On Frozen Blog » Former Coaches & Players

"Can't-Miss" Carpenter's Legend Lives On

The OFB Team — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 02:10:00 +0000

I recently came across a post on Mental Floss (home of the great Don Cherry quiz) titled “Where Are They Now? High School Kids Immortalized By Sports Illustrated” and skimmed it. Then I came to #7:

7. Bobby Carpenter: February 23, 1981

The Cover: The subheadline accompanying the image of “The Can’t-Miss Kid” performing a hockey stop says it all. “Here’s Bobby Carpenter. He’s 17 and hails from Peabody, Mass. NHL scouts say he’s the best U.S. prospect they’ve seen. Ever.”

The article continues with a misleading sentence, “Like Ovechkin would be more than 23 years later, Carpenter was drafted
by the Washington Capitals with the third pick of the 1981 NHL draft,” but who’s counting? While Carpenter was no Ovechkin, at least he had a decent career as a professional athlete, unlike many of the others on the list.

However, I really felt bad for #9, Mike Peterson. Reading the description tells me that Sports Illustrated seemingly didn’t have much going on back then, if they accepted letters from barbers as proof of the next big thing. Peterson, who didn’t progress too far with his athletic career, said: “The same week the article came out I was at a camp in Colorado, and everyone there wanted to play me one-on-one in basketball. If they did well, they asked why they weren’t on the cover. It was as if I was supposed to be the world’s greatest athlete.” Not many people can live up to those expectations. Poor guy.

On a side note, the article wasn’t completely devoid of humor- well, at least in the comments section. Who knew that LSU graduates took themselves so seriously?

“In profiles 5 and 6, this article refers to Louisiana State University, calling it one time “Louisiana State” and the next simply “LSU.” It’s the same school, please refer to it consistently. For the record, LSU’s Sports Information department prefers “LSU” over “Louisiana State” in written articles.”

Of course, the next several comments were either calling her out for being ridiculously arrogant or quibbling over the meaning of the word “acronym.” Seriously. You’ve got to love the Internet- everyone’s an editor!

Buzz From Boswell

gustafsson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:01:12 +0000

In Tom Boswell’s discussion on washingtonpost.com today, he had nothing but effusive praise for a certain #8:

New York, NY: Ovechkin is really, really, really good. We need to be more appreciative of the fact that we are likely to have a back-to-back MVP playing for a local team.

Seriously. He’s really, really good.

I wish I wasn’t living so far away!

Tom Boswell: The goal he scored last night was, perhaps, the best I’ve ever seen. And it’s one of the most amazing plays I’ve ever seen in any sport. Of course, after all these years, that’s a long list. But you have to find a way to see. Boudreau, who’s seen it all, said it might have been the best he ever saw.

No. 8 intercepted a errasnt pass near the red line, spun completely around and, in one motion, passed the puck around a defender and OFF THE SIDE WALL to himself. Then, without breakiung stride, he accelerated so fast (the part Boudreau couldn’t believe) that he pulled away from a defender who should have had ther angle on him. So, as No. 8 bore down on the goalie from the left side, the defender hooked him down from behind. As O hit the ice, he still controled the puck, switched from his left to his right side and, flat on the ice, deliberately shot the puck into the net into the only open sliver of room that the goal provided on his stick side.

Before the puck was in the back of the net, No. 8, still on his back, had fired his fist in the air. He knew he’d scored before anybody else knew what had happened.
_______________________

F Street: How can there be any doubt that Ovie is the best in the NHL. Last night’s goal was Jordanesqe. He does things that appear impossible. It appears that all the people arguing for Crosby are Candians. Worse, the reason is starting to look like blatant xenophobia. That they refuse to believe someone besides a Canadian can be the best hockey player in the world. What are your thoughts?

Tom Boswell: Ovie is the best. And his recent goal-scoring binge over the last three weeks or so has been seismic. Come on, I’m taping the games and replaying them to see this guy. And Green has jumped up a whole level as many expected him to. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Terry Murray (ex-Caps, now Kings coach) isn’t the only one who thinks they are ready to go deep, maybe very deep in the playoffs. “They don’t have to wait to be great.”

