Olympics give great sport a boost
The Olympics let everyone in on a little secret: Hockey is a great sport.
Before you accuse me of stating the obvious or start thinking that I might have taken too many pucks to the head as a boy, I’ll let you in on a little secret: A lot of the nation didn’t know hockey from the hokey-pokey before last night’s incredible gold medal game between the United States and Canada. http://wintergames.ap.org/story.aspx?st=id&id=349b7483de5f4d31b9e261114f5f0193
YOU knew the joys of hockey long before Sid the Kid scored the winning goal in overtime for the heavily favored Canadian team because, if you live in the circulation area of the Watertown Daily Times, you are a slap shot away from Canada. YOU can’t help but know that hockey is a great sport.
I’ve known it all my life for the same reason. Cross-check someone hard enough where I am from in Detroit and they’d end up in Windsor. We so knew about the sport that they dubbed the city, “Hockeytown USA.”
Hockey Night in Canada was a mainstay in my house on Saturdays back in the days when broadcasts from the Great White North were one of five channels that managed to struggle down the antenna on our roof and into the snowy screen of our black-and-white television. We’d cheer the Red Wings and boo the Maple Leafs or Canadiens. We lived the rivalry of USA vs. Canada in hockey long before the Olympics brought it to our homes.
We pretended we were Gordie Howe or Alex Delvecchio while skating on the five or six backyard ice rinks built with two-by-tens and filled with garden hoses by the fathers in the neighborhood. Or, if you were like me, you wore boots and played goalie while pretending to be Gump Worsley of the Canadiens. Hockey didn’t discriminate against fat kids who couldn’t skate. What a great sport.
I figured everyone knew that. Then I lived in or traveled to places where water didn’t freeze in the winter. Places where none of the 450 channels on cable television originated from Canada. Places where they thought Red Wings were birds and Canadiens were a foreign race prone to doing shots of maple syrup with their beers. They didn’t know much about hockey. And they cared about the sport even less.
Things changed a bit when a bunch of college hockey players suited up and beat a Russian team of professionals at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980. We called it a miracle and cheered. After that, the National Hockey League expanded into cities where it never snows. Talk about miracles.
Olympic ice hockey no longer pits pros against amateurs. Stars from the NHL dot most of the Olympic teams nowadays. Canada might have more dots than other teams and were clear favorites to win the gold medal that they won, but they weren’t a “lock” like the Russians in 1980. You really couldn’t have called it a miracle if Team USA, behind arguably the best goalie in the NHL in Ryan Miller – a kid who probably grew up on homemade rinks in his neighborhood in Michigan – would have won. An upset, maybe ... but no miracle.
The upset almost happened. Team USA was down by a goal with only 25 seconds left in the game. With 24.4 seconds left, it was tied. That is one of the beauties about hockey: It’s never over until it’s over. Another is the fact that a team judged to be fifth best in the tournament beat the favorite in a preliminary round and took them to overtime in the fight for the gold. That’s hockey. That’s a great sport.
There were a lot of winners at the Olympic ice rink in Vancouver this year. Cue up “O Canada” for the team that should have won the gold and did. Follow it up with a chorus of the “Star-Spangled Banner” for Miller, the tournament’s most valuable player. And if you know it, whistle the theme of Hockey Night in Canada in honor of the sport whose popularity – at least for a moment – got a boost from the exciting final game. At least for a day or two, it’s no longer a secret that hockey is a great sport.
