Baseball will always be number one in my book. There's nothing like the feeling of Yankee Stadium: going through Monument Park, watching a Yankee game in the same stadium where Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle once played and hearing Sinatra's "New York, New York" cued up at the end of every win.
I will always wear my Yankee hat, no matter what city I am in. If anyone tells me baseball is boring, "shock and awe" doesn't even begin to describe my reaction. Baseball players, just like anyone being prosecuted in the legal system, are always innocent until proven guilty in my eyes. But, if any one of them actually ends up being guilty of "de-purifying" the game through steroids, gambling or corking their bat, they drop a notch in my eyes. I consider myself a purist. There is a reason why the Yankees only have two uniforms (the same two they've worn since the 1920s and still have no names on the backs of their jerseys. That is baseball for you and I absolutely love it.
While baseball certainly has been swirling with negative publicity lately, given Yankee spending and the steroid scandal, my next favorite sport, hockey, has taken its share of hits.
This Canadian-born sport continues to get a black eye from the American public. The 1980 "Miracle on Ice" Olympic team may have put hockey on the American map, but it gave it an area the size of Rhode Island. It is true that many more Americans have played hockey since then, and that the rising crop of hockey players, while increasingly European, is also increasingly American. But most of the American public has never even tried to embrace a sport that features athletes on skates. The Mighty Ducks will never be able to live up to Rudy or Bad News Bears or Hoosiers.
Regular season hockey games can end in a tie, which many people think of as an un-American concept. Little do they know that football and baseball All-Star games can also end in ties. And I do not care what sport you favor, there is no sport in the playoffs that has as dramatic an overtime as the do-or-die marathons played annually in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Where else do you have games going on until the middle of the night where fans actually continue to watch, no matter the time? Where do you find a team like the Pittsburgh Penguins, which a couple of years ago, actually opened its doors during the overtime of a playoff series for any fans in the area who wanted to come and stand and cheer for the game until it finally ended at some ungodly hour?
What soccer (or football) is to some European countries, baseball is to some Latin American countries and football is to much of the United States, hockey is to Canada and the upper reaches of the United States. Wayne Gretzky's father made a rink in his backyard from the frozen ice and a rickety hockey net so that Gretzky could practice every day and night.
So many Canadians like Gretzky are born with skates on and dream about one day playing in the NHL for the Toronto Maple Leafs or Montreal Canadiens as American children dream about putting on the Yankee pinstripes or playing a college basketball game for the Duke Blue Devils. As they say in Mystery Alaska, a movie about a town in love with hockey, "I play hockey and I fornicate, 'cause those are the two most fun things to do in cold weather."
I am not saying hockey does not have its problems, because it certainly does. The collective bargaining agreement in the NHL is about to run out and a crippling work stoppage is very possible. If the Canadian dollar continues to slip, Canadian teams will continue to have a difficult time keeping up with American teams. The Buffalo Sabres (a la the Montreal Expos of MLB) were briefly owned by the NHL and came to the brink of folding. The Pittsburgh Penguins are continually losing money, and, if they don't get a new arena soon, may have to fold themselves. And then came an image that may haunt hockey for a long time to come.
It had just come to the point that the American public had forgotten about Marty McSorely's stick to the head of Donald Brashear, resulting in a huge suspension and even an arrest, when ugliness struck hockey once again.
Todd Bertuzzi's hit on Steve Moore the other night was inexcusable, despicable and was appropriately disciplined. Bertuzzi obviously thought about what he was going to do, then sucker-punched Moore on the back of the head and drove his face into the ice. What resulted was near-paralyzation for Moore, and Bertuzzi, one of the Vancouver Canucks' best players, being lost to them for the rest of the season. It was a disgusting display, one that should be punished by the NHL, and it seems Bertuzzi will be punished by the law.
But to think that this is represntative of hockey players as a whole is absolutely wrong. Hockey may be a very violent sport, but that does not mean that other sports are any less violent. Football may even be a nastier sport than hockey, where every play contains people getting hit and 16 regular season games leave a player's body aching and in need of medical attention.
Baseball has featured many "headhunters," pitchers like Bob Gibson, Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez, who deliberately throw high and inside to batters to intimidate them. Is anyone telling football players to be less aggressive or baseball pitchers to stop throwing inside? Not really, so why should they be calling out hockey players?
In every sport but hockey, fighting gets you an automatic ejection and suspension. In hockey, a fight gets you five minutes in the penalty box to sit and think about what you've done.
Hockey is one of the most pure sports out there. The game is played with pure heart, soul and grit. In football and basketball, every team gets a bunch of time-outs to rest and set up plays. Hockey teams get one per game. Hockey is played at a continuous pace. It is really fast, with players coming on and off the ice, hitting people all over the place, while still trying to keep their balance on a surface that is not conducive to keeping upright. Most people, when they go ice skating for fun, fall down. Imagine having to worry about a puck to pass and shoot, and five huge guys on the other team who want to take that puck from you and won't hesitate to take your body with it if necessary.
And there is no size that judges how your place in hockey. Wayne Gretzky is a tall, wiry guy, who ended up being the best ever to play the game. Eric Lindros and Joe Thorton are huge players, and P.J. Stock and Theo Fleury are small players and they all play the game with the same ferociousness. It is always the size of your heart in hockey that determines how you play the game. I root for the New York Rangers, who are one of the worst teams money can buy, and they are constantly beaten by teams that have far less salary and far less talent but so much more heart and determination. And that's why I love hockey.