| Thursday, February 03, 2005 |
| Sports, and the Fans that love them |
This is sad. The NHL is going to cancel the season this Friday barring a last minute ruling regarding salary caps.
If the season is cancelled, the NHL would be the first North American sports league to lose an entire season to a labor dispute. The Stanley Cup has been awarded every year since 1919, when the great flu epidemic wiped out the final series between Montreal and Seattle.
This is why my favorite sport is NCAA College Football. They play for the fans and the alumni and the glory that goes with that. Of course, the cynical, grown up side of me realizes that they are also playing for future endorsements, NFL Contracts, and advertising, but I also think the scrutiny placed on the NCAA in the last few years has gone a long way to reducing the graff that used to be the status quo.
But, back to hockey. My Dad was a hockey player. He played both in high school and in college for Rensselaer Polytechnic University (and yes, this link is a blatant source of pride for a building he designed for his alma mater). Later on when we were in school, he coached our high school team as the goalie coach.
As little kids, he made us scaled down hockey sticks so we could play family hockey games on the frozen lake near our house. We would go to the lake in mid morning and Dad would lace up our skates one by one, as we were sitting lined up next to each other on the gate of the old Ford LTD Station Wagon. He ALWAYS laced the skates too tight. After an hour, my calves would be throbbing and I couldn't feel my toes.
Also, my sisters and I had the "Dorothy Hamill / Peggy Fleming" skates. The skates were white leather, looked like roller skates with blades attached, and had these nasty toe edges in them in case we wanted to suddenly burst into a Double Salchow, but were relatively useless if you wanted to check the opposing player and steal the puck.
Meanwhile, the boys all wore "Mustang NHL Jr." skates. Their skates had long, smoothed, curved blades like scimitars, and did not have annoying toe ridges to trip them up. They also had metal ankle supports (imagine that!) to keep your feet straight. This meant, the Boys feet were always straight and linear, and ours were always falling in on themselves - doomed to be perennially knock kneed and pigeon toed, which did little to correct that general impression of me as the tallest girl in the 7th grade.
Mom always brought hot cocoa to the lake as a pablum to sooth our frost bite and sore ankles, but I could always tell she was humoring Dad in making us his "little team" and in teaching us how to skate.
I still don't skate well. I like it, but it's like I almost have to learn it all over again every time I do it. Maybe because I only do it once a year - if that. It's kinda like the guitar. I was pretty damn decent at one point, and now, I have regressed to "Michael Row the Boat Ashore", and a few Beach Boys/ Springsteen/ Kansas riffs.
Anyway, my brother stuck with hockey, and played at Penn State. He later played roller hockey with his buds until fairly recently. I remember calling him at Penn State on Valentine's Day one year when our folks were out of the country (as usual), and I was in college in Wisconsin. It was a Sunday morning, and he sounded as if he had been on a bender the night before. Slurred speech, awkward phrases. It turned out that he had been broadsided/slapsticked in a hockey game the day before with a stick to the face. The hit stunned him, but it wasn't until the next morning when his eye was blood red, his face looked sunken, he had trouble chewing, and he had a VERY bloody nose, that he realized all was not right. Turns out he had broken his face / cheek with that slap shot, and they had set his face by going up through his mouth/cheek.
"Don'd tell Mum N' Dad", he mumbled with clenched, wired jaws. "I'm fine. Jess can'd ead real food ride now".
So - canceling the NHL Season is canceling a piece of family history in some ways. I love the sport because I was taught to love it - both at home, in Pittsburgh, and at the University of Wisconsin (where there are more Canadian hockey player jokes than dumb football jock jokes -eh? )
Face Off!
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posted by Broadsheet @ 9:45 PM   |
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| 4 Editorial Opinions: |
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Didn't they cancel hockey last season as well? I always liked watching it; grew up with the Capitals, although I don't know how to skate, and went to a bunch of Skipjacks/Bandits games here. I think it's an acquired taste, like soccer, and it's kind of an expensive sport (equipment, rink), so it doesn't get a lot of high school exposure. But where else do you get to see blood bounce on ice?
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Well, as an alum of BU, I must admit that I am somewhat partial to the Hockey East. Of course, I did get to see an NCAA Hockey Championship banner hoisted in my 4 years there.
Nothing like a little smack talk about college hockey--which I do miss dearly.
Beanpot Rules! ;-)
Jason
http:/radio.weblogs.com/0142115
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Well if it's a little trash talkin you want - you came to the right place! Let me remind you that the Badgers have FIVE national championships under their skates, compared to BU's (respectable) FOUR, and that we are currently #3 in the country with an 18-7-1 record, while BU is ....oh, there you are...#17 ;-)
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Mark - get your own blog sweetie. :-)
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Didn't they cancel hockey last season as well? I always liked watching it; grew up with the Capitals, although I don't know how to skate, and went to a bunch of Skipjacks/Bandits games here. I think it's an acquired taste, like soccer, and it's kind of an expensive sport (equipment, rink), so it doesn't get a lot of high school exposure. But where else do you get to see blood bounce on ice?