Mustaches Make Everything Better

George Parros without mustache:
mild-mannered Princeton-educated economist.

George Parros with mustache: Terrifying punching machine,
possible antagonist in Tombstone film remake.

A Young Man's Dream Come True

Czech-born hockey forward David Krejci had to have been excited when, on April 2, 2013, his Boston Bruins traded for his childhood idol, twelve-time NHL All-Star and two-time Stanley Cup champion Jaromir Jagr. It’s hard to imagine a young athlete who doesn’t dream of one day suiting up with his or her favorite athlete, and not only has gotten to play with his idol, but also is (as of this afternoon) only two wins away from winning a championship with him. That has to be exciting.


As it turns out, Krecji isn’t the only Bruin who gets to skate with the favorite player from his childhood:




Getting to hit the ice with Jaromir Jagr has to be a dream come true for Jaromir Jagr, even if the guy hardly ever passes him the puck or even looks him in the eye.

The best comment we’ve seen so far on this comes from Yahoo Sports:

“In Jagr's defence, who would he have named as his favourite player anyway? When hockey was invented, he was nine.”¹

NOTES
1. We’d probably find this even funnier if we weren’t just barely younger than Jagr, and weren’t getting awfully thin-skinned about our impending decrepitude. But, hey, this is the internet; we can hardly expect people to pass up the low-hanging fruit of an “old guy being old” joke. Besides, have you seen the guy? He’s forty-one years old—shouldn’t he have, like, died by now?²
2. See what we mean? Low-hanging fruit. Cheap jokes. Internet.

And Now, One Reason to Dislike Hockey Players. Or At Least the Crazy Ones.

To be fair, we have never heard of this happening anywhere else on Earth, so we choose to view this as less of an indictment of hockey players in general and more of an exhibit that even people that seem perfectly normal on the outside can, on occasion, do something absolutely batshit crazy.


For more information on this especially bizarre story, follow this link to the article on Deadspin.com, which includes gem of understatement:
 

As it turns out, Rogue Squadron has won every game this year in which one of their players didn’t poop inside an opponent’s equipment.

The World's Deadliest Drinking Game

About a week ago, we more or less accidentally discovered the deadliest drinking game in the history of human civilization.

We realize this is a bold statement to make, and one that requires a certain amount of qualification. We admit that it is, in fact, possible to create a drinking game more deadly than the one we’ve discovered. Some examples that we absolutely recommend you do not ever, ever try include:

1. That drinking game where you take a shot every time you breathe.
2. The game where you take a sip every time somebody writes something offensive or stupid on the internet.
3. That one that involves turpentine.
4. The one where you re-create a day in the life of Oliver Reed.

The difference here is that the above games are obviously deliberately designed to kill you, whereas our discovery, is intended to be fun and entertaining, with your unavoidable death being merely an accidental if unfortunate side effect.

The single rule of this game is as simple as it is devastasting: listen to Mike Emrick talk, and take a shot every time he says something weird.

Hockey play-by-play announcer Mike Emrick, wo earned the nickname “Doc” after having graduated with a PhD in Phraseology from Thesaurus State University in 1976, is well known among America’s six dozen hockey fans for his enthusiasm for the sport and for his unusually wide-ranging vocabulary. So when this drinking-game rule demands that you take a shot when Emrick says something weird, it doesn’t mean talking (or, God help us, dressing) like Don Cherry. It means, rather, that you should have a drink whenever Emrick uses a puzzling or intriguing replacement for some of the sport’s more mundane verbs.

Let’s face it, there aren’t that many ways to describe propelling or directing a puck with a hockey stick—not for most of us, anyway—so we tend to stick with a small, meat-and-potatoes variety of verbs: Shot. Sent. Passed. Pushed. Bounced. Deflected, flipped, tipped, fed, held, lobbed. That’s about it for most people.

Not for Mike Emrick, though. Emrick seems to view this linguistic limitation as a challenge, and throws out a cavalcade of synonyms as easily and naturally as we might down an impossibly large number of alcoholic beverages.¹

Lest you think we’re exaggerating, the following is a mostly-complete² list of words used by Emrick during his call of the March 10, 2013, NHL game between the New York Rangers and Washington Capitals. Words used more than once are indicated by the numbers in parentheses:

• Knifed (4)
• Careened (2)
• Filtered (6)
• Ricocheted
• Swatted (2)
• Kicked (2)³
• Rocked (2)
• Jammed (3)
• Sailed
• Spiked (4)
• Banked (4)
• Pushed
• Tucked (2)
• Corralled
• Speared (4)
• Chipped (2)
• Nudged (4)
• Squirreled⁴
• Floated (6)
• Plucked
• Popped/plopped (3)
• Flagged (2)
• Muscled (3)
• Cancelled (2)
• Punched (3)
• Hoisted⁵ (5)
• Reversed (2)
• Pitched (3)
• Brushed (2)
• Ripped
• Jabbed (2)
• Stymied
• Dealt (6)
• Paddled (2)
• Batted
• Blistered
• Shuffled (2)
• Shanked (4)
• Padded (2)
• Hacked
• Rattled
• Squibbed
• Lugged (2)
• Trigger-pulled⁶
• Steered (3)
• Chopped
• Scooped
• Spiked
• Slugged
• Shaken
• Twisted
• Angled

Conspicuously absent from this list is “scaled,” which we know from viewing experience is one of Emrick’s favorites. Also worth noting is that near the end of the game, a clearly exhausted and mentally drained Emrick describes a puck as going into the corner. Even the greatest have limits.

So, at the rate of one shot per oddball word,  you have now just consumed 116 shots in the span of a single three-hour game on a Sunday afternoon. Congratulations! You are now dead, unless of course you are Oliver Reed . . . in which case, congratulations! You are now dead.


