Stanley Cup Playoffs
Hello all, Steve here, with your hockey update. Yes, its that time again, time for the Stanley Cup playoffs, soon to be won by the Vancouver Canucks. Likely. I’m legally required to say that or I can be kicked out of Vancouver. They have a committee for that. Anyway, they played a great game last night. They went into a fourth overtime period, fighting through their fatigue and frustration to finally score and win the game, and they celebrated their victory by falling asleep on the ice.
For those not from rancid Northern climbs, hockey can be a confusing sport. The rules are very simple: try to injure as many people as possible and if you can find the time and still have enough wits left, try to get the little black thing into the other team’s net, as in, “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.” That’s pretty much it, really. Unlike football or basketball which get bogged down with a lot of confusing rules and regulations, hockey’s is very simple, as has been famously said, a combination of ballet and murder. It might not make a lot of sense looking at it from the outside, but its really just the best of all possible alternatives. After you’ve spent the Winter shoveling and freezing, sitting inside and slowly going insane, all you really want is to see people smash other people with sticks. And that’s pretty much what hockey is. There are, for safety purposes, some rules about how you can hit people with sticks. Todd Bertuzzi hit someone in the head with a stick and they fined and banned him. Apparently he was a bit surprised, his argument being that, after all, he was getting paid to hit people with sticks. From his point of view, he was merely adhering to the standards of his profession. The Devil is in the details.
As far as I can tell, hockey pretty much evolved out of this desire to hit people with sticks, with some minor modifications. The Powers That Be looked at this organized stick-hitting and thought three things:
1) We should certainly pay professionals to hit each other with sticks, so that civilians don’t resort to hitting each other,
2) There should be some rules and an apparent point to this thing, so that the people watching it won’t think that society’s totally collapsed, and
3) If we come up with a scoring system, then we could put it on t.v. and sell commercials.
And they were right. People who are sick of staring at each other will go for just about any other activity, especially if it involves pointless violence and commemorative jerseys of some kind. They say that Canadians are happy to make love, as long as they can both keep an eye on Hockey Night In Canada. Should be a good playoffs:)
Go Canucks, go!