His entire team, including my son, were sworn to secrecy - under no circumstances was I to find out.
But as one player's wife said to her husband as he gleefully recounted the episode to her: "But if you're telling me, how long will it be until Julie finds out?".
Jack, our son, finally cracked and confessed that Dad had been playing.
I'm sure his physio would be thrilled to hear about it - I'm pretty certain playing hockey wasn't part of his rehabilitation schedule.
My only consolation is that the moonboot had very little grip (not being designed for playing sports) and he spent a fair amount of time falling over and grovelling around on the turf, fortunately not taking a ball or a stick to the head.
His team haven't won many games this season, so not being able to tell me about their great win and his part in it was the ultimate punishment, and I take some comfort from that.
He was lucky again the other week, also at hockey.
He took the boys along for the Saturday morning games, parked the car and headed in to the hockey centre, probably talking on his phone and distracted.
After the game he couldn't find the keys in his pocket and it dawned on him that he had possibly left them in the car.
Indeed, he had - our car sat for more than an hour in a public carpark renowned for its burglary rate, with its keys in the ignition.
It's almost as bad as another friend of mine, who merrily walked home from work on a Friday, forgetting he'd driven the family car in that morning.
The car was stuck in a securely locked parking building all weekend, leaving the family carless and fuming.
Distracted by Bruce and his moonboot, I seem to have deviated from the rural theme, so let's consider another male who lives not too far away from us.
He and his wife have recently embarked on the good life and taken up small-scale goat farming.
Just last week the husband (let's call him David) was inside a closed trailer loading hay in preparation for a road trip to pick up more goats.
He had parked the trailer in some stockyards that their neighbour had recently moved some cows through, so deposits of fresh dung coated the underlying layer of pine needles.
Another forkful of hay proved the straw that broke the camel's back, and the trailer, with David in it, slid off down the hill.
Fortunately a fence lined with plants halted its rapid descent but also blocked the back of the trailer, trapping the unfortunate David inside.
His wife was out so couldn't hear his cries for help, nor did he have a phone on him but, eventually, through sheer physical effort, he eased the trailer far enough back off the fence to wedge a gap big enough to crawl through.
And a vital lesson about parking trailers was no doubt learned.
