Ice Hockey at the Iowa Games

For over twenty years, there was this coworker on the railroad who told fantastic stories. Generally, he featured himself as the central character. The stories were "fantastic" in that they all were fantasies. Sometimes they would be just plausible enough that someone unfamiliar with him might believe, but often they exceeded the bounds of plausibility. He always told them as though they were quite literally true.

There were a few basic forms. One form involved an informal and familiar relationship with a rich or famous person. These were never the "A-list", but rather, involved someone with whom the listener would be expected to have heard of, but would not know much about. For instance, he was a good friend of the singer Ann Murray and he dropped in to visit "every time" he was "up there in Canada."

Another group of his stories would involve fantasies of his past, such as experiences in three branches of the armed forces, stock car racing, night club owner, eyeglass lens maker, horse trainer, etc.

A third major group of stories involved "how I saved the day." This would generally follow the form: (1) I was in a crowd at some event; (2) someone did not show up to do his job; (3) the person in charge had no way to accomplish whatever was to be done; (4) so the crowd was asked if anyone could step in; (5) "and I were the only one...." who could do whatever was needed. This included driving a water truck fighting forest fires, playing trombone in a jazz band, etc.

This fellow was an excellent though unintentional teacher of skepticism.

I write that preface to explain my general aversion to "how I saved the day" stories, even when they are true. Nonetheless, I have one from yesterday, so I will share it:

After spending a full day in the Chicago office, I got home from after midnight, and got to sleep sometime after 2. And so I was still drifting in and out of sleep when the phone rang at 9:20. It was Jeff Dralle from the Cedar Rapids Ice Arena - some referee scheduled for the Iowa Games was not going to make it so could I come in and do the 11:00 game? Having noted the 563 area code in my phone number, he wondered if it were even possible for me to make it in time. (Cedar Rapids is in the 319.)

But, yes, it takes 50-55 minutes to get there from here. Add a few minutes to pack, try to get a little food and caffeine in there somewhere, get dressed once at the arena - it would be close. And the car needed gas. At $25/game, it was not something to be done just for the money. In fact, I was not keen on hurrying in to do just one game. So he gave me a second game that he had planned to assign an arena employe.

Fortunately, the Anamosa BP station still had some warm (but stale) breakfast pizza and a good supply of Mountain Dew in the cooler

Gas - check; breakfast - check; caffeine! - check.

Fortunately the the 11AM game was the third of the day on that sheet of ice, and they were running more than 15 minutes late already by the time I got there, so I had plenty of time. Unfortunately, neither I nor my partner (who had also been called on short notice) had read the tournament rules, but we correctly guessed they were using the USA Hockey adult no-check rules (available through this link).

So it was about two hours from sleep to ice. The 2 PM game (which started at around 2:30) was a little easier after having already warmed up and woken up. For the record, there were no fights, but we assessed penalties for roughing, body checking, checking from behind, holding, hooking, slashing and tripping. And that was just the women's game. The men's game had all those but checking from behind, plus coincidental minors for unsportsmanlike conduct (two guys trying to pick a fight with each other).

And I got this nice T-Shirt.

You can check it out. Well, the schedule and placings, anyway.