When I was growing up I tended to be good at almost any sport I attempted. I just had a knack for sports and no matter what the sport was, for the most part I ended up being at least better-than-average at it. There were some exceptions though and as far as USA-centric sports are concerned, baseball was the big one that stood out for me as something that try as I may, I just simply couldn't become good at it.
I did try almost any sport that was offered to me and because I grew up in a colder city where ice-hockey was quite popular, there was a tendency for certain parts of society to really push towards being good at it. So just like anything else, I decided to strap on the skates and give it a go.
I don't recall how old I was but I know it was quite young. I wasn't the most gifted skater, but I could hold my own and was capable of free skating pretty fast without much falling down. I could also skate backwards which is necessary if you are going to excel at this sport but for some reason, if you put a stick in my hand and told me to do these things at the same time, I simply couldn't do it. Perhaps this is the reason why I was never good at baseball as well. It seems to be a trend with me: If you put a stick of any sort in my hands in a sport I just end up not being all that great at it. This was true with any sport involving tools held in your hands. With just about any other sport that involved using only your body, I was just normally naturally good at it but in hockey, I simply just wasn't very good.
In the youth leagues, they have a lot of protection for the players and for the most part they don't allow a great deal of contact, which is good because with me I was blindly running into other players on a regular basis because I must have some sort of psychological block where anytime you put a stick or a bat or a club in my hand, I tend to either not enjoy the sport, or just am inclined to not be good at it for one reason or another.
For a while there, I thought that maybe it was just the ice that was getting to me so later on in life when I was a teenager and roller-blades started to become really popular, I tried my hand at roller-hockey and found out that I was just terrible at that as well. Hell, even the few times that I tried my hand at field hockey I was a real turd at that one as well.
As strange as it might sound, field hockey was the one that I was likely the worst at but a lot of this might have to do with the fact that we didn't really have a lot of great instruction with this on the boys' side of things. I don't know if it is still this way but when I was young field-hockey was kind of viewed as a "girls' sport" and when the boys would play it, it just became a bit of a war where people would get their hands bloodied by aggressive opponents. I quickly became afraid of the inevitable stick to hand connection that could bloody your knuckles pretty quickly if someone on the other team singled you out and wanted to hurt ya a bit. It was a different time in the 80's and if you gave a bunch of boys some sticks and sent them out into a field it was definitely going to turn into a massive sword fight.
When I was in college I met a guy who grew up in the north east of the United States near Canada and he was incredible. When I meet someone that excels at a sport I have to say that I am considerably more impressed when ice-hockey is what they are good at because to me at least, it just seems to take a wild amount of skills that are not easy to hone. Skating on its own is difficult enough but when you introduce weapons and the fact that slamming into others and getting slammed into by others into the very fabric of the game itself, this is just a crazy thing to somehow become really good at it.
I think that when you have a sport where fist-fighting is just a regular and accepted part of regular play, that we are dealing with a very special sort of fearlessness when people are good at it. I recall how I met Rob Jordan, the guy in question. I was 17 years old or so and was tooling around with my roller-blades in the street and he asked me if he could give them a try. Even though the skates were not his size he strapped them on and immediately started skating forwards and backwards in a way that just boggled my mind.
I didn't feel much like skating after he humbled me that day but I am glad it happened because here we are around 25 years later and Rob is still one of my best buds on the planet! Sports bring people together!