As you know if you're a close friend of mine or if you regularly log onto this website (sometimes I wonder if the two categories are one and the same), I am a complete fantasy sports junkee. But up until this year, I've stuck to the traditional sports (The Big Three, if you will): football, basketball and baseball. My fantasy career began inauspiciously in the fall of 1997 when I drafted Penny Hardaway, then a young stud for the Orlando Magic, in the first round of my very first fantasy draft only to have his career completely fall apart the moment I giddily clicked on his name, thinking I had scored the single-greatest coup of all time. Though my fantasy team that year was probably the most gruesome cast of weenies ever assembled (other than the current rendition of the Atlanta Hawks), it's safe to say that I was not deterred in the least by my humble beginnings. Now, in Year Seven, I've reached a jumping off point in my fantasy career, a point of no return if I hadn't already passed it years ago. The gateway between being a serious fantasy sports player and a full-blown mega geek has slammed shut behind me, never to be re-opened again.
I've joined a fantasy hockey league.
Yes, on the surface, this is somewhat embarrassing. It may very well be embarrassing below the surface, but let me explain myself before you pass judgment. You see, I grew up in Atlanta in the 1980's in the shadows of the Atlanta Flames, which left the city in 1980 when I was two years old. By the time I was cognisant enough to watch You Can't Do That on Television, the only hockey game in town was my friend Wells Bennett's Saturday morning league, which he often discussed in great detail. While this was certainly an informative insight into the world of youth hockey, I wasn't exactly getting much of an education in the sport, and while I grew up memorizing stats from Andres Thomas and marveling at the aerial artistry of Alexander Volkov, hockey as a sport got entirely left behind. And until recently, very little has changed in that regard. As my knowledge of other sports grew, hockey's growth seemed to be permanently stunted. It was my own personal Emmanuel Lewis.
I'm sure you're wondering by now why I didn't try harder to learn, but I did. The problem was, I really couldn't watch the sport on TV. Remember the ill-fated experiment of superimposing a digitized orange streak onto the TV that traced the puck's path and pissed off hockey traditionalists beyond belief? I think I may have been the only person on the planet who actually liked that, because I can't pick a hockey puck out of a police lineup. Never have been able to, now matter how much I watch. It's a simple mechanical problem, but it has been a huge impediment to my learning process, and more importantly, it has caused me much embarrassment every time the subject of hockey comes up amongst knowledgable sports fans, because for years I've known next to nothing about the sport. So a few months ago I decided to spoon feed it to myself the only way I knew how, and on one level, it has worked. I can now tell you without so much as blinking that Senators' defenseman Zdeno Chara has one of the best plus/minus ratings in the NHL. I can also tell you that at 6-foot-9 he's the tallest player in NHL history and looks vaguely like Gheorge Mhuresan on ice skates, which really makes me more happy to think about than all of my newfound NHL knowledge put together.
On another level, though, my experiment has failed. I still can't watch an NHL game on TV. Even though I now have a vested interest and am genuinely intrigued by the sport, when I flip to an NHL game, my undiagnosed A.D.D. kicks in almost immediately. Where is the puck? I can't see it. Oh, there it is. Crap, lost it again. I wonder if there's anything good on Oxygen...
Okay, so I was kidding about that last part. I never, ever watch Oxygen. As far as you know. Either way, here's the point: even though I am now pretty knowledgable about America's fourth major sport, I'm not passionate about it, which means one thing -- either I have a long way to go as a fan or hockey has a long way to go as a sport. And I've come a long way already.
