One hundred reasons to love hockey

Hockey is the world's greatest spectator sport, which makes the NHL my favorite professional sports league.

This is the NHL All-Star Weekend and it has been taking place right here in my own sunny waterfront metropolitan area, with the All-Star Game itself (actually, a 3-on-3 tourney with each division fielding its own team) slated for later today.

That makes this the perfect time to list 100 reasons to love the game of hockey. Before I do that, I should admit that I stole the idea from Tampa Bay Times writer Joe Smith. But so what? I swear my list is better than his! And here it is...


Nikita Kucherov one-timers from the right circle.

Steven Stamkos one-timers from the left circle.

P.K. Subban one-timers from the point.

Overtime playoff games.

Lanny McDonald's 'stache.

Playoff beards.

Warroad, Minnesota.

That Canadian players hail from towns with names like Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw, and Yellowknife.

That European players hail from towns with names like Ornskoldsvik, Kuopio, and Jacovce.

That the alternate captain's "A" on a Calgary Flames jersey is also the franchise's original logo from when it was the Atlanta Flames.

The Winnipeg Jets logo.

"He shoots, he scores!"

"Number four, Bobby Orr!"

"Jesus Saves. And Esposito scores on the rebound."

Slap Shot.

Eddie Shore: First as the authoritarian blueliner for the Boston Bruins, then as the authoritarian owner of the Springfield Indians, and finally as the recurring old-school reference in Slap Shot.

Hating the Habs.

Hating the Flyers.

Playoff octopi in Detroit.

Personalized goalie masks.

1994 Eastern Conference Finals: Brodeur, Leetch, Messier's guarantee, and eventually "Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!"

2002 Western Conference Finals: Sakic, Forsberg, Drury, Foote, Blake, and Roy... versus Lidtsrom, Fedorov, Yzerman, Robitaille, Chelios, and Hasek... and that's just getting started.

Tennessee Titans offensive linemen chugging beer at Nashville Predators playoff games.

Doc Emerick's play-by-play.

Don Cherry's bombastic commentary.

Don Cherry's bombastic suits.

The Miracle on Ice.

50 goals in 50 games... but especially Wayne Gretzy's 50 in 39.

Hearing both national anthems.

The one -- and still only -- Mario Lemieux Hat Trick.

Elliotte Friedman's "31 Thoughts" column.

Kristen Shilton's byline photo.

Backyard rinks in Manitoba.

Frozen ponds in Maine.

The Beanpot Tournament.

All those dulcet French surnames: Beliveau, LaFleur, Lemieux, Lecavalier, Giguere, Dionne, Dumont, etc.

All those craggy Russian surnames: Kucherov, Kuznetsov, Konstantinov, Tretiak, Tikhonov, Gonchar, Zelepukin, etc.

The Summit Series.

1996 World Cup.

2010 Vancouver: US, Canada, Parise (yes!), overtime, Crosby (shit).

1994 Lillehammer: Canada, Sweden, shootout, Forsberg, Salo.

Patrick Roy saying he couldn't hear Jeremy Roenick trash-talking because he had plugged his ears with his championship rings.

Reminding everyone that the New York Islanders were once a dynasty that dominated the NHL.

Reminding Toronto fans that despite all their entitled "capital of hockey" gasbaggery, it's been more than 50 years since their team hoisted the Cup.

Defending Alexander Ovechkin's playoff productivity.

The Punch-up in Piestany. 

The Gordie Howe Hat Trick.

Line nicknames: The French Connection, Legion of Doom, Trio Grande, West Coast Express, ZZ Pops, etc.

Player nicknames: Rocket Richard, The Vladinator, The Russian Rocket, The Finnish Flash, The Golden Jet, etc.

The anticipation when Patrick Kane is on a breakaway with the puck on his stick.

Goalies "stealing games" by "standing on their heads."

T.J. Oshie in a shootout.

The eternal argument: Gretzky or Lemieux?

The "era argument": Was Brett Hull's 82 goals in one season a more impressive accomplishment than Wayne Gretzky's 92?

