Hockey

The NHL season started.

When your team plays deep into the playoffs for the first time in ages, the NHL off-season is thankfully quite short.

I missed the below hit in the preseason but the newly discovered www.thetwolinepass.com didn't. If you're a hockey fan I suggest checking the site out. It's quite excellent. A nice addition to my bookmark toolbar.

Dion Phaneuf hits Kyle Okposo

Hockey is pretty much the coolest sport on earth, aside from football. And rugby. Ron Artest even goes to hockey games. That's how cool it is.

Also, I posted a Milan Lucic fight from the other day...here's another one. This time he beat the living shit out of Jay Harrison. At this rate, Lucic is going to bloody someone up every 3 days. It's going to be an awesome hockey season.

Happy Monday.

Woah. Hockey Fights Are Back. And Ties Are Stupid...

Hockey. It's coming back...soon. Like Thursday I think.

I know the Chicago Blackhawks start the season in Finland or Korea or Iran or some really stupid place on earth so I'm not overly positive on when the NHL kicks off their ice charades. It's soon.

Part of the reason I do enjoy hockey is because you can fight during the contest. Make a big hit on the other team's star player? Star player's goon teammate is going to find you and try and slit your throat with his skate.

Marc Savard, one of Boston's superbly talented players got raped earlier in the game by ginger-boy Chris Neil of the Ottawa Senators. Milan Lucic, as noted by his Serbian name of destruction, doesn't like when that happens.

He tries to shove the smaller Neil around and make him mad. Neil responds by shoving back. Lucic, like any good Serb, decides when the puck drops, just to hit Neil in the nuts with his stick.

Neil, like any good ginger, quickly responds because he has no genitalia and begins to fight Lucic.

Lucic gets some good shots in and Neil actually hangs tight in the fight before it ends with Neil's face looking a lot worse than Lucic's.

Either way, it's professional athlete's, who could kill you and me, fighting in the middle of a pre-season game and the refs allowing it. That's why hockey is great. It's a sport full of talent and skill and huge hits and fights. Plus, some teams have hot ice girl cheerleaders too.

** On a side note...the NHL used to have ties. Teams would play 60-minutes of hard fought hockey and then go to overtime. If the teams tied at the end of overtime, the game ended in a tie. That's retarded, I know. Thankfully, nowadays, the NHL forces a short OT, then goes to a shootout to decide the winner. OT is neat. Shootouts are awesome. Ties are for losers.

The NFL, thankfully filled with non-losers, rarely has an OT game end in a tie because the teams are so exhausted from brutally destroying each other that one team usually screws up and allows a TD or field goal or safety and ends the game before OT can end with no scoring.

That leads me to last night's softball game that my co-workers and I played in...

We played our second game of the season, in typical Chicago fall fashion - a little warm weather, diagonal rain, wind, darkness, coldness and dust. We played a good team that got out to a big lead and we came back to tie it up, take the lead, and go back and forth with this team for 6 strong innings.

When the 6th inning ended, tied 14-14, the ump looked at his watch, and yelled, "TIME!! The next game has to start now! Game ends in a tie!"

...what?!?...a tie??? Are you f*cking serious?

We were pissed. Both teams agreed that this sucked. The game before ours went long and we started late. Now we had to end on time so the two teams behind us could play? It's not like it was 0-0 either. Both teams played well and still had another inning or two in them before we had to hit the bar...but nope. Game ended in a tie.

I couldn't imagine being a professional sports player and having to end the game in a tie. NFL football ending in a tie? Rarely ever happens. NHL? Nope, not anymore. Baseball? Aside from the All-Star debacle a few years back, no more ties. NBA? They'll play till 1,000 points are put up or Vernon Maxwell snaps and kills both teams. For Christ's sake I've seen a 3-day Cricket match take place in London so a tie wouldn't happen. And those f*ckers stopped to drink tea in the middle of the match!!

...which leads me to two final points...

1) Ties are f*cking retarded. Two teams go to battle and one comes away a winner. Wars don't end in ties. Sports shouldn't either.

2) Soccer is for weirdos. Soccer games end in ties. They flop all over the field for 90 minutes, scratch and scream at each other, and kick a ball. Soccer games end in ties. Soccer sucks.

That's all.

More Spooning With A Stranger coming soon. I enjoy writing too much to take prolonged breaks for actual real-world work. My plan for fall is to grow a beard, wear flannels, drink hot-alcoholic cider, and write. Hope it works out.

Hockey Fighting Is Always Cool

Earlier this month, Cam Janssen of the St. Louis Blues had a hockey fight. He drinks all the time and spends way too much time at bars so he fights a lot.

This wasn't a traditional hockey fight though. Normally, guys fall down off-balance or one guy lands a ridiculous shot and the other guy gives up. Or some idiotic loser stops the fight early because "fighting is bad and the world should be full of peace." But it can't be. The world is a violent, crazy place full of terrorists and people who watch 'Survivor'. People need to fight to put each other in their collective place. Thank God for people like Cam Janssen.

Cam Janssen not only drinks and plays hockey, he fights like Rocky. He has marathon fights that result in bloody knuckles and standing fans. He always manages to piss people off, make them swing away, then pound them until the other guy is too tired to fight any longer. Here's the fight from earlier this month. It's an eternity in the hockey fight world.

Here's another one. This was Janssen's fight from the other night. He had some whiskey on the bench, made love to some woman in the crowd, then decided he needed to fight someone. It was another epic title fight. It lasted for almost two minutes until the guy he was fighting said, "F*ck this. That dude's knuckles are all bloody and he won't stop punching me."

So thank you Cam Janssen. There's losers who are weak and dislike fighting and there are heroes who are godzillain in their love for destruction. You carry that torch. You are the reason hockey will (hopefully) never ban fighting.

Seriously, fighting is awesome.