Dale Jackson has spent the better part of his life at the rink.
He has been a referee in the Kingston area for 27 years, guiding Kingston’s hockey-playing youth through the rules and regulation of one of the country’s greatest pastimes.
For all of those 27 years, he has been the only black person to do it in Kingston.
But now, he’s ready to hang up his skates.
“It’s a lot weeks where you’re at the rink four or five times a week. It’s a big commitment. Just all the injuries, I’ve had a separated shoulder, multiple bruises, multiple concussions,” said Jackson, ahead of going out to ref yet another youth game.
For Jackson, the son of a military father who moved around plenty, the love of hockey followed.
However, as a black person, Jackson has been forced to balance his love for a game that, at times, didn’t love him back.
“You try not to think about it, because your friends were all with you, so it kind of helped, but as you get older and you start hearing it, you … you kind of get angry,” he said.
Jackson remembers incidents, mostly when travelling with his team, of other players, or even parents in the stands, hurling insults and racial slurs at him, just for playing the game.
He said that as he transitioned from playing to refereeing it was the relationships he made, along with his passion for hockey, that made it all worthwhile.
“The biggest thing I’m probably going to miss is, I really like my interaction with a lot of the coaches and players in different leagues. You see them come on the ice, they come over and say hi, how’ve you been, I haven’t seen you for a while,” said Jackson.
As time winds down in the last period of his refereeing career he said he’s proud to have been a role model for black people in hockey.
“Any team I ever played against, there was never another black kid, so, seeing how many there are playing now, it just … it warms my heart,” said Jackson.