Reflections on being an Olympian. True story no one usually believes in.
Today, I attended an event at UNR School of Business, and a speaker mentioned something about “veterans and athletes making the great founders because they have discipline.”
“Oh, so you are saying there is a chance?” with Jim Carrey’s smirk, I thought to myself.
I have been playing ice hockey since I was a kid. I have traveled the world, I met a lot of people, I have seen the princes and the poorest people, I have been at swanky receptions in European castles, and I have been humiliated and discriminated against based on nothing but the fact of who I am and where I am from. This is my reflection on what being an athlete gives to you.
First and foremost, playing hockey gives you a team. Hockey is a team sport, and you cannot play alone, it just does not work that way. This means you have to trust people on your team. Trust them to do the right thing at the right time. You have to know and care about your teammates; you protect them, and they protect you. It is a wolf pack in some sense. Betrayal means death. The deepest wounds in my life came from people I trusted to have my back.
Second, you wire your brain to think in nanoseconds:
- You have two knives on your feet.
- You have a wooden ( okay, that was 20 years ago; the composites were just coming up) stick.
- You can get hit any second.
- You have to calculate and skate “where the puck will be,” to quote The Great One.
- And your nanosecond decisions have to align with the strategy ( bigger picture) of what you want to achieve.
Guess what, people (ordinary people) do not usually think like that. In my technical career, it was a breeze to meet people whose thought process was “so out there” because we were on the same wavelength, and they understood me instantly. I never thought “speed of thought” was actually a discriminatory variable, but it is. Thinking too fast, mentally looking through “all possible combinations and all possible permutations,” and picking up the probability of the “most likely to succeed” is a useful skill in hockey. In the real world it intimidates people. How do I know? I was told so many times. But then, do you need to bring yourself down so other people can be “comfortable” and not “intimidated” by you? What do you think? At the same time, “thinking fast” is ultra helpful in building computer systems, debugging them, and connecting the dots together ( graph theory on steroids, heheheh.) If you think “fast,” know you are not weird, you are super! With all that AI coming up ( i.e. the need to comprehend extremly fast “thinking machines”), it is finally our time to shine!
Third, you know how to take the hit. You also know the rules. If the hit is clean, both parties understand it, and there are no hard feelings — the game is the game, and the show must go on. But if it is a dirty hit ( those games are the worst), dude, watch the heavens’ rage descend — why? Because those who play dirty violate the basic agreements of the game. And it is a big no-no. And they get their karma, trust me. We recently got a new ice rink here in Reno, Nevada. It is a “Community Arena,” and the founders, builders, and community made it that way. Sometimes, in an Adult League, you get misguided people who think their goal is to hurt as many people as possible. The RenoIce kicks them out — because no one is coming to play 11 p.m. games to end up in a hospital. Play clean and enjoy the game, no one needs your macho stuff.
Fourth, you know what hard work is. Many people often told me how they admired my game and my skating. Do you want to hear about the pain, 5 a.m. runs, midnight ice practices, and never-ending sweat on your eyebrows? Do you want to know what it took to get all that hockey wisdom? To be fair, that pain does pay off — I coached the U12 Jr.Sharks Team many moons ago, and after my glorious coaching, they have won the USA Hockey National Championship. If you are ever at Sharks Ice ( or whatever it is called these days), look up the banner. That’s my little Sharkies!
Fifth, is discipline. How many of you, parents, sign your kid for a team sport just to teach them discipline? Because they will listen to a coach ( they respect). In hockey, given the nature and the speed of the game it is multiplied. Do you know the average shift in NHL is 45 seconds? Have you ever played at the NHL speeds? Trust me, if you are playing at those speeds, 45 seconds is a hell of an eternity. Yeah, sure, in a pick up game you can sandbag and stay there for 10 minutes, but your teammates won’t appreciate it, trust me. This also leads to the skills of knowing your limits, when to run, and when to take breaks.
In a nutshell, being a pro-athlete is hard, it’s difficult, it is gruesome, it is painful. But the benefit — in my case, a little ethnic girl who was left in the orphanage made it all the way to the Olympics — is tremendous. But it also gave me a character of not giving up, the ability to discern good and bad, and to travel the world and enjoy experiences people usually do not believe I have had. So I keep it quiet. We have a guest staying at our house today, and he knew my Olympic past, so here I am, doing memory lane because of the morning talk and looking at the pictures from my other life.
Oh yeah, and Go Knights! I love my bling bling Vegas team!!!
To Be Continued…
