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Playtime for the Sporting Gods

November 4, 2011 by 2 Comments

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Above: The Joe Louis Arena, pre-game, this week.

In 2007, I was at one of the lowest ebbs of my life. I was lurching toward an inescapable conclusion that I couldn’t stay in my marriage. No need to dwell here, but when you deeply love the woman involved and have two boys, that is a very hard place to be.
So, to distract myself, I did what all sports fans do and went to lose myself in some live sport.
I know, I thought, I’ll go watch Richmond play Geelong in a Sunday twilight game at the Docklands stadium! That will be awesome!
If I had thought to look, the Icehouse was probably under construction at the time, just a little over to the west.
I caught the tram from Fitzroy to Docklands with an uncomfortable awareness that the afternoon might not go according to my plan. See, Richmond v Geelong has a certain history in recent times. Yes, my Tigers kicked Geelong in the 1967 Grand Final but that was quite a while ago. Almost perfectly matching the time I spent as a football journalist for major Melbourne papers, and The Seven Network, Richmond had fallen into a hole deeper than the Romanche Trench. It wasn’t so much that successive Geelong sides of the late Eighties, Nineties and new millennium, featuring several Hall of Famers, would beat the hapless Tigers, whose back line would struggle to get a game in the VFA, but more that the Cats would slice and dice with the needless brutality of A Clockwork Orange. Gary Ablett Snr would perform party tricks that made the entire press box* burst into spontaneous laughter and applause (journo humour being what it is, I was ALWAYS sent to cover these games; to suffer it out) and I’d laugh and clap along. What the Hell. It wasn’t as though we had a chance. One day at the MCG, I can recall Ablett flying so high and so ridiculously early (over Brian Leys, maybe, or Mark Summers, or both) that he found himself metres into the air, looking around for the ball. It finally arrived as he was well into his potentially painful descent. The great No. 5 marked it one handed, jammed into his elbow, moments before he hit the turf. He booted 10 or maybe 12 that day …
So anyway, Richmond had improved a bit by 2007 but the Terry Wallace five-year plan was lurching and our young kids would be up against it on this day. But I needed a change of headspace, I needed some light in my life. Surely, my mule-headed lifelong devotion to the often hapless Tigers would show mercy and give me something to smile about.
Richmond lost by what I believe was an all-time record against the Cats. 157 points. I didn’t need to look that margin up for this blog. It’s scarred into my withered soul.
The loss was so huge that by mid third quarter, I was smiling. Even chuckling. Ah, Tigers, you never fail to let me down. It’s not only that you continue to kill us fans, you run the truck over us four or five times to make sure of it, when we are most hurt. The funniest part was that the sheer black humour of The Universe that day strangely did the trick. The massacre was so horrific, it was awesome. I walked all the way home, lighter, thinking: OK, you’ve got more planned for me, huh, Universe? Bring it.
And it did. And it has.
What has all this got to do with hockey?
Well, a key component of my current massive American trip has involved watching the Detroit Red Wings live. To actually witness some games at the Joe Louis Arena. And Will (aka Kittens), Mack and I have now seen three of four.
The Red Wings are the most consistently successful team of the past two decades. They haven’t missed the play-offs in 20 seasons, despite salary caps, equalization, etc. They are very much a Geelong, not a Richmond.
