I Play Broomball

No one expects the goalie to be blind. I live to defy such expectations.

Partial or otherwise, blindness is usually a disadvantage when it comes to playing sports. There are plenty of exceptions to this: a marathon runner, a dog-sled racer, and an old friend who plays basketball comes to mind. Due to my 6+ foot height, people used to expect that I'd be good at basketball. I'm not. It's not because of blindness; you need coordination first.

Really, I was never good at sports, even before I lost the center of my vision. I had enough trouble catching, throwing, and running. Once I lost the ability to see the baseball or the football, the game was pretty much over. Even once I reached my full height and started to become comfortable with my build, the coordination improved dramatically, but I still couldn't really follow a ball. So, I stuck to watching pro sports on TV and listening to sports talk radio, and left the playing to those better equipped.

Then, a few years ago, a friend called me up with a strange proposition. He and a bunch of my friends were going to rent an ice rink, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and show up with a bunch of brooms and a few old tennis balls.

"I can't skate," I quietly protested.

"We're not going to skate," he explained. "We're going to walk on the ice with our shoes. They're going to leave the ice all chewed up for us, so we won't slip around too much. We'll play hockey with the brooms. The goalies get push brooms."

The game is called Broomball. It has few or no rules, and no one keeps score. Legend has it that a bunch of drunk Canadians were sweeping out an attic once, when they found a ball and decided to play hockey with it on the frozen pond. It's popular in patches of the United States now, and most of the players I know live in sunny, warm Los Angeles.

I play the game every year, right around Christmas. For the most part, I tend goal. I did try playing out on the open ice once or twice, but I'm too slow on the ice to ever get near the ball. This is not a problem at the goal.

You may wonder, "How can a not-not-blind guy play goalie?" The answer is, not very well. I have a habit of letting in the shot that is right in front of me, and my reflexes border on lame. However, I'm better than most people, including myself, expect. My peripheral vision gives me quick reaction to stuff that comes out of the corner of my eye, and I can almost always tell exactly where the ball is from watching the rest of the players. My spatial reasoning is good enough that I'm just about always between the ball and the goal.

This all adds up to a consistent pattern. I can keep the ball out of the goal for the first twenty or twenty-five minutes I play, and then things start to go downhill. As members of the defense get tired and people start getting more unchallenged shots on goal, I start6 breaking down -- mostly because it's tough to clear the ball out when you can't really see it. I get a bunch of saves during the game; I don't keep track of how many. Again, this is a sport where nobody keeps score.

I'm not sure how many of my fellow players know that I'm partly blind, and there's something comforting about the fact that nobody comes up to me, open mouthed, stunned that I can block a goal at all successfully. People have far too much fun playing the game to think about such things. SO do I.