I listened to my usual dosage of sports talk radio today - and what the channel guide describes as hip, Emmy-award winning sports television - and there was no talk about hockey.
Well, it was fun while it lasted.
The sport has been the talk of sports news and talking heads for a couple weeks now thanks to the build-up of the Olympic tournament. Now the game of hockey has been put on ice.
It’s gone back to its regularly scheduled programing where most of the free world can ignore it - just like all the people that were cheering on Lindsay Vonn or Bode Miller can forget about the sport of skiing and ignore the World Cup season. At least there are those Ice Capade-like skating shows to keep the real fair-weather fans something to be excited about.
I was actually a little torn about all the hoopla about hockey.
On the one hand, it was nice to see the sport get a little attention. It was also nice to see some good hockey. Olympic hockey is so much faster and more exciting than the muddled down regular season game and a good taste of what is to come when the Stanley Cup playoffs come around - not that any of us will see much of it since the TV coverage is so sparse.
Playoff, or tournament hockey, can be pretty awesome stuff when teams are skating back and forth and the next goal and the winning goal could happen at any moment. It can be on-the-edge-of-your-seat riveting. I have a ton of great hockey memories of watching a nail-biter of a game go into the wee hours of the morning. Some of those marathon games I was covering.
It was also nice to see U. S hockey do so well and give Canada a scare - even though as soon as the U. S. beat Canada the first time, I knew a possible beatdown was to come. Fortunately the U.S. team made a game of it.
To have that going on at the same time we were remembering the 1980 Olympic Gold Medal was quite timely. Even though the nitwits that wanted to compare the U.S. win over Canada as a modern day win over the Soviets needed a two-hander across the knees and maybe a good spear to the balalaika's.
Still, hockey was in the news. People were talking about it. People were watching it. And the game was getting a pretty good showcase and all the puckheads of the world were happy.
Of course, then there was the downside. With any Olympic coverage there is the multitude of bandwagon jumpers that all of a sudden give a puck about a sport they knew nothing about the day before the opening ceremonies and won’t pay attention to after all the torches are extinguished. It’s like all the people that show up at Super Bowl parties and couldn’t name one person on either team. They want to be at the party and want to watch the commercials.
That’s why I can hardly stand the Olympics anymore. It really isn’t about sports now. All the people that live and die with their reality shows suddenly become couch potato sports fan waiting for the next great “up close and personal” Olympic feature to give us some sad story about this or that athlete whose dog died or had bad acne as a middle school kid.
As I waited for the late news to come on one evening, I caught the award ceremony for figure skating. It included the Canadian skater whose mother died during the Olympics. The announcers fell all over themselves to be overly dramatic while production zoomed in close enough to make sure no footage of any tears were missed. It was nauseating at best and exploitative at worst. Yet, I bet the viewers lapped that stuff up.
When I was watching Sunday’s Gold Medal game in a bar, I was surrounded by people who knew nothing about hockey. When the U.S. pulled its goalie in the final minute, one women asked “What happened to the goalie guy?” Another person wondered if they’d have to play the rest of the game without said goalie guy.
Me, I just cringed. People were talking about hockey but it was kind of like people that talk about politics that are equally clueless about the topics at hand. It’s enough to wonder what the forefathers were thinking when they came up with the whole freedom of speech idea.
But now, after a few days of hockey talk, life returns to normal. It’s kind of like when a national event draws the country together and even gets the politicians playing nice. The Republicans act like human beings while the Democrats display some backbone and quit their whining. That only lasts so long and so does the the nation’s attention to hockey.
Now the world can get back to discussing American Idol and Tiger’s private life and leave hockey to the puckheads that truly enjoy the game and knows when and where the goalie guy might be.
