A Hockey Break-Up for Huntington

April 16, 2005:  Falling in love can be a cruel experience.  When you put your trust and hopes into one singular thing, you’re almost setting yourself up for an even bigger fall when that singular thing leaves you.  The loss of what’s in its most basic terms a sheet of ice seems miniscule.  But for the small but close-knit fraternity of people who put their trust and hopes into the Tri-State Ice Arena in Huntington, W.Va., what happened on a Monday in early April is a break-up that we all knew was coming.  Still, it was as sudden and as heartbreaking as coming home, and finding your woman has packed up her things and left. Basically, it happened like this: one Sunday night, the regulars were there.  Skating shifts.  Chumming it up on the bench.  Sitting in locker room 6.  Talking about the NHL season that might have been.  Talking about the passes they missed.  Talking about the passes they’d make next weekend.  And then they left. Monday, the doors were locked, opened long enough for those regulars to come back in, clean their stuff out of locker room 6, and leave for good.   It’s a strange feeling to know that the end is coming, but be surprised when it actually arrives.  Everybody that took to the ice at Tri-State basically knew we were skating on borrowed time.  We weren’t waiting for the money to run out.  We knew it was already gone.  We knew that we were skating on the generosity of investors who had maybe waited too long to cut their losses.  Still, every week, we chipped what we had for the privilege of getting out there and skating. Hockey, if you’ve ever played it, can be very frustrating at almost every level.  If you’ve never skated before, it’s frustrating to know you’ve got to fork over hundreds of dollars for the most basic equipment, and then realize that even with that, you’re starting at the very bottom.  There’s a lot of falling and awkwardness.  There’s a feeling that you’re a liability when you play with others who are better than you.  There’s nothing worse than knowing you’re a cone out there.  For those who pick up the game later in life, it takes a true love of the game to get to the point where the falling and awkwardness go away. The next level of frustration comes in when you’ve got that kind of love for the game.  You start to realize that not everybody feels the same way about playing that you do.  There are a core group of players that wouldn’t miss a night of open hockey.  But others don’t feel that way.  They don’t always show up.  You realize that the ice rink where you play isn’t making money hand over fist.  It's treading water.  And so, you do everything you can to get those people on the brink to come and play at an arena that’s probably on the brink itself.  It becomes your obligation. Warren Wright took up that responsibility.  There was hardly a Sunday or Wednesday that went by that Warren didn’t call, trying to get me to come and play net.  Even when Warren knew I was working and couldn’t play, he’d give me a ring on the off-chance that maybe I had a day off and could come.  On nights when we were supposed to take the ice at 8:00, and nobody was at the rink at 7:55, Warren wouldn’t give up the ship.  He’d grab the phone and start making calls.  “We’ll have enough,” Warren would say to the three of us sitting in the lobby.  “Go get dressed.” Warren loves hockey, because he hasn’t always played it.  He took it up later in life, and then later, when the Huntington Blizzard packed up and left town, Warren took up hockey’s cause.  When the numbers started to dwindle and hockey was on a ventilator, Warren refused to pull the plug.  He wasn’t an employee of the rink.  He was just someone who loved the game so much that he didn’t want to it to leave. In late 2004, I moved to Charleston.  The rink in South Charleston is nicer.  Even the Tri-State regulars would tell you that the ice is smoother, the locker rooms don’t have that hockey stench yet, and overall, the place is just higher-class.  I tried to get back to Huntington and skate every once in a while, but after a while I just found it hard to drive 40 miles, only to arrive at a rink where we couldn’t get enough guys to form two complete teams. In the end, there were just too many people like me.  Huntington is a place where the people are there because at some point, they needed to be there.  And when they don’t need to be there anymore, they leave.  There are a core group of people who call it home, but also far too many who take the first available train out of town for what undoubtedly is a greener pasture.  And when you leave, as much as you say you’ll keep in touch and call, it just gets harder as the time goes by. At Tri-State, I watched people leave.  Regulars from Marshall graduated and left.  People got new jobs and left.  People got frustrated and left.  Those former players dropped in from time to time, but never came back for good.  Nobody came in to take their place.  The rink’s closing sent shockwaves through our small hockey community.  For those people who had never been there before, there was a feeling of “Oh, that’s too bad.”  But for both groups: those of us who care and those of us who don’t, it’s just a rink.  It’s just compressors and glass and ice and cinder blocks, video games and padded floors.  The ice was never particularly good.  The locker rooms were crappy at best.  It was always too cold when you put on your equipment.  If you left your stuff at the rink, it never dried out.  The lobby was semi-inviting at best.  Nobody ever left the place saying how impressed they were. But for guys like Warren, it’s heartbreak.  People like him have a fated love of a game that few people want to understand, and seldom works as a business.  It’s like falling in love with Latin, only to realize that nobody speaks it anymore. Most of the Tri-Staters will find a new place to play.  But some of us still feel a profound sense of loss that’s hard to understand.  We took our rink for granted, and after it’s melted away, like we all knew it would, we all now realize that maybe we all could have tried a little harder to shoulder the responsibility of keeping a game and the place where we play it alive.  It’s a relationship that was doomed at the start, and we find ourselves, again, nomads with hockey sticks, looking for someone new to take us in. We just can't keep ourselves from falling in love.