March 10, 2004
Hockey In An Unfamiliar Place
Courtesy of one of Off Wing's roving correspondents, we've found a trio of short pieces on our favorite sport in the pages of The New Yorker. The three (cleverly broken into periods), start with one piece by Alec Wilkinson on the forlorn state of the sport as seen through the prism of the twilight of Mark Messier's career.
The middle stanza has us travelling back to the 60s to take a hard look at Senator John Kerry's high school hockey career, and what it might tell us about the presumptive Democratic nominee for President:
As Kerry has aged, so has his style of play. The comedian Denis Leary has skated with Kerry about ten times over the past few years. Leary describes Kerry as “kind of a Phil Esposito type of player,” referring to the old Boston Bruins star, who was famous for scoring so-called garbage goals. “Kerry’s kind of tough to move out of the front of the net, and he’s king of the rebounds,” Leary said. “He’s not big on back-checking.”
Leary played in a game organized by the Kerry campaign shortly before the New Hampshire primary, in which Kerry scored two soft goals but failed, in numerous attempts, to complete the hat trick. “He took a lot of crap in the locker room,” Leary said. “He must have had six opportunities where he was wide open and he couldn’t put it away.”
Don't be surprised if Leary's invite to a potential Inaugural Ball gets lost in the mail.
In the third, we get to watch Miracle, the movie that chronicled the 1980 Olympic Hockey Tournament, through the eyes of Russian-great Igor Larionov:
Before coming to New Jersey, last summer, Larionov spent eight years on the Red Wings, in Detroit, where his teammates called him Iggy. (N.H.L. nicknames are governed by an esoteric set of rules, one being that the long “e” sound is removed from names that have it, and added to those that do not. Thus, Gretzky is Gretz, and Clarke is Clarkie.) Several times a year, the Lake Placid game was rebroadcast on cable. Without fail, a teammate, Brendan Shanahan, would come in the next day and call out, “Iggy, you watch the game last night?”
“Who was playing?” Larionov would ask.
“U.S.A.-Russia! It was a miracle!”
“Jesus, Shanny, I wasn’t there, so don’t ask me.”
Each piece is well worth your while. Read them all now.
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Tracked on September 14, 2004 09:53 PM
Great Larionov article. I had the same take on the movie he did.
Miracle was a good hockey movie. If they showed more about how the Russian players approached the game, it would have been a great movie.
Posted by:
at March 10, 2004 06:24 PM
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