hockey Archives - Page 5 of 9

The top ten Christmas or holiday gifts for a sports fan

The Friday after Thanksgiving is infamously the first day of the holiday shopping season. Black Friday, as it’s called, is a time for sales of questionable worth and dangerous hordes of stampeding shoppers. The whole phenomenon is a funny one though, because by and large, the only people I know who actually get their holiday shopping done before the last minute are all people I would classify as being the least likely to riot over reduced-price electronics. Most of my friends are just rounding into shopping form now, with plenty of gifts left to buy before the 25th. Their motto (our motto, I suppose I should say,) is “if you leave it until the last minute, it only takes a minute.” Here are the top ten sports related gifts that I’ve reviewed over the last couple years. All are guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of the sports fan in your life!

Bob Ryan’s Scribe

Bob Ryan is one of the best known and most respected sports writers in the country. He started as an intern at the Boston Globe in 1968 and retired from full-time work there in 2012 after 44 years as a beat writer and columnist. He is a Boston sports writer, through and through — never bothering to adopt the feigned objective neutrality of many journalists in sports. Although he is “retired” now, he remains almost as prolific as he ever has been and this book is proof of that.

Stadium prints

We’re always on the look-out for tasteful ways to represent beloved sports teams in home decor. Items that fit this bill are worth their weight in, well, not gold at current prices, but aluminum at least. They give the sports fan in the household a way to express pride and love while simultaneously giving their family, partner, or housemates a chance to express their own tasteful sense of home propriety. The large selection of colorful stadium prints from City Prints fits the bill on every detail.

30 for 30 sports documentary box set

ESPN and Bill Simmons’ series of sports documentaries, released under the 30 for 30 brand name, have been home to many of the best sports documentaries of the last several years. Their model of targeting filmmakers from outside of the sports media conglomerate and then asking them to work on a subject of their choosing has produced some very interesting pieces. My favorites (Once Brothers, The Two Escobars, and June 17, 1994) from the series are all included in the box set of twelve films.

NBA player art

Baseball is the sport of the trading card but that leaves some very interesting niches for other sports to fill in. Seattle-based illustrator Matthew Hollister decided to create player artwork for every basketball player in the NBA. He displays and sells these funky and attractive prints at his site, EveryPlayerInTheLeague.

The Stanley Cup of popcorn

This gift should be a perennial on every top ten list of gifts ever written. It’s hard to beat the combination of the Stanley Cup, the greatest and most desired trophy in all of sports, with the equally desirable delicious goodness of home-popped popcorn!

Baseballism shirts

The holidays are the perfect time to invest in some stylish, clever baseball apparel for yourself or for the baseball fan in your life. Baseballism is a great place to find baseball apparel that looks and feels good. Their style plays on the traditional aspects of baseball without taking on the conventional and a slightly ugly characteristics of old-school baseball uniforms.

The Blind Side

A best selling book and Hollywood movie, Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side remains a classic and incredibly contemporary. On top of being a touching story and a great tactical history of football, The Blind Side, is an insightful, challenging book about America, one that has incisive insight into this fall’s cultural issues.

Baseball stadium prints

Not only are these minimalist baseball stadium prints by S. Preston great presents but they’re also a good defense against the fan in your life buying a regular sports poster to remember the season by; one that you will not want hung in your living room. A gift of one of these prints says, “I like how big of a fan you are and I support your team” without saying “let’s turn our house into a locker room.”

Rep your school this holiday season

For fans of college sports, December is not just the holiday season, it’s also the time when college football enters into its postseason bowl games and when college basketball starts its regular season in earnest. It’s a great time to pick up something sports related as a gift for yourself or the college sports fan in your life. Here’s a selection of college sports gifts that range the gamut from useful to kitschy.

Sports books for children

How better to pass on the gift of sports than to give a young sports fan a book that will spark their imagination and inspire them? Two of my childhood favorites, Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars by Walter Brooks and Ice Magic by Matt Christopher are joined by three wonderful baseball books, Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates, You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!, and You Never Heard of Willie Mays?! by Jonah Winter.

Bonus: Who’s on first?

Holiday time is classics time in many households. It’s the perfect time to slip back into the wonderful nostalgia and legitimately great entertainment of the mid-twentieth century, back when men were real men, women were real women, and comedians were really funny. Whether it’s an introduction or a reprise for the fiftieth time, watching or listening to Abbott and Costello’s classic Who’s on First comedy bit is a great time. Celebrate the genius of their humor with this selection of Who’s on First memorabilia.

