Not daily, but posting.
dira asked me: Maybe talk about your feels about hockey-the-sport, as distinct from hockey-the-fandom?
Sure! I'm not too involved in hockey-the-fandom anymore, but I am very fond of it for getting me back into hockey-the-sport.
I didn't grow up watching hockey as a kid; my parents weren't into sports at all. Actually, it went beyond that - they were intellectual hippies who were poor and deeply, deeply mistrustful of anything that pegged them as such. Sports were for the uneducated masses, you know?
Anyway, as a teenager, I ended up being really into hard rock and metal. And I hung out with hard rock and metal dudes. These dudes were the anti-jocks. None of them were into football, baseball, or sports culture at all. But they all loved hockey. LOVED it. They lived and breathed the Bruins. Hockey was the weird little brother sport. The players had shitty haircuts and scars and the whole sport stank like beer. Even better? They punched the shit out of each other while they were on the ice. It was totally, totally metal.
I remember staying up late to watch Cam Neely on a shitty, fuzzt TV where you could barely see the puck. I remember going to see the Bruins in the old Garden, freezing my ass off and screaming with the shitfaced season ticket holders in the cheap seats.
I love the speed and the skill involved in what the sport is now. I love watching Patrick Kane make gorgeous, impossible shots and I love watching Rask pluck pucks out of thin air. But I love the violence too. I love the checks and the rattling boards and yeah, I even like the fights. I nkow they're dumb. I know they're pointless. But they were one of the first things I loved about this totally, totally metal sport.
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