Hockey Mom Tribute At Memorial Cup

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Is the Memorial Cup (Canadian Jr Championship) carried on US tv? Hope you guys can catch it-great hockey. Good article below on a new award, have to love the mom's passion for the game.

Hail to the hockey moms

Father Raymond J. De Souza, National Post

Published: Thursday, May 24, 2007

At the Memorial Cup this weekend in Vancouver, the title of "Great Canadian Hockey Mom" will be awarded during a ceremony at the final game. The contest invited essays from young hockey players about their mothers. The judges are Bobby Orr, David Branch, president of the Canadian Hockey League, and Linda Staal, who has two sons in the NHL, and two more in the Ontario Hockey League, presumably headed to the big league soon.

No word about whether the award will be named after the first mother of Canadian hockey: Grace Sutter, whose six sons made it to the big leagues and who, still the hockey mom, has contributed a few of the recipes she raised her boys on to a fundraiser cookbook for the rebuilding of the burned-down arena in Viking, Alta.

The hockey-mom contest adds a touch of pure Canadiana to that most Canadian of sports events, the Memorial Cup, Canada's junior hockey championship. Roch Carrier's Hockey Sweater may have made it on the back of the $5 bill, but somewhere there was a mom who hung it up when wet, found it when lost, mended it when torn, and washed it a hundred times. And tried almost as often, no doubt, to persuade her son to wear something newer or warmer or less malodorous.

I am not sure if there is an award for hockey dads, but I rather doubt it. When it comes to kids' sports, the generalization is that fathers are more interested in the sports and the mothers more interested in the kids.

There is some truth to that, of course. I never played hockey, but when I played flag football as a boy, my parents would faithfully come to the (less than mediocre) games. Football was a strange game to my mother, so my father would explain to her that she should cheer when the ball was moving in the right direction. Occasional embarrassment ensued if he forgot to tell her when we switched sides at the end of the quarter.

In reality, the hockey moms at the rink for early morning practices are quite knowledgeable about the game, and woe to the player/coach/referee who earns the wrath of a hockey mom who believes her child has been wronged. Hell hath no fury like an aggrieved mother rousted out of bed for six o'clock ice time.

Perhaps the dads are overlooked, but it is the hockey mom we salute as the one who makes the sacrifices, and who is there to provide consolation when the game seems more sacrificial than successful. Given that only one team ever finishes on top, such occasions are frequent enough.

"She had a lot to say," recalled Bobby Orr about his own mother in a recent interview. "But nothing about hockey -- zero about hockey. My dad was a hockey guy. She kept it all together."

Childhood sports require a lot of keeping it together. It's not just the car pools and billets and figuring out whose turn it is to bring the hot chocolate. It's the fact that sports are often the first window children have on the unforgiving reality of the world. There are winners and losers, those who are good and those who get cut, those who are skilled at the politics of the team and those who get the shaft. Sometimes you lose to a superior team, and even worse, sometimes you lose to an inferior one. The outcome is not always fairly decided. And it all takes place out in the open, where everyone can see both your successes and mistakes. Playgrounds are full of carefree kids, but rinks and fields and courts are often places of great pressure.

A few weeks back, we had our annual football banquet at Queen's University, where I serve as chaplain of our team. The most senior players traditionally give farewell speeches toward the end, and it is remarkable about how the big boys cry when they speak about their parents, and their mothers in particular. By the time boys become men, they realize that it was not love of the game that brought their mothers to the game, but love of those playing it. That too is an important lesson -- that love is measured by sacrifice, including watching football in the rain or being chilled to the bone at the rink.

The mom at the rink also gives to her child something precious -- the confidence that someone is interested in what he does, that someone is there to cheer him on, and that he is the star in at least someone's eyes. It is easy to overstate the lessons that sports can teach, but the faithful hockey mom teaches something important about fidelity, and sacrifice, and love. And so while the boys compete for the Memorial Cup this weekend, it is fitting to remember the mothers who watch them play.

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<--- Waiting for Mary to post. Its been a while :.(