The Red Wings home-grow players, churn them out and create great team after great team. In that 20 year span, the Wings have won four Stanley Cups. In poor, half-deserted, out-of-money-and-luck Detroit, they have been a shining light. Because Detroit IS Hockeytown and the Wings MATTER.
So, our first Wings game ever was in Washington DC, against the Capitals at the Verizon Centre. Detroit lost, 7-1. A massacre.
No, matter. Bring on the Joe Louis Arena, hometown Detroit with a Wings crowd revving them on. Against the San Jose Sharks, who knocked the Wings out of the last two play-off series but haven’t been as dominant this season. The Wings lost, 4-2.
Tuesday night, we were there again to see the increasingly worried Wings take on Minnesota Wild. By now the losing streak, home and away, was at four, the worst straight streak since 2008. The Wings hit the ice like skaters possessed. A goal inside of 5 minutes to Nick Lidstrom, with Zetterberg and Datsyuk on assists; our main line sparking. The Wild barely had a shot on goal for the entire first period. The Wings lost, 2-1 in Over Time. We were totally robbed by the refs on the final goal, but still …
The lesson: No matter which side of the world you are on, in any sport, the Sporting Gods will fuck with you, given half a chance. “Hey! It’s that Richmond loser in a Lidstrom jersey!” they must say to one another, sniggering.
Happily, I am in a much better headspace than 2007. I have genuinely shaken my head with nothing more than bemusement at Detroit hitting such a trough at the exact moment we are in town and have paid hundreds of dollars to be in excellent seats at the Joe.
It actually occurred to me after the Wild fiasco that I must be in a good place. I have genuinely loved every game – just being at NHL games, with all the excitement, hoopla and energy. The sheer breathtaking level of skating and shooting and skill of NHL players. Seeing my heroes, “Hank” “Zee” Zetterberg, Dats, Lids, Mule, Helm, Abby, Jimmy Howard in the flesh. Gazing at the retired numbers and all the pennants hanging from the roof of the ageing Joe arena. Being surrounded by genuine Wings fans and being accepted, unquestioningly into the fold.
Between games, we have wandered the eery streets of Detroit and fallen in love with this art deco, decaying city. We have examined every inch of the Hockeytown Cafe – sort of a Red Wings version of the Hard Rock Cafe – and grinned at old time Wing names like Honey Walker, Ebbie Goodfellow, Art Giloux and Wilf Starr (all 35-36 Cup-winning team), Gunzo Humeniuk and Red Kelly (49-50 Cup team, with Gordie Howe) and Lefty Wilson and Enio Scisizzi (51-52 Cup). I’ve loved building my knowledge of Wings lore and general hockey history.
The NHL home and away season is 82 games, so the Wings don’t have to panic yet, although this form slump is worrying. They have barely scored since we arrived in America – five goals in five games, which is ridiculous.
Maybe tonight will be when the drought breaks? At our final game, when we’re sitting on the glass. Row 1, Seat 1. And the Red Wings are giving us a personal tour of the Joe before the game. and it is Bobblehead Thursday, so we get to add three Henrik Zetterberg bobbleheads to our already groaning baggage.
Or maybe the Wings will lose again, to the struggling Calgary Flames and I’ll head home to Australia on Saturday, possibly never to see the team play live ever again, having not seen a win, having not sung “Don’t Stop Believin'” to celebrate victory because we’re enough goals clear with a minute to go.
I don’t really care either way. I have a lifetime of Tiger training on absorbing match day disappointment to fall back on.
I’m just happy to be here. Getting momentarily annoyed by opposition goals, dud ref calls or whooping at Wings brilliance. Letting my passion soar.
Watch for the three of us, behind the glass in Section 120, screaming our lungs out, whichever way tonight goes.

