[Eromaveabeara]

What is Hockey?

Answer.....

=Something to take your mind off music
=to remind you of home when you spend time in away from home (Texas)
=a way to be close to friends and family
=something to look forward to
=a conversation piece, (ex, this thread)

Go Canucks Go

Wish I was there to hear those "honks" and "celebrations".

Will be watching here in Toronto, late at night, and watching every shot.

Distractions are all relative

[Eromaveabeara]

thanks, I need it........

[fount_pirat]

I've often asked myself exactly the same question Brian.

Only, unlike you, I'm not kidding.:-)



Really. All the years I lived in Canada, I never 'got' hockey. I guess you have to be a native born Canadian for that. Ken Burns notwithstanding, there is no 'national sport' down here, not in the 21st century anyway. It's more regional. Here in the south, football is an obsession (in Texas it's a religion), although I do live right near Tulane's Reily field, and the intercollegiate baseball games there seem well attended. In big urban centers up north, basketball is it, especially if you're black, or aspire to hip urbanity. Detroit and Philly are also big hockey towns, as is Boston to some degree. New Orleans loves the Saints, so I guess this is a football town. A phrase you'll hear often in working class neighborhoods is " Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?" The answer is, of course, "everybody!" They're the losing-est team in pro football. Nobody gives a shit though. Everybody still goes to the games. It's very "Montreal" here that way.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, in Canada, if you admit to not caring much about hockey, that is somehow "un-Canadian." Down here, if you say you don't dig baseball, people just assume you're into hoops or something.

[Eromaveabeara]

to each his own I guess

it's what makes us all unique

there are roller hockey skates and ice skates in the closet

and coltrane's ascension in my collection

maybe the canucks should have listened to that before the game....

[JohnVK]

I don't get hockey.

Calling Don Cherry (the other Don Cherry) an intellectual is like calling Herod a child-care professional.

And please get serious - Hockey has nothing to do with jazz or any other art-form. It's just a game grown out of people's need to rush about on ice keeping warm.

Nationalist religion would be a more workable comparison.

I would appreciate it if this board was hockey-free.

Baah Humbug

Lazz

[Fegasderty]

I think you get it, but are too hip to admit it.

[UriyVlasov]

Answer=distraction

end of story....

[foltdan]

I think I mentioned this last year, but Hockey, for me, is a perfect metaphor for jazz. There's a long, storied tradition with unimpeachable greats. The game has changed in recent years, due to technological advancements and the size of the players, yet the essence of the game hasn't been lost. It's a team sport, meaning your contributions as an individual merely serve a whole-- a family aspect. There is a physical aspect to the game... muscle memory involved in the perfect wrist shot requires hours and hours... thousands of pucks shot. The best players have an almost prenaturnal instinct for the game. They are in the right place at the right time, and never choke in the clutch. The game can be gritty, dirty, hard fought and ugly. It can be beautiful... the epitome of graceful physical poetry. It can be Shakespearean in it's tragedy, and there is always an epic element to the game that is the entire reason they play it. I think it's beautiful.

[nuabuncarnigo]

I love you Brian. I really really do.

[Saduyre9de]

Maybe they should have tried giving 60 minutes of effort as opposed to too little too late. Interesting off season for sure. Who stays and who goes...

[Junrlaeh]

We haven't had a good hockey discussion in here in a while so let's get this over with.

What is it about this so-called sport that causes its fans to celebrate both the victories and defeats of teams of professional hooligans with the combined IQ (I'm talking about the entire NHL here) of 100 by hopping into the nearest car and driving aimlessly around honking their horns like berserk moose?

I'm even more mystified by the fact that musicians who can barely eke out subsistence by practicing a craft they've spent a lifetime learning are devotees of barely intelligible boneheads earning obscene amounts of money whacking each other on the head with sticks.

I don't get it.

[fount_pirat]

Brian and Guy. What an absolute delight to find two kindred spirits. While my apathy extends to sports in general (I can't think of anything more stupifyingly boring than sitting around watching "the game.") hockey in particular has always struck me as particularly dopey. If I want to see guys hit each other with sticks, I'll just go down to the Balmoral Hotel beer parlor around closing time on a Saturday night. And any 'sport' that can't cough up an 'emminece grise' more erudite than right-wing waterhead Don Cherry absolutely does not deserve to be taken seriously. Dwarf tossing in the Australian outback has more class.


Sorry Morgan. Looks like you're outnumbered (although I've got a feeling that's about to change).

[neeclindy]

John, I (naturally) found your analogy brilliant!

On this thread, you have two hockey proponents arguing different things. One says that it's uniquely Canadian; another says it's popular world-wide.