Mix and match – the best sports articles of the week

This week’s collection of endorsed articles about sports that are good to read whether you are a sports fan or just sports curious don’t have a real theme. If there is anything that connects them, it’s the idea that greatness, even or maybe especially in sports, comes in all shapes and sizes. From the dominance of an obsessive compulsive quarterback to the rise of an enthusiastic young defensemen to the notoriety of disappearing foam, sports greatness is as fun to describe as it is far ranging.

Preparing for Peyton

by Brandon Flowers for the MMQB

Peyton Manning is a familiar face because of his widespread commercial work (“chicken parm you taste so good” and “cut that meat, cut that meat” are my favorites). In his commercials, Manning comes across as down-to-earth and self effacing. But what is it like to actually be across the field from him, trying to stop him from doing the thing he’s best in the world at. On the field Manning is totally ruthless, effective, and to hear defensive back Brandon Flowers write about the experience, terrifying.

That week felt like we were preparing for battle. You have to be precise in everything you do. You can’t give him even an inch. You have to conduct a flawless game plan.

We thought we had a good one. After studying film, we had this one blitz our coaches drew up that we thought we could drop in. We’d essentially send our whole left side of the defense at him. He wouldn’t see it coming. Well, somehow he did. Nobody jumped or gave any indication we were blitzing. Then right before the play, Peyton checked and threw a quick pass to the left side. Big gain, first down. We weren’t even showing the blitz! I have no idea how he knew.

The Ice Breaker

by Ben McGrath for The New Yorker

P.K. Subban sticks out like a sore thumb on an NHL ice hockey rink. The obvious reason for this is that he is the child of Carribean immigrants and his inherited dark skin is still unusual on hockey teams. Subban has also been criticized and celebrated for sticking out for other reasons — his unabashed enthusiasm and his style of play. The difficulty in writing about him is separating his truly unique person from the stereotypical characteristics that he is imbued with in the eyes of others because of his skin. McGrath tackles this task with grace and insight.

Hockey, like the country of its birth, has long valued understatement—sometimes comic understatement—and shunned salesmanship… The conformist power of Canadian hockey culture is such that even New Englanders and Swedes, after a few years of inhaling North American Zamboni fumes, will come to adopt a Manitoban prairie lilt, and speak in run-on sentences of cautious optimism.

Subban’s family believes that others have mistaken their beloved P.K.’s boisterous personality for something more sinister. “He is confident,” Maria says. “My son is a different kettle of fish.” He is also an inveterate camera hog, dating to the earliest birthday parties and home videos. I can vouch for his chirping outside the rink, too, turning up the radio at stoplights and drawing wayward looks from other drivers as he shimmies in his seat.

The arrival of a force as disruptive as Subban, in an institution as self-regarding as le Club du Hockey, is as significant, in its way, as Gretzky’s arrival was in Hollywood a quarter-century ago.

That Weird White Spray they Use in Soccer: An Investigation

by Jorge Arangure for Vice Sports

Ever since the World Cup this past summer, I have wondered about the disappearing spray that referees used to mark distances on set pieces. Arangure gives me more information in this article than I had bargained for and it’s very interesting. As with many inventions, the disappearing spray seems to have been the product of convergent evolution, and like many inventions, now seems to be marketed aggressively and simultaneously by multiple get-rich-quick hucksters.

The true star of the 2014 World Cup was a little spray can that referees carried in their pockets and took out during stoppages. At this point, the ref would press down on a nozzle and spray out a foamy residue to draw a line on the grass that players were not supposed to cross.
Then, after only a few moments, the line would magically disappear.

Part of the spray’s popularity lay in that it lived in an almost philosophical universe. It existed and then suddenly it didn’t. It disappeared without leaving a trace of what had come before. And that was the allure. Its existence was never supposed to matter. The spray’s purpose was to mark a time and a place at a certain time and place and then it was supposed to go away forever. Who couldn’t use a magic metaphysical line to divide things every now and then in their everyday life?

Mario Lemieux from phenom to star to owner

The story of Mario Lemieux is one of the more incredible in sports history. In celebration of 30 years of Lemieux’s involvement with Pittsburgh as a player and owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has produced an excellent interactive history of his life. Written by J. Brady McCollough, this short-novel length article is well worth the time it takes to read whether you’re a fan of the Penguins, a hockey fan, or just someone who loves learning about honorable, determined, and talented people. The Post-Gazette has kindly given their readers three options for consuming this piece: read selected excerpts, the full text of the piece or browse an interactive timeline.