LATER THAT NIGHT UPDATE: Wings played like crap and got beaten 4-1, the last goal being an empty netter after they’d pulled Jimmy Howard. Laugh it up, Sporting Gods. Like I said, I can take it. On a brighter note, we stood on the ice at the Joe Louis Arena, during our tour. The ice maintenance guy wasn’t thrilled but we did it. Stood on that famous ice. Now we’re leaving the country, Detroit can get back to winning …

* As I was typing this, auto-correct on my iPad changed Press Box to Pessimism Box, which is so perfect I never could have come up with it.

Below: happier days at the Joe. The celebrations after a Cup victory.

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America

October 31, 2011 by 4 Comments

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OK, You can look at this two ways: I’ve been slack, or I’ve stayed heroically on message. This is allegedly a hockey blog and the vast majority of our American adventure has not involved pucks or ice, so I was right not to blog about it. The reality is also that I’ve loved having a month of not being in front of computer screens, so for a while there the idea of trying to write anything, even about hockey, wasn’t appealing.
Sometimes you just need to live life. I always want to slap people who look at their entire vacation through a viewfinder (“Here’s the Eiffel Tower, although I didn’t see it in the flesh, because I was filming every second.”) and tell them that.
I’m as guilty as anybody of wanting to record moments, to immortalise them through an iPhone camera. But you can’t always. And you don’t need to. And so it is with this trip, despite the literally thousands of photos and short videos we have shot along the way (Will aka Kittens has got the camera bug big time).
And yet … White water rafting in Carolina, a bald eagle flapping majestically above the Fall leaves ahead of us. The Chrysler Building in the sunshine. Mack asleep, with his head on my legs, like a kid, as he hasn’t for five years or so, and may never again, thanks to a brutal early start for the train to Chicago, where I’m typing this. A crazy knife-scarred taxi driver’s wildly inappropriate stories of nightclub adventures and women, while hammering through Chicago lakeside streets at 60 miles per hour, all of us laughing our heads off. The eery emptiness of Detroit’s downtown. The sheer rush of the start of the 0-40 mph in 2 seconds Hulk rollecoaster in Orlando. Gotta live all these things.
Hockey was nowhere for the first few weeks. In LA, we drove past a few Kings billboards but nothing to get excited about. In New York, apart from one small flock of Rangers fans, gathered in a bar next to Madison Square Garden to watch their team’s early season game in Sweden (they lost), we barely sighted the sport. The NHL store on Sixth Avenue was our only fix ( and potential source of financial ruin).
In Washington DC, we saw the Red Wings play live for the first time. A capacity crowd of Caps fans, with plenty of Wings sprinkled. Us among 20,000 hockey fans. The sheer joy of diving into the energy of a NHL game and seeing the Wings for real, in the flesh. Even if they did stink things up and lose 7-1. Watching Ovechkin as well. I still can’t believe how hard his shot is. A wrist flick that could put a puck through a wall.
But even then, DC doesn’t live and breathe hockey. It was in Chicago that we finally found what we were looking for. There’s no way I can write it but hockey is in the fabric of the city. Johnny’s Icehouse rinks, one of which is the Blackhawks’ training venue, in dubious western suburbs of the city; Will and I wandering like tourists with neon signs around our neck. making pilgramages to Gunzo’s and then Total Hockey, massive stores devoted to the sport. (Will and I loading up on new gear, so much cheaper than Australia, and with so much quality and choice.)
But even more than hockey retail, it’s the outdoor rinks, the players everywhere; talking to guys who have played their whole lives. Winter approaching with lakes and rivers freezing so that people like us can play pond hockey or skate for fitness. A sense of hockey being central, of being important.
Of course, we were glittering novelty items: Australian hockey players?? But accepted unquestioningly into the tribe. John, a slick-haired Chicago futures trader just finished a drop-in game at Johnny’s, who possibly saved our lives by offering to drive us to Gunzo’s – quite a distance west and through some parts of Madison Street we really were best not to walk – sympathized about learning hockey stops and pivots, even though, for him, that struggle was as a kid. A guy in his 50s, on the train back from Total Hockey, telling about his life of hockey, up to playing street hockey as well as winter hockey. Players who made it to college level; something to be respected by everybody’s tone.
In Detroit, we stood at the shrine of the Red Wings, at the base of the steep stairs leading into the aging Joe Louis Arena. Inside, I found myself meeting Gordie Howe, THE Gordie Howe. Feeling like such a fraud; a rookie Australian chatting with this whispering-voiced, white-haired man only metres from his statue celebrating the greatest Detroit career ever. But his eyes watching me as I explained how honoured I was to meet him, that this was my very first time at the Joe, being an Australian. Becoming genuinely interesting to him at that point, instead of just another book signing. Howe ditching the polite photo opp to start actually taking to me, telling me he wasn’t allowed into Australia although I couldn’t understand why, his soft soft voice swallowed by a buzzing crowd, pre Wings-Sharks. Me joking that he must have been seen as a dodgy character – hanging shit on Gordon Howe, for fuck’s sake – and him getting a gleam in those old eyes; his minders’ beaming, slightly startled faces as I said goodbye telling me how rare that moment had been. how I should appreciate what had just magically happened. Aussie rookie has genuine chat with Hockey Royalty. Give me that brief volume-challenged connection with The Red Wings’ immortal No 9 any day over tea with the Queen or, Hell, somebody who matters.
I’ll have to write a whole different blog about watching the Wings live. Right now, we’re en route to Chicago. The Blackhawks lost 3-0 last night, so there will be talk of that. I won’t wear my brand new, signed Lidstrom jersey while in the Windy City. Wings fans aren’t liked in that town. On Tuesday, we head back to Detroit for three days, and two games. I think I have a tour of the Joe, by the Wings, lined up for Tuesday afternoon. Hockey adventures await. And then a plane home.
It’s been a trip. I can’t begin to do it justice in brief words. So much for me being a writer.

