“Hockey and Wayne Gretzky kind of saved me”
Growing up as a young girl I was always the shortest maybe a little too smart for my own good in school. This didn’t make me the most friends, it made me a little stand outish. Maybe we didn’t have the money to wear the best kind of clothes or have the newest polly pocket toys but I had a television and I found sports, specifically hockey. And all of a sudden not only was I the short too smart girl who didn’t fit in, now I like talking and then I stuck out like a sore thumb because of instead of wearing princess stuff I was wearing hockey jerseys. I was the tomboy that was too short, too smart, too obnoxious for my own good. But with being all those different things and falling so deeply in love with hockey, and Wayne Gretzky and finding my hero in him and finding inspiration in how he played the game and how he was too scrawny, too fast, too perfect, too amazing that may be on paper he shouldn’t have been the best player but he was. So I could be the short scrawny little kid, too smart, and find a different way to succeed that wasn’t putting my fist in someone’s face, like you might do in hockey. But I can outsmart somebody and I use that as maybe my shield, my sword as I got through life.
Really, hockey and Wayne Gretzky kind of saved me, and finding inspiration through that, made me grow up and say yeah I can be different. I can find a community within hockey fans. It didn’t matter what you looked like, you love the LA Kings, you love a certain player, let’s be friends, comrades. Let’s cheer for a common goal and help our team succeed.
And it was probably 20 years later in my life that the LA Kings finally won the Stanley Cup, oh my goodness did I think of that little 11-year-old me, that grew up thinking my team would never be good enough and then maybe if I was a fan of this team then I wasn’t good enough, but then they finally won a championship for me. And that was pretty cool.
Deep down underneath everybody, “please don’t judge me”, “I’m going to be happy”, “I want to live my life” and if everybody can do that no matter what their jobs are, no matter where they came from, the core of people is self acceptance, outside acceptance and just happiness.
As a child I had a baby doll named after myself and she was a baby me. I took care of baby me because I didn’t want to be the baby in the family anymore. I had to make someone else the baby. She inspired me to spoil somebody else for once instead of myself. She let me play pretend and kind of escape into a real fun kids world where as a kid I could pretend to be an adult.