From a young age, Lemieux was tagged as one of Canada’s best young hockey prospects. When he was drafted and signed by the pitiful Pittsburgh Penguins, he had no idea the twists and turns and challenges that were ahead for him and the city of Pittsburgh. During Lemieux’s incredible career, he endured chronic back and hip problems as well as a bought with cancer. Lemieux was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in 1993 at the age of 27, right in the middle of his prime as a hockey player. Coming face to face with his own mortality jarred Lemieux, as it would all of us, so he decided to focus his thoughts on the subject he knew the best. While his body was being treated for cancer, Lemieux’s mind lived in its own person ice hockey rink. Here’s the excerpt from McCollough’s piece:

Lemieux had spent so many nights over the years awake, thinking about what lay ahead and what he was going to do about it. With weeks of radiation therapy staring him down, that wasn’t easy to do. So, he just thought about hockey.

“I had a big lead on Pat Lafontaine,” Lemieux says of the points race. “I would stay up at night and watch ESPN and find out how many points he got, day after day. He got a lead, and that was my goal, to come back after the last treatment and step on the ice and start chasing him. That was important for me. That was a challenge.”

On the morning of March 2, 1993, Lemieux had his last radiation treatment. He had missed 23 games, and Lafontaine now led him by 12 points with 20 games to go. The Penguins were playing that night at Philadelphia against the hated Flyers, and Lemieux wasn’t going to miss it. He hopped a charter flight and arrived at the Spectrum, surprising everyone, even NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who didn’t have time to get to Philly from New York to witness it.

When Lemieux took the ice, the Philadelphia fans who had lustily booed him for years were now on their feet, cheering him. Having not skated for nearly two months, his body tired from blasts of radiation, Lemieux scored a goal and an assist in a 5-4 Penguins defeat. That felt remarkable, but he was just getting started.

Pittsburgh ran off an NHL-record 17 straight wins, as Lemieux set his sights on Lafontaine. Playing some of the most inspired hockey anyone had ever seen — never mind the circumstances — he scored 30 goals and 26 assists after his return to pass Lafontaine and win by 12 points.

It was one of the most unfathomable seasons an athlete has had in any sport, and for a guy who valued his privacy, all it did was pull his fans and admirers closer.

“He was a superhero of flesh and blood,” close friend Chuck Greenberg says. “He hurt, and he got sick, like real people do, and he did things that only superheroes can do.

After Lemieux retired, the Pittsburgh Penguins fell on hard times financially and their owner took the rare but not unprecedented step of declaring bankruptcy. Lemieux had structured his contracts as a player to include a lot of back-weighted money so that he could provide the most flexibility for the team to pay his teammates while he was there. The Penguins owed him over $30 million dollars, money that the current owner was not planning on paying as part of the bankruptcy settlement. This was the impetus for Lemieux to attempt something that was more than rare; something that was unprecedented — he decided to buy his old team. In what were eventually successful negotiations to do this, Lemieux ended up insisting that he take all of his back wages in equity in the team, as an exhibition of his intent to buy the team for the good of the city, not as a way to recoup his losses. And this is what he has done for the last fifteen years! Here is an excerpt from the Post-Gazette piece about the fateful night at Morton’s restaurant in Pittsburgh when Lemieux decided to try to buy the Penguins:

That night at Morton’s, it was time to discuss the options. Lemieux just listened, which was his way. Tom Reich started talking, which was his way. Reich said that the only way to guarantee Lemieux would get his money — and that the Penguins would remain in Pittsburgh with proper ownership — was for Lemieux to put together a group to buy the team out of bankruptcy. It was wild, insane even. But Lemieux considered it. They proposed the scenario to bankruptcy attorney Doug Campbell, who had the legal know-how.

“I said, ‘OK, do you have any money?’ No. ‘Do you have any investors lined up?’ No,” Campbell says. “OK, so you’re telling me a $30 million unsecured creditor who has no investors lined up is going to go head to head against two publicly-traded corporations, one of which has the master lease for the Civic Arena and the other the TV rights, and we don’t even have a telephone or an office, and we’re going to outmaneuver them legally and financially and get control of the franchise?”

Well, yes.

Go check out the full story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and J. Brady McCollough! You won’t be sorry. Again, the three options for consuming this piece are to: read selected excerpts, the full text of the piece or browse an interactive timeline. Enjoy!