The Three Stars.

Sibling players: The Neidermeyers, Espositos, Bures, Hatchers, Sutters, etc... and by all means, this includes Tony and Cammi Granato... and can I count the Hanson brothers?

Father-son players: The Howes, Hulls, Parises, Tkachuks, Hextalls, etc.

1964 Stanley Cup Finals: Bobby Baun scores in overtime while skating on a fractured ankle.

1999 Stanley Cup Finals: It was not a goal.

Mike Lange's Lange-isms.

Phil Kessel.

Esa Tikkanen.

Johnny Bower.

Neal Broten.

Martin St. Louis.

Tony McKegney.

Justin Williams.

Rod Langway.

Vaclav Nedomansky.

Ryan Callahan.

That the Anaheim Ducks dropped the "Mighty" from their name.

That the brother of Sebastian Bach (lead singer of Skid Row) had a brief career as an NHL goaltender in the 1990's.

2014 Winter Classic.

"Potvin sucks!"

Gordie Howe's final goal.

John Scott in the All-Star Game.

Washington-Pittsburgh in the playoffs.

Detroit-Colorado hatred 1996-2002.

Jacque Plante's mask.

Gerry Cheevers' mask.

That the Chicago Blackhawks pay homage to Black Hawk himself with their name and logo.

That the Chicago Blackhawks refuse to bow down to the PC blowhards who falsely and ignorantly call their logo racist.

Complaining about Gary Bettman.

Complaining about suspensions handed down by the NHL Department of Player Safety.

Wondering where Connor McDavid is about to pass it to.

That the winning players' names get engraved on the Cup.

Redirects.

Goals banked in off of goaltenders from behind the goal line.

Chasing down the puck to avoid an icing call.

2003-04 Tampa Bay Lightning.

2016-17 Nashville Predators.

That the 1990-91 Minnesota North Stars got hot at the right time and played their way into the Stanley Cup Finals.

That during those finals, Mario Lemieux showed his skill by shaking and baking them so bad on this goal that, as the aforementioned Mike Lange liked to say, "they lost their liquor license!"

The hero's welcome Dominik Hasek received in Prague after backstopping the Czech Republic to the 1998 Olympic Gold.

Old-school real men versus analytics-geek pajama boys.

Goal songs.

The goal lamp.

Childhood teammates growing up to become NHL superstars.

Sidney Crosby's loyalty to "his" numerals (he was born in '87, wears jersey #87, and forever sticks with a salary of $8.7 million even though he knows he would get much more if he asked).

And, although this is a bit of a repeat: "Do you believe in miracles!?!?"

et ceteras

American sports fans not from the Philadelphia area have been conditioned never to root for any Philly team, ever.

And American sports fans not from the Boston area have been conditioned never to root for any Boston team, ever, especially if that team is the New England Patriots of the National Football League.

Well, the match-up for Super Bowl LII has now been set and it is the New England Patriots versus the Philadelphia Eagles. Heaven forfend! What shall American fans do? What, what, I ask!

Well, for me, I subscribe more to the first paragraph than the second, so...

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One story we haven't been able to get away from over the past week is the allegation that Donald Trump described Haiti and some unidentified African countries as "shitholes."

I happen to believe the allegation, and look, I understand why it upsets people that a POTUS would say that, but here's the thing: Haiti is a shithole, and so are many African countries, and everybody including Corey Crocodile Tears Booker knows it.

Trump is being criticized not for telling a lie, but for telling the truth. No matter how much they publicly claim to be horrified by his adjective of choice, every single Democrat politician and left wing journalist privately agrees with it, and I suspect many of them have used it themselves (privately of course) when talking about the exact same locales.

For those who care about the human condition, the proper response to Trump's remark is not to ask "why would he call those places shitholes?" but to ask "why have those places been made into shitholes?" And then: "What can be done to make them not be shitholes? What can be done to enable their inhabitants to reach their fullest human potential?"

