Merry Christmas, 2001

To celebrate Christmas, I am sharing my Christmas Day columns, a tradition that started in 1996. Here is the 2001 version:

A Christmas story, 1979: He left home late on Dec. 23, flying to Sweden to join his team for the World Junior Championships. But he missed his connecting flight in London.

So Christmas Eve was spent in a hotel near Heathrow Airport. The airline gave the 20 strangers a coupon for fish and chips in the hotel restaurant; instead they had a feast and charged it to the airline.

The next day, our man got only as far as Denmark. He took a walk that Christmas night and found himself in Copenhagen’s red-light district.

“I walked right down the middle of the street,” he said. “Didn’t waver one way or the other.”

Finally, the next day, after another flight and a 12-hour train ride, he made it to Karlstad, Sweden, where the Canadian national junior team welcomed assistant coach Doug Sauter.

A Christmas story, 1987: The great ice storm hit, delivering Oklahoma a white Christmas. And the 8-year-old in Bridge Creek was excited.

His house was in a valley — his dad couldn’t even get the four-wheel drive Jeep Cherokee up the driveway — so he and a pal rigged a sledding course. They slid down the hill, into the family garage and crashed into mattresses set up against the back wall.

They wore cleats for better traction going up the hill. After a couple of trips, the boys took a break. When they came back, they didn’t put on their cleats.

Our lad slipped on the ice, his head was sliced by a nail and he suffered what proved to be a concussion. His father got a little more motivated to get the Cherokee up the hill, so his son could get to a hospital. Since then, when he’s at play, you can always find a pair of cleats on Trent Smith.