I'll Take Ice Hockey

I don't know very much about ice hockey. I remember as a lad that the Pittsburgh team were named the Hornets. As a young adult, I sat in a waiting area with the Hornets awaiting a flight from Cleveland, Ohio to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That is sum and substance of my relationship with ice hockey until the Penguins began play in the National Hockey League in 1967 at the Civic Arena(Mellon Arena).

As a product of the inner-city and a student at Westinghouse High School, legendary coach Pete Dimperio and the inordinately successful football program, attracted me not unlike the flickering flame of a candle lures the moth. Although I matriculated at another Pittsburgh high school, the influence of the "Bulldogs" continued to burn inside me. Football and my parent's insistence on education, provided me with an opportunity to squander an athletic/academic scholarship. Football was an all consuming addiction and I chased the brass ring via sandlot participation. When reality finally became recognizable, I gave up participation and avidly followed the National Football League(NFL), particularly the Pittsburgh Steelers. The chance encounter with the Hornets in Cleveland, however, piqued my curiosity about hockey.

Ice hockey contains some of the elements of football. I just could not grasp the concept of the game and hockey was just another game that entered my awareness, yet, not my consciousness. As with so many others, I got caught up in the fervor of the USA team defeating the USSR team in the 1980 Olympics "Miracle on Ice." I attended a Penquins game and was highly entertained. America's game had not been supplanted, but, hockey entered my consciousness. As the college football teams increasingly became training grounds for the NFL and the Benjamins increasingly drove the owners and players, it seemed to me that a new culture was being generated. Football players at all levels projected attitudes counter current to team concepts and resorted to outlandish behaviors that the media willingly beamed into television sets.

My love affair with football was dying an agonizing death. I formed a perception that a conspiracy existed in the media to provide a negative image of football players. Daily broadcasts of criminal behavior and expletive laced egotistical diatribes appeared to be the norm. Men who completed four years at institutions of higher learning could not formulate cogent sentences and grammar certainly was not a forethought.

I have not, to date, acquired a real understanding of the game of ice hockey. The speed of the game is exciting, the physicality of the game is entertaining, brawls not withstanding. The greatest attraction for me, however, is the maturity exhibited by the youngest players. "Bad boys" seem to be the exception rather than the rule in the NHL. Most, if not all, of the interviews I have seen, or, heard, are intelligible and team oriented. I cannot bring to mind reports of hockey players beating up women, fighting dogs, shooting themselves with illegaly owned weapons, using and/or trafficking in narcotics, to mention a few recurring themes associated with football players. Perhaps I do not follow hockey closely enough. Based on what I have seen and heard and my perceptions, I will take hockey.