just to entertain people and maybe show them a darker side of our great, glorious, Canadian pastime," Lawrence explains. "There is a side where maybe the star athletes aren't the greatest heroes of all time."

Despite the "Shakespearean irony" of hiding behind his goalie mask, Lawrence has come face to face with many childhood bullies on the ice.

"I clearly carry the baggage of those younger times more than they do. They don't remember anything of that time, and nor do I bring it up with them," he explains. "That I stop their shots. .. brings me deep, deep, deep satisfaction to the point of joyously celebrating after the game if we've beaten them."

The Lonely End of the Rink is about resilience. Just like a meat//bone/skinhead didn't keep Lawrence from the party, hockey players couldn't keep him from hockey.

Despite associating the game with personal ridicule and embarrassment and violence, hockey is inescapable for Lawrence.

In one of the book's more horrifying chapters, a hockey player named Psycho Powers arms himself with Lawrence's BB gun and starts shooting. Lawrence runs off a cliff while trying to escape.

"I could have easily been killed," he says. "When I actually sat down to write it, I did kind of get a chill up my spine."

The future author made it home, semi-conscious and covered in blood.

When it came time for knee surgery, the doctor was Stu McNeill, formerly a centre with the Detroit Red Wings.

The final third of the book covers Lawrence's beer league hockey team, the Flying Vees.

"'If someone tapped me on the shoulder at age 13 - probably one of the lowest points of my entire life - and said, 'Hey, you're going to be playing hockey when you're 30 as a goalie with a bunch of musicians on a hockey team,' I would turn around and probably burst into tears."

As an adult, Lawrence's butterfly goaltending style is likened to both a wounded moth and a guy who just fell out of his wheelchair. But for the first time in his life, it's meant in fun.

"I started out in life liking hockey but I got pushed away from it," Lawrence explains. "I think the takeaway is even if you've missed out on things earlier in life, go back to those things. ... Just make sure that you're doing it on your own terms."

The Lonely End of the Rink is Lawrence's followup to Adventures in Solitude, which the writer considers his summer book.

"I feel like this is kind of like the winter counterpart, or the winters of my discontent," he says of his hockey book. "Often people, when they read the first book, they wonder, 'How is it that you are such a scared little geek, so nervous and afraid of your own shadow?' And I suppose the answers for why I was so meek and submissive when I was a younger kid, the answers are provided in this new book."

Lawrence says he'll likely dip into his treasure trove of rock 'n' roll stories in his next book. The Smugglers eventually toured Japan, Australia and Europe, but they started in West Vancouver.

"I remember one of our first gigs for The Smugglers was playing a back to school bash in the parking lot of the Lynn Valley mall and being fired mid-song," he says. "The manager of the mall just came up to us mid-song kind of waving his arms in front of us like an air traffic controller just getting us to stop, and he goes 'Enough, enough, enough, no more, stop, you're fired.'" The band also snagged about $100 worth of empties from the North Shore Winter Club after management refused to pay them, according to Lawrence.

Rock 'n' roll features heavily in The Lonely End of the Rink. Besides lifting its title (with permission) from a Tragically Hip song, the book includes what is perhaps the most in-depth examination of puck rock ever published.

The book also covers a little bit of life on the road with The Smugglers and the release of their song "Our Stanley Cup," which came within a couple goals of accurately predicting a Vancouver Canucks Stanley Cup victory in 1994.

The book provides a blow by blow of each heartbreaking Canucks Stanley Cup loss, as well as a few tidbits about Nardwuar the Human Serviette, one of Lawrence's high school classmates.

But before the animal factory of public school or the beer-drenched debauchery of the Flying Vees, the story starts with two parents teaching their child to skate on a frozen pond.

Lawrence recently had his first child, a boy named Joshua.

Lawrence says it won't be too long before Joshua gets fitted for his first pair of skates.

"I'll teach him to skate but I won't force him to play hockey," Lawrence says.