“I’m taping the games and replaying them to see this guy.” Never thought I’d see those words come out of Boswell’s mouth (or fingers, as the case may be). Just another stop on the way to Washington, the hockey town.

Jamie Heward Update

The OFB Team — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:59:29 +0000

Courtesy of Caps PR (thanks, Nate):

TAMPA BAY – Tampa Bay Lightning
defenseman Jamie Heward has been released from a Washington
D.C. hospital and is traveling back to Tampa today. Heward
suffered a concussion during the third period of last night’s game
against the Washington Capitals.

Heward, 37, was taken to Sibley Memorial
Hospital last night,
accompanied by Lightning Assistant Athletic Trainer Mike
Poirier. He underwent further testing, where it was
determined that no damage to his cervical spine occurred. Heward was kept
overnight as a precaution and will be sidelined indefinitely, though the
prognosis for his personal health is good.

Rewriting History

The OFB Team — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:57:26 +0000

Rick Tocchet played for the Caps in 2007? I bet even Tocchet didn’t know that.
(Guess someone at Comcast still has a New Year’s hangover.)

A Former Talking Head Talks Tough After a Tough Loss

The OFB Team — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:48:37 +0000

There were columns in yesterday’s local papers about Olie. (Largely uninteresting.) Last night there was a packed Verizon Center press box, many there who normally wouldn’t be, to chronicle the homecoming. But by 8:30 last night I’d had my fill of the storyline. For me it had become a cliche. I wanted something fresh to cover.

I followed the MSM pack to the postgame Tampa room — and it was a pack, 5 or 6 deep in a near full circle around the relieved-it-was-finally-over-looking former Caps’ netminder. I stood among them out of morbid curiosity. They asked questions you thought they would. He gave respectful answers as he always has. The formula was in full force. To the extent that you’ve consumed their coverage late last night and this morning, you know that, ah, it was a tough night for our old goalie, that he’d been thinking about the game a while, that he was relieved it was over.

I was far more interested in listening in on Barry Melrose (mullet missing), particularly on a night when his Tampa charges so obviously under-performed for a goalie making a special homecoming. For the past 10 or so years, I’d known only Barry Melrose the outsized ESPN personality. I’d known his endearing on-air Canuck kitsch, a humility blended with passion and accented with self-effacing wit that had managed to celebrate hockey even for years after ESPN ditched its coverage deal with the league. Melrose had been a big hit on ESPN for 10 years, and when early this past offseason he decided to ditch the comfy TV gig for the heavy lifting behind the Tampa bench, I thought his among this season’s most interesting storylines.

Melrose’s court of press last night consisted largely of Florida media and local bloggers. We had to wait nearly for 30 minutes for his arrival. He didn’t address us long, not even 5 minutes, but it was abundantly clear that had he not had those 30 minutes to partially cool off, much of what he would have told us wouldn’t have been fit for print even on most blogs.

Barry Melrose the cult of ESPN personality, I learned in 5 minutes last night, is very much a personality of the past. Today he is a fiercely competitive big-league bench boss, and whether he succeeds or fails in this latest gig, his analytical eye is keen.

He started by calling his team’s first-period performance “brutal.”

“I told the guys, ‘Why try when you get down 3-0, why try then? Why care [only] when you’ve given up three goals?’”

“I was very disappointed with the play in front of Olie, in Washington. [Rising anger pause at this point] We got a lot of guys that gotta do some soul-searching, cause we got a lot of players that aren’t playing very well right now.”

When one reporter suggested that the Caps had made things difficult for the visitors by coming out and playing inspired against their former goalie, the coach would have none of it.

“They had five shots in the first period [6, officially]. They weren’t the New York Islanders of ’84 by any stretch of the imagination. They had three scoring chances and they put them in. And that’s what the Caps do, they got some great talent. It wasn’t what they were doing, we were awful.”

“A terrible change gives up a goal, Green beat two of our guys up the ice on another goal . . . it wasn’t that Washington was great, we just weren’t ready to play.

“For the life of me I do not know why.”

Then a reporter asked a legitimate question about between-period adjustments Tampa made to make the game competitive after so sour a start. Melrose the nice guy, the studio yuckster, was nowhere to be found.

“We sang ‘Kumbaya’ around the fire after the second period,” he shot back with a death stare.

