Flippy - I Rant, You Read
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
A Long Tedious Story About How I Became A Hockey Fan
I was cleaning up my desktop and I found a private message that I’d written to someone about how I became a hockey fan. I took out a few off-topic personal asides and I shall post the rest. I’m pretty sure I haven’t explained in this much detail here about how I become a hockey fan. Since I have some work to do, I thought I’d be lazy and use something old, yet descriptive.
It all starts way back in my childhood (see, I told you) - I was born and bred to love baseball, basketball and football. All of my brothers played baseball, high school & college; and I played softball, also high school and college. My brothers played Pop Warner football and I played basketball when we were kids. We all developed an aversion to soccer - we were never much for running around without a purpose, plus the game is so slow. So, being that we lived in Southern California, we felt the same way about hockey. Sure, we watched Olympic hockey, but that was the extent of our hockey watching. We’d decided hockey was boring and that was that.
Fast forward twenty or more years - I met Leigh-Ann, the evil Canadian. Although, for the first good bunch of years of our relationship, her being Canadian was mostly limited to her weird pronunciations of words like scone and has-been and the fact that her parents could send us my new favorite addiction, Canadian chocolate. Coffee Crisp, how did I live without them? After the “war” though, things started to change. I started to look at Canada in a more enlightened way - any country who didn’t support the “war” was looking better and better to me. Last September (Frozen Fury 7, September 27, 2003) , I went to my first hockey game...to make Leigh-Ann happy. I was going to suffer through it, all in the name of a happy household. We saw the pre-season Avalanche/Kings game at the MGM Grand. Sitting in front of us, three guys dressed as pimps. Sitting behind us, a couple who had just gotten married and were still in their wedding clothes. Sitting across the arena, five or so guys together, dressed as Elvis. Sitting at glass level, a really wealthy looking Asian couple. The woman seemed to feel that every time the players ran into the boards, they’d end up in her lap. It was very entertaining. I still had no idea what was going on on the ice, except that there were a ton of fights and penalty minutes. I had no idea who the players were and really didn’t care. I was entertained. I thought, “That’s nice, maybe we’ll come back again next year.”
A month or two later, we found out about NHL Center Ice and Leigh-Ann was totally beside herself that she could see Hockey Night in Canada while still having lovely mild winters. At first, we watched mostly to see Don Cherry & Ron MacLean (I love him - he reminds me a bit of Leigh-Ann’s dad) and to make fun of the accents on the local commercials. We really did fast forward through the games a bit and watched all the commercials. Nutty, I know. Slowly, we started watching more hockey - the Leafs, of course. It could’ve turned out that Leigh-Ann was a Senators fan like her brother-in-law (he has glass level season tickets), but no, she was a Leafs fan. I slowly started to figure out some of the rules, but I hate not knowing what’s going on, so we bought Hockey for Dummies to clear up some stuff. After a while, I
Yeah, so I decided Tie was my favorite player. Sports aren’t fun for me if I don’t have a team or favorite player to root for. As an example, much to my mom’s chagrin, I’m rooting against the Lakers in the finals. I think they’re spoiled obnoxious babies and they’re nothing like the Lakers of my childhood. So, I’m rooting for the Pistons and I’ve picked Ben Wallace as my favorite player for the series. I like his big hair…and the fact that he looks like he’s actually trying when he plays. Anyway, back to Tie. I like how he plays, that he cares and has a good time. I didn’t look up anything about him online though, except for going to a couple of hockey fight sites because I didn’t know who Bob Probert was. My complete knowledge of hockey before Fall was maybe a handful of names throughout NHL history. I read lots of sports books, so I have a general knowledge of Hall of Fame people in most sports.
The sports stuff ends and then I start blathering on about “Buffy” and “Angel” and our neighbors and so on. I’ll spare you.
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Here is my story of how I became a hockey fan: my brother told me to.
Helly on 11/29 at 12:24 PM -
Hmm, that would’ve been a whole lot easier. And...easier to explain. It is how I became a fan of other sports though. It’s genetic.
on 11/29 at 06:35 PM -
I always figured that I could have become a sports fan if my significant other was, but I’ve never dated anyone even one time who was a sports fan. I enjoyed your story very much, though.
Nancy on 12/01 at 05:25 PM
