Some perceptive people have already noted that hockey is really little more than boxing on ice. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It seems to me that most people prefer the fights anyway, Don Cherry usually included. Stripping away the veneer of hockey and turning it into purely boxing on ice would surely be an improvement. Of course, I can think of several other ways of improving the sport. One would involve making it more like Ice Hockey, the classic old Nintendo game. The skills of players would thus be entirely dictated by their weight. We wouldn't have to remember player names or numbers anymore, but would only have to recall if they were skinny, normal or fat. It would also make their training much simpler. Training camps would involve only crazy exercising for the skinniers, absolutely nothing for the normals and all-you-can-eat buffets for the fats. If real hockey was as much fun as Ice Hockey, I know that I would be watching it any night of the week. Ahh, nostalgia.
I suppose I should finally mention the actual origins of this quote. It came from the exciting conclusion of my most recent roleplaying campaign. If you want to read about it in detail, I suggest you visit the Deep Space page. I'll provide a summary of the context here, though it can in no way compare to the six hundred pages of adventure summaries. One of the villainous forces involved in the Deep Space campaign was an elite space fleet called the Red Wings. Through vigorous metagaming, this obviously associated them with the hockey team of the same name. One of the enemy pilots was named Sergei Federov, and he had a bit of a grudge against the heroes.
In the concluding adventure, the heroes launched an attack on the Red Wing base, only to find it mostly abandoned. After some searching of the empty base, one of the heroes finally encountered Federov for a little one on one. At this point, Federov unleashed this weeks' quote, declaring that the Red Wings had pulled their goalie and launched a full scale attack on the heroes' station, intent on scoring a winning goal. To pull the hockey references to the next level, I should mention that Federov's best combat move was the slapshot. Though extremely inaccurate, it was obviously very powerful. Such desperate tactics proved insufficient in the end, and the Red Wings went down to defeat in the final period. I'm sure these enemies would have fought even better if their skills had been entirely based on their weights. After all, no one can knock down a fat.
In my opinion, the greatest things about most sports are the puns they provide for public consumption. Hockey is no exception, and it's the subject of this quote. Hopefully, I'll score with this one, especially since I'm on some sort of power-play here. If not, I could soon find myself and my website warming the bench. As you can see, I'm already off-side with most of these comments, and I'm only getting started. I really don't know how sportscasters can keep their faces straight. The temptation to crack these sorts of jokes has got to be extreme. Unfortunately, some journalists take hockey a bit more seriously, and actually comment on the game, rather than just making puns and italicizing random words. This is a mistake, as far as I'm concerned.
Return to Jaridis Blade's Gallery of Quotes