Yowza!

Did Tampa’s improved play in periods two and three make the start all the more frustrating?

“It just pisses you off more,” the coach returned.

“When you come in here and you’re just stick-checking and nobody’s hitting anybody and you say ‘Excuse me’ when you go to the net . . . “

A final broadside launched by the new head coach returned to the topic of Tampa’s 20 skaters letting down a goalie on his special night.

“If I’m those guys I can’t look Olie in the face. You know probably the biggest game this guy’s played in years, and they show up and do that for him. I think those guys should all be hiding their eyes when they walk by Olie Kolzig tonight.”

A Sort of Homecoming

The OFB Team — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:11:17 +0000

The final five minutes of this eight-and-a-half-minute reminiscence of Hall of Fame netminder Eddie Giacomin are devoted to Giacomin’s heart-wrenching departure, at age 36, from the only NHL team he’d known, the New York Rangers, to Detroit. If on this odd afternoon of very mixed emotions you find striking parallels between Giacomin’s circumstances some 30 years ago and Olie Kolzig’s in D.C. today, that’s because there are.

Fairfax's Collin McKinney Sees Life Through Hockey

The OFB Team — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:26:00 +0000

[Part I of II ]
In the moments leading up to my meeting Collin McKinney, 42, of Fairfax, I readied myself for a seriously sad encounter. There are newsworthy triumphs and tragedies in life every day, and all I knew of McKinney was that he was a huge hockey fan and that he’d endured a sudden and unimaginably tragic misfortune a few years back. This was to be a happy hour meeting devoid of the happy, I imagined. But adversity, I learned over the course of two hours in McKinney’s company, even of the most shocking and harrowing kind, can summon untapped resolve and renewed purpose within the afflicted. In Collin McKinney I found the story of a man who endured one of life’s most savage blows, turned to hockey as a comfort on his road to healing, and emerged an inspiration to his Northern Virginia community.
Life in general didn’t deal McKinney, an Arlington native, much of a strong hand to begin with, health-wise. He’s diabetic, and he battles thyroid and heart problems. He also has severe arthritis.
“I have a lot of bills and pills,” he told me with a chuckle.
When I met McKinney in Ballston on a recent Monday night he stood at the very entrance of our restaurant waiting for me, wearing his Alexander Ovechkin Caps’ jersey so that I could easily identify him. I noticed the black sweater enveloping his frail, 150-pound, world-weary frame, and a blind stick in one hand.
Over our first beer he shared with me the tale of his very first Caps’ game, back in 1986. Somebody had given him tickets at work. Collin took his brother to the game.
“I had a blast, and I was hooked,” he told me.
His attendance at Caps’ games in the immediate years that followed was sporadic; working a handful of modest jobs in offices and maintenance, he attended as often as he could on a modest salary. But one visit to the old Capital Centre that featured a Peter Bondra hat trick upped the ante. He became a puckhead of the first order. Today his home is a shrine to all things Capitals — he has three sweaters, signed hats, “every ‘Rock the Red’ towel ever handed out” he noted with pride, and scores of signed player cards and photos. He owns a Caps’ Tiffany glass lamp, a Capitals’ rug, a big wall hanging of Alexander Ovechkin. “T-shirts like you wouldn’t believe,” he emphasized. I asked him how many games he attended during last season’s stirring run to the Southeast division title. “I think pretty much every one,” he told me. McKinney’s email prefix starts out “bonzai.”
“I just love the Caps, I just love hockey,” he told me. “I used to be a giant Redskins’ fan, but that’s taken a back seat to hockey.”
A Life Forever Changed
On May 10, 2001, McKinney, then working his way through more school with three jobs, was in a hallway at his job at Neiman Marcus. He dropped a paper, bent down to retrieve it, and met a brutal fate.
“There was a guy doing trash, and he had a whole bunch of folded over cardboard boxes,” McKinney began. “He came up as I was going down . . . and he caught me across the bridge of the nose.
“Both of my retinas detached.”
In an instant Collin McKinney’s world went black.
“I dropped a piece of paper and my life changed forever,” he said.
He went immediately to an ophthalmologist. “‘You need surgery and you need it now,’ he told me,” McKinney related.
His left eye was operated on first, as it was believed to be the more seriously damaged. That surgery proved moderately successful, and today McKinney has, in conditions of bright light, a tiny bit of vision out of it. But during surgery on his right eye McKinney woke up out of the anesthesia, bringing the procedure to an immediate halt. In the delay between his second surgery on the eye, damaged nerves failed to regenerate. His right eye began to die.