I italicize the word "care" on purpose, because there is a big difference between caring about a bad situation in a general sense (which most people do) and caring about it to the extent that it keeps you up at night (which few people do). What annoys me to no end is politicians pretending to be justice warriors and armchair philanthropists pretending to be real ones. The publicly vocal critics of Trump's remark come overwhelmingly from those two incestuous populations of hypocrites.

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By the way, yes, I know that Trump talked about "shithole countries" in the context of immigration. And yes, that does give his critics reason (real reason) to wonder if there was something more sinister behind his adjective, but I see no actual reason to believe there is: Let's not forget that before he ran for president as a non-Democrat (which is what his critics consider to be his true crime) Donald Trump was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, and was praised more than once by Jesse Jackson in front of Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

The evidence that Trump is racist amounts to people saying he is racist. And their main reason for saying so is that there were some racists among the scores of millions of people who didn't vote for Clinton. But there were also some (more?) racists among the scores of millions of people who did vote for Clinton. It's called math.

If we are being honest, there is much more evidence that Barack Obama is racist than there is that Donald Trump is racist. However, the hyperventilating Facebook sociologists who knee-jerkingly accuse Trump of racism would never consider looking at the former evidence, much less consider admitting that it even exists.

I, like all conservatives, am pro-immigration. My heart strings, just like those of all conservatives, are easily tugged by stories of people from "shithole countries" coming to the USA and attaining for themselves a better lot in life than they could have attained in their homeland, all while contributing to our blessedly mongrel culture and supporting the blessed cause of individual liberty. But that does not change the fact that our borders cannot be open like a sieve, and that we must therefore pick and choose who we allow in.

If there are 20,000 jobs to go around and 15,000 Americans looking for jobs, how can we let in 50,000 job-seekers from other lands? Wouldn't doing that drive wages down rather than up, and thus drive standards of living down rater than up? And are we facing a janitor shortage or a doctor shortage? And don't medical and technology specialists, who are not easy to find and replace, have more to offer than those who sweep rooms and clean toilets and are easy to find and replace? It feels kind of wrong to say these things out loud, but they are obvious truths and must be dealt with as such; refusing to acknowledge them does not do anyone any good.

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Another story we can't yet get away from is The Great Government Shutdown of 2018!

A big part of me wants to tread lightly, because I have personal friends of both political persuasions who work for the federal government and who are being told to report to work and perform their jobs while receiving no pay. One of them has four kids to feed. Another is pregnant. When it comes to the shutdown business, this is the human side which rarely gets mentioned but of which we should be aware.

Still, there is a big part of me that wants to tread heavily on this, because in almost every instance I can remember -- including this one -- it has been Democrats who shut the government down yet Republicans who got blamed for it. And it has been Democrats who have deliberately chosen to shut down parts of the government most likely to impact "ordinary Americans" (like national parks where people go on vacation) rather than shut down superfluous crap (like the NEA).

In order to avoid the current shutdown, last week's Senate bill needed to get 60 votes. Republicans voted in favor of the bill by a count of 45-5 while Democrats voted against it 44-5, and somehow this is being portrayed as the Republicans shutting everything down.

Elementary math tells you the Democrats opted to do this. And when you consider that they had no objections to what was in the bill (they simply wanted it to have more) it is obvious that the only way Democrats would not have done this is if Republicans rolled over and obediently did every single thing Democrats demanded they do asked them to do -- never mind that Republicans are in the majority because a majority of Americans (who employ them) put them in the majority in order to enact Republicans measures, not Democrat measures.

In other words: Shutting down the government was an act of dictatorship by the minority, planned and orchestrated by the same political party which defended slavery and imposed Jim Crow, the same political party which has long had a soft spot for dictators from Stalin to Minh to Castro.

Shutting down parts of a representative government, against the people's will, because you don't get what you want, is not in the same league as throwing political prisoners in gulags. But it does stem from a tyrannical impulse, especially when done by a political party whose history is what I described above. That party is one of the two dominant parties in these United States, and it is the Democratic Party, and it does no good to play nice with that party when it routinely slanders and harasses and lies about anyone who disagrees with it. I think it is time to start calling a spade a spade and referring to the Democratic Party as the Dictator Party.