Sports books for children

My family didn’t have a television until I was around six or seven and even after that, it was more often a piece of furniture than an active source of entertainment. Most of my earliest memories of sports come from either playing them or reading about them. As I have been thinking about sports gifts to promote on Dear Sports Fan, I realized that even today, when it’s so much easier to find live sports on TV or streaming over the internet and the number of sports documentaries, radio shows, and podcasts is almost countless, books are unmatched in their ability to stimulate the imagination of young sports fans. Here are a couple of my childhood sports favorites and a trio of books by a friend of mine who writes slightly odd and extremely enjoyable children’s books. Any of these would be a great holiday gift for the young sports fan in your family or social circle!

Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars by Walter Brooks

The Freddy the Pig series was my favorite as a child. I was even a proud member of a Freddy the Pig fan club! Freddy is the leader of a farm of talking animals in Upstate New York. With the benevolent permission of the farmer, Mr. Bean, Freddy pretty much runs the farm as well as being a reputable detective, explorer, and in this book, baseball manager. In the process of investigating the disappearance of one of the community of Martians living in the area, Freddy goes undercover the manager of a mixed Martian and circus animal baseball team. Published in 1955, this book is full of wonderful era-appropriate characters and plot twists, like the head of the ABI (Animal Bureau of Investigations), J.J. Pomeroy (J. Edgar Hoover, anyone?) as well as the very 1950s Martians and their flying saucer.

I really can’t recommend these books enough. If you want to pair this one with one of the earliest and best of the series, buy a copy of Freddy The Detective too.

Ice Magic by Matt Christopher

The premise of this book is that a youth hockey player’s fortunes in the rink are predicted by the results of his nightly games on one of those table-top hockey games that are like foosball but with little hockey players on tracks. Matt Christopher was a prolific writer of sports books for children — he wrote well over 100 books — and I must have read a bunch of them but this one was particularly memorable. I think it played some role in making hockey my favorite spectator sport from a young age.

A trio of baseball books by Jonah Winter

Jonah Winter writes children’s books in the spirit of the early Muppets. They’re wonderful for kids and won’t drive you totally mad even if you have to read them out-loud every night for months on end. In these three biographical books about baseball stars from the 50s through the 70s, Winter emphasizes not just his subjects’ achievements on the field but also the challenges they faced as African American, Jewish, or Hispanic baseball players.

Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates

You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!

You Never Heard of Willie Mays?!

Sidney Crosby and the talent penalty

Sidney Crosby is the greatest hockey player on earth today. He’s also the most hated. Wherever he plays ice hockey, unless it’s in his home town of Cole Harbor, Canada, or his professional home of Pittsburgh, PA, he is subjected to boos and curses. Last night, I went to a Rangers vs. Penguins game in New York, and despite what I would characterize as a very friendly atmosphere in the stands, I heard him described as a bitch, a pussy, and worse. Hockey fans hate Sidney Crosby. That’s a strange phenomenon in an era when sports stars, due to a combination of television exposure and a natural instinct among sports fans to admire and respect the very best in the world, are generally more liked than hated. It takes a massive public misstep like LeBron’s fateful “decision” blunder to turn the casual fan against a star. So why is it that Crosby is so reviled?

People hate Sidney Crosby because he doesn’t fit into the hockey fan’s image of how a supremely talented player should play. The greatest players in hockey history have mostly had a detachment from the physical extremes of the sport. Wayne Gretsky was 5’11 and 175 pounds. He used deceptive quickness, a preternatural ability to know what was coming before it came, and the intimidative power of some of the games toughest enforcers on his team to stay largely untouched during his record breaking career. Mario Lemieux had the size (6’4″, 230 lbs) to inflict a physical toll on anyone who tried to prevent him from scoring, but because of his chronic bad back and his elegant style, he didn’t get into too many scrappy situations. Power forwards like Bobby Hull and his son Brett or Alexander Ovechkin certainly throw their weight around the rink but their remembered more for their rocket shots than anything else and they specialize in scoring from distance.

Crosby is different. He is a pest, he’s a scrapper, he thrives in the dirty melees in front of the net. If you use Sporting Charts’ awesome NHL shot chart tool to visualize Crosby’s goals compared to one of his closest peers and biggest rivals, Alexander Ovechin, you will see the difference. Crosby scores many of his goals from only a few feet from the net. Even his most spectacular goals usually involve him hurtling into traffic to split defenders or fantastic shots he makes while being knocked over. There’s not a lot of elegance to the way he scores, he just gets it done. Even his equipment bears witness to his utilitarian desire for goal scoring — he uses one of the flattest sticks in hockey so that his backhand can be almost as good as his forehand.