I think Greg probably finds it least boring of all sports because he grew up in Canada, and there's safety in numbers, as Brian pointed out. That's just my guess, though. I grew up here and find it quite possibly the most boring of sports. Anytime a team successfully passes the puck more than twice is cause for a mini-climax. The game is too haphazard. Dump the puck in the corner and then crash the boards until your team comes up with it. Also, I'd guess that about 85% of the goals (if not more) are what I'd consider "fluke" goals: just whip it as hard as you can in the direction of the goalie and pray it ricochets off a limb or stick.

Also, Greg, your assertion that it's more popular worldwide than any "American" sport is just wrong. I assume you're counting basketball as an American sport (even though it was invented by a Canadian). Basketball is the most-played sport in the world at all levels, despite what soccer fans will tell you. There are more countries represented in the NBA than there are the NHL. Basketball is popular in warm and cold countries. Hockey is really only popular in cold climates.

As for the swinging quality of hockey, let me just ask you this: Have you ever seen a jazz musician with a mullet?

[neeclindy]

Another put-down of Vancouver (and exaltation of the South) by John!

John, not all born and bred Canadians are hockey fans. Brian isn't, and I'm not. I have no time for it and am not afraid to tell people. No one gives me a hard time because of it. I know plenty other true-blue Canadians who don't care for the sport. Still, I must admit we are in the minority. And it puzzles me when I see grown men and women walking around with a hockey jersey on. I mean, if you have to wear it at the game, take it in a bag or something and change when you get there! And for Christ sake, keep the celebrating to yourself!

Maybe I'm just bitter because the South stole my Grizzlies...

[ranndomderr]

John, your interesting account of jazz origins fails to make the case that basketball isn’t boring.
I won’t watch any sports unless I’m killing time in a bar where the TV screen is the safest thing to look at. Then I find hockey the least boring of all team sports.
At least hockey has an international following. No American sport, not even baseball, has nearly as much popularity in other countries.
Speaking of least boring, John also brought up Don Cherry. I used to hear his radio commentaries years ago and found him to be a really boorish character, the sort of guy most people try to avoid. But for all his obvious faults, he’s an intellectual giant in the trite, complacent world of Canadian broadcasting.

[Junrlaeh]

A stunningly beautiful young woman, obviously a witch, clasped my head in her hands, stared into my eyes, and said "Hockey is good." (At the Cellar of all places, so this is jazz-related.)

Tonight I found myself inexplicably listening to the game, shattered at the outcome.

Know any exorcists?

[Sheelldaw]

I think you guys are missing the point about hockey. I have lived in Canada my entire life. I still remember being 3 years old and stepping on the ice for the first time, and I will enjoy that feeling everytime I tie my skates. Hockey is unique to Canadians. Its a part of our culture. "Hockey Night in Canada" is a Canadian tradition. Every Saturday families across Canada get together and watch hockey. I'm not going to get into what's wrong with hockey. I don't care, I love it for what it is. I'm also not on of those "Bandwagon jumpers" like a lot of people in Vancouver. And when the Canucks lose their best player... and then go on a six game winning streak to clinch the division and fly into the playoffs... that's hockey. GO CANUCKS GO!

[Junrlaeh]

condolences.

[fount_pirat]

Hey c'mon Greg, I'm trying to stir up a little controversy here. This thread's as dead as deconstructionism in the UBC English dept.

Seriously, the hockey-jazz model is absurd. Hockey does NOT swing. Jazz does (although I know plenty of avante guardists would argue the point). Jazz scholarship is commonly in agreement these days that the elusive 'rhythmic lilt', Jelly Roll's 'Spanish tinge,' the thing that it ' don't mean a thing' if you ain't got,i.e. swing, is a product of Afro-Cuban rhythms that arrived in New Orleans at the very end of the 19th century.

In Cuba it'self, it was the 'Negritos' who were responsible for transforming plain old subdivided rhythms like the Cinquillo and Tressillo into hip and swinging additive Clave forms. Similarly, once the color line was broken in sports, African Americans transformed the game of basketball from a square-john white-guy college game into the hip and swinging "Sweet Georgia Brown" game practised by the Harlem Globetrotters. The Globetrotters, and basketball itself, were at the center of jazz culture in the crucial years of the mid twentieth century.

I have no idea what music was associated with hockey in the 1950s, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts it wasn't jazz. Currently, as Guy points out, we have the swinging sounds of Stompin Tom Conners and Tom Cochrane, two guys who couldn't swing if you hung them from a saloon door.

[Junrlaeh]

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