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So wrong it was totally right.

September 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

So my half-arsed theory was totally right, which always rocks.

Nicko (in white), Will (in dark), ever ready to go head-to-head, mid-game. Photo: Mack Place

All logic told me not to even attempt to contest our final lesson scrimmage on Wednesday night.

Hadn’t skated for two weeks (apart from one very brief wobble around the Bradbury Rink on Tuesday to see if I could remain vertical after my manta ray lay-off).

A shocking head cold, moving towards flu, moving towards pneumonia or whooping cough. Or straight to death, the way I felt/feel.

Stressed and a heavy heart.

And this was the final hockey date before getting on a plane for a five week USA adventure, which would not be a good time to fall and hurt myself. (A big shout out to my San Jose doppelganger and her partner, who are both nursing broken legs from their Over 40 hockey start-up … hope you’re skating again soon, guys.)

So everything said: take the night off and go to bed. And so, of course, I did what any good hockey player should do and declared: “I’m a hockey player. I need to go play hockey now.”

And I did and it rocked. With low expectations of myself, I had a ball. In fact, if I wasn’t just a dumb hockey player, I could be forgiven for thinking there was a clear lesson there somewhere, like: stop judging myself so harshly on the ice as a rule, and just skate.

It worked on Wednesday. I loved every second of it, and could even breathe one my heart-rate was up, and didn’t need windscreen wipers on my visor for the expected snot. All good.

I think everybody had a ball (except maybe Will who was gutted that he didn’t score, as he usually does). We had white and blue jerseys, and an actual scoreboard and a clock. Our White team won, for the grand prize of a bag of lolly snakes, but nobody was too fussed about the scoreline beyond mindless competing for fun.

I was struck by how different the Intermediate Final Class game was, compared to the last game I’d played (where I’d massively sucked) at the end of my second Intro stint.

In this Intermediate game, everybody was thinking; including me. Gone were the days of seeing the puck in front of you and panicking, swishing indiscriminately.

Instead players were trapping the puck, looking for options. Others were skating to position. Defenders were guarding lanes. There were some really good goals; clean hitting from angles, or from genuine passes.

(Having said that, one of the other team’s goals was clearly offside. At the face-off, I said to coach Lliam, who was ref: “How about off-side?”

He replied sweetly: “How about shut up?”

I love hockey.)

The bottom line was that, for the first time, it felt like I was in an actual hockey game and most surprising of all was that I felt like I was keeping up. I had several moments where I controlled the puck, even in traffic. Won a couple of face-offs, won a puck in defence, trapped it and safely got it outside the blue line to stifle the attack.

Sure, these are all minor moments, but big for me, and sure, I fell over more than most people in the game (this is me we’re talking about), and I totally botched two or three potential goal-scoring opportunities, but even those I feel good about: suddenly finding myself in front of the goal, with the puck, I didn’t swipe it or just blindly shoot. I worked really hard to control it, to guide it home.

Yes, I fell over on one attempt, blowing it. Yes, a defender cleared it just as I thought I was going to score. But I was thinking; I was working the puck, not flapping stupidly. So that’s a big improvement.

It actually gives me a lot of hope for the next phase of all this: dev league or drop-in hockey, when Melbourne Ice players among other much more accomplished players can turn up. As I get more used to being out there in game conditions, and I can see others are playing Thinking Hockey, I reckon I’ll find life easier than Intro, where we were all still mostly flailing.

Oh, and I tried to give Josh, in the blue team, a shove, just because we were playing hockey and so I should try to shove him, right? I only half got him and duly fell over. Jay, a good friend of Josh’s, got into him as well and said, as we headed back to the bench at the end of our shift: “I’ve got your back, Nicko.”

“Thanks,” I replied, “but I should point out that I started it.”

(Hearing us discussing this later, coach Lliam said: “That doesn’t matter. You’re on the same team…”

Lliam had also warned me during the game for trying to Board an opponent, which I took as a win. Happy days.)

