Chapter 1: What inspired Craig Fitzpatrick to explore blind hockey?
a couple years ago i tried out blind soccer i lost my vision a few years before that so i thought i'd try out some paris sports because i've always tried to stay active you know and there was a blind soccer team in pickering in the gta that was really close to me so perfect i gave it a go um
Running around a field totally blind with seven other totally blind or blindfolded people is an interesting sport. I gave it an honest go and I can confidently say that it's not for me. But in the process, I met people who were genuinely super committed and passionate and developed a really niche skill set to play the game at a high level that just blew me away.
But there's another pair of sport adapted for blind players that might be even more bonkers. Blind hockey. It's played on a regulation rink. There's a range of visual impairments for the different positions and the puck is bigger and rattles super loudly so players can hear it. There are a couple other rule adjustments, but that's the short version.
and trust me that the players who play blind hockey have a super impressive super niche skill set like echolocation blind stick handling next level communication with their teammates i'm only scratching the surface today i'm talking to a player who's been central to team usa's blind hockey team and importantly for the show, wrote a memoir. It's called Finding the Puck.
I'm talking about Team USA Forward, Craig Fitzpatrick. This is Audiobook Cafe. I'm Jacob Szymanski. Finding the Puck is available on Audible. It's just a little under six hours long and narrated by Reagan Wilson. Here's a sample.
Hockey's a strange pastime for a blind person. but in many ways, it gave me back my life. Sunday, April 3rd, 2022. I'm in Pittsburgh, suited up for the deciding game of the second hockey championship I've taken part in over the past 10 days. And I'm a wreck. Not mentally, not anymore. I'm in a much better place than I've been for the last several years.
Perhaps I'm in the best place mentally that I've ever been. But boy, physically, I'm a disaster.
That was a sample of Finding the Puck by Craig Fitzpatrick, narrated by Regan Wilson. Craig, thank you so much for your time. How's it going, man?
Thanks for having me. It's really good seeing you guys. And a little background on me getting to know AMI. AMI was one of the sponsors of the first competitive blind hockey event I ever played in, which was the 2016 Canadian Blind Hockey Championships. So I very much appreciate you guys' mission. And it's a thrill to be here with you today.
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Chapter 2: How does blind hockey differ from traditional hockey?
For those that have never heard of blind hockey before, it's regulation hockey with three main adaptations. We have a metal puck that makes really loud noise while we play that on the ice. The goalies have to be completely blind. And for that reason, the nets are a foot shorter than regulation nets.
And then the attacking team has to complete one clean pass inside of the offensive zone past the blue line before they can score a goal. Other than that, it's regulation hockey. It's played at probably 90% of the speed of NHL hockey at its highest level, which is the Blind Hockey League.
And it's extremely entertaining to watch if you can see it or to follow it live at a game even if you can't see it. It's a heck of an experience.
Yeah, and I heard that even as a blind participant, even as a blind audience member, you can still sort of follow the game because of the way the puck rattles and the skates of the players. You can also kind of track that, plus the ref whistles in specific ways that kind of give you context clues as to what's going on. And you can follow the game pretty closely, which is really cool.
Now, you wrote this memoir where Blind Hockey takes a big part of not just your life, but also this book. So what was it that led up to you deciding to sit down and write this memoir?
My wife, Jenny, became pregnant with our first kid in the spring of 2023. And at the time, I was 46 years old. I didn't know at that age in my life if I would get a chance to be a dad, but it was really important to me that if I was given the chance that I do it right. I lost my own dad to a heart attack when I was 10 years old.
And there wasn't a lot that I had from him that I could use to remember him by as I got older. And I've always kind of had this longing for what was he like as a man, especially as I grew up and even on top of that as I'm becoming a dad myself. So I started sitting down to write some stories that I could tell to my son someday. His name's Pace. He's not quite two now.
And so at night, after my wife Jenny would go to sleep, I would open up the laptop and start dictating sometimes. Sometimes I'd put fingers to keyboard because that helps me think. And for anybody that has a little bit of vision, you probably understand what I'm saying. Sometimes you want the adaptive software. Sometimes you don't.
But I started doing some storytelling at night as a form of journaling. and then showed some of the stories to a friend of mine. And he said, you might have a book here. Have you thought about formatting it into a start-to-finish story about your career in hockey and what your life was like off the ice while you were starting to play and then eventually playing for Team USA?
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