The Weekly Meat

Coed Hockey

"The hottie is wrecking my mojo."

That's what I'm thinking as I skate down the ice. And that is not a good thought to have. To my mind, nearly any thought is bad. I prefer to just be in the moment-to-moment pace of the game, reacting to whatever situation I'm in. If I think too much — either about what's going on, or about anything outside of the game — I tend to screw up. I'm a beer leaguer, but I love the sport, and I've been playing a long time. So though my ability to see the ice is still far better than what my hands and feet will actually do for me, I do alright when simply reacting as plays develop.

Hockey is one of the few things in my life that generally allows me this hyper-aware, almost meditative focus. I don't empty my mind per se while skating. Rather, I empty my mind of all things not happening right then and there on the ice — an act that is frees me tremendously from the stress of adult life.

So, you can perhaps understand my red-blooded, heterosexual dismay when, say, a good-looking young Swedish lass skates with us — as one occasionally does.

Her mere presence antagonizes me, throws me off my game. Thought creeps in. At times, even, the sorts of thoughts for which Jimmy Carter was apt to apologize publicly.

And it's not just me. I've skated with the same Wednesday night group of guys for more than a half dozen years, and women sometimes skate with us. We're all of varying skill levels, from high school hacks to guys who played Canadian juniors. It's a good, competitive skate, with a nice pace to it. Without showing anyone else up, guys don't tend to give lesser-skilled players a break. But for the hotties.

This current one plays alright positionally, but she's not very quick on her feet, and for that, we tend to give her a bit more of a chance than we would show any of the less skilled guys who regularly skate. Is it sexist and slightly pandering? That's a discussion for another day. I just know it's different.

Doing anything athletic with women is fairly new to me. (That is, to say, in a group setting. Ahem.) And hockey doesn't generally lend itself to coed play, despite what those sophomoric '90s college t-shirts might have had you believe. Softball, sure, but that's a sport one can play recreationally while drinking a beer. Hockey's innate physicality makes coed play difficult, as even in non-checking games, there is plenty of incidental contact. Sure, there is bulky gear involved, so any male-female physicality is relative (as opposed to the closeness of a basketball court, where tight one-on-one defense is essentially groping). But still.

When I sit next to guys on the bench, we tend to smell, as I've noted before on these pages, like rotting pig stink. But even under all the same gear, women manage to smell like women. And that throws me.

I grew up playing team sports. After a 10-year lull during college and grad school, it was great, during my late twenties, to get back into the group dynamic of team sports while playing in an organized soccer league. The league was coed, and that was fine. I was single, and well, none of my teammates were exactly Keira Knightley.

But soccer led me back to hockey, and hockey has now put me, a handful of times, in a sweaty locker room with women. And that creates a strange dynamic, in a place that has been one of the few man-caves in which I regularly hang out. Not to get all drum-thumping about male bonding, but I do enjoy the camaraderie, and the moment women enter that world, sex enters into it — adding a certain stress into my sole stress-free activity.

Hockey always been sacrosanct for me in that way. More so than anything I've done, it has always provided a break from all things sexual in life. Playing soccer as a teenager, I was always aware that the girls' teams were practicing on nearby fields, and always in part was hoping to somehow look cool even as I was playing. But in the early days of Title IX, aside from the occasional figure skater, women were only ever at ice rinks for actual games — and conveniently-scheduled prime-time games at that.

I don't know, maybe sports in this new millennium have entered a post-gender realm. Maybe I just need to look past attractive women and rise above what seems, at times like these, my biological handicap. Ach. Maybe I'm just a crotchety middle-aged married guy with too much to say about this.

Förlåt, Swedish girl. Jag förstår inte. So, go ahead, play on. Play with us, even. But skate with your head up. And dammit, if I can see your eyeliner, you're too close.

Thanks to Laura and Katie for the pics.

Full Spectrum*

*Post title lifted from Jay Greenberg's book of the same name, an outstanding and thorough history of the Philadelphia Flyers.

In 1974, the Flyers won their first Stanley Cup in what I can only describe as the temple of my youth, the Philadelphia Spectrum. I was six years old. I played street hockey religiously, and my hero was a skinny, diabetic kid from Flin Flon, Manitoba; no front teeth; wore number 16. His name was Robert Earl Clarke.

