from Ryan Kesler at The Players' Tribune,

We lived in an old ranch-style house outside of Detroit. It’s over 100 years old now. In the winter, my dad would make a rink out back. But we didn’t have a pond or anything. Just a big yard. In the beginning, he would just take the garden hose out and spray down the grass. Then he got a little smarter and put some tarp down first.

That was only good for three months a year, tops. The majority of my hockey life revolved around ministicks in the basement, or ball hockey out in the street. My brother is nine years older than me, but for some reason I always kicked his ass whenever we played street hockey. I was dominant. The weird thing was, the domination extended to everything else — Monopoly, Connect 4, Sega.

I was good at everything. Or I thought I was.

It wasn’t until years later, when we were playing board games with my own kids, that my brother looked at me and just shook his head.

“Dude, I was letting you win. Whenever you lost, you’d go crazy. You’d ruin the whole day.”

I’ve always been uber competitive. I didn’t quite realize this until I had my own son, and he started flipping out every time he lost on his iPad games. It runs in the blood.

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