I think this last team I mentioned is the one I find hardest to follow. I like the game itself, but the season just drags out so darn long. The 2009-2010 season began on October 1st and ended on June 9th. Eight-plus months of hockey. I don’t have the stamina to be a hockey fan.
Hockey is a winter sport; it would be great if the hockey season ended and the Stanley Cup was presented on the last day of Spring Training for Major League Baseball. That would be a neat way to mark the end of Winter and the beginning of Spring: the last Sunday in March, Hockey crowns it’s champ and Winter is unofficially over. The next day, the First Pitch is thrown out in a Major League ballpark, and Summer is ready to start. When it is the beginning of June and you are only beginning the Stanley Cup finals, , I find it is as hard to maintain my enthusiasm for hockey as I do for wearing long sleeved flannel shirts.
I was driving down a neighborhood thoroughfare on warm afternoon last week, debating as to whether I should turn on the air conditioning in my truck or roll all the windows down, when I drove past a yard display of an ersatz Stanley Cup with three foot high cardboard numbers 2-0-1-0 propped up in front of it. The display was constructed from silver duct-tap covered circular containers stacked on top of each other and topped off with a shiny metal salad bowl; It wasn’t just the hastily constructed amateurishness of The Stanley Cup yard display that made it clash with the riding lawnmower cruising over the green lawn next door; it was the incongruity of the winter element in the lush greens and golden sunshine that is spring and summer. Like a plastic Santa figurine overgrown by dandelions, the Stanley Cup display seemed like a relic from the cold dark days of 3 months ago left outside too long.
I have to admire that fan’s dedication to his sport, though. When I am at a Memorial Day cookout or sweating through late Spring humidity while mowing my lawn, I’m not thinking about rushing in to catch the latest hockey playoff scores. It seems odd, actually, to drive by the local sports bar down the street where people are hanging out in the warm evening air of June watching hockey being played on the giant screens inside. At the other end of the street, a Little League baseball game is finishing up.
I really have a difficult time trying to be a hockey fan for a few reasons:
#1. It’s not fun to listen to. I usually listen to sports on the radio in my studio, and hockey is my least favorite thing to listen to. The players’ names are often hard to pronounce and/or remember, and the French Canadian and Russian accents are incomprehensible during post game interviews.
#2. Money, Money. Hockey was an expensive sport to play properly as a kid, with lots of pricey equipment, and transportation was needed to get back and forth from the rink. It also required a large time commitment from not only the players, but from the families that would be transporting you to games, practices, and trips to the sporting goods store to purchase the pricey equipment. We usually played hockey on open expanses of frozen water in vacant lots during the coldest parts of Winter, wearing heavy boots instead of skates, or on hard packed snow in suburban streets or backyards. As long as you had a puck, a hockey stick, and some heavy clothing to protect against errant pucks and hockey sticks, you could play. You just couldn’t do it on skates.
#3. Tough Guys, Sensitive Egos. Hockey players seem to be easily offended. I have followed both the Flyers and the Bruins, and since I receive New York City radio stations easily here in Pennsylvania, I also follow the Rangers and New Jersey Devils. Too many times, though, I would hear reports of a player or coach not talking to each other because they were unhappy with what one had said about something, or were miffed over lack of playing time, or felt slighted by being moved to the third line from the second. Big tough guys who could take a full body check or a slam against the ice head first seemed to have very fragile egos.
#4. The season is almost nine months long. By the time I’m putting the air conditioner in my studio window and ice in my drinks, I’m no longer interested in ice hockey, mostly because of the word "ICE" in the name... I’m thinking about baseball. We had fun playing hockey during the cold, dark days of winter, but when the days are getting longer and warmer, it’s time to put away the hockey stick and pucks and get out the bats and balls. Granted, the NBA is still in the finals of their postseason in the early summer, and it’s true that high school and college basketball is played in the winter, but I never considered basketball a winter sport. As kids and teenagers we usually played it when the weather was warm and the out door macadam courts or driveway basketball backboards could be used. In addition, basketball is a sport played in the Summer Olympics; Hockey is a centerpiece, of course, of the Winter Olympics.
