“In one night, he stole my booze, beat me up, and had sex with my girlfriend.”
So says Vancouver-based author Grant Lawrence about a villainous hockey-jock from high school. Remembering his days of thick glasses, knee braces, and bullying, he recalls his journey to becoming a CBC radio broadcaster, author, and founder of a hockey team where, years later, he finally faced that same jock and gave him his comeuppance on the ice.
From longsuffering dork to indie rock star, Lawrence, host of CBC radio shows The Wild Side and RadioSonic, was familiar with being in the attack zone of hockey meatheads long before he became a goalie himself. A great storyteller, his new book, The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie, is funny, contemplative, and wholly Canadian.
“I’m a really artsy guy, and have been since I was a little kid” he says. “If anyone told me I would be writing a hockey book when I turned 40, I would have looked at them like they were completely insane.”
Despite Lawrence’s total disinterest in sports as a kid, his parents were never without their skates in winter.
“I got my first pair of ice skates when I was two years old. [The ice rink] smelled like sticking your face in a freezer of stinky socks,” he says, adding that he later grew to love the smell, which was to him indicative of “having some fun with friends, free of jockular harassment.”
Lawrence later got a taste of being one of the “cool kids” when he became the lead singer in a rock band, an experience from which he draws many comparisons to hockey in his book.
“The goalie position is like the drummer; you have to be in perfect sync with the bass player/defencemen,” he says.
Although Lawrence is the lead singer of popular garage rockers the Smugglers, he says that playing the centre position on a hockey team never appealed to him in the same way.
“It was always the goalie that intrigued me,” he says. “When everyone else is on the other end of the rink, you’re by yourself focusing your ice vision.”
His baby coos in the background as we chat, and Lawrence continues to describes how playing in a band and playing on a hockey team are, surprisingly, similar.
“They both end in a lot of sweat,” he says. “We change into matching outfits in the locker room or backstage, and play as a team for crowds of people, facing criticism for both.” (The Vancouver Flying Vees, named after the legendary Gibson Flying V guitar, are a hockey team of Vancouver musicians founded by Lawrence in 2003.)
“I’ve come a long way,” he says, after reminiscing about his hate for hockey and beefy jocks, which turned into celebration and success. Fate came full circle when he was able to throw a few punches back and marry Canadian singer-songwriter Jill Barber, with whom he spent a month in the south of France while writing the bulk of his new book.
“I feel great about the new book coming out,” he says. “Now the trepidation is if people will like it.”
The Lonely End of the Rink book launch
7 pm October 25
The Copper Owl, 1900 Douglas Street
copperowl.ca