To tell the truth, though, the combatants never seemed very interested in that. That's because the real object of the game, which is always played in front of Klondike, Snow and 16,000 drunks, is to knock your opponent's ass into his hat every chance you get. I'll tell you one thing: A hockey game without eight or nine visits by emergency medical technicians and at least two viewings at the city morgue is like Bosnia without explosives. Or basketball without tall guys. Or Montreal without onion soup. When a hockey player kills another hockey player, they let him sit down on a little chair for five minutes, all by himself, so he can catch his breath. If he maims a fan or strangles the other team's mascot, he gets to rest for two minutes.
By all accounts, hockey coaches are all former members of the Waffen SS. Even the young ones. Look cross-eyed at one of these guys in the bar afterward, and he's likely to hit you in the face with a quart of Moosehead. This is what hockey people call "fore-checking," and the coach doesn't get to sit down at all when he does it. Instead, the team owner increases his salary.
Tell me how I'm doing so far. Am I getting a feel for the game? Maybe some phone calls up to Goose Bay or Saskatoon would help.
In any event, I learned a couple of startling new things last Tuesday night at McNichols Arena. First of all, whenever the home team scores six unanswered goals in the first period of play, adds four more in the second and goes on to a 12-2 win, the locals have had a pretty good night.
Butch Blaisdell, hockey-wise neighbor, sports historian and faithful interpreter up in the $10 nosebleed seats, explained that the Colorado Avalanche's 6-0 first-period outburst against the toothless San Jose Sharks was not akin to Pete Sampras laying a goose egg on, say, Ray Charles, in the first set of a tennis match.
Nor was it like your beloved Broncs kicking a couple of early field goals against the Raiders. It wasn't a pair of three-run homers by Walker and Bichette in the first two innings of a Rockies game, or even Liz Taylor's win-loss record in district court against her discarded husbands.
No. In hockey, I learned, if you run up a score of six-love before the big Italian milk truck they call a Zabaglione even makes its second circuit of the rink, smoothing the ice and washing off the blood, it's like the Visigoths paying a little visit to ancient Rome. Seven-nothing is Hitler overrunning Poland, and ten-zip at the end of two periods is akin to a meteor the size of Jupiter striking the earth at 17,000 miles an hour.
In other words, the Avalanche players didn't bother crushing any San Jose skulls Tuesday night. They didn't have to poison their opponents' feeding trough or french their beds over at the hotel. Because a ten-nothing lead is a blowout. By the end of seven periods, after all, the score could be seventy-nothing. Or more.
Now, as I understand it, the San Jose Sharks are not a very good hockey team. They're big but they're slow, and they give up lots of goals. Hey, no wonder. How can you produce enough ice in San Jose to play hockey when the temperature out there rarely drops below freezing? Bet they have to practice out in the parking lot with roller skates and a rubber ball. Anyway, a check of the league standings confirmed the Sharks' ineptitude: As of last week, San Jose had won four games, lost nineteen and tied four--the worst record in the entire NHL. Next year, Blaisdell says, the Sharks are going to join a water-polo league, where they're bound to be more successful. At least they have a couple of swimming pools in San Jose.
This brings us to the Colorado Avalanche itself. The experts say they are one of the best teams in the league, which will come as no surprise to those who saw the Sharks game last Tuesday. For one thing, they've got players named Leschyshyn, Sakic, Gusarov and Ozolinsh, which is good practice for all the former spelling-bee champions who hold season tickets. For another, they recently moved here from Canada.
That's very good. Because, as everyone knows, the game originated up there. To put it concisely, a group of Canadian businessmen, including pianist Oscar Peterson and future prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, invented hockey back on July 19, 1933, the day an amateur baseball game in Toronto was suddenly interrupted by a violent blizzard. Within an hour the diamond had frozen solid, and the visiting shortstop, who happened to have two dozen pairs of ice skates in his bat bag, promptly handed them out to his teammates and opponents. The players skated out to their positions, but as they tried resuming the ballgame according to the usual rules, one of the businessmen, seeing a light, encouraged them to inject some new fun into an old sport.
Inside of two innings, Butch Blaisdell relates, the young athletes were pulling each other's jerseys up over their heads and pounding each other on the sternum with clenched fists. Thus did the first game of ice hockey come to be played in a Toronto city park. Except for a brief surge by the Dominican Republic's national team in 1971, Canada and Canadian teams have dominated the game ever since.
As if you didn't know, the businessman credited with inventing the game was a 53-year-old Prince Edward hardware-store owner named Stanley Puck. It is in memory of this visionary, who died in a tragic high-sticking accident in 1960, that the little black rubber disc everyone's trying to slap into the net is called a "stanley." And it is in his honor that the National Hockey League's championship trophy, which travels from city to city each year with the winning team, was named the "Puck Cup."
Thanks again to Butch Blaisdell for the information.
Before long, Butch and the other experts agree, the Colorado Avalanche, who moved here from Canada last summer and had a division-leading 16-7-4 record as of last week, will probably win the Puck Cup. They say that day's drawn nearer with the signing of somebody named Roy Patrick, although no one has been able to explain why Roy has two first names. Naturally, the Avalanche's first Puck Cup will represent a shining moment for the city, which has never seen one of its major-league teams earn a championship.
The night it finally happens, this is what you can expect to see. According to hockey tradition, members of the winning club take turns circling the ice with the huge silver Puck Cup held high over their heads. Next, the trophy is taken back to the dressing room and filled with cold beer. The team captains then submerge their victorious coach, head-first, into the bottom of the Cup, holding him firm and true until he completely stops breathing. This is the time-honored ritual hockey people call "icing." No one gets to sit down to rest for two minutes or five minutes afterward. Instead, the players remove the coach, refill the Cup with champagne and lucky stanleys and continue with the party until the wee hours.
Thus it has always been and shall ever be. I just hope Klondike and Snow are watching on cable, wherever they are.