Crosby is a physical player. He’s got a low center of gravity and he’s incredibly strong but unlike Ovechkin or Eric Lindron, that doesn’t translate into highlight producing body checks. Instead, Crosby uses his strength defensively, to withstand the fierce body checks that his opponents throw at him to try to tire him out, wear him down, or intimidate him. Indeed, he often bounces off the player who’s trying to hit him, leaving them in a worse position than when they started. When Crosby does use his strength aggressively, it usually comes out in a slash of the stick at an opponents unprotected wrist, a dangerous slew-foot, or a seemingly casual elbow that just happened to connect with an opponents jaw. Crosby also has a reputation for the darker arts of hockey: diving and for complaining to refs.

Crosby probably doesn’t sound like a very nice guy from this description, at least on the ice. That’s true, he’s probably not, but the curious thing is that fans normally love players like that. Every fan base has their favorite pest. The pest’s job is to play on the third line of forwards and go up against the best players on the opposing team, play solid defense, and annoy the shit out of them. The goal is to be so annoying, that the opponents best player is knocked off their game. If your team’s pest can convince their opposition that winning tonight is not worth the effort, bruises, and cuts or switch the opponent’s focus from winning to beating them up, your team has a significant advantage. Often these pests are also surprisingly effective as offensive players. They fight their way in front of the net and tip shots in or bang rebounds into the back of the net. Just off the top of my head, I can list some examples of players of this type who were absolutely loved: Dino Ciccarelli, Tony Amonte, Jarkko Ruutu, Johan Franzen, Mats Zuccarello, Sean Avery, Brad Marchand, and Max Talbot.

That is exactly how Crosby plays, except Crosby also happens to be the most talented player in the world. If he weren’t, he’d probably be happy to be a pest, toiling on the third line, killing penalties, making his living annoying his opponents with trash talk and a never-ending flurry of slashes, cross-checks, and face washes. And trust me, he would be embraced and loved by his teammates and fans. Fans of opposing teams wouldn’t like him, but they would respect him and if he ever ended up on their team, they’d embrace him as “their pest.”

Sidney Crosby plays hockey the way the players we love to love play hockey but because he’s so talented, we love to hate him. In Chuck Klosterman’s mastercollection of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, he has an essay exploring a similar phenomenon in the career of the supremely talented but mostly unloved basketball player, Ralph Sampson. Sampson was a 7’4″ center who enjoyed playing the more highly technical, less physical game on the perimeter of basketball games. “Why” fans asked themselves, “does Sampson play so delicately? If I were 7’4″, I would dunk on everyone.” It’s the same thing with Sidney Crosby. Fans believe that if they had the advantage of talent the way that Crosby has, they would play more honorably. And yet, they, we honor the less talented players who play the vital pest role on team’s third lines. Why do we penalize Crosby in our judgement for the talent he possesses?

The greatest hockey player in the world is a pest stuck in the body of a superstar. Why is that so bad?

Five rules for being a fan of the away team

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m a Boston Celtics fan living in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve got tickets to see my team play later this week and I’m super excited about it. But then I started thinking about going to the game and I realized that I don’t really know how to act or what to wear. Can you help?

Thanks,
Kirk

Dear Kirk,

You are a sports fan. You spend dozens of hours watching your team on television. You read about your team obsessively, you follow players on twitter, you know the names of your team’s beat writers, and you have more than three bits of team paraphernalia in your closet or on your walls. You don’t live in your team’s city anymore (or maybe you never have) but you haven’t let that stop you from rooting for them. Finally, your team comes to town and you splurge for some tickets. You’re excited to see your team play in person. It’s the day of the game and suddenly, you starting thinking… oh man, what am I going to wear? How should I act? Is everything going to be cool? I’m rooting for the away team tonight. How should I act?

It’s an age old conundrum: how should you act as a fan for the away team?

