January 17, 1980
He could smother the hardest slap shot, deflect the quickest wrist shot, break up the cleanest breakaway. John (Ozzie) Nelson would have been a fine goalie if not for one small detail: He couldn’t skate. Street hockey was his game. As an 8th-grader, he won the MVP award at a national tournament in Stamford, Conn. But if he wanted to play hockey in high school, it would be ice hockey, not street hockey, and he took to ice like a six-pack of Fresca.
Ozzie Nelson had no choice but to attend the Wissahickon Skating Club hockey camp in the summer of 1977. It would be a painful experience. The other boys came to refine their skills, to pick up a pointer here and there. Ozzie Nelson came to learn how to keep his feet. Suddenly, the MVP had become a rank beginner. “The first night of camp,” he remembers, “they had everybody skate around the rink. I came out on the ice and fell down. To this day, the coaches at the camp laugh whenever they see me.” One of those coaches was Lower Merion High School’s Doug Adams. Strange, but when he ran into Nelson last week, he wasn’t laughing much. His team was being beaten by Chestnut Hill Academy, 8-0, and in goal for the Hillers was that kid who couldn’t skate over to his own shadow. “Nothing gave me more joy than playing against Mr. Adams and beating him,” said the 5 foot, 2 inch sophomore. That’s what motivated me.” That was part of what motivated him. There was a little matter of an eight-period shutout streak to keep up. The victory over Lower Merion made it 11 periods without allowing a goal, and the string reached 13 before West Catholic snapped it last Thursday. The shutout streak earned Nelson designation as The Inquirer’s City Athlete of the Week.
“I used to be so awful, I knew I had to get better,” said Nelson, who owns a 2.08 goals-against average and an 8-3-1 record in his first year as a varsity regular. “Once you learn to skate, the other skills come easily. You can cut down the angle, go out, and challenge the man.” He’s even learned to skate over a nickname like Ozzie, “In class one time a teacher asked me if I was related to the (television) Nelsons, and the name stuck,” he recalls. “Hey, I’m just glad I didn’t get Harriet.”
The original