I am a conservative and I have problems with the GOP -- which I also do not trust, albeit to a much different degree. But those problems do not include The Great Government Shutdown of 2018! Said shutdown is nothing more than political theater intended to deceive the ignorant, and it is the Democrats' shutdown, not the Republicans'.

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And now for some links...

In the "shithole countries" section above, I italicized the word "care" and explained why. Here is the article, published 16 years ago by John Derbyshire, where I kind of got the idea. I say "kind of" because when I read it now, it doesn't rally give a care-in-italics explanation the way I recall. But it kind of does, and is where I got the idea regardless, and is still a good read.

Nikita Kucherov doesn't only have game -- he also has merch!

An American hockey winger playing for South Korea in next month's Olympics.

Secret paths to spots where Catholic Mass was secretly held in old Ireland.

Th U.S. government lied to you about Cliven Bundy.

Speaking of lying, this "call 'em out" piece is an oldie (actually, only 35 months old) but a goodie.

If only there were more like him.

Dilbert's creator knows about more than just how to doodle.

2017: In Memoriams, Part Two

This is the second in a series of posts about major figures who passed away last year. The first can be read here.

Glen Campbell

He was the rhinestone cowboy who made his mark in country music but also spent some time as a member of the Beach Boys... and who in 1967 made history by winning Grammys in the same year in both the country and pop categories.

Glen Campbell was born in Arkansas during the Great Depression, one of twelve children in a farming family whose house had no electricity. He said that in order to get his hands on more money than they could produce tilling their own land, he also worked for other farmers and "picked cotton for $1.25 a hundred pounds. If you worked your tail off, you could pick 80 or 90 pounds a day."

When he was four, his uncle gave him a guitar from Sears and taught him the basics of how to play. As Campbell grew to adoloscence he could not afford lessons, but developed his playing skills by listening closely to the radio and records, citing jazz legend Django Reinhardt as a major influence.

At 17 he moved to New Mexico, married a 16-year-old, and joined his uncle's band. At 21 he formed his own band, the Western Wranglers, before eventually packing up again and heading to LA in 1960.

During his early years in California Campbell worked as a session musician and performed on the albums of an eclectic variety of big names: Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Jan & Dean, and the Monkees, to name a few. For obvious reasons this opened doors for him to record under his own name, but three years after doing just that for the first time, his biggest "hit" was his rendition of "Universal Soldier," which peaked at only #45; displaying a clear sense of aggravation over his career's trajectory, when Campbell was asked about that song's pacifist-sounding lyrics, he retorted that "people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung."

But his trajectory turned upward in the Summer of Love, when he scored major hits with "Gentle on My Mind" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," the tunes for which he won the aforementioned Grammys. He followed those up one year later with the hits "I Wanna Live" and "Wichita Lineman." Then came the 1970's, when he lit up the charts with a series of tunes capped off by "Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Southern Nights."

Glen Campbell conquered drinking and cocaine habits by stopping altogether in 1987 and remaining clean the rest of his life, other than a brief relapse in 2003. And he never stopped recording good music, finishing his half-century career with 70+ albums and 80 songs that hit the charts (29 of which made the top ten and nine of which went #1).

In 2010 he recorded what was intended to be a farewell album, Ghost in the Canvas, and later that year was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Still functional, he embarked on a farewell concert tour, with three of his kids in his backup band so that they could tell the signs and help him out if and when the "brain fog" struck during performances.

After the tour he went to Nashville and recorded his final album, Adios. And after that, in January 2013, he recorded his final song, "I'm Not Gonna Miss You," which contains excruciatingly knowing lyrics: "I'm never gonna hold you like I did / or say I love you to the kids / You're never gonna see it in my eyes / It's not gonna hurt me when you cry / I'm never gonna know what you go through / all the things I say or do..."