NOTES
1. When we write “we” here, what we actually mean is “you.” We can stop any time we want. You’re the one with a problem.
2. For some reason, our wife and houseguests seemed to think it was appropriate to talk about hockey when there was a hockey game playing on the TV in our living room, so we were somewhat distracted and can’t guarantee that this list is comprehensive or 100% accurate. But given how little headway has been made in the scientific study of Mike Emrick’s vocabulary, we’re satisfied with our results.
3. As stated above, all of these terms were used to describe propelling or directing a puck with a stick, and not to describe any of the hundreds of other actions possible on a hockey rink, including but not limited to kicking. So in this case, the puck was not kicked in the traditional sense—that is, with, you know, a kick—but rather not-kicked with a stick, in a non-kicking motion.
4. See note 3, above. To the best of our ability to tell, enhanced by repeated slow-motion replay, the puck in question was not, in fact, propelled or directed in any way by a squirrel.
5. In some cases, Emrick may have used the word “foisted.” We are aware that the word “foisted” rarely makes any sense in a hockey context, but that doesn’t mean Emrick didn’t use it.
6. Emrick did not, in fact, use this phrase in the more conventional arrangement of “he pulled the trigger,” but rather as written, along the close lines of “the puck is trigger-pulled down the ice.”

Another Good Reason to Like Hockey Players

ESPN, a colossal ESPN-centric entity that splits its time between savvy self-promotion and the occasional sports broadcast, has long received its fair share of criticism from multiple angles and various sources with axes to grind. Some of this criticism is significant and newsworthy in itself—such as when First Take’s Rob Parker got roasted, suspended, and then eventually let go for suggesting that Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III was insufficiently black.

RGIII’s whole left sleeve
white. Rob Parker was right!

We find it interesting that a discussion of race involving a team named the Redskins can, even in this day and age, have absolutely nothing to do with the team being named the Redskins, for God’s sake, but that’s a topic for another day on a different, much more mature blog.

Our gripe with ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Sports and Also ESPN-Related ESPNiness^TM, is far less socially significant and more centrally located in most people’s “who really gives a shit” category: that is, its tendency to occasionally and/or systematically forget that certain sports and/or leagues, such as the National Hockey League, actually exist.

There are dozens or perhaps hundreds of other sports that also get shortchanged when it comes to national news coverage, but that’s fine because nobody gives a shit about them.¹

The NHL, despite Gary Bettman’s apparent best efforts, still really does exist, although fans are hard-pressed to find evidence of it on ESPN. Since 2004, for example, the network has broadcast the Scripps National Spelling Bee—by far the most athletically taxing of all spelling bees—seven times, and broadcast zero NHL games.² In 2011, “the ESPN family of networks aired thirty-six hours of Main Event coverage”³ of the World Series of Poker—which is probably more like a sport than a spelling bee, but less so than, say, darts—and, again, zero hours of live NHL hockey.

And in the “In Memoriam” section of SportsCenter’s 2011 Year in Review, there was no mention of the deaths of Derek Boogaard, Ryan Rypien, or Wade Belak (the first two being active NHL players at the time of their deaths), or of the forty-three members of Lokomotiv Yaroslavl in a plane crash in Minsk.⁴

Does this make the folks at ESPN bad people? No. Well, kinda, but not really. It does mean, though, that the network has a lot of work to do to make it up to, or even stay relevant to, American fans of hockey.

We view the following as an encouraging step in the right direction. Our wife, Dr./Mrs. Some Gal, would probably agree for very different reasons.⁵










NOTES
1. We were going for kind of an irony angle here; not sure if we’ve quite pulled it off it not.
2. In ESPN’s defense, they only stopped broadcasting NHL games when it became apparent that they were going to continue to have to pay for it.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series_of_Poker#WSOP_television_coverage
3. http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/disgrace-espn-sportscenter-year-in-review-snubs-hockey-tragedies?urn=nhl,wp20822
4. We understand that many, many athletes have died without making an ESPN end-of-year memorial segment, some of them likely being well-known and having played popular sports, but to overlook a disaster on the scale of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl crash is a bit galling. We don’t have a scrap of evidence to back this up, but we have managed to convince ourselves that the Marshall football team’s plane crash got more press than Lokomotiv in 2012, and that happened more than thirty years ago.
5. We are big fans of hockey and Muppets; the doctor/missus is a big fan of Henrik Lundqvist’s dreamy Swedish eyes. So everyone wins here.

The $5,300 Toilet

In what almost certainly provided a pleasing "hey, it's not just us" moment for the United States military, in November 2012, Ontario lawyer Jim Vigmond paid more than five thousand dollars for a toilet. Yes, really. It wasn’t just any toilet, though—it was a dressing-room toilet from Toronto’s historic Maple Leaf Gardens.

In other words, it’s very much like any other toilet. While it’s well established that people are willing to spend a tremendous amount of money on things that do little little more than create poop, it’s a bit more unusual to spend anything more than hardware-store-standard prices to collect an object that does nothing but collect poop. While one can, in fact, easily spend a couple grand on amazing space-age shitters, five thousand dollars seems like an especially outrageous price for a normal one, even if it has, in its heyday, been on the receiving end of some of the most distinguished shit in the annals of Canadian hockey.