And so now, to America, hopefully sans this lurgy. In less than one month my boys and I will be at an NHL stadium in Washington, five rows from the glass, watching the Red Wings live.

God knows how this self-indulgent blog will mutate while I’m away. The NHL teams are playing pre-season games now, so we’re hitting the States at exactly the right time. Maybe this will become a blog about NHL official merchandise retailing?

When I get back, I start following my plan to get private skating lessons and become a much better skater, before tackling Intermediate again with more sure footing on blades.

It’s a good plan. But only after some major adventuring.

Bring it.

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Once more with feeling …

September 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Nicko (right) and a manta friend.

So, I have a game of ice hockey tomorrow night. Turns out I’m in town, back from crazy manta ray adventures, for the final class of Wednesday night lessons. And that means scrimmages.

Having not been on the ice for a couple of weeks, and having been in a different universe (see picture) and now caught in the quicksand of life and labouring under a heavy head cold … well, what could go wrong?

Weirdly, this could be just what I need. I can hit the ice tomorrow with no real expectation of performing at a high standard. I should just get out there, crash into people and have fun. Given that I don’t plan to take formal classes next term (Will and many others are doing Intermediate again, and Dev League, so I’m very worried about being left behind, but I think I need to follow my plan to become a better pure skater) … this could be my last real game for a long time, unless I take the plunge into Drop-In hockey when I’m back from America.

The last scrimmage session I attempted was at the end of my second stint of Intro and it was an absolute shocker. My dodgy shoulder exploded very early in the piece after a nasty fall, confidence ebbed with every shift and I was terrible all night.

I’m pretty sure the whole experience was made worse because I was dumb enough to carry expectations onto the ice. I hadn’t played so badly in my first end-of-Intro scrimmage and it made sense that, 10 weeks of refining and underlining skills later, I should be an infinitely better player, right?

Wrong. When I was clearly fumbling and bumbling like your standard end-of-Intro beginner, I unravelled.

Happily, in Intermediate, I’ve known all term that I’m at the lower end of skills among the class, so I can just embrace that and do what I can. The others have been in hockey mode right through, whereas I blew off to Lady Elliot Island to dive with Project Manta, and you can’t believe what an awesome/foreign headspace that was.

hockey sledging in the Tropics.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the lead scientist, Kathy, is a Canadian who wore her Canadian hockey jersey around between dives, and one of the dive masters, Alesh, was a Czech who gave Kathy anti-Canada hockey shit at every turn, well, hockey would have been another planet.

Canadian Kathy.

Even stranger than spending seven days underwater with giant mantas was having no phone or internet access for a week. You tried that lately? It’s freaky, if you’re as connected as most people who would bother to read a blog. I had no idea Sam Stosur had won the US Open, only sketchy details of the footy finals and missed a whole week of friends’ lives on facebook. Very unusual.

Since I got back to Melbourne, I’ve been absorbing the trusty Detroit Free Press and Detroit News sites, to see what’s been happening at the Red Wings. Informal training has now ended and the team is in Traverse City, holding formal pre-season training. Pavel Datsyuk is wearing No. 24 instead of his usual No. 13 for the entire pre-season, as a tribute to the Wings’ previous 24, the late Ruslan Salei, killed in that plane crash a week or so ago.

Me at Earthwatch's Project Manta.

My last blog stands, about not knowing where life is going to take you; allowing those Wings of Fate to flap. For good and bad, and often at the same time.

Right now, I need to concentrate on the good, because there’s a lot of it if I tune in. I can’t believe last week I was swimming with manta rays, with up to a five-metre wingspan. I can’t believe in two and a half weeks, I’ll be in Manhattan, skating at Central Park. I can’t believe in a month and a bit, we’ll be watching the Wings live, in Washington and then Detroit. I even have tickets, stashed among my luggage. As long as online booking across two countries works, we’re there. Or very unhappy.

But first I need to survive tomorrow night, including coming up with a way to handle mass snot under a glass visor. I never said this hockey adventure would be pretty.

