December 2, 1999
LIBRARY
Hockey, Behind the Mask and on the Web
By BRUCE HEADLAM
f the four major-league sports
in North America, hockey has
the best trophy, the most exciting playoffs -- there is more tension in a Calgary-Edmonton divisional semifinal than there has been in
all 30 Super Bowls combined -- and
the most inspiring championship
ceremony. Players from the winning
team skate around the arena and
take turns hoisting the Stanley Cup
overhead, which is somehow preferable to the baseball ritual of running
around a shrink-wrapped locker
room and spraying Tim McCarver
with Budweiser.
What hockey doesn't have is respect, or at least not the respect it
craves. In the United States, the
sport remains a distant fourth behind football, baseball and basketball
and locked in the regional cable-television rotation with five-pin bowling
and swamp buggy racing.
In response, a schism has opened
in the hockey world between the internationalists, who want hockey to
become part of the global entertainment business, and the isolationists,
who believe that hockey belongs to
Canada and the parts of the United
States that resemble Canada and
who don't really care what the Sun
Belt or the rest of the world thinks.
For now, the internationalists are
winning. The National Hockey
League's official site (www.nhl.com)
publishes the usual game reports,
player statistics and bland articles.
But it also includes links to a page on
European hockey players -- an acknowledgement that the league currently draws players from 18 countries and that many of today's best
players come from Europe -- and a
page on the league's Diversity Task
Force.
The task force, an attempt ""to
introduce children of diverse ethnic
backgrounds to the game of hockey,""
is a tacit acknowledgement that
hockey, despite players like Grant
Fuhr and Mike Grier, remains a poor
draw among African-Americans.
If NHL.com suffers from basketball envy, then the Exploratorium
Science of Hockey site (www.exploratorium.edu/hockey/) suffers
from baseball envy. The curveball
may have physical qualities worthy
of debate, but just about everybody
agrees that colder rinks have better
ice and that knowing an open-ice hit
delivered by Eric Lindros produces
6,232 joules of energy doesn't make it
hurt any less.
For a very different view of hockey physics, you can look up the Hockey Enforcers' Web ring, for pages
dedicated to hockey goons and their
trade. Despite the efforts of the
league to minimize fighting to sell
hockey to a family audience, goons
do serve a function in hockey -- they
use their fists to stop other players
from using their sticks. As the old
joke goes, it's a good thing hockey
players don't realize they're standing on knives.
The Web ring seems to have only
one page so far, Steve's All Canadian, All Hockey, All Fight Page
(www.angelfire.com/ab/steevstuff/fights.html). It offers photos, some
crude animation, a poll and a special
citation for Steve's favorite goon,
Rocky Thompson of the Calgary
Flames. ""Look at Rocky pound his
opposition into the ice"" screams the
site. Look at our marketing strategy
go up in flames, the league office
says.
The patron saint of fighting and of
hockey isolationists everywhere is
Don Cherry, the flamboyant former
coach of the Boston Bruins and Colorado Rockies. He has cultivated an
enormous following in Canada and
the United States through his
Coach's Corner segment during Saturday night hockey broadcasts.
Deeply suspicious of the league and
shamelessly patriotic, he could easily be dismissed as hockey's answer
to Pat Buchanan if not for his superior knowledge of the game and his
underlying decency. The Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation makes
Coach's Corner available on the Web
(cbc.ca/sports/hockey/hnic/coach.shtml) in both audio and video formats.
For an art-historical perspective
on hockey, several sites, including
Chip's Puck Page
(www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Sideline/7959/hockeypucks.html) and My Ever
Increasing Puck Collection
(www.cjnetworks.com/%7Estallion/pucks/puck.html) features photographs of, you guessed it, hockey
pucks. The Painted Warrior Web site
(users.aol.com/maskman33/classicnf.html) contains an archive
of goalie mask designs dating from
the 1950's.
Goalie masks started out as protection for injured goalies. By the
early 1970's, they had become a form
of theater and, like masks in Greek
drama, they revealed as much as
they concealed. Ken Dryden, the imperturbable goalie for the Montreal
Canadiens, wore a mask that resembled a sardonic grin. Jacques
Plante's mask had an eerie mathematical perfection. Gerry Cheevers,
a Bruins goalie who sometimes skated out of the way of slap shots, painted fake stitch marks across his mask
wherever the puck made contact.
Current mask designs, sadly, tend
to feature cartoon dinosaurs and air-brushed fangs -- a letdown for the
longtime fan but perfect, no doubt,
for the global marketplace.
Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.
www.nhl.com
www.exploratorium.edu/hockey/
www.angelfire.com/ab/steevstuff/fights.html
cbc.ca/sports/hockey/hnic/coach.shtml
www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Sideline/7959/hockeypucks.html
www.cjnetworks.com/%7Estallion/pucks/puck.html
users.aol.com/maskman33/classicnf.html