You’ve probably heard the old expression about going to a hockey game and a boxing match broke out.
I can attest that it’s true.
I wouldn’t call myself a hockey fan. I don’t keep up with professional hockey. I never watch hockey when it’s on TV.
But when I lived in Macon years ago, there was a minor-league team called the Macon Whoopee, which is without doubt the greatest team nickname in the history of organized sports.
The Macon Whoopee’s logo was a fig leaf.
We went to a lot of the Whoopee’s games because hockey can be fun in person. But when we first started going to the games, I admit I didn’t know any of the rules. And even after a couple of years of attending games, I still didn’t know many of the rules.
About the only thing I was certain of was that the teams skate around on ice, using their sticks to hit a small, rubber puck into a net.
Why would I know the rules? I’m a proud Southerner, and hockey is definitely not a Southern game. Most of us in the South hate cold weather. That’s why we lived in the South.
The Internet tells me that hockey was created in 1850s by British soldiers stationed in Canada, which makes sense, because I’m reasonably certain that ice was invented in Canada.
The website didn’t tell me exactly how the soldiers created the game, but I’m going to assume it happened one winter when they were bored out of their minds because the base was covered by six inches of snow and the nearby lake was frozen solid.
What else was there to do? Canada doesn’t fight wars very often, so it was unlikely the soldiers were going to have to fight off an invading army. They couldn’t go swimming. The lake was frozen. And even if it wasn’t, the temperature in Canada in the middle of winter isn’t what you’d call “swimming weather.”
“Hey, Neville,” one of the soldiers said, “I’m bored out of my mind. What can we do for fun?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, Rupert,” the other soldier said. “What if we take this little piece of rubber I found in the garage and go down to the lake? We’ll get a couple of sticks. I’ll use my stick to try to hit the piece of rubber to one end of the lake and you try to hit it to the other end. The one who gets to their end of the lake most wins.”
“Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?” Rupert asked. “I was thinking we stay inside and watch the new season of ‘House of Cards’ on Netflix.”
“Dude, we can’t watch Netflix. It won’t be invented for another 150 years. Besides, trust me. One day, there will be whole leagues of teams trying to hit little pieces of rubber with wooden sticks and we’ll be famous for thinking it up.”
Anyway, the Whoopee don’t exist anymore. Macon’s team is now called the Mayhem. Five minutes into the game, two players threw down their sticks and their gloves and started punching each other. It went on for several minutes before both players were taken to the penalty box and the game resumed.
I still don’t know the rules of hockey. I still don’t think I’ll bother watching a game on TV. But we had a lot of fun watching the game in person, and, to cap it off, the Mayhem won.
Rupert and Neville would be proud.