I’m going to a hockey game as a fan of the away team tonight, so this is something I’ve been thinking about today. At first I thought I would write this piece with a certain amount of uncertainty. “I’m not sure what I think,” I thought I should write, “but here are the variables in play.” Actually though, the more I think about it, the more I feel certain that I do know how one should act as an away team. When you are a fan of an away team, you are basically a guest in someone’s house. You should act accordingly. Here are five rules for being a fan of the away team:

By all means, wear your team colors, but do it with restraint. A hat or scarf is great. A jersey is fine. A full team warmup suit accompanied with team pom-poms and face paint? That’s a little too much. Save that for when you are going to a home game.
The same holds for your behavior. Don’t get belligerently drunk and scream. That type of behavior is permissible (some might say ideal) when you are rooting for the home team, but as an away team fan, you should be more demure. Applaud your team. Cheer when they score. But you know what? Stand and applaud when the other team scores too. You’re watching with thousands of people for whom that is a good thing. If you want them to welcome you, show that you appreciate their hospitality.
Don’t try to affect the game. Home teams deserve to have the advantage of being supported by their fans. In most sports, this advantage simply consists of the emotional boost players get from hearing the support of their fans. In a few sports though, fans have more direct ways to try to affect the game — by making it impossible for offenses to communicate in football or by distracting a free throw shooter in basketball. It’s not your right to do this as an away fan. You’re already limiting the impact of home court by taking a loyal supporters’ seat and you don’t have to apologize for that but you don’t get to try to impact the game as if you were at home.
Being an away fan does not make you a legitimate target. Good natured ribbing is fine and can be enjoyable, but you should not put up with intimidation or abuse. If you do find yourself the target of anything from a crude or mean-spirited home fan, be firm but do not escalate. Either ignore them or remind them that you’re simply a visitor who want to watch the game and support her or his team. Ask them how they would like to be treated if they traveled to an away game with their team. If things get bad, don’t be afraid to move away from them or appeal to a stadium worker for support. There are almost always other seats that you can move to.
Be knowledgeable. This goes back to acting like a good guest. It wouldn’t be nice to show up at someone’s house for dinner and not know their children’s names, what they do for work, or why they walk with a limp. That’s what you’re doing if you show up as an away fan and you don’t know the home team’s record, players, coach, history, and traditions. You don’t need to go overboard and memorize everything, but take a quick glance at the standings, a team depth chart or roster, and the team’s wikipedia page before you go. It gives you something to talk about with the people who will be sitting around you.

Sports allegiances always come down to coincidences: where you were born, who your parents were and who they rooted for, or what teams were winning championships when you were around nine years old. The relationships you create with people, even if they are only for a few hours while you watch a sports game, are more important than your devotion to a team. Being a fan of an away team can be a tricky balancing act, but it is worth it. Have fun!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

The benefit of learning toughness from sports

You have to be tough to play sports. That’s a central message of most sports cultures that gets hammered into athletes brains from a very young age. Sports culture is fairly unyielding on this principal. “Walk it off.” “There’s a difference between being hurt and being injured.” “Rub some dirt on it.” These common phrases are just some of the ways that parents, coaches, and peers all reinforce that core tenant of sports, playing through pain. We also honor professional athletes who play through pain. Michael Jordan’s flu game, where he scored 38 points despite being visibly ill is legendary. Willis Reed coming out to play in game seven of the 1970 NBA finals despite having a torn thigh muscle is equally famous. In baseball, Kirk Gibson’s hobbled home run in the 1988 World Series remains one of the most famous plays ever. Football players make playing through injury so routine that you needn’t look farther back than a few weeks ago when quarterback Tony Romo broke two bones in his lower back and came back to finish the game. No sport lives its injury ethos more diligently than hockey. In the 2013 playoffs, Gregory Campbell broke his leg during a penalty kill and played on it for more than a minute before getting to the bench. In that same playoffs, Campbell’s teammate Patrice Bergeron played through broken ribs, torn cartilage around the ribs, a punctured lung, and a separated shoulder. Just this season, Olli Maata, played with a cancerous throat tumor. He played until his scheduled surgery, which doctors think was successful, and is now back skating, ahead of schedule to return for his team. Not only does hockey culture demand this of its players, but it demands that they play through injury immediately (thus the phrase, “player A [suffered this injury] and didn’t miss a shift”) but without complaint.

Playing through pain isn’t always a good thing. We now know that ignoring the effects of brain injuries is a very, very bad thing to do. The culture is slowly shifting to be more permissive of players who voluntarily report injuries or who choose to sit out a game or two to get healthy. This is almost definitely for the best but it’s easy, when in the midst of a cultural shift, to forget the benefits of the element of the culture that is changing. There are real benefits to the principals of toughness that sports instills in its participants. Most of us who play sports don’t become professional athletes. We’ll never need to play basketball while unable to properly walk or hockey while in intense pain but all of us are people who, at some point in our lives, will face intense challenges. Whether it’s fighting through a flu to watch your child perform in something important to them or suffering from a disease or handling the anguish of a loved one’s death or giving birth, no one makes it through life without being faced with a painful situation. The benefit of learning toughness from sports is that it’s there when you need it.

