Hockey Primer: Not Just a Canadian Sport

I’ve been paying closer attention to the Stanley Cup finals ever since the people behind the Anaheim Arena project promised to bring a hockey team to Orange County.

Since this is a promise I’m sure they will keep, I figure it’s time to start doing some research.

My findings so far:

Hockey has long been stereotyped as a Canadian sport--all back bacon and forechecks, hosers on ice--but these Stanley Cup playoffs have unmasked it for what it really is: The last great American sport. Remember the old American Dream, where anyone could grow up to be President? That’s not true anymore--now only Republicans can grow up to be President--but in hockey, anyone, and I mean anyone, can still win the Stanley Cup.

The Minnesota North Stars won 27 of 80 games this National Hockey League season. They finished 16th in a 21-team league.

But if they beat the Pittsburgh Penguins two more times, they will be champions of professional ice hockey.

The NHL has a wonderful playoff system that the Angels wish baseball had adopted decades ago. Beat Quebec twice and you’re in. Then, according to the announcers on SportsChannel, all you need to reach the finals are two things--”a hot goalie” and a fine “power-play efficiency.”

Jon Casey is the Minnesota goalie. He’s hot. So far, he has fended off the Chicago Blackhawks, who once had Bobby Hull; the St. Louis Blues, who have Brett Hull; and the Edmonton Oilers, who had a hull of a run on Stanley Cups before and after the Wayne Gretzky trade. Now, Casey is trying to fend off Mario Lemieux, who does today what Gretzky did yesterday--carry entire franchises on his back. The only difference is that nine months ago, Lemieux’s was in traction.

Hockey players are tough. Lemieux herniates a disk, has back surgery, suffers an infection from that surgery that sidelines him until late January, but come the playoffs, he’s seen skating end to end, splitting defensemen like ski slaloms and firing pucks into nets past hot goalies.

A Pittsburgh teammate, Paul Coffey, is playing with a broken jaw and a scratched cornea. A few rounds back, Tomas Sandstrom, a winger for the Los Angeles Kings, fractured a leg so badly against Edmonton, he had to miss two games.

Compare that to baseball, where the only thing separating Mike Marshall from the Hall of Fame is a better manicurist--hangnails, hangnails--and a hamstring pull turns Dick Schofield into the invisible man for three months.

Goalies are tough. Hot, cold, at any temperature. It’s terrible work if you can get it.

They are wrapped and strapped into so much padding that they resemble masked Michelin men. They are perched on thin blades of steel. Metal bars obscure their faces. Then they are asked to stop hard disks of galvanized rubber, screaming at them at speeds near 100 m.p.h., often deflecting off skates, stick handles, knee caps and goal posts--with 15,000 puckheads howling for a flinch.

And John McEnroe can’t hit a second serve if someone crinkles a hot dog wrapper.

Hockey has a rule book apparently written by Rubik--icing the puck and offsides are traditional favorite party stumpers at Mensa meetings--but the power-play concept makes for great fun. Every sport should have a penalty box. Commit a foul in basketball and you sit for two minutes. We’d be seeing a lot of box-and-none zone defenses.

Clip somebody in football and your offense goes short-handed, 10 against 11. The Rams could have used this rule last year.

Baseball? Actually, baseball has a version of the penalty box. It’s called: Traded To Cleveland.

Hockey also has quirky customs, such as the playoff beard, which commits a player to a non-shaving oath until his team is eliminated. Minnesota winger Brian Propp figured he’d get a seven-day growth and then fire up the Norelco, but no, the North Stars are still going strong six weeks later and a Twin Cities columnist now refers to Propp as the “team Chia Pet.”

I also like the hockey custom of TV reporters getting to interview players between periods. Off the ice they come, sweating, chest heaving, towel wrapped around their necks, and they sit and chat about whatever the interviewer likes, usually hot goalies, before strapping on the helmet again and skating out for another 20 minutes of nosebleeds.

Baseball needs this. Every three innings, bring ‘em in. “So, Mike, another inning like the last one and you think you’ll be hanging out at the West Edmonton Mall?” As it stands now, in baseball you can’t talk to the pitcher the day he starts, sometimes not even on the day before he starts and often, if he loses, not even after he starts.

Hockey does this, partly because it needs the publicity and partly because hockey players, by and large, are good guys. There’s a reason Wayne Gretzky plays hockey and Kirk Gibson plays baseball.

Hockey, of course, is not without its problems. One of them is watching it on TV. The puck is too small for easy viewing--Is it a gnat? A chocolate sprinkle? A poppy seed?--and it gets lost completely whenever a player puts his stick blade on the puck, which is about 90% of the time. That’s because the puck and the tape on the stick blade are the same color, black on black.

I have a suggestion, however, that could revolutionize the sport.

Try white tape.

Hockey also gets stereotyped as a needlessly, mindlessly brutal game, but I think that’s a bum rap. Hockey violence has always been overrated, especially now.

Have you sat in the stands at a baseball game lately?