Under the Cover: From Hockey to Poetry in Ben von Jagow’s Goalie

I’m not entirely certain when poetry stumbled into my life, though I can tell you what kept it there.

It was 2019. I was living in Denmark and spending a good chunk of my days at the library. I wanted to be a writer but didn’t have the patience or the foresight necessary to craft stories. The novels I pored over had plot twists and blue herrings. They took their readers on long purposeful journeys and never rushed to the finish. In this way, they were rivers. Readers, the raft.

I wanted action and intensity—everything at once. Like barreling over a waterfall.

Again, I’m not sure how I started with poetry, but what I can tell you is that I took to it instantly.  

Instead of wrestling with character development and plot webs, poetry became my shotgun blast. An instantaneous release. I found that I could pour my heart onto the page and move on. Later, calm but still capricious, I’d be able to return and comb what I wrote to my liking.

In time, these poems took shape. Some after a single sitting. Others, after months of sporadic tweaking.

I submitted three of these poems to the CBC Poetry Prize, and shortly after forgot about them entirely. I visited Berlin and, for a short period of time, fell in love with the concept of street art. Under the cover of darkness, I glued posters around the city, and scribbled hurried messages beneath them.

I thought all of this was cool and edgy, but looking back now, I realize it was just ridiculous.  

First of all, my messages.

Beneath a wheatpased printout of my face, I’d write “Kill the ego.” It made zero sense.

Secondly, my work never lasted for more than a couple of days, often far less than that. I’d bike by the following morning and see my face or a printout cardinal staring back at me. Then, later that afternoon, the wall would be blank, or freshly painted. I don’t know who the Danish municipality hired to keep the streets clean, but they were as effective as Batman himself.

Anyway, the street art lost its appeal. I realized I was more interested in lying beneath blankets at night in my pyjamas than I was roaming the streets dressed in black. I kicked my supplies beneath my bed and never really touched them again.

Without graffiti competing for my creative attention, I turned back to writing. I reignited a brief stint with poetry until I received a job opportunity in northern Norway and things changed once again.

The gig was to guide tourists through the Arctic and show them the aurora borealis, the northern lights. Standing beneath such a spectacle each night was a tremendous source of inspiration, but when it came time to describe the experience, I found my words often fell short.

The lights are the most brilliant green you’ve ever seen.

Like neon.

They snake across the sky like…a green snake.

Linguistically impotent, I turned to something far more adept at capturing the aurora’s brilliance: my camera.

In a span of three months, I took close to ten thousand pictures of the northern lights, and even the worst of them was more captivating than my futile attempts at a poem.  

In my defense, a camera will always outperform the keyboard when it comes to the aurora. It’s like showing up to a gun fight with a knife. Admirable of the knife-wielder, sure, but still far too much of a handicap to overcome.

Eventually, inevitably, the aurora season came to end. I turned in my camera reluctantly and moved to Stockholm. It was the onset of COVID, and people were trying to stay indoors. It would’ve been the perfect moment to buckle down and return to writing, except I couldn’t shake the photography bug I caught while in Norway. Guiding had provided me with a nice lump sum in my bank account, and I used some of that money to buy my own camera.

Over the next month or so, I wandered the city taking photographs. A few turned out half decent, so I started submitting them to journals. I wasn’t writing all that much and instead was brainstorming how I could transform this photography thing into a career.

Then I received an email.

Subject: 2020 CBC Poetry Prize – Confidential

As soon as I read the first word—Congratulations—everything shifted.

My submission, “Goalie,” had been selected as a longlist winner.

That might not seem like much, but to someone like me, with only a handful of publications under his belt, it meant everything. Validation, inspiration, and motivation meshed into one.

My submission had been exactly 600 words—the contest limit. Over the course of the next few years, I began expanding on what I had written. “Goalie” transformed from a 600-word contest entry to a 12,000-word story, told in poems. When I started, I had only three poems with a single underlying theme. When I finally deemed the manuscript worthy for submission, I had thirty. Somewhere around the middle-mark, I hit a snag.

Here’s why.

If you’re unfamiliar with Goalie, it traces a hockey career, from novice all the way to retirement. It is, by all accounts, a hockey story.

Like countless Canadians, I grew up playing hockey. When it came time to expand on that initial collection, I discovered that I had access to a whole bank of memories. Road trips, ministicks in hotel hallways, shinny on the ODR—the list was endless.

Except that it wasn’t. Because my memories, although plentiful, had an expiration date. They dried out at the age of sixteen, when I stopped playing organized hockey. And since I wanted Goalie to span an entire hockey career, I realized I had to get creative.

Fortunately for me, salvation came in the form of a different sport.

Football.

As mentioned, I hung up my skates at the age of sixteen. But I didn’t walk away from sports altogether. Instead, I slipped my feet into cleats, and that’s where they’ve remained ever since.

This is the second part of my identity. The Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. To some, I’m Ben von Jagow, Canadian poet and author of Goalie. To others, I’m Big Ben, import wide receiver for the Fukuoka Suns of the Japanese X-League.

Stepping away from hockey was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but I did so for good reason. I wanted to dedicate more time and energy to football, and in that regard, I’ve succeeded. I currently make my living by catching passes and scoring touchdowns, and in the past nine years, I have played professionally in nine different countries.

Football’s given me more than I ever could’ve imagined—but that’s another story. What I want to highlight here is how, against all odds, it transformed me into a writer.

In addition to providing me with a roof over my head and a bit of money in my pocket, international football has provided me with a far greater gift:

Time.

As an import player, I’m required to attend team practices, the gym, and a game on weekends, but when it’s all said and done, I’m left with a surplus of hours, free to invest however I see fit.

I won’t lie to you. During my first year abroad, I squandered those hours, doing little more than piss them down the drain. The following year though, something clicked, and my mentality shifted.

I went from sitting on the couch surrounded by weed smoke to sitting in the library surrounded by books. I churned sentence after sentence after sentence, just trying to find my voice. And when that bell chimed, and the library locked its doors, I took those books home and scoured their pages beneath lamplight—looking for clues.

My days were spartan, simple. I lifted weights, blocked linebackers, and I wrote—hurling myself full-force at all three.

Football instilled within me this ironclad work ethic, which I found I couldn’t turn off. When the bar felt heavy and my legs shook, I persevered. When it was late in the fourth quarter and my lungs were gassed, I sucked it up and played on. And when the cursor blinked back and the screen threatened to burst my retinas, I told myself, “Come on now. Just one more paragraph.”

But even more valuable than time and stamina are the experiences international football has afforded me. Experiences I thought I’d never get back after stepping away from hockey.  

I wrote the first part of Goalie by pulling memories. But the second, I wrote in real-time while playing football abroad. Big games, budding friendships, team wins. Because when you get down to the brass tacks, it isn’t the technical aspects of the sport that resonate—it’s the emotional ones. The bus rides, the teammates, the highs and the lows—that’s what lives on.

Somewhere between the games, the weight rooms, and the libraries, I found something steady. Poetry is no longer just my shotgun blast. It’s a lens, a ritual, a means to make sense of everything sport has given me. Even now, as the seasons mount and the cartilage wears thin, the writing remains.

One day, I’ll hang up my cleats alongside my skates. And though that thought unsettles me, it doesn’t undo me. Because when the fans go home and the lights turn off, poetry will still be there. Not to replace the game, but to preserve its echo.