Nowhere is the benefit of having learned toughness from sports more clear than in the amazing story of Mikey Nichols. Brought to us by Steve Politi of NJ.com, this is a truly inspiring story. Nichols was playing hockey for his high school team from Monroe, NJ, when he suffered an injury to his spine which left him paralyzed:

He was chasing a puck in the corner when he was checked from behind. “I remember sliding into the boards and thinking, ‘Oh (shoot), I’m going to get a concussion. I don’t want to miss a shift.’ And then I hit the boards.”

He knew something was very wrong.

“Mikey, you good?” his best friend asked.

“I’m fine, bro. I just can’t move anything.”

Hockey culture informs its players that they should respond to all injuries with casual indifference. Yes, he’s fine. He just can’t feel his body. But he’s fine. Viewed from afar, the fact that the sport Nichols loves might have informed how he responded to a catastrophic injury he suffered while playing the sport may seem like not nearly enough to balance the scales in favor of hockey and sports culture. But when you read Politi’s article, you get a sense for how amazing Nichols is and how having grown up a hockey fan and player doesn’t just inform the moments after the injury, that it’s going to be a part of who he is forever, no matter what challenges he faces, then you start to think about things differently.

“To play in the NHL, of course,” is what Mikey will say when you ask him his goals. But then he’ll get serious. He’ll talk about his parents and the sacrifices they’ve made. “I want to be able to do everything I used to take for granted, and now I wished I had back.”

Maybe it’s The Big Idea that’ll give him that. Maybe it’ll be some other promising research. But, after spending the past 10 months meeting other people with spinal-cord injuries and benefitting from their help, he hasn’t lost hope.

“I want everyone who’s ever had to be in a wheelchair to walk again,” he said. “And to get a second chance.”

Getting paralyzed during a sporting event is horrible and I wish it never happened. There are some common-sense things hockey could change to avoid more of these injuries and they should absolutely do them. They are rare though. Nichols is one of the small percentage of people who suffer a life-changing injury playing sports but his attitude is an inspiring reminder that the lessons taught in sports can help all of us overcome (the hopefully smaller) the challenges that life presents to us. Just remember, if Nichols can figuratively say of himself, “hockey player becomes a paraplegic, doesn’t miss a shift” we can do it too.

What happened on Thursday, November 14?

Goalie gets offensive: It’s very rare in NHL hockey for a goalie to score a goal. It happens only once every decade or so when a goalie takes a shot at the opposing team’s empty net. More frequent but still rare is the goalie assist. San Jose Sharks goalie Antii Niemi got an assist last night in the Sharks 2-1 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Line: Goalie assists are like when a pitcher hits a home run in baseball — unusual and fun.
Past beats future, present beats the Nets: The Chicago Bulls, whose chance to win a championship may be in the rear-view mirror thanks to Pau Gasol’s age and Derrick Rose’s inability to stay healthy, beat the young, up-and-coming, Toronto Raptors 100-93 in Toronto. Meanwhile, over in California, a team built to win now, the Golden State Warriors beat the visiting Brooklyn Nets 107 to 99. Could be some of my own fan’s pessimism, but I don’t the Nets are built to do much of anything this year… or any year in the foreseeable future.
Line: The Bulls beat the Raptors but Derrick Rose hurt himself again. That’s like three injuries in twelve games.
High scoring college football games: In the two featured college football games last night, there were a total of 168 points scored! That’s a lot. The Cincinnati Bearcats beat the East Carolina Pirates 54-46 and the USC Trojans beat the California Golden Bears 38-30.
Line: I can almost guarantee that those were two of the five best college football games this weekend. Shame I missed them!
A throwback NFL game: The Miami Dolphins beat the Buffalo Bills last night in a game that looked, at times, like football from 20 or 40 years ago. For the entire first half and a good portion of the second, no one scored a touchdown. It wasn’t bad offense, just really good defense, so this was enjoyable to watch. Then, in the third quarter, the Dolphins finally broke through on offense, scoring a touchdown, and on defense where they scored a safety after pressuring Bills quarterback Kyle Orton to take an intentional grounding penalty in his own end-zone.
Line: I love watching that type of throwback football where the defenses dominate the game.

