For anyone with a hankering for hockey after a winter without it in Chicago, the place to go, of course, is the beach. North Avenue Beach Sports runs a street-hockey rink near the big ocean-liner-style beach house. It organizes leagues of various skill levels and will even place interested individuals on a team if they can’t find enough friends for their own. (See nabsports.com for details.) If Oak Street Beach to the south is where the svelte and the tan go to see and be seen, and beaches to the north offer their own diversions but tend to be more utilitarian, more for Chicagoans wishing to cool off in the lake and sun on the sand, then North Avenue is the fitness beach, the jock’s beach–and the hockey rink is its most unusual attraction.
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Ice hockey is beautiful when played at the highest levels, but the players are masked by helmets and blankets of padding. Not so at North Avenue, where the players tend to be as easy to look at as their game is to watch. Men favor ball caps, shorts, and sleeveless shirts if they’re not bare chested, and the elbow pads and shin and knee guards that no hockey player at any level would go without give them a gladiatorial look. Women–and there always seem to be a few women more than holding their own in the rink–show more range: double-layered tank tops matched with Bauer sweat pants, sleeveless T-shirts that say “Vulcanized Rubbers” with sorority shorts, lion paw prints on both cheeks. The women tend to put up a tough facade, then go about proving it’s no facade at all.
I saw a guy climb across the boards, pull up a plastic chair, and immediately light up a cigarette. One of the women soon came over to ask for a drag.
“What kind of ball is that?” said the woman.