Some fun historical facts about Jim Vigmond’s costly crapper:

• On February 6, 1976, Darryl Sittler took an astounding ten dumps into this toilet in one sixty-minute span, setting an NHL record that may well never be broken. If someone does come along and break it—we’re still talking about the record here, but the same goes for the toilet—we don’t want to know about it.
• Hall-of-Fame center Mats Sundin used this toilet exclusively for the bulk of his Maple Leafs career. Unfortunately, during that span, the shitters to his left and right were rarely any good.
• Dion Phaneuf never got to use this toilet, as the Leafs stopped playing at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1999 and he first joined the team in 2009. Had he ever used it, though, Sean Avery probably would have claimed to have gotten there first.
• We would like to add a fourth bullet point right about here, but are forced to admit that we don’t know all that much about the Toronto Maple Leafs. We should have done more research, by which we mean stealing jokes from Down Goes Brown.

Our biggest disappointment here is that, had we posted on this topic back in November when it was relevant, and when the National Hockey League was in the throes of yet another stupid and contentious lockout, we could have wrapped this all up with a joke about how Jim Vigmond could look into his $5,300 toilet and see the remains of the 2012-2013 NHL season.


But then we remembered that Vigmond is a Maple Leafs fan, and when he takes a look into the shitter, he can see every season since 1967.

One Good Reason to Like Hockey Players

Mathew Dumba is an eighteen-year-old defenseman (defenceman, for you Canadians) playing for the Western Hockey League’s Red Deer Rebels. He was drafted in 2012 by the NHL’s Minnesota Wild, and earlier this season he was with the Wild—presumably in the strike-abbreviated training camp—long enough to get assigned a jersey number.¹

The number was given the number 55, which you may not find particularly relevant or funny unless you look at it and think about it for a little while.

Photo by Minnesota Wild center Zenon Konopka.

Dumba wears number 24 for the Rebels, so it’s quite possible that looking like a dumba55 in his brief stint with the Wild was not his idea at all. It’s very likely, though, that even if Dumba wasn’t happy with his assigned number, he didn’t make a peep about it, but just showed up to practice every day and worked his tail off.

That’s a rare thing in sports today, and speaks to the modesty, sense of humor, and down-to-earth nature that we like to believe exists more often in hockey players than in any other athlete. Seriously, we dare you to name any other sport where the athletes are so willing to look like dumba55es.

Okay, fine—golfers too. But let’s be honest,
these guys look more like lunatics than dumba55es.

NOTE
1. To be fair, we have no idea how long one has to be in an NHL training camp before getting a number. Maybe it’s the first thing that happens when they get off the bus. We ourselves play in the kind of hockey league where jersey assignments are generally determined by how fat the players are—the higher the number, the larger the jersey. Not a lot of takers for #2 through #10 anymore.

Marc-André Fleury Updates His Facebook Profile Photo

Above: Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Mark-André Fleury.

Today in Hockey History: Mike Ricci's Head Suspended Two Games for Conduct Unbecoming a Face

February 10, 1997: Immensely popular Colorado Avalanche fan-favorite Mike Ricci (above) appealed the decision, but it was rejected on the grounds that nobody could figure out what, exactly, was Mike Ricci’s appeal¹ in the first place.

NOTE

1. Get it? It’s a pun!

Sidney Crosby's Mustache Demoted to AHL

An already difficult season for Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby took a turn for the worse this afternoon when the team announced that his mustache (left), after struggling for the better part of seven seasons, will be sent down to the organization’s farm team, the AHL’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins.

Although long expected, the demotion of Crosby’s mustache, Patchie, is another radical turn of events for the star center in a year filled with thrilling and troubling turnabouts. Sidelined by a concussion for sixty-one games over a span of two seasons, Crosby and Patchie made a dramatic return to the ice against the New York Islanders on November 21, 2011, tallying two goals and two assists in a 5-0 victory.

Crosby proceeded to register eight assists in the next seven games, and appeared to be picking up right where he left off before his injury. But his concussion-like symptoms¹ returned after playing the Boston Bruins on December 5, 2011, and has not skated in a game since.

Even before Crosby’s latest absence, concern had arisen than his facial hair was not pulling its weight at the NHL level. His defenders point out that while Crosby is twenty-four years old and—concussion symptoms aside—arguably at the top of his game, his mustache is perhaps as young as two and a half, and has many years left to blossom. The team decided, however, that with the prospect of facing first-class playoff beards only a few months away, Patchie leStache was better off moving down to the AHL.

“We definitely don’t see this demotion as a punishment,” says Penguins coach Dan Bylsma. “This is an opportunity for Patchie to grow, thicken up, and expand his game at his own rate, in a less intense and stressful environment.”

“Sid’s one of the best players in the game,” says Ray Shero, Pittsburgh’s general manager. “He’s got great strength, hands, and vision, and he has a drive to succeed like I’ve never seen. But let’s face it, beardsmanship really isn’t one of his strengths at the moment. We’re committed to changing that.”

Your mustache will never
look this great. Don’t even
bother trying.

Shero has backed that commitment by arranging for Crosby’s mustache to receive exclusive one-on-one coaching from the legendary Lanny McDonald (right), the first (and, to date, only) athlete inducted into both the Hockey Hall of Fame and the Mustache Hall of Fame. At his 1991 MHoF induction ceremony, McDonald stated that scoring 500 career goals was his “twelfth greatest achievement,” and that “the other eleven are all whiskers.”

“The Pittsburgh Penguins firmly believe that Sid’s mustache will play a big part in the future of his face,” Shero adds. “Sure, ‘Sid the Kid’ has a great ring to it, but we look forward to the day when we can start calling him, say, ‘Sid the Growing Boy’ or even ‘Sid the Pubescent.’ ”

Sid and Patchie leStache
in happier times.

