Hawwwkeeyyy. That's how it's said if you have ever played it. Aside from a few pond hockey opportunities as a 5-year old child, I know next to nothing about hockey. So when I signed on to the Union vs Clarkson hockey match for Time Warner, I was less than thrilled. I couldn't check off any of the Sports Viewing Trifecta, or the three requirements for enjoyment of sports watching: I had never played the sport, I barely understood its rules, and I certainly didn't give a rat's buttock who won the game. Hockey is as familiar to me as Elle magazine.
Let's focus on the game itself. 5 vs 5, with 1 goalie apiece. Fine, that's like soccer, I can live with that. But substitutions? It doesn't seem to matter where the puck is for a substitution to take place. In, out, in, out, ROTATE! Each hockey substitution reminds me of a relay race in which one team consistently cheats by beginning to run before his teammate touches his hand. The official rule is that a player can enter the game if whom he is substituting for is within 5 feet of the bench (according to proicehockey.about.com). What referee can measure 5 feet in the blink of an eye? I propose changing that rule to require a good ol' fist bump (sometimes referred to as a "dap" or "knucks") prior to a new player skating onto the ice. This rule change would make it easy to determine who can legally substitute and who cannot. Who's with me?
It's unlikely that I will ever understand what constitutes a penalty in hockey. There is so much grappling, shoving, slamming each other into walls, and lost balance that penalties appear totally arbitrary to the layman (me). Occasionally I will even see on TV two grown dudes with fists bared, encircling each other on skates. Then they fight. If that's not a penalty, I don't think I'll ever understand what is (I think it actually is a penalty, but it's a penalty for both sides... So what's the difference?) Is calling someone on the other team a "poof" a penalty? How about ramming your skate into their upper thigh? What about intentionally passing gas as they skate behind you? That call would sound something like this: "*TWEEEET* 2 minute penalty on #42 for Aggressive Farting." The point is that I don't know what hockey penalties are. All I know is that there is a box of shame that players must go to where fans can jeer at them and call them names from the safety of their seats. Similar to medieval stocks, but without tomato throwing.
The game, to me, is confusing, with arbitrary whistles and massive amounts of testosterone (which isn't that weird, but hockey is especially aggressive.) So what about strategy? If I were coaching, my strategy would be this: Stick 4 of the 5 field players in front of the goal, and play 1 versus 5 on the rest of the ice. Could anyone POSSIBLY score with 4 defensemen lying down on top of each other in front of the goal? Plus a goalie to act as he normally does? I think not. In all likelihood, there is a rule preventing this, but until someone proves that to me, I'm sticking with my guns.
So now what about the fans? Do they understand all of the game's intricacies that I am missing? Well, according to what I witnessed at the Union-Clarkson game, the answer is a nice, resounding "No". When I attend a game I love, like soccer or basketball, I think of the strategy my team could employ to win, and yell out some helpful advice to my team, such as "Watch out for the other guy!" (My advice is rarely heeded.) I don't just yell generic crap like "Be aggressive" or "You suck ref!", but even that I can understand. Hockey fans are a different breed. They yell "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH", and I'm pretty sure it's because nobody knows what to say (although it may have just be that drunken college kids don't feel like thinking too much about their cheers. My sample size is small.) What should they yell? "Skate faster!"? That's the worst cheer ever. Hockey fans love the fast-paced action and the slamming bodies, but, from what I've witnessed, understand the game only a teensy-weensy bit better than me, and are too inarticulate or drunk to express their knowledge.
Somehow hockey gets grouped into the "Big 4" of American sports (with basketball, football, and, ugh, baseball), but I'm not sure it belongs there. Couldn't we just give it to Canada specifically? So instead of being a "Big 4" sport, it could be one of Canada's "Big 2" sports (the other? Curling, of course.) Unless there is a serious, nationalistic passion for the sport, like in Canada, it just doesn't feel fair to designate hockey as a "Big" anything. Can a sport be considered "Big" if only a small fraction of it's population play's it due to it's high costs of padding, skates and sticks, rink use, and doctor's visits? (If you argue that football is the same way, I will retort that you don't need an ice rink to play football, and then sulk a little bit at the validity of your argument.)
You know how it's difficult to focus on a person talking about something you just don't give a crap about? That's what watching hockey felt like to me. What my forced attendance of Union-Clarkson hockey really made me consider was how most people feel when intentionally attending an event that they will not enjoy for somebody else's sake. It's the strongest show of support when somebody puts themselves through misery for another's sake. Like girlfriend's watching a television game because they know their boyfriend enjoys it. Or mother's going to their son's sporting events. Or husband's enduring a chick flick with their wives. They fake interest just for you. That means something, and became all too apparent as I sat through 2.5 hours of hockey.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Court Side Journalists
Upon sitting down in my cramped court-side seat to protect my "talent" from stray basketballs, a quick glance to the right yields two pretty unremarkable characters. Both work for the Albany Times Union, and I have scanned many an article written by each of them. Yet, until I began working with Time Warner Cable, I had no idea who they were. And it wasn't like I had suddenly unmasked the caped heroes, revealing the simple human beings behind them, but rather that I had read their name tags and recognized them from somewhere... I couldn't quite remember... Oh yea, they wrote in the Times Union. It certainly wasn't a storybook revelation about me meeting my lifelong heroes, although that would make for a much better story.
When I finally picked up on who they were, I began reading their articles in each morning's paper more thoroughly. It became pretty clear who did what. Guy #1 wrote the game reports, Guy #2 did the color. I was immediately disappointed in the systematic nature of it all. I had always dreamed that writers wrote purely on inspiration. But there we were, 3 peas in one court-side pod, 2 professionals and 1 amateur, me watching them, them watching their computer screens. I was rollin' with the Albany "big" dogs.
