LOL, I became the goalie because I moved there and had never ice skated before, so the only thing I could do was be the goalie, if I was going to play pond hockey with all the guys.
I found out a couple of key points to remember:
First, everyone ALWAYS needs goalies. Always.
Second, as a goalie, you could never bail and not show up. People would excoriate you if you did that. The worst thing to do was not show up, and hear later they had to turn one of the nets around.
Third, playing goalie could be painful. When I first started playing with friends (as a transplanted southerner) and became the goalie, my equipment consisted of a first base mitt, a regular hockey glove with two squares of wood paneling sandwiching foam attached to the glove with phone wire, and folded up carpet samples stuck up the pants of my dungarees.
No mask.
They wanted to “practice” with me while we waited for the ponds to freeze, so I stood in front of a metal shed at the top of a driveway, and they laid a sheet of paneling at the bottom of the drive way so they could slapshot the puck off something better than asphalt.
The shed was “the goal”.
The puck was not a regulation puck, but a street hockey puck, one of those ones that is just a tad lighter than a real puck but is made of some kind of harder material like plastic, not rubber.
It had sharp edges.
The kid wound up and slapped the puck at me, since the driveway was somewhat slanted, as the puck came flying at me, it was rising.
It hit my unprotected thigh right above the knee. Holy crap, that hurt. I jumped around in place for about a minute, cussing and breathing heavy, gritting my teeth. Damn, did that ever hurt. But I did what you had to do. Cussing and shifting in pain from foot to foot, I got back into position in front of the shed and set myself up again.
He wound up and fired the puck...it rose as it came, and hit me in the exact same spot. Unbelievable. That REALLY frikking hurt. I hopped around for twice as long, cussing guttural curses through my gritted teeth, than, shaking my head from side to side thinking how much this sucked, took position again in front of that shed.
He reared back and slapped the puck with a full swing, and as the puck came towards my stick side, I stuck my paneling/foam/phone line homemade blocker in front of it, and the puck deflected off and came up hitting me at nearly full speed high on my cheek right under my eye.
I took all the stuff off and threw it angrily on the ground yelling and cussing about how much this game sucks!
That was my southern boy intro to hockey! To this day, my buddies still laugh about it. They were watching me throw that shit on the ground and were saying to each other “Holy crap, I can’t believe he got back in front of us that third time!”
But you could have used a few more lessons in playing goal:
1. Never, ever show pain in front of the other players. Relish the pain, and wear it with pride. I played goalie in floor hockey in high school, and I was pretty good at it. Better yet, a lot of the jocks in my gym class who never thought much of me suddenly had a ton of respect for me in the locker room after gym class when they saw all the welts all over me. They couldn't believe that I would stay in goal for an entire gym period after getting peppered like that.
2. Acquire a strange, eccentric habit that will make other players (opponents and teammates alike) certain that you are a lunatic. This is one of the defining characteristics of hockey goalies. LOL.
I played as a defenseman in my younger days, and I had my share of blocked shots that did some damage. I took one shot high on my ankle -- right below the bottom of the shin pad on the front of the skate -- that made my foot completely numb for two hours. I had to take two Tylenols several times every day for a week just to deal with that pain.