Campbell went into a nursing home in 2014 and died last August at the age of 81. His body is now buried at his family's cemetery in the unincorporated community of Billstown, in southwestern Arkansas.


Roger Moore
He famously played James Bond, British Secret Agent 007, in seven movies from 1973 to 1985. In portraying Bond, Roger Moore did not project the same rock-ribbed masculinity as Sean Connery or cold-blooded danger as Daniel Craig, but he also did not project the absurd softness of Timothy Dalton. What Moore brought to the role was an air of debonair perfection, transforming Bond into a middle-aged playboy who could beat the crap out of roided-up young men while wearing a tuxedo that somehow didn't get wrinkled or turned askew in the process.

That version of 007 was of course ridiculous, unrealistic, and quite unlike the character in Ian Fleming's novels. In Fleming's hands, 007's womanizing was depicted as a character flaw that enemy spies sought to exploit in ways that could put free societies in jeopardy. In Moore's hands it came off as the ultimate of cool, and teenage boys (including yours truly) fantasized about being like that themselves. That is a major disconnect and not a positive one, but it's hard to fault Moore -- it was the directors who wanted that kind of Bond at that point in time, and as the actor they chose, he delivered it better than anyone else could have done.

The only child of a London police officer, Roger Moore was conscripted into the British Army at the age of 18, rose to the rank of captain, and commanded a depot in West Germany. His first television appearance came in a small role during a live broadcast of The Governess in 1949. He moved to the United States in the early 1950's and made his first big screen appearance in 1954's The Last Time I Saw Paris, but for years his main splashes remained on the small screen as he had prominent and leading roles in The Alaskans, The Roaring 20's, Maverick, and most famously The Saint, which ran from 1962 to 1969 and aired in more than 60 countries.

In other words, Roger Moore was not a one-trick pony. But the role of James Bond was clearly the biggest and flashiest pony he ever rode and the one for which he will always be remembered, and that ain't bad. In the end, Bond always defeats the bad guys and saves the free world after skiing off an Alpine cliff and surviving the 3,000-foot fall by deploying a Union Jack parachute right when all seems lost. And nobody does it better.


Jake LaMotta
When I was a kid, my grandfather talked about how his favorite boxer from his younger days was a tough-as-nails middleweight champ from the Bronx who could take a punch better than anybody and still keep coming. He talked of how that man was more street brawler than technical boxer, and how he would eventually prevail by out-enduring opponents and finally beating them with merciless barrages of in-close punches, no matter how many blows they had managed to land on his iron chin.

Giacobbe "Jake" LaMotta was born in 1922, to a US-born mother and a father who immigrated to New York from Sicily. His childhood was rough, as his father forced him to fight other children in makeshift rings with grown-ups watching and placing bets on the outcomes. When he won, his father pocketed the cash and used it to pay rent. It should not come as a surprise that when your dad treats you like a cockfighting rooster you develop your street tough instincts honestly -- and your alcoholism too.

LaMotta won 83 professional boxing matches, fighting both as a middleweight and light heavyweight. Unsurprisingly, given his reckless style he also lost 19 (five to Sugar Ray Robinson alone) and had four finish as draws. After his boxing days were done he lived a life of booze and crime, serving six months on a chain gang and later admitting to a rape for which he was never charged.

Eventually LaMotta mended his ways and became an actor and stand-up comic, once quipping that "my wife never knew I had a drinking problem until one night I came home sober." Robert DeNiro won the Best Actor Oscar for portraying him in the 1980 film Raging Bull, a Hollywood classic whose accuracy gave LaMotta mixed emotions because, in his own words: "I was a no-good bastard. It's not the way I am now, but the way I was then."

Impressively, Jake LaMotta retained his mental faculties to the end despite all those blows to the noggin and all those years of hard living. He performed in an Off Broadway play at the age of 90, and was 95 when he died of pneumonia in September.


