8:09 a.m. - Monday, Feb. 24, 2003
Ms Leslie Exposes Herself to Hockey

You should congratulate me today.

After a half century of being just plain confused by sports of all kinds, I finally got one of them figured out. It�s ice hockey.

Oh yes, there is a robust and enthusiastic ice hockey league �way down here in the deep warm south. And while it�s true they are sometimes referred to as �hicks with sticks�, even I know better than to say it in public. To do so within earshot of a Mississippi Seawolves fan is to risk being educated to the true meaning of �hick� and and exactly how an angry hick can use a hockey stick to help you explore the depth of your rectum.

It was a Seawolves game I attended last night. There was a free ticket to see them play with the Pensecola Ice Pilots attached to a T shirt I bought from my hair stylist the other day to support the fight against cancer. I didn�t buy the shirt because I needed another T Shirt. Good grief, I am already throwing T shirts out of my closet. I only bought it because one of the other stylists in the salon had lost her young daughter to cancer recently and it just didn�t seem right somehow for me to spend eighty bucks on highlights and a trim without rounding it out to an even hundred out of respect for her tragic loss.

I decided at the last minute to go to the actual game. Before I could change my mind and chicken out, I threw on some clothes and drove to the Gulfport Coliseum early enough to take a lot of deep breaths, get out of my van, find my way in, get some six dollar popcorn and find seat 12 in row 6 of section 27C. Or at least I think I did. No one ever challenged me for my seat, so I must have done OK.

Well, as I said, I�ve never understood sports very well. I�ve tried on occasion, but I never could really understand the attraction. Take basketball, for instance. I know it�s a team sport in which a crowd of tall people� usually guys, work together, using a large bouncy ball to batter a couple of plexiglass backboards with netted hoops attached. As I understand it, the object of the game, after a good ball bashing is to see who can do the most damage to the nets, hoops and ultimately, the boards themselves. There does always seem to be a lot of excitement over this; especially if one of the tall guys can manage to shatter the backboard, but I have to be honest; I never could see the attraction. That might be because I�ve never really seen a game in person. Oh, I�ve been to a few games, but seldom could I maintain enough interest to start unravelling the logic of the game. That changed for me last night. Here�s how it all went down:

There was a large rink of ice� of course. It was surrounded by high transparent walls, obviously to protect the hockey players from their fans. It�s hard to imagine the pain involved, unless one actually experiences being caught unawares by the resounding thud of a styrofoam cup hitting the back of one�s helmet. Even those walls, though, weren�t enough to protect the ice against vandalism. Before the game even got started, a couple of crazy people drove heavy tractors right out onto the ice. The tractors were like steam rollers, except instead of a big iron drum, they had powerful propane heaters attached to the back. They drove all over the ice, melting it as they went along. It was disturbing to see all that hard work and expense freezing the ice being undone by these lunatics. No one tried to stop them though. Down here, I think everyone understands that you can only make matters worse if you try to get between a redneck man and his motorized machine. In fact, people were real polite to these guys. Once they had been over every square inch of ice, they even held a large door open for them so they could drive away and make their escape. Fortunately, they didn�t do enough damage to stop the game. The ice froze again, even harder and slicker than before, so their efforts were basically wasted. They came back a couple of times later, but the results were pretty much the same. I guess they need bigger tractors.

Not long after the vandalism was over, the crowd of five thousand plus stood by their seats while the second grade class from a local elementary school gave the worst rendition of �Star Spangled Banner� I ever heard. That was the signal, I think, for the game to get started.

There was a pretty large group of young men with skates, dressed in very thick long johns under short pants and jerseys. They were all very cute with their little helmets and wooden hockey sticks. They were southern boys, I could tell. The shortage of front teeth was a dead giveaway. Other than that, they really were cute, except they all seemed to be in a very bad mood.

Besides the young guys, there were also three disabled trusties from the county jail on the ice. They wore black and white stripes just like the ones the trusties wear when they work outside on the roads. The only difference is that the outside trusties wear green and white stripes. That must mean they are the outside crew. These poor inside trusties were supposed to be helping out, but I think they actually did more harm than good. According to several of my neighbors in the stands, at least one of the trusties was blind and the other two were idiots. I thought it was wonderful that these kind people were willing to let the handicapped convicts be a small part of the action. Right off the bat, though, one of them started a terrible fight when he dropped a rubber shoe-heel on the ice right between two of the cute young padded guys.

Like I said, these boys all had bad attitudes. They apparently hated that rubber taw, because they went crazy trying to destroy it or at least knock it out of the rink. The first two boys were immediately joined by everyone who had a stick. They chased the puck around the rink, pushing and shoving to get a chance to really give that thing a good smack. I have to admit I was shocked. Southern men are usually so polite. The trusties mostly tried to stay out of the way. They didn�t have sticks or any other means of protecting themselves. Watching them, Isuddenly realized that a person would HAVE tobe mentally deficient to hang around that ice without a weapon. Occasionally, two players would seem to explode. Helmets, sticks and gloves would fly in all directions and the two detonatees (a new word thankyouverymuch) would go at it in earnest, using bare knuckles against bony cheeks. The trusties had a special interest in these encounters and would skate close to the combatants where they could get the best view. Once the two fighters wore themselves down, the trusties would help them back to the sidelines. Oddly enough, it seemed like one of the boys always had to take a bathroom break. There were lots of bathroom breaks, as a matter of fact and like, pre-schoolers at a Christmas play, they invariably had to be shown the way to the restrooms by one of the trusties. The trusty would escort the needy player to the opposite side of the rink, show him out a small door, and the game would resume without the young man.