Every day until dark, I played my eyes out, drank orange juice to raise my blood-sugar level, I got cut, and I fell down and still scored even as I was falling. I wanted to be Bobby Clarke so badly I was actually mad I wasn’t diabetic.

Thirty-some years later, l've migrated north to Boston, but still follow the Flyers with fanatical devotion. And I find myself disappointed beyond melancholy to read plans for the Spectrum to be torn down.

I'm a realist; I've got nothing against change. But when change breeds acres of ostentatious, soulless, repetitious crap meant to create a "'Philly Live!' experience," well then, I've got a problem with it.

The Flyers' current arena, across the massive parking lot — the CoreStates First Union Wachovia Center — is itself case and point.

The approach funnels you to an outdoor beer garden, followed by a WalMart-sized merchandising center, then escalators up, up, up to your seats, and so forth. It has the cavernous and artificial canned-air feel of a mall, or a cruise ship. Same as Boston's Fleet Center Bank North Garden.

On my first visit to the new Philly rink a dozen years ago, I witnessed a ticket-taker telling a young orange-and-black-painted fan that no cardboard signs were allowed in the arena. Obviously, there were no advertising dollars associated with his homemade "Let's Go Flyers!" sign. And the Big Bank Arena couldn't hear his protests, for all of its bone-jarring neon, blinking TV monitors, and arcade games, with enough wattage to tear the roof off the old Spectrum.

It seems we cannot simply build new arenas with comfy seats and better sight lines. No, we're told we need "thriving entertainment destinations." Because, apparently, we fans are so prone to boredom while walking from the parking lot to the arena; the arena entrance to our seats; and, of course, while we're watching the game itself.

You know, there's a fine line between successfully selling, and selling out. But the line is there if we care to heed it. Hockey players are still arguably the most unaffected in pro sports, yet with every new arena complex, diehard fans like me are priced out of tickets by fatcat hack owners concerned with the corporate dollars brought in by their expanding arsenal of luxury boxes — filled largely with wealthy suits who think “forechecking” is something that happens before one player checks another.

I would open my window and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” like Peter Finch in the movie Network, but I can’t even do that because all of these big bank buildings attempt to manufacture enthusiasm (something the Spectrum — or the old Boston Garden — was never wanting for) by playing that exact video-bite on their big-screen jumbotrons.

So you real estate suits can go have your redevelopment project cakewalks, and then you can go screw. You're even worse than the fair-weather moguls who own our sports teams — and who are, themselves, often justifiably despised by their true fan base.

Me? Whether in Philly or Boston, I stay home and watch the games with a few other oldtime fans, all of whom have the ability to concentrate on only the game for a few hours — or in the event of quintuple overtime — for as long as it damn well takes.

I’m six again. It’s late in the game, we’re shorthanded, and we’re down a goal. I’m tired, I’m bleeding, and I’m diabetic. I don’t care. Give me the goddamn puck.

Postscript: I've got loads of great memories of the Spectrum. From hockey to hoops, to concerts, to a brief out-of-the-crowd spotlight moment I had with the Globetrotters, to '80s WWF wrestling, to a high school game skated on Spectrum ice (I think we played West Catholic, and I think they kicked our ass. But we got to change in a big-league locker room, and I met Tim Kerr as he arrived for that night's game), it was grandly labeled "America's Showplace." But that was marketing department wordplay, and in actuality, the Spectrum never presented itself as anything more than it was: a thunderous sardine can of a building with bad ice, sticky floors, basement bathrooms, and the smokiest concourse you could ever experience. But it was Philly, through and through — crammed with heart, soul, and genuine emotion. It was ours. And if you wanted to win in our Spectrum, you had to fight us for it.

The following are the five perfect memories of the Spectrum that will always spring immediately to my mind (I was there for 2–4, loving every minute of each):

5. March 28, 1992: Grant Hill inbounds to Christian Laettner, for the win in the NCAA east regional hoop finals.

4. May 16, 1985: Davey Poulin scores while two-men down to clinch the Wales Conference finals and send the Flyers to the Cup.

3. January 11, 1977: Flyers v. the Soviet Red Army Team.

2. May 28, 1987: J.J. Daigneault forces game 7 of the Cup against the Oil.

1. May 19, 1974: "The Flyers win the Stanley Cup! The Flyers win the Stanley Cup!"

Stink Palm

As we wind down to the final third of the hockey season, it's important for us all to take stock of crucial issues and discuss the deadly phenomenon silently stalking our sport: gear rot.

