Bench Strength

I told The Owner I had Parkinson’s and had to quit our oldtimers team. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Leave it with me”

By Sean Rossiter

Being a goalie, I take a long time to get dressed for games. I’m usually at the rink at least an hour before game time, but I’m not the first in the room. Keith Morrison is.

Morrison is the organizer of our oldtimers hockey team, the Vancouver Flames (just so there are no misunderstandings, our Flames were Flames before there were Calgary Flames). Back when I joined them, 15 years ago, I’d sworn I’d never play with a choose-up-sides club again. But this group was different. They already had a quarter-century of hockey culture, endless stories, and a genuine regard for each other that has almost never degenerated to the glove-dropping stage. And they had Morrison, a retired engineer and banker, a prototypical big right winger, a master of the give-and-go. Morrison does everything short of dry cleaning our jerseys to make our hockey experience complete. He even built overhead shelves in a dressing room owned by UBC.

Morrison likes watching whoever’s on the rink before we are, enjoys greeting the guys as they arrive, gets some weird kick out of whistling “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” in July. We tried to find a nickname for him—he was Boat for a while—but the one that stuck is The Owner. That sums up his contribution. His parlour in Point Grey is a shrine to a half-century of playing Canada’s national game. The Hall of Flame at his place is stocked with tournament trophies, Ken Danby prints, and commemorative silverware. Morrison is himself enshrined in the Canadian Adult and Recreational Hockey Hall of Fame as an organizer.

First in, last out. The Owner and I were the only ones left in the room at the Britannia Community Centre after our game on the night of Monday, August 18, 2003. He was already dressed and, being the soul of consideration, he waited for me, sitting opposite the goaltender’s bench while I towelled off. Once I was decent, I crossed the room, sat down beside him, took a deep breath, and said, “Keith, I’ve got Parkinson’s.”

I was too absorbed in wondering whether I’d disclosed my news in an appropriately offhand way to recall his exact response. He murmured something empathetic and supportive. Of course, I said, I’d have to quit the Flames. He thought about that for, oh, maybe five seconds. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Leave it with me.”

Strange, telling people who mean a lot to you that you have a neurodegenerative condition. If you do it right, it involves communicating a great deal of detailed information. So you resort to metaphors to condense the essentials, saying that you’re heading down a highway that will become a rocky road and then a footpath that peters off into the chaos of unpredictable movement, possibly a complete lack of nervous control.

At the time, the only symptom I had was in my right leg. The joints would go rigid at exactly the same corner every day on my jog through Lower Shaughnessy. My play in the net had declined, too, although there are better-qualified observers who say it was always pretty bad. And I was, of course, like everybody, getting older. Loss of memory is a symptom of Parkinson’s, but my memory has always been bad enough to make the distinction between forgetfulness due to age and due to brain damage beside the point. Fifty-seven is the classic age to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and it’s an age at which you wonder whether every mental and physical slip-up is actually a symptom.

PAGE: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

CONTINUE