Cheek to Check : Alison Wong Waltzes Around the Men in Hockey Leagues by Pushing Her Weight and Charm

The pickup hockey game was almost over at Van Nuys Iceland on a Saturday morning. In nearly 90 minutes of glacial encounters, there had been a couple of near fights, a few bloody collisions and numerous displays of serious macho cool. There were also enough misfired hockey pucks whizzing over the low-standing boards to explain the wisdom of keeping spectators as far away as possible.

When an errant shot whistled into a corner, it was pursued by a burly player who was chugging forward with his head down. Just before he reached the puck, a little player flashed by and got there first. Hockey etiquette demands that the intruder be smashed against the boards, hopefully breaking a few ribs. There is little doubt that the hulk had this in mind, but when he looked up to see the identity of his target, his intentions changed.

Digging the puck was a slender, attractive woman, Alison Wong, who has a knack for turning hockey players into gentlemen. Bright-eyed and cheerful, she’s the kind of selfless, hustling player any guy would want on his team even if he wasn’t a sexist. And if he wants to make passes off the ice, too, that’s OK with Wong, who has dated some of her teammates.

Treating her more like a kid sister than a potential victim, the burly player smiled and spared her ribs but nevertheless whacked her stick, stole the puck and lumbered off, Wong in pursuit.

Wong, 27, has been chasing boys for the past five years on rinks all over the Valley. One of a handful of hockey-playing women in Los Angeles, she is the only woman ever to play in the Los Angeles County Hockey Assn. Division I, the top men’s amateur league in the Valley. At only 5-5 and 120 pounds, she has persevered and survived despite playing against men who are bigger, faster and stronger.

“I have to be crazy to get out there and play with the guys,” she said, “but if I didn’t, I couldn’t play anywhere. There are no leagues for women.”

Don’t mistake Wong for a stick-swinging madwoman with a hormone problem. “If I want to do something, I just do it,” said Wong, “but people always make the wrong assumptions about me. A woman doesn’t have to be a 200-pound dyke to play hockey with the guys. But I don’t care what people think. If they don’t think I’m feminine, fine.”

Her top priority on the ice, she said, “is being respected as a player while maintaining my image as a woman.”

Wong has always been independent and a self-described nonconformist. Part Chinese, part Anglo, she has an American father and a Canadian mother. A tomboy, Wong never liked playing with dolls as a kid growing up in Vancouver. Ice skating went on hold when she was 9 and her family moved to Hawaii. She spent the next 10 years in Honolulu, which, she said, “was worse than living on the Love Boat.”

Eight years ago she headed for Los Angeles as a drummer in a rock ‘n’ roll band called Wizzards. Like a lot of young artists, she eventually drifted out of the music business and got a job as an assistant bookkeeper in an accounting firm that handled entertainment accounts like that of Boston and Tom Petty. A couple of jobs and a few extension courses later she wound up as an accountant with Joel Baumblatt, an entertainment business manager.

Wong got into hockey in 1982 when one of her first employers went out of business. When she wasn’t looking for a job, she was spending her time in malls, a diversion she quickly tired of. To beat the hot weather and lack of funds, “I needed something cold and cheap,” she said. So she took up ice skating and became a rink rat all summer.

“I had no intention of playing hockey,” she said. “But there was really nothing else for me to do if I wanted to skate. I couldn’t see myself skating around in a pink tutu. Hockey looked like fun. I didn’t care if women didn’t play. Maybe I have some inner thing in me that says I can do anything the guys can do.”

Wong was sprawled on a wooden bench after the pickup game, her long black hair wet from sweat and condensation. She lit a cigarette and began removing various parts of her uniform. The orange-blue jersey went into a large bag along with shoulder pads, arm pads and rib pads. She tugged off her baggy pants, revealing a . . . what?

“It’s a woman’s jockstrap,” she said with a deep laugh. “Women have to protect their pelvic bones, eh?”