Because the dirty little secret about playing hockey is this: It stinks. The equipment just flat-out reeks.

Now, for the uninitiated, let's be real clear about this. I've been skating for a long time, and I don't mean any of this in a prissy, sweat-is-smelly sort of way, I mean that, by any objective standards, old hockey gear smells like dead goddamn pig funk.

It's a smell all its own, yet shockingly the same from player to player: stale, fetid, animalistic. Not quite body odor, not quite fungus, not quite feet, not quite aging cheese, not quite ass — but a combination of all. It defies categorization, is strong beyond its years, and cannot be cured by simple measures. It laughs in the face of Febreze, washing machines, and even more rigorous chemical and non-chemical bacteria-killing treatments. Like puke, or "new car smell" (or can we just call that what it is?), it is so inherently linked to the thing itself, that it's hard to imagine even brand new gear not being a bit rank.

To put things in context for those of you who don't play or have never lived with someone who did, I skate with a goalie whose gear is so ripe that his (perfectly healthy) cat once mistook it for the litterbox and peed in his bag.

Once in high school, I borrowed a friend's ancient leather blocker to play goalie for a street hockey session. My right hand smelled for nearly a week. I washed it all the time. It was pink and shiny. But it smelled like a dead goddamn pig.

I used to have the experience where I'd be sitting next to a guy on the bench — or worse yet, skate by a guy on the ice — and get slammed by a sudden and thunderous wall of stink, the sort of which burns your nostrils and can be described only with words like putrid. Simply put, that doesn't really happen to me anymore. Which can mean only one thing: I've become that guy.

This is the sort of evolution that happens "two ways" — as Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises: "gradually and then suddenly."

As a teenager, it wasn't too bad (despite my mom's protestations to the contrary). My equipment was newer, I didn't sweat as much, and, well, kid sweat is no match for the briny sweat of a grown-ass man. Now, I'm hairier, more out of shape, sweatier, and — though I've swapped out bits and pieces over the years — most of my gear is still old enough to drink legally (and live enough to walk itself to the pub).

Still, I think it wasn't too bad off until I started playing year-round. Sure, rinks are cool enough to keep the ice properly frozen, but a rink on a hot, humid, summer day in the northeast U.S. is significantly warmer (warm enough to fog up) than the same rink in the dead of winter. When I finish a summer skate, I and everything I'm wearing, am soaked to the gills in such a way that takes more than 24 hours for my pads to properly dry.

And suddenly, I'm that guy.

I should mention here that I'm a pretty clean, non-slob. I don't leave my wet gear in the car — or even in my hockey bag — overnight. I air it out — until my wife can't take it anymore, and my two-year-old daughter points to it and says "Stinky pee-ew. Daddy, hockey game."

Does it embarrass me? Hell no. I draw from that stench a perverse source of veteran's pride. It is maybe the only tangible rec-league career milestone I'll ever see, and I've worked hard to earn it. I don't dislike the stink and I don't begrudge it. So you clean-freak ninnies can take your fancy anti-bacterial countermeasures and walk on, eh. You'll get my hockey bag from me when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

...And I will smell no worse than that bag.

The NHL All-Time All-Ugly Team

We have to respect ugly. Ugly is part of the game. It is smart and calculating. It does not rest on its past glory. It's out there scouring obscure corners of the globe, signing guys while they're still playing Midget, and — judging from Brad Park's draft photo — it has been for a long time. Ugly has its teeth in several young stars of the moment, and ugly will be around for a long time to come. We simply cannot beat ugly. We can, however, celebrate it.

If some of these guys look like they've been hit in the face with a bag of nickels, it's because they have. Yes, several have won Cups, and most (OK, all) could kick my short, skinny, rec league ass, but the roster must be made.

Note that none of these guys are the victims of a single especially bad picture, at an awkward time. And aside from Doug Favell, I took a pass on old-school goalies like Gump Worsley. They were easy targets, but as the Gumper himself liked to say, "My face is my mask" — and that's a tough nut you've gotta respect. Kasparaitis, on the other hand, well, he ain't got no alibi.

