On Frozen Blog

Welcome to my vacation. This week I have friends recreating in Switzerland, Canada, and Virginia Beach. Meanwhile, I’m spending my week-long R&R at Kettler Capitals. No offense to my traditional vacation-traveling friends, but I think mine the most alluring, fulfilling, and restorative of getaways. And yes, most exotic. You could offer me a cruise, a secluded and gorgeously rustic mountain chalet, a week in a massive suite at a 5-star, swanky hotel in a happening town, and I’d turn them all down in favor of my perch in the rink atop a parking garage.
About five or so years ago I began the puck-afflicted habit of of burning a week’s leave at opening week of Capitals’ training camp. I travel enough as it is with my day job, but even if I were a desk jockey I’d still make this annual pilgrimage. At the risk of overstatement, it carries and delivers a genuinely spiritual dimension for me. I guess it has something to do with being a native Washingtonian and being in love with the game and being a survivor of the Save the Caps campaign way back when and never tiring of watching world-class hockey players up close and personal. I just don’t take for granted that this magnificent sport resides in my hometown, and so at the very start of each new season I schedule a series of dates with it to feed and express my affection.
I understand perfectly well the allure of soothing breezes on tropical islands, or golf getaways out in flesh-friendly temps. But this week I’m watching world-class hockey and blogging in bluejeans and a sweatshirt in a well-refrigerated rink, among friends; at the end of this week my skin will be Elmer’s Glue pasty white, but my hockey heart will be euphoric.
Each morning this week I’ll Metro down to Ballston and leisurely sip coffee and chat puck for hours each day with the likes of Mike Vogel, Corey Masisak, Tarik El Bashir, Lisa Hillary, Nate Ewell, and perhaps a couple of bloggers who’ve snuck out of the office for an hour or so to take in some scrimmaging. Over the years I’ve known colleagues who’ve burned a week’s leave merely on long-neglected household chores. My week is much better than that.
For my friends in Canada, my vacation — far from requiring a defense or justification — is viewed as a literal fantasy camp, the type of week they’d very willingly plop down $2,500 to replicate.
Late last Friday afternoon the parting exchange I had with my boss was rather amusing.
“So where are you going next week?” he asked.
“A parking garage in Ballston,” I replied.
“How exotic,” he returned.
Beyond getting reacquainted with rink friends after summer’s adjournment, week 1 of camp typically delivers September’s special storyline: that unheralded individual who seizes the attention of the coaching staff and the media, catching them completely off guard, breaking through and injecting a palpable buzz in camp with his play. It happens just about every camp, and it’s something special. It’s Jan Benda one year, Matt Herr and Jacub Cutta another. Alexander Volchkov remains one of the most impressive training camp performers I’ve ever seen. It’s absolutely true: he could do things with the puck that his countryman Ovechkin a decade later can’t even dream of. I hate how thoroughly wretched and fleeting his career turned out to be, but still I savor some of the dazzling displays he authored in drills and scrimmages.
That’s the other thing about camp — you see on display the elite hockey player’s full compliment of toolbox treats. Over the weekend I watched transfixed as Alexander Semin scooped up a puck and dangled it on his blade in the air, as if he were a lacrosse player, while skating fairly quickly. During camp, players always are on the ice early, sometimes many minutes before scheduled drills, just because they want to be. I love that about them. If you merely attend games guys then are carrying out the coach’s system, and reacting to the conditions of the game that night. But here, at the dawn of a new season, among the even the oldest players, you see the enthusiasm of a boy at play. Donald Brashear was tossing a puck across the full width of a newly made sheet of ice yesterday — still very wet — with Alexander Semin. But they weren’t snapping hard, accurate passes onto one another’s blades but rather lofting soft tosses that often landed near the feet of one another; it appeared to me that they were trying to make small splashes onto one another.
One day this week my old man will drive over the Bay Bridge really early one morning and take in a full morning and early afternoon of camp with me. He rang me over the weekend to find out what time he should leave, taking account of traffic of course, so that we were seated in the stands in time for the very first drill of the day.
I can’t wait for him to get here.