The National Hockey League has canned its season due to their protracted labor dispute.
Pardon my bluntness but, who gives a flying fuck?
The story lead off last night’s eleven o’clock newscasts. The story was plastered on page one of the Raleigh newspaper, an editorial in the news opinion pages, and then three pages in the sports section. Is this Raleigh’s only claim to fame, that it has a professional hockey franchise?
Pitchers and catchers have reported. I’m hoping for a full season of Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, and Greg Maddux anchoring the Cubs rotation.
Baseball, people. Baseball.
Hockey? I just don’t get it.
Published by Allyn
A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.
View more posts
Frankly, I don’t know why the NHL expanded to places where people just don’t grow up playing hockey, watching hockey, and talking hockey. I couldn’t give a flying whatever about any sport, personally, but you can’t be Canadian without feeling some kind of connection to hockey. My father played hockey when he was younger, not professionally, but in a little league some of the military guys had. He still has a scar on his chin from one game, and one of my earliest memories is watching one of his games. As a kid you play street hockey, you do a little in gym class if there’s a rink near your school, and so on. Ottawa’s got an NHL team so there’s always a lot of talk about hockey. I’ve been to a few Senators games with my dad.
But if you don’t grow up with the kind of winter you get in most of Canada or in the parts of the USA that had NHL hockey 30 or 40 years ago, I can’t imagine you’re going to have that connection. And so the NHL expands and expands and spends more and more and dumbs the game down into a goonshow to attract wrestling fans while forgetting how much attention the ungoonish performance of Wayne Gretzky used to mean to the game, and smaller northern markets lose their teams while more teams are sold to hot places where no one’s ever owned a hockey stick or a pair of skates (which means skates for skating on ice unless otherwise indicated by a modifying noun or adjective) and they talk about “ice hockey” as if that weren’t the default variety of the form.
Grumble, grumble.
Yes…it is, sadly our only claim to fame in the sports world…besides, well “The Panthers” …
They went to the Stanley Cup and then, lost…but still- they went!
And those Panthers…they went to the super bowl…and then, lost…but still–they went!
We North Carolinians are what some people call a “3rd world state”
I always love reading your blog.