	Mike Ricci — Don't kid yourself it's all about the missing tooth or the long hair. Beauty might be only skin deep, but ugly cuts straight to the bone. (Warning: Click the thumbnails for a bigger pic only if you dare.)
	Darius Kasparaitis — The man whose name sounds like a disease as bad as his mug. Darius, I'll always remember you losing in the fifth overtime, baby, when Keith Primeau shook you out of your jock. Now that was some beautiful ugliness.
	Nick Fotiu — A tough fighter who was always a hometown fan favorite. Probably a great guy to go have a couple of pops with. But a puss that only Mrs. Fotiu could love.
	Rod Brind'Amour — Ah, Brindy. I love his game: he's all effort, all the time, and I'd be willing to look like him if it meant I could play like him. But he's first team All-Ugly in any league.
	Doug Favell — One of the first guys to really start painting his goalie mask creatively, but like an ugly girl wearing gaudy jewelry, there was clearly some misdirection behind that. He always looked much better behind the mask.
	Chris Chelios — Sorry, Chelly. Your longevity is admirable, as is this piece of acting brilliance alongside Samuel L. Jackson, but you're on the list and you know it.
	Eddie Johnstone — Even when I was a young kid, I remember thinking this guy kind of looked like a rat with a beak.
	Slava Fetisov — Ugly in Russian? "уродско." A mainstay on the Soviet Red Army team, Slava was one of the best D-men in the world for a good decade before coming to play in the NHL at age 31. Shown here on the Wings, he proves that you can leave your country, but you can't leave ugly.
	Tiger Williams — The NHL all-time career penalty minutes leader, and a stand-up ugly dude. I think of him in those old school, equally ugly Canucks "flying V" jerseys. Of special note, epicurean readers will be keenly interested to see that Tiger has not been idle in retirement. If you can find a copy, check out his cookbook: Done Like Dinner: Tiger in the Kitchen.
	Esa Tikkanen — "The Grate One" was maybe the most accomplished pest of all time. And let's face it, the worst kind of pest is an ugly pest.
	Gino Odjick — Lurch, why the long face? Tough as nails, it's still inconceivable to me that the "Algonquin Enforcer" was forced to retire early due to a concussion from taking a puck to the head. Gino looks like he makes pucks run away and wet themselves.
	Jeff Odgers — Square jaw, busted up nose, accentuated by the Breathe Right strip. Frickin' beauty. Gotta love Odgers.
	Mike Bossy — Bossy was ugly in that stylish Iggy Pop sort of way that undoubtedly got him lots of action back in the Studio 54 days, and he was hands-down the most talented guy in this bunch, but he's one ugly dude.
	Kjell Samuelsson — Ugly is sneaky. Kjell tried to outgrow it, but even at 6'6" ugly was able to catch up to his face.
	Marcel Dionne — The aptly nicknamed "Little Beaver" was another amazingly talented first team All-Ugly guy. And one with more staying power than Bossy. One of the few guys in the 700 goal club, 5th on the all-time points list, and center to the legendary "Triple Crown" line, with Charlie Simmer and Dave Taylor. Neither of those guys were real strong in the looks department either, but something tells me they managed to get laid a lot with Marcel around for comparison, eh?
	Bobby Holik — Holik's got that medical-experiment-gone-awry meets drill-sergeant thing going on. He just plain scares the crap out of me.
	Brian Bellows — A point-a-game guy for a long time, but he never really learned to backcheck. And, of course, there's this damning evidence, courtesy of Bryan Trottier and Kevin Stevens (who, you know, was always a great judge of character). OK, OK, Bellows isn't really all that ugly, but I can't resist that ridiculous Trottier/Stevens clip.
	Dennis Polonich — Ladies and gentlemen, we just might have a winner. By all accounts, Polonich was pretty much a grade-A asshat during his tenure in the NHL. Despite being roughly the size of the artist formerly known as Prince, he was a pest of the highest magnitude. I remember going to a Saturday matinée game in Philly and having the benches clear so the Flyers could get a piece of him. It was Donnybrook every time he came to town, and like any good fan, I hated his guts.

The Cold War on Ice

Back in my professing days, I once tried to explain the concept of the Cold War to a classroom full of college students, most born after 1980, who gleefully admitted, "Our idea of the Cold War is Rocky IV."

I could sympathize a bit, allowing that my own memories of Vietnam were those of hearing the morning news on the radio and asking my parents why we were off fighting "gorillas" in some jungle. What'd we have against them anyway?

But when I was eight, I witnessed an epic Cold War battle played out in my own hometown. It was January 11, 1976, and my dad gave up his ticket (I can still see it now, with crossed US and Soviet flags) so my mom and I could go down to the spiritual temple of my youth, the Philadelphia Spectrum, the day the Soviet Red Army hockey team came to town to take on the team for which I lived and breathed.

