In the locker room, anything goes. Salty language, strange smells and infantile behavior - some of hockey’s best games are played behind closed doors. Stepping onto the ice and playing hockey requires timing, a bit of strength, some lung power and an overall physical exertion that both exhilarates and exhausts, even when it looks like the Keystone Copsroutine I regularly turn it into.

It’s a highly athletic game, and only those who are or who aspire to be athletic can understand the high you get from playing hockey. Having said that, some of the secondary aspects of the game are nearly as enjoyable, particularly if you’re involved in any brand of hockey attached to either a rink or a community league hall (like my Wednesday-night gang).

For instance, if you enjoy salty and inventive ungrammatical language, a medley of disagreeable smells, undeserved verbal abuse, zinger one-upmanship and generally infantilized behaviour, I suspect you would enjoy one key aspect of what I’m referring to: the locker room. Our locker room is a place where men are men and women are usually too smart to venture (though I feel compelled to add we’ve had a woman or

two join us on occasion, and it can be quite literally a breath of fresh air to have a female presence in the room).

There’s something utterly unique about the hockey locker room. I’m not sure why. I’ve played other team sports and none of the locker rooms were like this one. For now, I will forgo getting into the various psychoanalytic “theories of the womb” having to do with the warm cocoon of the locker room, where everyone’s dripping wet and everything carries a vaguely fecund odour. But there is no doubt the hockey locker room is different than those of other sports. It carries an air of exhaustion baseball doesn’t force on you, an intimacy football loses through sheer roster numbers. The soccer locker room (if you’re lucky enough to have one) may be closest, with similar player numbers and roughly equivalent levels of fatigue. Still, soccer doesn’t feature the great joys of getting to the rink hours in advance to don the equipment in the same ritualized, almost obsessive way that hockey players have, decade after decade. Soccer players also usually wash their socks.

But more than the equipment rituals, I think the locker room retains a mystique and even an unspoken attraction for men because of its simple

intimacy. It provides an easy way to manufacture conditions for intimacy under which men can operate without ever having to pretend or, God forbid, admit that they care about anyone. Friendships are formed, personalities are revealed, bonds are cemented. It’s a safe haven for men in a way that sitting in a Starbucks with a couple of pals sipping a chai latte and sharing a low-fat cranberry muffin probably never will be. As shocking as this may be to the distaff side, men are evolving but have not yet fully grasped the frankly rather bizarre bonding methods women typically favour (such as the premeditated use of not just questions, but answers). The locker room, therefore, offers a frictionless way for men to bond while also participating in the one thing that truly defines us as men: abusing one another verbally. Women, of course, can also dish it out when they have to, and I have no doubt women’s locker rooms feature their own brand of bonding and ritual. My daughters love hockey and they can cut someone (okay, me) down to size with a couple of words and a half-lidded glance. But my sense - or hope - is that women are above it all. Men, on the other hand, are plainly at their most manlike (notice I didn’t say manly) when they are able to freely harass, torment, provoke and insult one another.

Take one of the friends I play with every Wednesday. We’ll call him JR. He’s one of the best players on the ice and is well liked by all, but it isn’t until you hit the locker room that his true gifts are revealed. It’s in our little hockey hall that he shines, doling out the abuse he feels is warranted on a weekly basis. If someone whacks him on the shins, he will suffer in the locker room. If someone cherry picks, he’ll hear about it. If someone quits early because it’s too cold, the poor sap will absorb a few slurs at the earliest possible moment. Even in writing this, I am exposing myself to the worst JR has to offer. For what, you may ask. For writing about hockey instead of getting out there and playing the bleeping game, even though I play it like a bleeping bleepy.

Yet it’s moments such as these that bring dreamy smiles to the faces of hockey veterans. Locker-room ribbing is part of how men communicate the world over - a male Esperanto if you will - and though I make no claims about its psychological worth, I think it’s a big part of why hockey veterans and former pros miss the game so much. Sure, they wish they were still flying up and down the rink, but it’s all the other stuff they miss nearly as much.

Bobby Orr once said hanging out with the guys was something he missed after hanging up the blades, and one of the reasons Wayne Gretzky came> back to coach the hapless Phoenix Coyotes was that he missed the locker room. Even Pat Quinn, the 65-year-old coach fresh off the thrilling World Junior success, was quoted as saying he came back to the game because he “liked being around the rink and liked being around the players.”

You could parse that many different ways, but to me it’s simple: He liked being in the locker room. I don’t blame him.

By Curtis Gillespie

Curtis Gillespie’s most recent book is the novel Crown Shyness.

As the great wheel of our democracy rolls forward, I think it’s important to take a moment and remember a forgotten hero. A man who so loved his country, he was willing to put on a suit purchased by a personal shopper, stand on a Minneapolis stage in front of a national audience and fake being happy about his impending shotgun wedding. Then, because he is a true patriot, he voluntarily ceased to exist for the next eight weeks. Of course I’m talking about Levi Johnston. Well, Levi, if you’re reading this, know that you’ve served your country well and you’re free now. Go! Run! Live your life! Or, you could acquiesce to marriage (look up acquiesce, you’ll get a kick out of it), in exchange for a plum job fighting crime in the frozen wilderness. Who knows, maybe there’s a TV show in your life and you’ll be famous again. I’m thinking we could call it, Tundra Heat, or, Permafrost Flatfoot, or, Glacier Gumshoe, or, Dude, I Forgot the Condoms. Oh, I so smell an Emmy.

- Chuck Lorre

• She was an early investor in Apple… the fruit.
• She actually robbed Peter to pay Paul.
• She was a fluffer for the Kama Sutra.
• She got a senior citizen discount to see Birth of a Nation.
• Her social security number is 9.
• She’s the third drawing from the left on the evolutionary chart.
• She remembers the mini-mall they tore down to build Stonehenge.
• She won’t give her real age because she pre-dates counting.
• She remembers the best thing BEFORE sliced bread.
• Methuselah dumped her for a younger woman.
• She remembers when Helen of Troy’s face had only launched a couple of ships.
• Her favorite hobby: Respiration.
• She majored in Spanish. Not the language, the Inquisition.
• Pre-menopause, she had geologic periods.
• Social life: Not Speed Dating — carbon dating.
• Likes older men, but there are none.
• First job: a papyrus route.
• She’s so old she remembers when: If you looked green around the gills you REALLY did.
• Old Faithful was new and unreliable.
• Tuesday was hump day.
• Incest was just called “sex.”
• There was only one way to skin a cat.
• In school Geology was called Current Events.
• The Twin Cities were Sodom and Gomorrah.
• Amphibians were just called “show-offs.”