Crosby’s teammates have been characteristically supportive of their captain during this trying time, according to Coach Bylsma. “A bunch of the guys felt bad for Sid, so they tried to cheer him up by giving away things that were about the same size as his mustache. Kind of a symbolic thing, you know. Jordan [Staal] pulled a button off of one of his dress shirts, and Geno [Evgeni Malkin] shaved off about a third of one of his eyebrows.”

Bylsma laughs fondly. “Steve Sullivan—what a great guy—gave away 20% of his height for Sid. Turns out that’s almost nine and a half inches. And Matt Cooke threw away the rest of his reputation as a clean player, which surprised a lot of guys who didn’t know he had any of it left. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Aaron [Asham] handed over two of his jocks. This is the kind of thing that brings teams together.”

As if to demonstrate hockey players’ good nature and sportsmanship, even at this most intense of levels, several of Crosby’s opponents have also passed along messages of support.

“Sid just needs to understand that it’s okay, everybody has places on their faces where hair doesn’t grow,” says Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas (right).

“I like to call mine ‘eyelids.’ ”


Patchie leStache is expected to be in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins’s lineup within a week, likely as a second-line center between Brian Engblom’s carefully sculpted, windswept mullet and Mike Commodore’s colossal orange afro. To make room for Patchie on the roster, Barry Melrose’s hair—known only as “The Melrose”—has finally been cut.

Crosby has taken Patchie’s demotion with the mature and grounded perspective expected from a superstar and team captain. “Hey, I won an Art Ross Trophy when I was still a teenager, and was barely old enough to drink when I won the Stanley Cup,” says Crosby.

“I have almost 600 points already, and I have another 10 or 15 years to get even better at hockey. If laughing at my crappy mustache lets some fat, aging, alcoholic rec-leaguer feel good about himself, that’s cool with me.”

---

About the Author: Some Guy is a fat, aging, alcoholic rec-league hockey player. He routinely gets hurt by players half his size, and his slap shot is widely viewed as a tragic punchline to a particularly embarrassing joke. On the other hand, his full, luxurious mustache and his willingness to mock others make him feel good about himself.

NOTE

1. News sources are now required by law to refer to concussions as “concussion-like symptoms.” Apparently they’re being paid by the word, just like weather forecasters who long ago replaced thunderstorms with “thunderstorm activity.”

You Aren't Cool Enough to Do This

 

To be fair, we’re not cool enough to do it either, and never will be. The physical mechanics and coordination involved in pulling off this shot—or, for that matter, getting that close to the goaltender without stumbling into him—boggle our admittedly tiny minds.

We take some solace in the fact that despite his obvious skills, shooter Rob Hisey has yet to make it into the NHL—just like us!

On the other hand, we take far less solace in knowing that nine-year-old squirts can apparently figure it out  with ease:

 . . . little punk.

Celebrate all you want, kid—at least we don’t have to sit on a phone book to reach the dinner table.

 

Remembering Bill

I wish I’d had a chance to know Bill Jubert better.

Bill died in October 2010, some four months after the meningitis outbreak that also took the lives of two other Fort Collins hockey players, Nick Smith and Brian Wormus. 

I never got to meet Nick, and although Brian and I had played against one another for several years, we may have spoken only once. It’s hard to be sure. I don’t mean to dismiss them, I just didn’t get to know them.

Bill, on the other hand, I’d known for more than ten years. I didn’t really know him outside of hockey; the few times we saw each other outside of our own rink were either barbecues with teammates or minor-league hockey games at the local arena. But in that limited way, at least, we’d known each other for quite a while. 

In fact, we skated together on my very first Fort Collins hockey team: the Raging Rhinos. (The team sponsor was a plastic surgeon—look up “rhinoplasty” if you don’t get the joke.) I knew nobody else in the league but my brother, knew nothing about how to draft a team, and had played in barely a dozen hockey games up until that point, but somehow I had been allowed to be a team captain. Granted, there’s not a whole lot of work involved in being an adult-league team captain, but I didn’t know how to do any of it.

Bill must have sensed this—perhaps it showed in my inability to set lines, shoot, pass, turn, or even stand still without eventually falling down. Over the course of that first season he would occasionally offer quiet, unassuming advice on, say, who should bring the beer (a good rule of thumb is for the guy who gets the game’s first penalty to buy next week’s beer), which players might work well together as linemates, where I should position myself in the offensive and defensive zones, and what I should try to do with myself in the event that I stayed upright for a whole shift. Clearly he realized that I didn’t know what I was doing, but he may not have realized how great it was that he knew, and how much it meant that he was willing to help.

In the years that followed I skated either with or against Bill just about every season. Even taking into account the three or four weeks a year where there’s no league hockey or drop-in ice time going on, we probably bumped into each other a couple of times a month. When we had time for more than a wave or a nod, our conversations were nothing out of the ordinary—just friendly locker-room bullshitting about anything or nothing, mundane and amusing, pointless and pleasant, as fun and as eminently forgettable as one might expect from two guys who knew they’d see each other again the following Wednesday.

Off the ice he’d usually greet me with a hello, his voice deadpan and bemused, as though I’d done something vaguely humorous simply by showing up. 

On the ice was surprisingly similar—I’d carry the puck into his defensive zone several times a game, and he’d greet me as casually as if we were passing each other in the parking lot. Then more often than not he’d read my feet, or my shoulders, or my hands—I could never quite be sure what would give me away—and he’d lean in at just the right moment to poke or sweep the puck away, then make a looping pass out of the zone to a waiting forward, patient amusement in his voice as he wished me better luck next time. He’d never talk trash, he’d just talk, and each time I turned and crossed back over his blue line, spitting out bad language and trying to catch up to the play that had so suddenly reversed directions, I wondered if he talked simply to screw me up, or for the added pleasure of having a conversation in the time it took to steal the puck off my stick.