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Hockey everywhere

July 31, 2011 by 2 Comments

Sydney's temporary ice rink

So I’m in Sydney for my kids film festival, and it’s a Wednesday so I’m a little bummed because I’m missing hockey class (despite my last blog’s exploration of fear in Intermediate hockey).  I screw up on the local train system and end up blundering back into the night at St James station, near Hyde Park, not very far at all from where I’d boarded a train at Circular Quay, and decide to walk back to my hotel. Which means I cross a road and find myself staring at a temporary outdoor ice rink. It was like a movie set: people skating in strange fluoro orange rental skates, marquees everywhere selling German sausage or beer or Dutch pancakes. Chicks in that slightly kinky Swiss/German outfit with the white blouse and the skirt and the long socks. And a bunch of hockey players aimlessly skating around between the punters, or sucking on cigarettes and drinking beer; probably not coincidentally perched right near the gorgeous Heidi chicks.

I went over and said hi and found out they were a local team, the Sydney Bears, presumably hired by the Winter Festival organisers to add some colour to the event. It turns out there are five or so regular rinks in Sydney (as against Melbourne’s two, that I know of). The Bears carefully hid their fags while posing for my photo. I wished them well, as fellow ice warriors.

It should have surprised me to find ice skating in the heart of Sydney. But it didn’t. For some reason, here in Australia, deep in the southern Hemisphere, about as far from Canada as you can get, ice hockey turns up much more than it rightfully should.

Getting a haircut at Dr Follicles, it turns out the dude cutting my locks as I sip my beer ($28 the lot:

The Bears: fags hidden.

great deal) is from Canada and plays a level or so below Melbourne Ice in the local leagues. (I’ve since seen him in action at Stick & Puck sessions: he’s amazing.) When my boys and I had a Thai exchange student stay with us earlier in the year and suggested hockey as a bizarre treat, she sniffed that her dad used to play. Say what? In Thailand? He studied in America and got a taste for it. She admitted she had played back home, and the subtle hint she was too polite to spell out was that she would kick Will and my arses all around the ice if it came down to it. A mate from journalism turns out to have played for years.

And so it goes. If you raise this crazy sport in conversation, almost everybody has a story, or a friend who plays, or some connection. I wonder if I still had my now-defunct Yarraville connection and had therefore become obsessed by, say, Trugo, if I would be having the same experience of constant connection with strangers? Is hockey on the rise as a Melbourne pastime and phenomenon, or am I just more aware of it when it crosses my path?

The good news is that I got back to Melbourne in time for Saturday’s class, led by Steve “Scuba” Edwards (No. 17 for the Ice) and Shona. This week, to my undying relief, the class was almost entirely skating and passing and shooting. I still sucked compared to some, but my stick handling is actually okay so I was able to keep up and it was a lot more fun than the pivots and transitions and other fancy skating that had unraveled me last time.

The skating Ninja, who chooses to partake in the classes without armour, was unexpectedly sent on his way, presumably for health and safety reasons, and Will was laid up after an operation on his toe, which left me and almost the entire team from the Ice Dogs, a Development League team who all seem to be using this class as practice and hunt in packs. They’re welcoming though, if tough on the ice.

We did a heap of drills and the sweat was pouring as we came off, in a good way. A genuine workout.

And for the first time, I had a genuine goalie in net, a woman who effortlessly stopped every one of my shots. Added to my list of skills to be worked on is a more powerful shot. I once broke a stick, cracking hard at the goal. I seem to have lost that power when it matters, which means I need to hit some Stick & Puck sessions to keep swinging until I can trouble a goalie.

But this week it all feels achievable again. Difficult, yes. Daunting, yes. A long road to be travelled, sure. But doable. What a difference a week makes – even if I did finally get around to watching “The Mighty Ducks”, a compulsory rite of passage for any hockey player, only to discover it was predictable early Nineties pap. (“What?” Will sneered at me. “You were expecting M. Night Shyamalan twists?”)

Even that couldn’t throw me off my stride this week. I have whisky, chocolate and True Blood following “send” on this post. I still have a functioning shoulder, after lots of hockey and a spirited footy hitout in today’s brilliant sunshine. Plus Melbourne Ice won in a shoot out last night against the Gold Coast Blue Tongues (who had an excellent goalie), with Jason Baclig and Army sealing the goals to win it. And I have my official Census forms, with the only question being what joke religion I’m going to go with on August 9? I’m thinking “Red Wing”, ahead of Jedi or Pastafarian.

Life is good.

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