I don’t get hockey. The Penguins are in the playoffs, so I have felt an obligation to be a fair weather fan. I’ve been making a half-hearted attempt to watch a few of the games in hopes that I can pretend to speak intelligently about them if I should happen to encounter other fair weather fans.
I understand the basic gist of the game. From what I can tell, it involves a bunch of large, toothless, white Canadian men who have been supplied with large sticks. The sticks are used to beat the living crap out of the other Canadians, although sometimes they use them to hit a little black puck around. The men skate around at random, looking for weaker men they can slam into the wall and cause puncture wounds.
And of course there’s the blue line. I don’t quite know what the significance of the blue line might be, but it seems to be a hot topic for the commentators from time to time. Oh, and there’s also “icing,” which I assume has something to do with the celebratory cake they eat at the end of the game.
There is apparently such a thing as offensive players and defensive players, but I have no clue who is doing what. To me, it just looks like a bunch of angry guys skating around and bleeding.
The coolest part is when a fight breaks out, which seems to be pretty often. In football, players can be penalized 15 yards just for giving a member of the opposing team a menacing glare. But it seems that anything goes in hockey. You can apparently rip someone’s arm right out of the socket, wave it around in the air, and only get a mild warning from the ref. Maybe that’s what they mean by a “Power Play.”
The Penguins’ star player, Sid Crosby, scored a hat trick the other day. I believe that means that he scored three goals, and for some bizarre reason this causes people to start throwing hats onto the ice. I can only assume that drugs must be part of the game. I couldn’t help wonder what purpose the hats serve; wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense if they threw bandaids and tourniquets out there?
I dunno. The playoffs should be over in just a few short months, I guess. Did I mention we have a player on our team named “Satan?” That can’t be good.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
See, you're watching too much. The trick to being a REAL fair weather fan is to just wait to turn on the game until midway through the third period and see if it's a close game. That way, you either get to see the thrilling finish, or get the satisfaction of knowing you didn't waste a lot of time on a dull game. You can always say you missed the big earlier goal(s) because you were off fixing more nachos.
Marc Anonymous Fleury
Post a Comment