It’s not that I dislike hockey as a game- of all the professional games I have seen in person, I will have to say the NHL was the most impressive. My wife Laurie happened to get Flyers tickets from her employer when we first moved to Philadelphia, and we ended up sitting in great seats just a few rows back from the rink at the goal end of the ice. The players moved with incredible speed and grace, and even the refs demonstrated remarkable agility and athleticism as they raced up and down the ice ready to assess penalties and break up fist fights after a hard check by one of the players. The game ended up being an exciting shut out win by the Philadelphia Flyers over the Edmonton Oilers and kept the Flyers in contention for a playoff spot.
Up to that point, the only hockey I had seen in person was the old Eastern Hockey League in Utica, NY. These games featured a lot of fights, and crowds that were eager to see them. Some scenes from the classic hockey film “Slapshot” featuring Paul Newman were shot at the Memorial Auditorium in Utica in the late 1970’s. The movie featured a scene of hockey players climbing into the stands to punch rowdy fans who were throwing debris at them on the ice, and the police subsequently showing up in the locker room after the game to arrest the players. This part of the movie was based on an actual event that took place in Utica in a game between the Johnstown Jets and the Mohawk Valley Comets in 1975.
We usually attended these hockey games as part of a Cub Scout night or some other freebee ticket arrangement, so the seats were almost always pretty far back from the ice and up towards the rafters. Just as well, as my arm wasn’t very good, and any debris I attempted to throw on the ice would’ve ended up in the less cheap seats ahead of me. I DID possess strong lungs and a loud voice, though, so instead of tossing empty popcorn containers we just hurled verbal insults at the players skating around and fighting below us. Except for fights, we rarely watched the entire game; most of the time was spent eating your popcorn as fast as you could and washing it down with a soda so you would have something to toss over the railing onto the opposing team when they skated off the ice and walked to the entrance of the Visitor’s locker room in between periods. Just before the end of the first and second periods, we demonstrated our own speed and agility as we would race around gathering up discarded cups, popcorn boxes, and game programs, toss them on the opposing team, and then jump back over the rows of seats to escape the security guards who would yell at us to knock it off or risk expulsion. Of course, in our Cub Scout uniforms or snorkel coats we all looked pretty much the same and they could never tell exactly which one of us was throwing a pop corn box, so verbal warnings were about all that was given.
I recall attending one game in particular where a player from New Haven wore a helmet. A helmet! We were incensed—what kind of hockey player wore a helmet? He was the only player on the ice wearing one, and in the late 1960’s EHL, possibly the only one in the league; Our taunts and cat calls were incessant, even as he sat on the bench. The helmet may have been worn as protection from head injuries on the ice, but was likely more effective as protection for that walk to the locker room entrance through a shower of trash and debris.
The Flyers lost in overtime of the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals to the Chicago Blackhawks. No Cup for Philadelphia this year. Yesterday, I drove by the house with the Stanley Salad Bowl display out front, and all the elements had been removed; just a faded area of grass where the circular containers were stacked was all that remained of the display. Given the tenuous position the Flyers played from all during the playoffs, seemingly only a game from elimination at every stage, it is no wonder the owner didn’t make a more elaborate declaration of team spirit. The whole thing could’ve been rendered pointless at any time over the span of three weeks, and the shiny steel salad bowl returned to it’s place in the kitchen cupboard once the team was eliminated from contention. And what can you do with leftover circular containers wrapped up in duct tape? Sadly,they probably ended up in the trash.
In retrospect, I guess Hockey has it right: after a long, dragged out, endless hockey season is finally over, you can sit outside in the warm sun and have a cool refreshing drink. For baseball fans, after a long season that begins in March and finally ends in November, we are left with making sure the storm windows are down and turning the clocks back an hour.
But at that point, including pre-season training camp, most National Hockey League teams will already have been playing for two months.
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