© the other press e¢ Sports

December 10, 2003

 

A Novice in the Arena:

Vancouver Giants vs Tri-City Americans

D-Lo McLeod
OP Contributor

On the snowy second day of the New Year
I take my 14-year-old son and his friends
to the Vancouver Giants game. Brent, a
laconic teen who plays hockey with a ban-
tam “hitting” team, is disgusted at how
quickly and easily the Tri-City Americans
make “cream of white” with the Giants,
though the latter manage to squeak out a
couple of goals while being basted five to
two. I'm there for the heck of
it and to see if it’s really true, according to
years of second-hand accounts of the
Canucks’ misdeeds, that no team from
Vancouver can be any good. As we pick
our way toward our seats, my son, Quinn,
tries to reinforce a few basics: “Remember,
Mom, when they get the puck in the goal,
you say they scored a goal. They don’t
make it. They score it.”

We settle into our sticky red vinyl seats
in time for the initial face-off. I like the
retro and intimate ambiance of the Pacific
Coliseum relative to BC Place—70s
music sound-bites thumping and happy
(read “mostly inebriated”) faces visible all
the way around the rink. While doing the
“wave, I imagine that—instead of
SkyTrain and minivans—waiting to take
us home after the game are funky BC
Hydro buses and Pontiac StratoChiefs,
just like in the old days. It’s all very three-

 

 

and-a-half decades ago. The players look
smaller and seem dressed less hi-tech than
the Canucks, the rink looks tiny, the
building feels—correction, is, old—dis-
played near one entrance, a Black and
White photo of the 1968 Coliseum open-
ing attests to that.

“Ref, you suck!” chant the high-spirited
males in the rows behind us, much to my
son, Quinn’s, red-faced glee. In his “non-
hitting” league, those words are ground
for expulsion—the drunken fans might
just as well be yelling, “Fuck, shit, penis,”
as far as he’s concerned. “But there’s more
than one ref,” I point out.

“Shouldn't it be, “Refs, you suck’?”
Michael, one of the friends, turns to me.
“Those other guys are linemen,” he said.
Two players are pounding each other
voraciously, their helmets scattered on the
ice.

“Gee, doesn’t that defeat the whole pur-
pose of helmets?” I ask.

Again, I am enlightened, this time by
Quinn: “The other guy pulls it off. And
usually he tries to yank the guy’s jersey
over his head.” He merely rolls his eyes
when I ask if, while they were at it, they
ever try to pull each other’s cups off. “My
mom's obsessed with jock straps,” he tells
his buddies. I want to ask if the refs ever

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got penalties, but figure enough already,
I've embarrassed my son.

“Five minutes for fighting,” said the
announcer, after another fight so pro-
longed that red-shirted bouncers move in
readiness toward the boards. As if they
could make any difference. “What? That's
got to have been at least a ten-minute-
penalty fight,” I said, thinking weakly
that, whoops, I betcha the maximum
penalty is only five minutes.

Sure enough, Michael says, “Five min-
utes is a long time in hockey.” Which it
is—the periods are only 20 minutes long,
but—depending on how many times the
play is interrupted—those 20 minutes can
really get stretched out. Rather disheart-
ening for any hockey ignoramus reluc-
tantly attending a game who looks at the
scoreboard and says, “20 minutes times
three? I can handle that,” only to discover
that each one of those minutes has the
potential to last nearly as long as the sup-
posed length of the period. For example,
Ive seen Canucks games where one
minute of game time consumed 15 min-
utes of real time. So, in addition to chips
and cola, I have brought along a book. As
it turns out, I have little recourse to it,
preferring instead to think about how stu-

pid the mascot blimp looks and how

much stupider the fans look screaming for
it to drop its little white papers on them.

By game’s end, the Giants have made 40
shots on goal, whereas the more calculat-
ing Americans have finagled a total of 27.
It’s been a game of disheartened passing
and shooting, but then, with five minutes
of fame time left, “our” team scores. In
response to my son’s look of disownership
when I look even stupider screaming and
doing the wave, I attempt to justify
myself: “But they made a goal.” Whoops,
my bad.

“Yeah, Mom,” he says, “they made the
goal out of net and rubber,” he says, his
whole countenance conveying the notion
that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

As we climb toward the exit up steps
gummy with beer (and gum), Brent says,
“Worse game ever. Makes me want to quit
hockey.” But the drunken guys saved the
outing. In the minds of 14-year-old boys,
there’s nothing like using coarse and
unsportsmanlike language to debate the
severity of penalties and yelling, “Ref, you
suck!” to liven up any halfassed game.
More evidence for my theory that, just as
in any performance, it’s the audience—
the more uninhibited the better—that
makes live hockey so darned entertaining,
no matter how pathetic the play.