I never did find out the answer.


At the end of that first hockey season, my brother—that is, my goaltender—and I invited the Raging Rhinos over to grill and have a few drinks on our deck. A good part of the team made it, including Bill. I was glad he showed up; despite the sporadic pointers he’d given out over twenty-some weeks, I wasn’t quite sure what he thought of me. (He was always, even years later when I knew him a bit better, somewhat hard to read behind his thick beard and big glasses.) 

The evening eventually blackened into night, and as folks began to drift toward the door, straight-faced, inscrutable Bill—after a long, solemn pause—grabbed me in a comically over-the-top bear hug and told me he was going to miss me. As if one of us were leaving the country, as if the next hockey season were four years instead of four weeks away. As if he were playing the lead role in a particularly hammy soap opera. 

I couldn’t help but laugh. I’m laughing now. 


Twelve years later, all I can think of is one damned story. After twelve years, there should be more, but this is all I’ve got.


On August 13th and 14th, Fort Collins-area hockey players will come together for a second annual hockey tournament in memory of Nick Smith, Brian Wormus, and Bill Jubert. We know they had lives outside of ice hockey—all three were married; Brian and Bill were fathers, and Nick was about to become one—but this is how we knew them; the game is what drew us together. 

I wouldn’t have gotten to know Bill if not for hockey, so to hit the ice is the best way I can think of to remember him. If I can find where I belong on the ice, it’s at least in part because he pointed me there a long time ago.


Thanks for that, Bill. I’ll miss you too.

Bill Jubert (bottom row, far right) with friends and teammates, 2008.

Don Cherry: Making Acid Trips Look Mundane Since 1934.

A touch of Spuds MacKenzie is the perfect
accessory for the sophisticated gentleman.

Not much commentary is necessary here, as the jackets worn by Canadian hockey commentator Don Cherry tend to speak far more loudly than we ever could. Be forewarned, though: do not look directly at the jacket. We repeat, for those of you who lack the ability to go back and re-read previous sentences, do not look directly at the jacket.

At first glance, we thought this was a
Canadian-flag pattern, but that
would be tacky.

Every time Chery wears this jacket on TV,
Pepto-Bismol owes him a nickel.

Damn it, we told you not to look
directly at the jacket.

The best part of this jacket is that it
genuinely qualifies as subtle.

In a moment, Cherry will wave his arms
to signal victory at the Indianapolis 500.

You looked straight at the jacket again,
didn’t you?

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.

If you cross your eyes just right, you’ll 
see the Statue of Liberty.

Several of Don Cherry’s outfits follow

a holiday theme. Here he commemorates

Chinese New Year.

It’s good to see that he paid attention to
this jacket’s warning about proper
eye protection. Safety first, kids.

Cherry saves his more subtle ensembles
for weddings and funerals.

We will refrain from describing what this

jacket looks, but it does make us wish

we’d taken some Pepto-Bismol a few

hours ago.

Special thanks to the good folks at Don We Now Our Gay Apparel for unwittingly supplying us with most of the images above.We swear we didn’t alter them even the slightest in Photoshop.

Pavel Datsyuk Grows Weary of these Pitiful, Tiresome Humans

Pavel Datsyuk.

Detroit Red Wings center Pavel Datsyuk, having learned long ago to conceal the powers granted to him by our warm yellow sun, walks on most days among mere humans as if he were truly one of them. Standing just under six feet tall and weighing less than 200 pounds, he is physically unremarkable, his only unusual characteristic being a head that can, from certain angles, look a little bit like a guitar pick and/or a younger, better-hydrated Willem Dafoe.

It is only on the hockey rink that Datsyuk’s superhuman nature becomes apparent. Much like Superman or Spider-Man, Datsyuk’s escapades are witnessed by many, but recorded by posterity by only a few.¹

Not Pavel Datsyuk.

Occasionally the mysterious Russian tires of pretending, and does his level best to make folks look stupid. He succeeds with cruel regularity. Granted, the man being consistently humiliated by Datsyuk in the clip below—Fox Sports Network reporter Trevor Thompson—is almost certainly not an NHL-caliber hockey player. But judging by his stance, footwork, mobility, and the puck-control skills he exhibited in the 0.08 seconds in which he actually has the puck, it seems likely that he’s played hockey at what your local beer-league player would consider a very high level—possibly juniors or college. So it’s not like Datsyuk is embarrassing somebody with no knowledge of the sport, such as certain Denver Post columnists or Gary Bettman.²


Nevertheless, the following footage is disturbing. Please watch it with caution. We can only assume that Thompson’s occasional utterances are sobs of shame:





Datsyuk does more than just make television hosts look silly. The following clip comes from an April 16, 2011 Stanley Cup playoff game against a real live professional hockey team.³




For those of you unfamiliar with hockey, it’s very rare to see a player attempt to shoot the puck with his stick between his legs in a real game because, well, it’s sort of ridiculous. One might occasionally see it from a player who’s screwing around—working on dazzling but impractical trick plays in practice, participating in an exhibition such as the NHL’s All-Star Skills Competition, goofing off, or trying to relieve the boredom of  being stuck in a league well below an appropriately challenging skill level. The latter appears to be the case with Datsyuk, who has managed to put this particular kind of shot on net before:




He’s mean to goaltenders too:



For those of you unfamiliar with physics, we’re not convinced that the above is actually possible. Yet there it is.

Skills like Datsyuk’s are what make hockey fun to watch, and what makes this time of the year the happiest in an NHL fan’s year. We hope that the other six dozen hockey fans in this country appreciate his skills as much as we do, and we can only hope that, should one of Datsyuk’s miraculous moves succeed at curing cancer, the sport might actually get some attention over at ESPN.