It became pretty apparent, pretty quickly, that "rollin' with the big dogs" wouldn't be the stressful, self-consciousness inducing endeavor I had imagined. One glance towards their computer screens told it all. Yes, 2 fully-grown journalists, sitting a jock straps length apart, were sitting at their laptops, talking... Via Twitter. It took me a little while, but I finally realized that they were each commenting on the other's Tweets. They could have looked up, and practically whispered what they were saying to each other. One guy could have coughed a little bit and forced the other guy out of work for a week with the flu. They could probably have guessed with 99% accuracy what the other had eaten for dinner, including appetizers and dessert, just by how close there breaths were to each other. Yet, they tacitly decided that Twitter was a better option. Any self-doubt that I had harvested about the responsibility of my seat position flew backwards out of me and smacked the guy screaming drunken obscenities at the refs right in the face.
Guy #1 is a brutally ordinary looking guy. He writes color-by-number articles, except in words. He just reports the facts. I often see him preparing the final product on his laptop with 5 minutes left to go in the game. The outcome doesn't really matter, because all he needs is to know who scored an important bucket, and when. He has a template in which he fills in the blanks, occasionally adding a key transition word such as "However" or "But". I want to believe that he wishes to move up to articles with less restriction, but he sort of looks like he's all set with his templates. If he were a painter, he would be fine with producing only predictably beautiful landscapes. He's good at painting rolling hills and menacing mountains, so why move on to anything else?
Guy #2 is the flamboyant color man, the one that gets deep into the action and asks the tough questions. Comparing his Times Union photo with his actual self is comical. In the newspaper, he looks like a strapping 6'4" hunk in his mid-30's with cleanly cropped hair and a trimmed goatee. In actuality, he's about 5"9" in his mid to late 40's with unkempt hair and a penchant for dandruff. He wears black jeans, a t-shirt, and a suit jacket way too often. He's the more sociable one, and can regularly be caught pal'ing around with old buds in the crowd. His garrulousness is expressed in his writing style. I envision him typing emphatically the last word of his witty column, and grinning at his own pithy last sentence.
I have never met these two men, nor shaken their hands, nodded my head at them or slapped them on the back while clamoring "How are you old sport?" They are journalists, and they are good at what they do. I imagine them like Frodo and Sam Baggins. One is the colorful and popular Frodo, who can be weak-hearted at times, while the other is the simple, steady Sam who keeps Frodo staggering forward in their quest to destroy the One Ring in Mordor. Together they make a great team. We can only hope that they will soon feel comfortable enough to speak their first non-Twitter sentences to each other. It may take time, but I think they'll get there.
When I finally picked up on who they were, I began reading their articles in each morning's paper more thoroughly. It became pretty clear who did what. Guy #1 wrote the game reports, Guy #2 did the color. I was immediately disappointed in the systematic nature of it all. I had always dreamed that writers wrote purely on inspiration. But there we were, 3 peas in one court-side pod, 2 professionals and 1 amateur, me watching them, them watching their computer screens. I was rollin' with the Albany "big" dogs.
It became pretty apparent, pretty quickly, that "rollin' with the big dogs" wouldn't be the stressful, self-consciousness inducing endeavor I had imagined. One glance towards their computer screens told it all. Yes, 2 fully-grown journalists, sitting a jock straps length apart, were sitting at their laptops, talking... Via Twitter. It took me a little while, but I finally realized that they were each commenting on the other's Tweets. They could have looked up, and practically whispered what they were saying to each other. One guy could have coughed a little bit and forced the other guy out of work for a week with the flu. They could probably have guessed with 99% accuracy what the other had eaten for dinner, including appetizers and dessert, just by how close there breaths were to each other. Yet, they tacitly decided that Twitter was a better option. Any self-doubt that I had harvested about the responsibility of my seat position flew backwards out of me and smacked the guy screaming drunken obscenities at the refs right in the face.
Guy #1 is a brutally ordinary looking guy. He writes color-by-number articles, except in words. He just reports the facts. I often see him preparing the final product on his laptop with 5 minutes left to go in the game. The outcome doesn't really matter, because all he needs is to know who scored an important bucket, and when. He has a template in which he fills in the blanks, occasionally adding a key transition word such as "However" or "But". I want to believe that he wishes to move up to articles with less restriction, but he sort of looks like he's all set with his templates. If he were a painter, he would be fine with producing only predictably beautiful landscapes. He's good at painting rolling hills and menacing mountains, so why move on to anything else?
Guy #2 is the flamboyant color man, the one that gets deep into the action and asks the tough questions. Comparing his Times Union photo with his actual self is comical. In the newspaper, he looks like a strapping 6'4" hunk in his mid-30's with cleanly cropped hair and a trimmed goatee. In actuality, he's about 5"9" in his mid to late 40's with unkempt hair and a penchant for dandruff. He wears black jeans, a t-shirt, and a suit jacket way too often. He's the more sociable one, and can regularly be caught pal'ing around with old buds in the crowd. His garrulousness is expressed in his writing style. I envision him typing emphatically the last word of his witty column, and grinning at his own pithy last sentence.
I have never met these two men, nor shaken their hands, nodded my head at them or slapped them on the back while clamoring "How are you old sport?" They are journalists, and they are good at what they do. I imagine them like Frodo and Sam Baggins. One is the colorful and popular Frodo, who can be weak-hearted at times, while the other is the simple, steady Sam who keeps Frodo staggering forward in their quest to destroy the One Ring in Mordor. Together they make a great team. We can only hope that they will soon feel comfortable enough to speak their first non-Twitter sentences to each other. It may take time, but I think they'll get there.
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