It was a politically turbulent time. There just had been two attempts on President Ford's life; Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had been sentenced for their involvement in Watergate; the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh; and Saigon fell (so much for that domino).

In the world of hockey, it was four years after the epic '72 Summit Series, but that was an entirely Canadian thing, and though the players themselves may have known better, most fans in the US were oblivious to our silver hockey medal in Sapporo. And we were still four years removed from the Miracle on Ice at Lake Placid, and all of the replayed sights and sounds associated with that game.

For me, life was pretty simple. I slept under a big National Geographic map of the US. Next to it was a map of the world, with each country's flag on it (so I knew the hammer and sickle well). I had a red, white, and blue bean bag chair on my floor. It was a bicentennial year and I lived in the city in which the Declaration of Independence had been signed. The Flyers had won the Stanley Cup the preceding two years, and were, we thought, on track to repeat a third time. Philly pride was at an all time high even before Rocky crystallized the feeling in celluloid later in the year.

Like all kids of the Cold War, I was taught fear at a young age. I knew there were good guys in the world (see States, the United), and there were bad (see Republics, Union of Soviet Socialist). I knew it was solely because of the bad guys that my school was a designated "fallout shelter" — and I knew what that meant and when I thought about it, it scared the crap out of me. I knew, too, that I was more free than my Russian counterparts, and I knew that (though my ancestors had a century earlier) I did not want to live in Russia.

On this day, the good guys wore orange and white, and the bad guys wore red. It's difficult in our now-global world to stress just how incredibly foreign the Soviets looked — so different from our guys: their facial features more severe; to a man, they were clean shaven, in contrast to our wild and woolly bunch; they did not smile; and they all wore matching Jofa helmets (odd, eastern bloc-y things in that era, and with the Cyrillic CCCP on them), at a time when few in the NHL wore helmets at all. They warmed up with different drills; they skated and played differently. As a kid, it was like going to the zoo for the first time, or witnessing aliens: new, fascinating, and a little frightening.

Their outstanding goalie, Vladislav Tretiak wore not a goalie mask, but a wire cage on a helmet — one of the first I'd really seen in action. It looked so ragged, after I'd become so accustomed to the smooth, clean contours of Bernie Parent's simple white logo mask. The difference seemed significant to me even then; the steel cage somehow speaking volumes about the lives of others in their country.

The Russians looked, and certainly played, like hockey automatons. They were extremely talented and machine-like, and at the height of their international dominance. This swing through North America was billed as a goodwill (though there wasn't any) tour, with two Soviet teams playing games against the best NHL teams, none of which had beaten the Soviets' vaunted Central Red Army team. The Flyers — "The Broad Street Bullies" whom nobody but Philly fans liked or respected — were to have the final chance at North American hockey salvation.

After Kate Smith's rendition of God Bless America, the Spectrum was as loud as I've ever heard it, and that place could get so loud it shook, and you felt the thunder in your gut. And somehow, we all understood — twenty-five years before the thought would be articulated in the trash-talking '90s —  what "not in our house" meant. Today was our day.

I can't remember who scored for us, but I remember Ed Van Impe's un-penalized bodycheck on one of the Russians (the talented and targeted Valeri Kharlamov) stopped the game cold, as the Russian players and coaches literally walked off the ice to protest the rough play and unfavorable officiating. A few Flyers players skated around the open ice and took shots at the empty nets, and I remember no one moved, though no one knew quite what was happening or if and when it would be resolved. And it seemed like forever, but finally, the Russians came back out onto the ice.

After that, we pretty much owned them. The Flyers had an unorthodox style — we came at you like Joe Frazier, from odd angles, willing to get hit, and taking dozens of awkward, if not plain off-target, shots — as foreign to the more fluid skating Soviets as the Soviets were to me. We were tenacious on offense, trapped in the neutral zone, and were smothering on defense. We scored immediately after play resumed, and by the middle of the second period, it was all over but the shouting.

Mostly, that afternoon I remember, when my mom and I finally stepped out onto Pattison Avenue, feeling the sudden joy and awe that David must have felt when his stone struck Goliath, and the mighty giant crumbled. And for that one day, everything I knew in the world was right. The US was better than Russia. And Philadelphia was the best in the US. Life was brilliant.