Reflections On The Fine Sport of Hockey
or

How I Lost All My Canadian Readers In One Post

I do not speak hockey.   Hockey, I understand, is a sport played on ice by men (and, maybe now and then, a cleverly disguised woman named “Lutwig”). But that’s about all I know. Okay, I know the stereotype: It’s violent, and… uh, it’s violent, and occasionally some doofus will pick a guy up and throw him headfirst into the ice and nearly kill him, and then suddenly everybody will be talking about hockey. But normally… no.  Stereotypes are dangerous, after all. There are people who think that NASCAR is the exclusive sport of white people in red-state America, drinking Budweiser out of cans and tossing the empties into the beds of their pickups.  Oh, wait. That’s actually true. Okay, bad comparison.

In San Diego, nobody really pays attention to the hockey. We have an AA-level team here called the Gulls, curiously part of the “East Coast Hockey League,” but other than knowing they have orange jerseys and play mostly for their own amusement, I know nothing about them. The sport just doesn’t pop up in anyone’s day-to-day life. The only reason it would is if you happened to score free tickets to a Gulls game by donating a certain amount of canned goods to a food drive, at which point you’d have a conversation like this:

“Tickets to a… Gulls game? What’s that?”
“They’re a hockey team, sir.”
“We have a hockey team?”
“Yes, sir. They’re called the Gulls. Short for seagulls. Very San Diego.”
“Huh. Are they, uh, are they good?”
“How should I know? I’ve never been to a game.”
“Oh. So… no free pizza coupons, then?”
“Sorry. Next up was the Gulls tickets. If you donate another box of canned goods you’ll get a free movie ticket.”

Hockey might as well be another language to us. In a land without natural ice of any kind, you’ve got to admit the sport is at the least a bit out of place, like a scuba diver in a cornfield. Sure, maybe there’s a dive tank hidden in that grain silo, but people are still going to look at him sideways and shove the kids back into the car.

I work with a guy transplanted from Michigan, and he speaks Hockey. He says things like “Redwings” and “body check” and various, um, things about… sticks. High sticks, low sticks, good sticks, bad sticks. He suffers all of us heathens with a quiet dignity. He understands that it’s not our fault, being desert dwellers as we are. But he’s a pretty lonely fan, and he didn’t become one here; he brought his enthusiasm with him from Michigan. 

Here is what I do get about hockey: I understand that, in places where it gets cold and things freeze, hockey is a sport with a lot of history and a big following. I understand that there are going to be fights that have nothing really to do with the game, and that there are people that attend or watch the games just to see them. A lot of people watch auto racing for the crashes, too. No accounting for taste, but I can at least understand that people do it.

What I can’t get is this: The Mighty Ducks.  Just to the North of us, in Anaheim, there is a professional team made up of fully-grown men who play, and enact violence upon one another, wearing the jerseys of The Mighty Ducks. Which, of course, is the name of a feel-good Disney movie from 1992 about little kids playing hockey.  The tag line of the movie was “He’s never coached. They’ve never won. Together, they’ll learn everything about winning!”  The Mighty Ducks are not a little AA team playing in a moldy old sports arena. They are a real, NHL team. They play at a gleaming, palatial, state-of-the-art arena in Irvine. Here are some other team names from the NHL: Thrashers, Hurricanes, Sharks, Devils, Predators, Flames, Lightning… and the Mighty Ducks. How do hockey fans not giggle to themselves every time they hear that name?  I honestly do not get that.

But as I do not know enough about hockey to truly make fun of it, I will just wonder in silence. I know only one thing for sure: I shall mock hockey at my own peril, for at least a couple readers here are passionate about their hockey and shall not hesitate in whacking me in the crotch with the butt end of a hockey stick if I step over that line.

So I’m going to delete this entry instead of posting it.
Just click this little delete button, right here –

Blog Entry re-printed with permission.
© Copyright 2006 Eric Lotze

For more of Eric's entertaining writing, visit Everybody Thinks I'm Working at Salon Blogs.