The action was brutal but fascinating. All of the players but two were extremely accident-prone. They could never stop without running full-bore into a wall or another player. They were constantly getting in the way of someone else�s swinging stick, and sometimes everyone would just get all piled up into a kind of gridlock around the poor hockey puck. In the meantime, the only two players with any sense at all were dancing back and forth in front of large netted cages at opposite ends of the rink. See, all the other guys wanted to hit the puck, but no one wanted to pick it up. Consequently, it streaked back and forth like an atomic watermelon seed, bouncing from wall to wall and face mask to helmet all around the rink. Once in a great while, however, it would accidentally become tangled in the net. The dancing boys did their best to prevent this, but sometimes it was just unavoidable. At first I thought they were just too lazy to chase the puck with the rest of the boys. Later I understood that they were doing their part to be helpful by keeping the puck from getting caught in the net. At least they didn�t mind bending over and picking the rubber thing up once in a while. That�s more than I could say for the other guys.

Meanwhile, the poor trusties seemed as confused as I was. Maybe even more confused. Fortunately they had been given whistles, so when they lost track of what was going on, all they had to do was whistle and wave their arms. The bad-tempered skaters were really awfully considerate to stop and start over. They would even let the confused trusty have the puck, whereupon he would almost immediately drop it and the fight would be on again. I�ll be honest. I wished I had a whistle because it was just about all I could do to keep up with all of this madness. A lot of my neighbors felt the same way I think, because many of them brought bells and even air-horns to the game. They were constantly ringing, blowing, screaming and waving their arms.. even standing up and jumping, but no one stopped for them. Only the mentally challenged trusties could get that consideration.

Once in a great while, in spite of their best efforts, a puck would get past one of the patient players and get caught in the net. This was a great event. I think that, since they wouldn�t stop the game for all the confused and waving fans, it must have been a great relief to see the puck get tangled up so everyone could start over. In any case, it always got a huge roar of approval when the game stopped this way.

The players, obviously tired and probably dejected that they didn�t play well with others, tried to end the game. As if on cue, they all stopped fighting and just skated off the ice, but the fans apparently weren�t ready to leave yet. Instead of gathering up their belongings and going to the parking lot, a great many of them simply dashed to the snack bar and bought more beer and hot pizza, chips, or chili dogs. A security team, led by two huge stuffed animals came onto the ice and tried to drive the fans away by firing wadded up T-shirts into the crowd but I guess they were all hopped up on violence by now, because they didn�t seem to mind the missiles. On the contrary, they jumped and waved, daring the security people to hit them with a wadded projectile. At the same time, a remote controlled blimp floated around over the crowd, littering them with scraps of paper. Had they asked me, I could have told them to save the trouble. You can�t feed a bunch of sports fans beer and pizza and then expect to drive them away with litter.

Eventually, the players agreed to try playing again. I was thinking maybe they had a group session or something in the locker rooms and were committed to being a little more sensitive to each others� needs. Sadly it was not to be. They started fighting again, even harder than before. It was a shame really. Why can�t they just all get along? But the fans just loved it all the more. They were yelling and dancing now, and jumping up and down from their seats every time the players successfully avoided getting the puck tangled in the net. I was beginning to wonder if I was in any personal danger but no, I was largely ignored by the crowd.

The fighting and fussing went on pretty much as before for a good while. Finally, the exhausted players gave up and skated away again. But the fans were crazed with alcohol and blood. Security captured five of the worst, I guess, and decided to make examples of them. They stretched a bungee cord across the arena, sat the young hooligans on a plastic sled and shot them one at a time lengthwise across the ice, through a stand of plastic Coke bottles and into the wall at the other end. Five times they did this, but the effect on the rest of the crowd was just the opposite from what was intended. With each young man hurled, the fans whistled and clapped. It was a spectacle reminiscent of the ancient Roman circus.

Once it was obvious that the crowd was only going to drink more beer, the players came back to try one more time to get a game going. Their social skills, however, were even more lacking than ever. They seemed to be in as big a frenzy as the chanting fans. The whole building was shaking with the noise and stomping. The poor trusties were in fear for their lives, cowering along the edges of the ice and jumping to avoid the flying puck whenever it rocketed in their direction. The very air was thick and vibrating with a crescendo of anticipation and excitement that just kept building. I lost track of events on the ice as I watched the people around me. I seemed as if I was about to witness a kind of violence-driven group orgasm of slightly more than five thousand people. I was fascinated.

It all came to a roaring climax just as the vendors ran out of beer. Right at the very height of the excitement, a loud buzzer sounded, signifying that the beer was gone and the snack bars were closed. I call that piss poor planning. They could have made a million if they�d brought more beer. Anyway, once the no-beer signal went off, everyone just seemed to lose interest in the game. The players left again, this time for good. The fans somehow sensed that the players would not come back and since the beer was gone anyway, they began filtering out into the chilled night air. I sat in stunned silence in my seat for a long time. I had no desire to be apart of the melee that I knew was about to occur with all the cars outside trying to leave at once. I only hoped that there were enough designated drivers to go around, or that by some magic, beer consumed at a sporting event somehow didn�t count.

I was stunned, but I was satisfied too. Even though I don�t think I ever did see an actual hockey game, I did get a sense of how a game could be exciting. With a little practice, I think everyone could learn to work together and really chop that rubber puck into pieces. I think it would be a real satisfaction to see people working as a team like that. I left thinking maybe I�ll come back someday to see if they make any progress towards that end.

Maybe if they had enough pucks to go around, they wouldn�t fight so much?

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