Last updated: 2:17 am
July 6, 2008
Posted: 2:00 am
July 6, 2008
A stifling cloud of sadness hangs over me as I write these words. Can you taste the despair? All across this great land of ours, from Saskatchewan to Manitoba, the grim fact is beginning to settle in: Hockey season is over.
Remember the Stanley Cup final between whoever it was and whoever they beat? Remember how the series lasted several games? Congratulations to all the residents of wherever. Perhaps it was Las Cruces, or Laredo, or Tuscaloosa, or some other hockey-crazed metropolis with a fanatical devotion to the sport dating all the way back to the late spring of 2006.
Hockey fans may accuse me of not knowing the details of their great love. And they will be right. Because the truth is, I'm not even sure there was a hockey season this year. I mean, are they still on strike, or what? Or was it a lockout? Or do they sometimes just cancel the season for lack of interest?
Hockey fans have their mullets in a twist about me. This is because I keep mocking them and their human demolition derby. Last month I got angrygrams protesting my frequent hockey-fan jokes. Why do I keep making fun of these people? Because it is easy, and I am cruel.
One guy sent me an angry e-mail full of surreal references to testicles. Which is a really telling metaphor when you're defending the only major sport that doesn't use a ball. Well, there's curling, which combines the atmosphere of hockey with the skill set of custodial work.
OK, I just went to NHL.com. Time for some statistics! Last season, which was 37 games long, all teams qualified for the playoffs, which meant an additional 223 postseason matches per team. The current season ended in June, but began in 1974. There were 132 violent fights, and then the second game of the season started.
Why is hockey so vile and yet so boring? Maybe because it wafts down like a low-pressure system from the most boring country on Earth, America's hat, a place that puts you on trial if you express politically incorrect opinions and makes you wait eight years to get your strep throat treated. We are talking about the land of Molson, Labatt's and other strange brews so vile and boring that, even in high school, when I would get drunk on Asti Spumante or Harvey's Bristol Crème or some other dusty near-poison from the back of the parental liquor cabinet, yes, even in high school, when having a drink with a friend meant gulping in the woods and chuckling feverishly like sprites, I thought Canadian beer tasted like something collected from the floor of the locker room after everyone has taken a shower.
(And drank it anyway.)
I believe, but am not sure, that there is a National Hockey League franchise called the Penguins. There is also one called the Ducks, and the Tinkerbells, and the Wee Willie Winkles (from, of course, Winnipeg). Cute family-friendly names are essential if you are going to get Mom, Dad, Scooter and Trixie to attend the bloodlettings of unibrowed Muscovite thugs.
My friend Chris was once arrested by New York City police after participating in (and winning) a street fight that lasted for exactly one shove and two punches, one of which missed. In a hockey fight the referees stand by like the UN in Darfur while carotids spray the ice like cherry flavoring on a Slurpee.
That last bit wasn't even an exaggeration. In February a hockey player nearly died on the ice when a skate sliced open his neck. The most surprising detail of this injury is that it happened accidentally.
Even hockey's one great moment occurred very . . . hockeyishly. The Miracle on Ice against the Soviet Union wasn't even the final - the USSR still could have won the Gold, and the US team could have finished anywhere from first to fourth depending on how it did in the followup game against Finland.
And it wasn't broadcast live, though it happened in Lake Placid at 5 p.m. By the time Jim McKay came on ABC to tell us we were about to see the epic clash, everybody already knew we'd won. That's hockey for you: when the game was on TV, everyone had to pretend to get excited again.
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