Hockey and BBQ

Being an avid soccer player while in school, i always thought of hockey as a game for chicks or males with less male-juice in them. My school wasn't particularly good in hockey and we'd loose matches to arch enemy St. John's whose players wear skirts and lipstick on the weekends i hear. Thats how bad we were. All this was infused into me and other school buddies to thrash our hockey players whenever we saw them on class corridors or the canteen when they had their meals. I would lead in booing them whenever they walked down the lonley school corridoors.
I know i was a real rascal then, in school everybody was. The school hockey team were a disgrace and as far as me and the other lads were concerned, hockey just didn't exist for us.

It was all until the m'sian hockey team came to town to play against the national team here. I can't remember the scores but i heard the geng lost the majority of 5 matches that they played here. My bro n father were persistent in asking me to go watch the match with them. But i told them that i had more important things to do that day .. like watching paint dry. They got the idea and left without me to watch the match in town. That nite, father told us that he'd invited the entire contigent over the following nite to the house for a BBQ session. My first thoughts were .. awww man .. a bunch of sissies in skirts eating in my yard. What would the neighbors think? Man i'm roasted. Like a mainframe IBM, my mind ran a gazillion bytes of excuses to come up with so that i wouldn't have to attend. Fry my barkers, and my barkers are fried.

The following day was a tough n rough day at work. I couldn't hack the WinCE based device application to build. The scripts wouldn't run. It was even more screwed up when team lead pointed out that a directory was wrongly named and I hadn't caught it in the verbose shell script log .. but he did. I really despise it when someone else finds the solution in 10 mins when i've spent 2 hours scounging around for it. So it was a bad day for me right. I left about 7 and drove up my drive way about 20 mins later. Getting out of the car i saw a 30 sitter luxury coach pull up infront of my house and a bunch of m'sian dudes in yellow jersey come out of the bus. At first I couldn't register what was happening. Was i being invaded by m'sian embassy agents? Are they spies taking refuge in my house? What was happening?

Amidst all the de-registering confusion, i remembered father saying he'd invited m'sian hockey players over. And then it all came back to me. I proceeded top join them for the lamb BBQ and found them pretty OK to talk to. I don't know about hockey being a cool game and all, but the m'sian blokes that I spoke to were not wearing skirts. Their capt Kuhan .. was pretty knowledgeable about our ways of life here. He asked some valid questions about govt tax and the whole work culture. After about 2 hours of eating and talking, their coach excused themselves as they had another game the next day and had to retire to bed consciously early. In rows of 2x2, like they do on the hockey field .. the players walked out the side gates and onto their bus, shaking my hand as they went along. If anything, the meat they took out that nite on the BBQ pit should help them win a game or two.

Later that nite, I thought of all the snide remarks i made over the years about hockey players being sissies and all the bad mouthing i done in school about hockey. My chat with the BBQ hockey boys made me realize that they were males after all. Something new learned today.

Despite cocking up at work today, I slept with a peace of mind and a smile on my face.