NOTES

1. It’s been suggested that Datsyuk is no other than mild-mannered photographer Peter Parker of the Daily Bugle. It is true that the two have, in fact, never been seen side-by-side.

2. The joke, here, for those of you who don’t follow hockey, is that Gary Bettman is the commissioner of the National Hockey League.

3. Technically, the Phoenix Coyotes are, in fact, still a professional hockey team. We had to look this up to make sure.

Rick DiPietro Out Indefinitely After Being Struck by Beach Ball

The unconscious DiPietro immediately after impact,

only seconds before hitting the ground.

New York Islanders goaltender Rick DiPietro, only days after returning to the team’s active roster after mercilessly attacking Penguins goaltender Brent Johnson’s fist with his face in an inconclusive early-February fight, will likely return to injured reserve after being struck by an errant beach ball before the team’s March 19 game vs. the Florida Panthers. Team doctors expect him to remain on IR until beleaguered Islanders fans manage to find some glimmer of hope in their long dark decade of disappointment, at which point DiPietro is likely to return, fully prepared for his next devastating injury.

Rick DiPietro’s fighting coach.

DiPietro, in the fifth year of a fifteen-year, $67.5 million contract with the Islanders, was the #1 overall draft pick back in 2000, started for Team USA in the 2006 Olympics, and was selected to start for an injured Martin Brodeur in the 2008 NHL All-Star game.¹

Starting in 2007, however, injuries began to take their toll—DiPietro has missed significant playing time because of (at least) two concussions, two hip surgeries, one wrist sprained after tripping over Brian Griese’s dog,² two knee surgeries, three instances of post-surgical swelling of the knees, one partial decapitation in a unicycle accident, one broken elbow sustained in a thumbwar, one lacerated scalp sustained in an (allegedly) drunken faceplant on Terrell Davis’s driveway,³ and of course the broken jaw courtesy of his unfortunate encounter with Johnson, which somehow also hurt his knee.⁴

DiPietro has played only thirteen games in the past two seasons, and his numbers in those games are about what you’d expect from any Islanders goaltender of the last twenty years not named Billy Smith. While it’s possible that DiPietro will regain his health and his All-Star-worthy level of play, the Islanders can take solace in the fact that his contract is on the books only until 2020, at which point science will have advanced to the point where he’ll be mostly bionic anyway.

NOTES

1. At the skills competition preceding that All-Star Game, DiPietro, wearing a microphone for the live broadcast, announced after making an awkward moment in a shootout competition that he had “just fucked [his] hip up.” Some network people were probably offended by this, but, seriously, guys, what did you expect when you put a microphone on a hockey player?

2. Wait, no, sorry, we’re thinking of Brian Griese.

3. Griese again. Sorry.
4. Yes, he got punched in the face and hurt his knee. (In addition to his face.) Either Rick DiPietro incredibly fragile, or Brent Johnson hits very, very hard.

Peter Forsberg’s Remaining Functional Body Parts Join Ankle, Spleen in Retirement

Oft-injured and distressingly¹ handsome Colorado Avalanche forward Peter Forsberg—a two-time Olympic gold medalist,² two-time Stanley Cup winner, and 2003 National Hockey League Most Valuable Player—announced his official retirement from the National Hockey League on Monday, February 14, 2011, in an afternoon press conference in Denver, Colorado. 

“I played hockey my whole life,” Forsberg said, according to the Denver Post. ”But I decided I've played my final game.”

Forsberg’s latest comeback attempt began, as far as local fans were concerned, on January 22, 2011, when he practiced in Denver with injured Avalanche center Ryan O'Reilly and assistant coach Steve Konowalchuk. After skating with the team for several weeks, he signed a contract on February 6; loitered temporarily in limbo—or perhaps Phoenix, Arizona, it’s hard to tell the difference—until his visa issues were sorted out; and hit the ice against the Blue Jackets and Predators on February 11th and 12th, respectively. Eight days later, his hockey career was once again—and officially this time, perhaps, unless things change—over for good. Probably. 

Peter Forsberg may not be our favorite Swede of all time—that spot is already occupied—but he’s definitely right up there near the top. While we at Bowling in the Dark are disappointed that our tickets to Wednesday’s Avalanche game (which we’ve had for several months—no fair-weather fans here) are now somewhat less exciting than they were, say, four days ago,³ we sincerely wish Peter Forsberg the best in his retirement. We hope he finds a new calling that provides as much satisfaction as playing hockey has given for so much of his life. Perhaps our most sincere hope is that he fades from the limelight gracefully and professionally, and refuses to follow in the footsteps of other recently/often-retired athletes when looking for that satisfaction. Ahem.

Forsberg’s rare combination of strength; willingness to play (and excel at) a hard-hitting physical game; soft hands;⁴ great vision; and exceptional sense of the ebb, flow, and movement of the game made him an exceptional playmaker and arguably the best two-way center of his era.⁵ It’s likely, though, that his physical style of play contributed to the injury problems that plagued the later stages of his career and forced him to quit the game several times. He missed the entire 2001-02 season after having an emergency splenectomy in the midst of the 2001 Stanley Cup playoffs, and the surgeries on his flawed and chronically pained feet and ankles are believed to number at least a dozen.

Forsberg’s ankle spoke haltingly but with pride about his long-term association with those parts of Forsberg that continue to function properly: “I’m glad we gave it one more shot, but I think we’re done,” it said. “By which I mean I hope to God we’re done, and I mean forever. Frankly, I was done with the game years ago, and could have sworn I’d made myself clear on that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take about two dozen Advil and lie down for a while, preferably for the rest of my life.”

Peter Forsberg’s spleen, possibly.