Stadium prints for sports fans

City Prints is an online fine-art print shop founded and operated by Tony and Katie Rodono that specializes in prints of places. The idea for City Prints came to them years after Tony started a traffic counting company. That business didn’t take off but Tony took away an enjoyment of drawing intersections. When the couple had a child, Tony writes on the about page of the City Prints website, he “realized the importance of place” and the idea of making fine-art prints out of locations was born. City Prints sells a wide variety of map-art. I’ve personally purchased one of the few non-map prints, an Apple II computer schematic, so I can vouch for the quality of their work. Most of what they produce are maps of areas as large as the earth and as small as a sports stadium or race track.

All of the prints are available as 12 x 12 prints alone, matted, or matted and framed. You can also get them in 30 x 30 Gallery-Wrapped canvases. Here are some of my favorites with links to the specific product and category so that you can hunt for the print that’s most meaningful to you or the sports fan in your life.

Race Tracks

Churchill Downs — the legendary site of the Kentucky Derby. Put this print up in your living room and mix some refreshing mint juleps.

Talladega Track — for the NASCAR/Will Farrell fan in you(r life.)

College Football

Michigan Stadium — called the Big House, this is one of the original and ultimate bowls in sports.

College Basketball

Cameron Indoor Stadium — the home of the Duke Blue Devils, where Coach Krzyzewski roams the floor and the students stand the entire game.

Dean E. Smith Center — home of Duke’s main Rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels. This is a fair and balanced blog.

NFL Football

Lambeau Field — home to the only collectively owned major professional sports franchise, the Green Bay Packers, Lambeau field is a national treasure.

NBA Basketball

Madison Square Garden — called basketball’s Mecca, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan is home to the New York Knicks but has also been an important location for the history of college basketball. It hosted the Big East championships for decades.

NHL Hockey

Bell Centre — What the New York Yankees are to baseball, the Montreal Canadiens are to hockey. The legendary franchise has won almost exactly one quarter of all the Stanley Cups in history.

Soccer

White Hart Lane — City Prints has a wide selection of international and domestic soccer stadiums but if you’re looking for a typically British design, the map of Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium is unmatched.

Why are game sevens so great?

If you’re a sports fan, there is nothing better than a game seven. If you’re a fan of the team in the game seven, it’s the most dramatic, heart-wrenching, nerve-wracking, squeal inducing sports situation your team can possibly be in. If you’re simply a fan of sports but don’t have a rooting interest one way or another, game seven is a joy. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about and why game sevens are so great, read on.

Sports has developed a wide variety of ways to decide which team or person is the best. The most common ways of doing this are round-robin tournaments, single-elimination tournaments, multiple-elimination tournaments, and three, five, or seven game series. Sometimes a combination of these approaches are used. There is something to be said for each form of playoff but the one we are concerned with today is a seven game series. In a single elimination tournament, like March Madness in college basketball, a team that loses once is eliminated forever. In a double-elimination tournament, a team that loses twice is eliminated forever. This could go on to infinity if you wanted it to. In a quadruple elimination tournament, a team that lost four times would be out. In an undecuple (yes) elimination tournament, a team that loses eleven times would be eliminated from the tournament. The seven game series is a version of a quadruple elimination tournament where two teams play each other in successive games until one team has won (and the other team has lost) four games.

Just reaching game seven in a seven game series tells you so many things about the series. For one thing, both teams have won (and lost) three games. The two teams are close to even in skill and determination, otherwise one would have been eliminated before then. There have been lots of ups and downs during the series. There’s been enough time for the players on the opposing teams to get to know each other and (usually) develop an explosive mixture of begrudging respect and bubbling disdain. This is magnified in sports like hockey where so much physicality is allowed during the game. It’s also magnified the farther you go in the playoffs. A first round game seven is not as dramatic as a second round game seven. Some sports, like baseball, recognize this and save the seven game series for later rounds, using shorter series earlier on. A game seven in the Stanley Cup finals, the NBA finals, or the World Series is the absolute pinnacle of sporting drama. The team that wins these game sevens are achieving life-long dreams and reaching the highest professional success possible.

Even if you put all the other factors aside, game sevens are still really cool because of their emotional resonance for the players. One common complaint about professional sports is that the fans care more about the teams than the players do; that the players are mercenaries who do it just for the money. In a game seven, you know that every player who steps on the pitchers mound or the batting box, every player who vaults over the boards onto the ice, every player who grabs a rebound or makes a layup, somewhere, in the back of their heads is thinking “Game seven, World Series/Stanley Cup final/NBA final…” just like they did when they were nine years-old in their backyards playing with a friend or two. Game sevens have a way of reducing sports back down to their essentials. Box out. Dump the puck. Make contact. Keep your eye on the ball.

Tonight the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants play in game seven of the World Series. Let’s enjoy it.