On Frozen Blog

I learned something startling this week — that a Washington Post blogger-reporter feels uncomfortable around the athletes in the Washington Capitals’ locker room. Let me first say that Dan Steinberg’s experiences and perceptions are obviously his own, and as such are not for me to second-guess or judge. Secondly, if anybody from the Post ought to feel uncomfortable around our town’s hockey’s players it ought to be the likes of Kornheiser and Wilbon. To the extent that Steinberg’s perceptions are spot on, I’d say this to the Caps: direct your animus where it ought to be — at the poison pens and trash-talking talking heads who’ve genuinely harmed the prospects of hockey in this town, and the nation, for decades.

So ends the comfortable portion of this discussion.

Thesis: in no small numbers we puck devotees are drawn toward, and quietly in bar corners over our puck sodas clearly acknowledge the distinction of, the caliber of human being that characteristically is today’s — and yesterday’s — pro hockey player. Which is best summarized explicitly as: we don’t have Ron Artests in our game.

Not to read too much into Steinberg’s very public disclosure of feeling discomfort in the Caps’ room (he’s acknowledged it in multiple forums), but it does strike me as fantastically ironic. When was the last time you heard a whisper of misgiving from any print or broadcast reporter in town related to having to work near, say, Sean Taylor? If I had a daughter journalist, of any age, she wouldn’t be allowed to step foot in Ashburn, Va., August through late December (the Skins’ lockers ever being cleared out by early January).

Shouldn’t any reporter, male or female, tasked with covering any football player factoried from U-Miami, demand hazard pay?

So many point to the seemingly unassailable accomplishments of Gretzky’s points total and Cal Ripken’s playing streak, but how about the more recent feat in Cincinnati: eight Bengals’ football players arrested in just the last calendar year.

Not to pick on pigskin exclusively. One of the predictably unreported sidebars to the Wizards’ strikingly successful season is the absence of law enforcement intervention directed at the roster. These Wizards, to this thoroughly disinterested NBA eye, genuinely seem like likeable fellas. Problem is, that’s genuinely newsworthy in David Stern’s NBA. Remember the Rod Strickland-led Wiz boycott of a season ticket holder gathering of a few years back . . . ’cause they weren’t being paid for it?

Thesis: when you replace Elgin Baylor’s and John Havilcheck’s NBA with one populated by high school and college dropouts, and suffuse it further with a pervasively broken home generating culture, you get . . . trouble.

You also get microphoned Stuart Scotts when you define deviancy down.

I’m wading into what Simon and Garfunkel would term troubled waters. And it truly merits a (courageous) sociology dissertation. But the premise behind this comparison is two-fold: (1) the MSM can’t quite seem to get their arms around the culture that is hockey . . . and (2) it’s damned interesting to speculate why they consistently fail to see any distinction among the caliber of human beings on the playing fields, courts, or rinks.

Quality human beings — most often, not always, but most often — are bred within quality family structures. Hockey’s distinction in athlete is one, I submit, that is anything but coincidental. One of the more telling exhibits I came upon at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto years back was that of a family station wagon bearing the likenesses of a standard hockey family within: Mom and Dad up front, kids behind, all bundled up in protective layers, school and hockey bags in tow. Its premise was simple and yet powerfully instructive: it takes extraordinary commitment of extraordinary family units over an extraordinary period of time to make a hockey player, whose development begins in pre-dawn darkness most often in rural outposts in bone-chilling, often car-killing temps. You get through that and meeting season ticket holders doesn’t seem like much of an imposition.

Contrast this with the armored SUV that adorns the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.; parental units within are replaced by posse.

I kid. I think.

“Uniform systems” in hockey are related to technological advances addressing perspiration displacement; with increasing frequency in other sports they relate to a lone color: orange.

“Icons” in baseball perjure themselves before Congress, while the rest of the sport’s lab rats scurry for cover and the game’s statisticians add another column to the scoring line: number of Grand Jury appearances. Matchups between Indiana and Detroit, among others, on the hardwood bear a ‘Braveheart’ element of hand-to-hand to them. In at least one large Midwestern city reknown for its chilli the residents are under an autumn-long curfew. I understand why there are firearms in Ted Nugent’s cache, but Michael Vick’s?

Who has the higher mortality rate these days, Spanish bullfighters or NFL cornerbacks?

But we are told that hockey is in trouble.

Tell you what, I’ll keep my low television ratings, the MSM can keep its sporting heroes.

[OFB update: a helpful reader has pointed out to us that the number of Bengals in perp walks the past year is now tallied at nine.]

[OFB update II: How do NBA enthusiasts carry themselves at the league's All Star Game festivities in Las Vegas? Breitbart News reports with 362 arrests by Vegas police, including shootings that left three people in critical condition.]