Reached for comment at its home in Miami, Peter Forsberg’s spleen expressed sadness at his former body’s retirement, but hope for a potential reunion: “We had some good times together, Foppa and me,” it said. ”Near the end there, I was just dead weight, he did better without me. But it sure would be good to get together again, now that he’s got the time, maybe filter some blood cells together, just like we did in the old days.”

Peter Forsberg’s spleen spends most of its time playing cribbage with other long-abandoned parts of retired and current NHL players, including Eric Lindros’s brain, Tyler Arnason’s heart, and Claude Lemieux's courage.⁶

NOTES

1. Distressing to us, anyway. Mrs. Some Guy doesn’t seem to mind.

2. In addition to winning the Olympic gold as a member of the 1994 and 2006 Swedish men’s hockey teams, Forsberg also won an honorary medal for the little-known subcategory of Goaltender Humiliation. 

3. Or, for that matter, just four hours ago, before the Avalanche had started getting pounded by the Calgary Flames.
4. We’re not referring to his use of hand lotion—this is a hockey term. It means that Forsberg had very good puck-handling skills in terms of passing, stick-handling, and dekeing goaltenders. We don’t have the slightest clue whether he prefers Jergens to Neutrogena, and hope to keep it that way.

5. The Detroit Red Wings’ supremely talented Sergei Fedorov deserves consideration in this argument, perhaps the only case against him being the occasional game where he just didn’t seem to give a crap.

6. This Wizard of Oz metaphor leads us to wonder who in the NHL would represent Toto, the runty little mutt that serves no purpose other than as a constantly yapping, inescapable, annoying little shit. The frontrunner, quite obviously, is Sean Avery. 

Famed Doctors Lidström and Staal Separate Twins after Thirty Years

The Sedins: Daniel (left, or perhaps right) and Henrik (right, maybe. Or not)

On January 28, 2011, in a gripping procedure televised internationally, surgeons Eric Staal and Nicklas Lidstrom separated noted thirty-year-old Swedish twins Henrik Sedin and Daniel Sedin before a live studio audience.

Not the Sedins.

This separation might be a touch more remarkable and newsworthy if the Sedin twins were actually conjoined twins, and Eric Staal and Nick Lidstrom were real surgeons instead of just captains in charge of picking teams for the 58th National Hockey League All-Star Game. For hockey fans, however, it’s still notable not only because the Sedins have spent almost the entire last sixteen years as linemates (Daniel at left wing, Henrik at center), but also because, in their twenty-two years at various levels of organized hockey, the brothers have not once competed against one another.¹

Also not the Sedins.

Drafted second and third overall in 1999 by the Vancouver Canucks, the Sedins were considered early in their careers to be moderate disappointments, given their high draft status and the complex series of hoops through which the Canucks’ general manager, Brian Burke, had to jump to obtain both players. In recent years, however, the Sedins have flourished—Daniel’s five best single-season goal, assist, and point totals have all occurred in the last five seasons, and Henrik has not only reached career-high point totals in three of the past four years but also is the NHL’s reigning scoring leader, having earned112 points (29 goals, 83 assists) in the 2009-2010 season. On top of that, the Vancouver Canucks have won the Northwest Division four of the past six seasons, and as of today, are a runaway favorite to win their third consecutive division title.

Definitely not the Sedins. Well, probably.

Credit for their success is often given to the fact that Henrik and Daniel are twins, and thus presumably possess some sort of mysterious psychic connection that allows them to know what to expect from one another on the ice. That folks in the media choose this angle is perhaps not surprising, and certainly good for a story, but it does tend to unfairly dismiss the positive effect on line chemistry that one gets from having played a thousand games and practiced ten or twenty thousand hours, day in and day out, with the same guy.

Now you’re just being ridiculous. Patty Lane and Cathy Lane were identical cousins, not sisters.

Regardless of whether the Sedins’ undeniable chemistry is the result of years of practice or just magical brain power, though, the whole hockey world is² speculating wildly—if not particularly seriously—about what will happen when the two brothers hit the ice as opponents for the first time. Will Henrik be teamed with a shooter like Daniel, and will Daniel be given the center that closest resembles his brother’s playmaking style? Will they click with their newfound linemates, or reject them like transplanted organs? Will they wander helplessly around the ice like disoriented homing pigeons, unsure of how to react to a suddenly-unfamiliar world? Will the universe react to this mind-boggling and impossible development by opening a swirling vortex that obliterates the game?³

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, reached by phone only moments before trying on a pair of ice skates for the very first time, admitted that each and all of these scenarios are not only possible but extremely likely.

Given the NHL All-Star Game’s well-earned reputation as a good-natured exhibition game in which the players are more interested in enjoying themselves than injuring each other, we’re hoping the Sedins take this unique opportunity to ramp up the intensity by dropping gloves and beating the ever-loving shit out of one another.

We’re not holding our breath, though. We’ll be happy as long as they choose not to dance.

Yeah, that's them. You’ve watched it—you can't UNwatch it.

NOTES

1. As far as we know.

2. As far as we know.

3. Here’s hoping the vortex starts with the NFL Pro Bowl first. If ever a game didn’t need to exist, it’s the Pro Bowl.

Relief Has Come to the Football Fan

As a longtime Colorado resident and sports fan, I always get a bit excited when autumn comes, and it’s not hard to understand why: the NHL’s regular season begins in October, which gives grateful sports fans a reason to ignore the smoldering wreckage that used to be the Denver Broncos organization, and instead focus on a sport that’s superior in most ways anyhow: ice hockey.

