Let me start off by saying that I moved to Bangkok, Thailand almost 14 years ago as I write this. I moved to Thailand to be with the woman that became my wife. For the first year and a half, we lived in Bangkok, then we lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand for 3 years and then we moved back to Bangkok, where we have been ever since.
When I first moved here, we talked about how I used to play hockey growing up, born in Minnesota and raised by a hockey coach father it was an inevitable part of my childhood. My wife told me about how there was hockey in Thailand, with a foreigner traveling hockey team called the Flying Farangs, and two hockey leagues, the Thai World Hockey League (TWHL) and the Bangkok Ice Hockey League (BIHL).
As interesting as that was, at the time, I wasn’t really interested in playing hockey. That didn’t happen until 2016, when I happened into one of the local malls here, Central Plaza Grand Rama 9 to watch a game with my wife. The teams that were playing were Warriors and Thunder. The two best teams in the BIHL. It was a lot of fun, and I ended up doing a podcast about it.
Two players from the Thunder team listened to my podcast and asked me for a meeting, because they wanted me to do a little bit of news and interviews for a league that they were just getting ready to start called the Siam Hockey League (SHL).
I went to the first game of the inaugural season and met the captains and did a few interviews that day. I ended up going to almost every game that season, getting to know quite a few of the hockey players, and I realized something in the process. Hockey is supposed to be fun!
It had been 28 yeas years since I played hockey, and now, at 45 years old, I wanted to start playing hockey again. When I went back to the States to visit my family, I started buying some gear, some new, some second hand.
One of the first things I noticed when buying my gear was the weight difference. I bought some new gear, and some second hand gear. One of the first things I noticed, were that most of the hockey gloves I looked at weren’t made of leather. When I got my shin pads, that was another thing. They seemed so much thinner and lighter, and when I wore them to shinny, they felt like they were more protective. Finally, another thing I noticed were the skates. The skates I got were second hand, but they were super rigid, almost like they were new, and they were so much lighter. It was so weird to feel the difference in how things felt now, compared to how I remembered them feeling.
My first game back, I excited and nervous all at the same time, at least until I stepped on the ice. Then I stopped thinking about it.
Here we are now, three years on, and I’ve played in half a dozen tournaments or so for the Flying Farangs, and I’ve played two seasons in the BIHL. My skill level wasn’t great, and it still isn’t, but I feel like I’m having more good games than bad games, and I’m loving playing hockey again.
