By Hans Eisenbeis

One of the great things about those recent TV series that go “behind the scenes” with NHL teams is that viewers get to see the professional game from ice level all the way back to the locker room, on to the team bus and beyond. And the first thing you notice about how the pros play the game is what filthy mouths these guys have. Coaches, players, equipment managers, the guy who sharpens skates – they all swear like sailors who’ve lost their liquor.

Like bodychecking and fighting, plenty of folks argue the F-bomb is an important part of the game, woven into its history and traditions like garter belts, friction tape and false teeth. My mother is not one of them, and therefore neither am I. Here is how I became a non-F-bomber.

When I was just a Squirt, the neighborhood boys all played football in the offseason. I was one of the little fellows and rarely got the ball, but once I made a fabulous goal-to-goal run only to be tackled on the one yard line by ... a water spigot weirdly placed in the middle of the vacant lot.

Both teams fell to the ground in gales of laughter, and with a bruise rising on my shin and tears streaming down my face, I dropped the effer at about 100 decibels  so loudly that my mother heard from inside our house a couple doors down. She came to the door, held it open and bellowed my full Christian name. This was decades before spankless helicopter parenting and the “everyone-gets-a-trophy” mentality of today. I was frog-marched directly to the bathroom where my mouth made the intimate acquaintance of a bar of Ivory soap.

I never swore again.

Until I was 16.

Toward the end of practice one day with my varsity high school team, our assistant coach – who’d been a defenseman on a national championship college team – was taking some shots on a friendly wager between us. I had stopped more than he’d scored, and this inspired him to take a terrific slow-rising slapshot  from the top of the slot. Being a stand-up goalie, I naturally stood there and took it like a man, directly to the Cooper-brand protective goalie cup – a shank of steel wrapped in a codpiece of high-density foam protecting the future of all my little stand-up-goalie children.

This equipment did not prevent me from experiencing the most intense and nauseating pain I’d ever felt, and when my voice returned to the spectrum of audible frequencies, I did drop the second F-bomb of my youth. It sounded like something out of a horror film. The rink came to a standstill and both the varsity and the junior varsity and even the Zamboni guy stopped to witness my writhing on the ice in a moment of silence and sympathy.

My mother was far away. It felt good and it relieved a great deal of psychic pressure that had built up over a decade of eff-lessness.

This little story illustrates my point, I hope. If we overuse a good bad word, then its power as a good bad word is greatly diminished. People can no longer distinguish really bad words from merely unpleasant ones, and the entire language starts to feel like a suburban mall – bland, monotonous, the same in every town.

Just the other day, in a Sunday tournament game for last place, I heard a hockey mom herself dropping F-bombs like candy at a parade because her team, leading by five goals, was not taking enough shots in the final three minutes of the game. Maybe it’s just me, but that situation might have called for something more along the lines of a “heck” or a “gee,” or even “golly.”

It may be a losing battle to try to clean up the language of hockey players and hockey moms, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. My boy has developed his own pre-teen alternatives to the effenheimer, which I monitor warily while we’re at the rink and in the car. I often find myself explaining the subtleties of cursing, the same way you might describe the differences between a light Chardonnay (“dang!”) and a lusty Burgundy (“frick!”). As a second-year Squirt, my boy is currently fond of the clever but wordy  “H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks.”

See, while I might have become a long-term disappointment to my mother after discovering the joys of a well-placed F-bomb, I also learned that one must be sensitive to one’s audience. By the time I got to college and had the privilege of playing stand-up goalie there, I knew how to watch my mouth. In fact, after one of our first practices, I was telling my teammates the story of how I’d stopped swearing after that fateful football game, and when I got to the punchline, I blurted the F-word at top volume just as my new coach was coming into the locker room. His eyes put a light sunburn on my forehead and he turned and left the room without a word. One of the captains murmured, “Dude. Coach is a deacon in his church.”

It might have been flop goaltending that ended my career early. Or it might have been collateral damage from one poorly placed F-bomb.

There’s no need to accuse me of being a prig or a scold. I’m just saying that, like the game of hockey itself, we must adapt to changing circumstances on and around the ice. Use good judgment. Do not drop the F-bomb within earshot of children who are just learning their first words. Do not swear at all when your team is ahead by five goals – it shows bad breeding. And do not repeat dirty stories in the locker room if your head coach is active in the local church. Amen.

Hans Eisenbeis was a stand-up goalie when Ronald Reagan was president, David Lee Roth was the singer of Van Halen, and hockey players were all “he.” It was a different time.