As we wind down to the final third of the hockey season, it's important for us all to take stock of crucial issues and discuss the deadly phenomenon silently stalking our sport: gear rot.
Because the dirty little secret about playing hockey is this: It stinks. The equipment just flat-out reeks.
Now, for the uninitiated, let's be real clear about this. I've been skating for a long time, and I don't mean any of this in a prissy, sweat-is-smelly sort of way, I mean that, by any objective standards, old hockey gear smells like dead goddamn pig funk.
It's a smell all its own, yet shockingly the same from player to player: stale, fetid, animalistic. Not quite body odor, not quite fungus, not quite feet, not quite aging cheese, not quite ass — but a combination of all. It defies categorization, is strong beyond its years, and cannot be cured by simple measures. It laughs in the face of Febreze, washing machines, and even more rigorous chemical and non-chemical bacteria-killing treatments. Like puke, or "new car smell" (or can we just call that what it is?), it is so inherently linked to the thing itself, that it's hard to imagine even brand new gear not being a bit rank.
To put things in context for those of you who don't play or have never lived with someone who did, I skate with a goalie whose gear is so ripe that his (perfectly healthy) cat once mistook it for the litterbox and peed in his bag.
Once in high school, I borrowed a friend's ancient leather blocker to play goalie for a street hockey session. My right hand smelled for nearly a week. I washed it all the time. It was pink and shiny. But it smelled like a dead goddamn pig.
I used to have the experience where I'd be sitting next to a guy on the bench — or worse yet, skate by a guy on the ice — and get slammed by a sudden and thunderous wall of stink, the sort of which burns your nostrils and can be described only with words like putrid. Simply put, that doesn't really happen to me anymore. Which can mean only one thing: I've become that guy.
This is the sort of evolution that happens "two ways" — as Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises: "gradually and then suddenly."
As a teenager, it wasn't too bad (despite my mom's protestations to the contrary). My equipment was newer, I didn't sweat as much, and, well, kid sweat is no match for the briny sweat of a grown-ass man. Now, I'm hairier, more out of shape, sweatier, and — though I've swapped out bits and pieces over the years — most of my gear is still old enough to drink legally (and live enough to walk itself to the pub).
Still, I think it wasn't too bad off until I started playing year-round. Sure, rinks are cool enough to keep the ice properly frozen, but a rink on a hot, humid, summer day in the northeast U.S. is significantly warmer (warm enough to fog up) than the same rink in the dead of winter. When I finish a summer skate, I and everything I'm wearing, am soaked to the gills in such a way that takes more than 24 hours for my pads to properly dry.
And suddenly, I'm that guy.
I should mention here that I'm a pretty clean, non-slob. I don't leave my wet gear in the car — or even in my hockey bag — overnight. I air it out — until my wife can't take it anymore, and my two-year-old daughter points to it and says "Stinky pee-ew. Daddy, hockey game."
Does it embarrass me? Hell no. I draw from that stench a perverse source of veteran's pride. It is maybe the only tangible rec-league career milestone I'll ever see, and I've worked hard to earn it. I don't dislike the stink and I don't begrudge it. So you clean-freak ninnies can take your fancy anti-bacterial countermeasures and walk on, eh. You'll get my hockey bag from me when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
...And I will smell no worse than that bag.
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