Y.A. Tittle
Like Jake LaMotta, Yelberton Abraham Tittle Jr. was born during the 1920's and became a world class athlete, but their upbringings could not have been more different. As a child in Marshall, Texas, Tittle lived in the same neighborhood as his idol, NFL quarterback Slingin' Sammy Baugh, and this fueled his youthful desire to be a quarterback when he grew up: He spent hours on end honing his passing skills in his yard by throwing a football through a tire swing, and eventually this paid off when he earned a football scholarship to LSU.

Tittle's college career was prolific as he was named MVP of the 1947 Cotton Bowl, was twice named First Team All-SEC, and set multiple school passing records that were not broken for more than 25 years. However, it was his pro career that made him a national rather than regional figure as he played from 1948 to 1964; made seven Pro Bowls; was a four-time All Pro; thrice led the league in passing touchdowns; and was league MVP at the very seasoned age of 37. Plus, he was the first pro football player to make the cover of Sports Illustrated and is believed to be the first person to use the phrase "alley-oop" as a sports term, after devising a jump ball kind of passing play with receiver R.C. Owens in 1957.

He played the bulk of his NFL career with the 49'ers, for whom he was a superstar. Believing him to be old and washed up, they traded the 34-year-old Tittle across the country to the New York Giants shortly before the 1961 season -- and he proceeded to lead the Giants to the NFL Championship Game for three consecutive seasons, break the NFL record for touchdown passes in a season, and re-break it again. When the Giants established a franchise Ring of Honor in 2010, he was named to it in its first year, even though it had been 46 years since he played and you would expect recency bias to work against him.

Y.A. Tittle came from a different era, back when the NFL wasn't a huge deal and players needed to work other jobs during the off-season to make ends meet. He did that as an insurance salesman, and after retiring from football he founded an insurance and financial services agency of his own. In his final season, 1964, during a game against the Steelers at since-demolished Pitt Stadium, he was hit and concussed by Steelers' lineman John Baker while throwing a pass that was intercepted and returned for a touchdown. This photograph of Tittle at the conclusion of that play, bloodied and kneeling on the turf with his helmet off, will forever be one of the most iconic images in the history of American sports. He died in October, 16 days before his 91st birthday.


David Cassidy
He considered himself rock star material from the same cloth as Hendricks and Jagger, and he desperately wanted the public to see him that way as well. But David Cassidy had androgynous babyfaced looks and became famous by starring in the schmaltzy sitcom The Partridge Family, so instead the public viewed him as the inoffensive teen heartthrob next door. And he detested it.

Cassidy made a point of mentioning that when he was still a minor he had hitchhiked to San Francisco and "up to Haight-Ashbury," where he was deeply aligned with "the music, the culture, the behavior" and where "I did a lot of fucking around, experimenting -- not smack, but grass and speed and psychedelics." In 1995 he told the LA Times: "It seemed whenever I'd read my name, it would be David 'former teen idol sex symbol' Cassidy. I used to think, well, I guess I'm going to have to do something more significant in my life, like David 'convicted felon' Cassidy or something, anything that would erase that convenient label."

I don't know whether his revulsion against his image counted as self-hatred or self-love, but it was definitely a sad case of a person being unable or unwilling to appreciate good things when they are happening. Cassidy made a fortune recording music and was adored by girls all around the globe (his records usually sold even better overseas than they did here) but for decades he never seemed to realize how good a life that was.

Fortunately, that seemed to finally change in his later years. As Cassidy approached and passed the age of 60, he seemed to understand that he had been given a blessing and not a curse. In concerts he started engaging with audience members by dong question and answer sessions, and he exhibited a peaceful air regarding himself that previously he had not.

In 2011 he recorded a PSA to support research and prevention of Alzheimer's disease. But life can be a cruel SOB, for in early 2017 he forgot lyrics during a couple of concerts and he released an announcement in February disclosing that he himself, only 66 at the time, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Cassidy stopped performing and withdrew from the public eye. Multiple organ failure landed him in the hospital in November, with liver failure claiming his life on the 21st.