Ice hockey lacks football’s long stretches of commercials, simplistic TV analysis, and brief blinks of actual game play; NASCAR’s hours of predictable high-speed tedium (go straight, left turn, GOTO 10); baseball’s lasseiz-faire approach to physical fitness; or basketball’s general unfamiliarity with teamwork, defense, and physical contact; so it’s not hard to see why the sport hasn’t fully captured the American imagination.

No, seriously, we’re athletes. Really! We mean it! We get uniforms and everything!

I prefer to believe, though, that this is mainly because casual fans of the game aren’t watching it quite right. Sure, casual hockey fans look forward to fights (often to the point of ignoring the actual game), and usually can identify when a goal has been scored, if only because they notice the flashing red light and the accompanying arena-shaking horn blast. Casual fans do appreciate goals (as they should) and admire and even idolize goal-scorers (which is cool), and that’s a good start.

What the casual fan is less likely to pick up on, though, is how often it’s a passer, rather than a shooter, that makes a goal happen, and by missing or disregarding this fundamental facet of the game, they’re missing out on much of the excitement the sport has to offer, and a great deal of the skill it puts on display.

Without the puck movement that sets up the goal—without players who can draw defensemen and goaltenders out of position —scoring would be virtually nonexistent, rendering the game of hockey slow, pointless, and boring . . . like some other sports I could mention.

And while it’s almost surely true that a good shooter will make his linemates look good, it’s as or more often the reverse, that a first-class passer will turn a middling player into a good one, and a gifted player into a star. To show the importance of the playmaker, let’s take a look at five shooters—one flash in the pan, two All-Stars, and two Hall of Famers—and see how they’ve done with and without the first-class passers with whom they’ve played.

Jonathan Cheechoo of the San Jose Sharks was officially crowned the Luckiest Guy in the World when Joe Thornton joined the team as Cheechoo’s center early in the 2005–2006 season. Cheechoo won the Maurice Richard Trophy—awarded to the league’s top goal scorer—that year, probably postponing his return to the AHL by at least a couple of years:

 

Jonathan Cheechoo Games Goals GPG With Thornton (2005-2006) 82 56 0.683 Every other year: 419 114 0.272

Milan Hejduk, a three-time All-Star for the Colorado Avalanche—and perhaps the team’s best-ever player to look just a tiny bit like a ferret—had his best year in 2002–2003 as a right wing for Peter Forsberg—not just one of the league’s best setup men of the last two decades, but one of its best overall players. While the two played together for several seasons, Forsberg’s struggle with injuries limited his playing time—at one point he played only 56 regular-season games in a three-year span—so the 2002–2003 season is the best example of Forsberg’s effect on Hejduk’s production.

Milan Hejduk		Games	Goals	GPG
With Forsberg (2002–2003)		82	50	0.610
Every other year:		765	289	0.378

Simon Gagne followed Milan Hejduk as the winner of the Forsberg Lottery when the Swede joined the Philadelphia Flyers for the 2005–2006 season. While Forsberg missed just over twenty games that year, he skated with Gagne most of the time he was healthy, and it shows in Gagne’s career-high total of 47 goals.

Simon Gagne		Games	Goals	GPG
With Forsberg (2005–2006)		72	47	0.653
Every other year:		598	212	0.355

Jari Kurri’s 601 career goals are good for eighteenth in league history, and he was the first Finn to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Wayne Gretzky assisted on 364 of Kurri’s goals, or right around 60% of the total. While Kurri may have made it into the Hall of Fame with somebody else as his center, it’s safe to say that Gretzky—not just the league’s all-time leading goal scorer but also its most gifted playmaker—helped nudge him in that direction. The two played together for the Los Angeles Kings for several years, but their chemistry and Gretzky’s playmaking effect were most evident in their years with the Oilers:

Jari Kurri		Games	Goals	GPG
W/ Gretzky (Oilers) (1980–1988)		600	397	0.662
Every other year:		651	204	0.313

Brett Hull ended his career known for more than just his big mouth, which is in itself a hell of an accomplishment. He retired with 741 goals in nineteen seasons (1,269 games), more than all but two players in league history. However, nearly a third of those goals (228, to be exact) came in just three seasons, from 1989 to 1992. In those seasons, Hull’s center was Adam Oates, one of the most gifted passers of his era, and Hull’s 86 goals in 1990–1991 set a league record (which still stands) for goals by a non-Gretzky.

Brett Hull		Games	Goals	GPG
With Oates (1989–1992)		232	228	0.983
Every other year:		1037	513	0.495

Without Oates, Hull still scored just under a goal every two games, a pace that likely would still have gotten him into the Hall of Fame. Had he played a couple more seasons with Oates, though, and maintained anything approaching that ludicrous .983-goals-per-game pace, he could have finished his career as the league’s all-time leader.

Based on this admittedly very small sample—in a half-assed study that is almost certainly rife with illogical assumptions, mathematical mistakes, and incomplete or misused data—these truly gifted playmakers appear to be able to add somewhere around one third to one half of a goal per game to a good shooter’s scoring average. In a sport where one out of every seven or eight games ends in a tie—and probably nearly as many end with a one-goal difference in score—an extra one-third to one-half goal per game is a huge.

So the mostly mundane and fairly obvious point I’m trying to make here is that the next time you’re going wild about the goal your favorite player just scored, take a good long look for the guy who got the puck to him, because he’s doing a lot of work to make that favorite player look good. Not to mention adding a couple of zeros to the end of the guy’s next contract.

. . . the other point I’d like to make is that Adam Oates looks a little bit like Ray Liotta. Like if you were to take Regular Ray Liotta and make him about 90% less intense and scary, you’d have Adam Oates:

Left: the Ray Liotta of the NHL. Right: The Ray Liotta of pretty much everything else.