Although she was overly serious about hockey when she began mixing with the men, she has since learned to take a bemused approach to the game, laughing during play as well as during Miller time. By now, it would seem that somebody would have tried to prove his manhood by forechecking her all the way back home. But most players seem to genuinely like her warmth and quick laugh.

“I have a good time with the guys,” she said. “I like to get raunchy, kid around, get crazy. Hockey is a social thing. You can’t play hockey without drinking a beer afterward. In fact, hockey has done wonders for me socially. I was real tired of the music scene’s drugged-out rock stars. In hockey I met a lot of guys like me, with similar interests and solid values.

“Most of my friends are guys from hockey. I don’t have a lot of girlfriends. I’m just not the type to have the girls over on a Wednesday night for a Tupperware party.”

It’s probably her upbeat personality and carefree attitude, as much as the protective gear, that have kept her out of intensive care. Still, she hasn’t been pampered, enduring a fractured finger, dislocated shoulder, stitches in the chin and loosened teeth.

“I can’t go out there and get into fights, but I don’t expect any favors,” she said. “All I ask is that they try not to check me as if I weighed 180 pounds. I’m like a VW Bug among a bunch of trucks. Most guys are chivalrous, though. There are some idiots who want to hit me because I’m smaller than they are, but they’re the kind of guys who’ll run at anybody who’s small.”

At Iceland, with fluorescent lights glaring from a low ceiling and rock music rattling out of a tape player, the pickup game seemed as if it were being played in somebody’s dark, dank rec room. Wong’s teammate, Steve Springer, sat on a hard bench and watched her jockey for position amid a towering forest of players in front of the goal.

“Nobody wants to hit her because she’s a girl,” Springer said, “but sometimes you forget. It’s a contact game. But she takes it. I’ve never seen her shy away.”

Wong is one tough cookie. “I’m not afraid to get into it,” she said. “I like the physical contact. It’s a real release for me.”

The majority of players, she said, “have real support for me and think I have a lot of guts, but some guys don’t want to play against me because they can’t play their game without hitting me, and they’re afraid they’ll hurt me. A small percentage are chauvinist pigs, and even though they might like me, they don’t want me on their team.

“The worst thing is when they check me like a guy and let me know, ‘I play hockey here.’ ”

Wong describes herself as an “OK player, better than some, worse than others.” In the highly competitive, organized leagues, she said, “I’ve had a hard time getting on teams because everybody wants the good player, so it’s not easy for me to get picked.”

Wong finished removing her uniform and size-4 skates, which looked as if they should be hanging from the mirror of Wayne Gretzky’s car. Wearing shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, she slipped on a pair of jeans like one of the boys, oblivious to other players stripping to their skivvies. When she played in leagues, she would change in the men’s locker room with her teammates, which did not make her best buddies with their girlfriends.

“They always got jealous,” Wong said. “There was never any reason. All I do is play hockey with their guys. I don’t go to bed with them.”

She does go out with unattached players, her philosophy being that people who skate together can date together. In the last few years, most of her boyfriends have been players. But hockey is brutal enough without love triangles. Once, she said, one boyfriend checked another boyfriend and touched off a brawl.

Immediately after the pickup game, Wong got in her car with the “BLULINR” plates and joined some other players at the Red Chariot in Van Nuys. Despite the early hour, there were a dozen other patrons drinking and watching football on television. Wong tried to order Molson and Moosehead, two Canadian beers, but had to settle for an American brand to go along with her hamburger.

Bob Fuchs, who just finished playing goalie on the opposing team, sat down at a table next to Wong and began teasing her, but she disarmed him with a laugh. They rehashed an incident that happened before they had become friends. During a game, she said, she naively skated into the crease and Fuchs tripped her. Wong retaliated, of course, by banging him on the helmet with her stick.

“She’s a goon,” Fuchs joked.

“He’s a slasher,” she countered, playing with the gold hockey charms around her neck.

“The first time I played against her I got her with my stick and she screamed ,” Fuchs said. “I thought to myself, ‘A hockey player is screaming ?!’ ”

Wong smiled. The guys were making fun of her again. But that’s all part of playing the game.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not easy doing what you want to do.”