Thirty-plus years of battling diabetes greatly complicated both the surgeries and the recovery.
“Diabetes, what it does, it produces very weak blood vessels in the back of the retina, so they had to go in and laser them, and that’s what caused me, ultimately . . . to lose everything,” he explained.
“What made me blind is my eye would hemorrhage, the blood vessels would burst and my eye would fill up with blood and I couldn’t see through it. I could see for like a week and then all of a sudden I’d have one of these hemorrhages and I’d be blind for four or five months.”
McKinney endured this fluctuation between partial vision and total blindness for fully two years. His right eye literally bled to death. Then it started shrinking.
“Once is started shrinking, it started pressing against the optic nerve, and this went on for five years, and the pain started getting so intense that I had to go on some pretty heavy painkillers,” McKinney told me.
“I don’t know about you,” he added, “but I don’t do drugs very well. It was a pretty ugly time.”
“It was highly depressing,” he said, with obvious understatement. “It got to the point where [the eye] just had to go. That was this past June.
“I finally just said, ‘Look man, it’s gotta go, it’s either that or I gotta go.’ I just couldn’t go on [in that pain].”
McKinney and I were seated in a booth in a chain restaurant surprisingly crowded on a Monday night. As I listened to him detail his tragedy I worried about him getting emotional and overcome with his story’s sadness, but it was apparent early on that I was in the presence of a young man of exceptional fortitude and perseverance. He relayed his circumstances to me without the slightest semblance of self-pity. He’d had seven years to live with his misfortune, and in his narrative there was no account of buckling under the woe.
McKinney went through more surgical procedures and specialist visits than he can tabulate. Neiman Marcus kept him insured for a solid year while he was out of work and receiving treatment initially, but McKinney’s pre-existing conditions transformed a bad accident into a malevolent mishap — one he was left to grapple with with only the support of friends and family.
“It was quite a life-changing event,” he said. “I was scared. I didn’t know to operate as a blind person. To learn all that I had to in mid- life, was . . . a weird stream.”
“I couldn’t take care of myself — I couldn’t see. I couldn’t check my blood sugar levels.”
Fortunately, McKinney has family in Northern Virginia. His father passed years ago, and he moved in with his mother, today his principal caregiver.
“I couldn’t get through my daily existence without her,” he said. “I had to go to a lot of doctors. She got me through all these different surgeries. She knew what I needed.
“Thank God she was there.”
Determined to try and establish some normalcy in his life, McKinney enrolled in Northern Virginia Community College, in some computer training programs. Computer programming, he explained, is a relatively common pursuit by the vision-impaired. But programming he found boring. Next he tried business classes, but the further he went along with those the more he realized how limited he was by virtue of being unable to work in common business software.
McKinney had a friend whose father went blind, and their intervention helped him in his early struggles.
“I was lucky I got a really good teacher who taught me how to get around with a [blind] stick, how to get on Metro.”
He spent “seven or eight” months departing his house only for followup surgeries and doctors’ visits, and another four months after that “just sitting around.”
“I was sitting there in my house trying to figure out what to do with myself.”

‘I See Ghosts on the Ice’
One day a friend suggested to McKinney that they go downtown together and take in some hockey. It was just a street hockey event outside the Verizon Center, but McKinney found himself getting reacquainted with an old friend — the game he loved. Next he would get rides out to Caps’ practices at Piney Orchard and strike up conversations with the players after practices. McKinney has been able to forge relationships with various Caps’ players over the years. Whenever Nicklas Backstrom sees him he offers McKinney a high five.
“Olie [Kolzig] was always extremely nice to me,” McKinney noted. “I used to go up to Piney Orchard, and all the players were nice enough to sign stuff, but at one point Olie saw me and actually got out of his truck and found me — I guess he saw my blind stick — and stopped and talked to me for a little while. I thought, ‘That’s an awesome guy.’”
Then, at a friend’s urging, McKinney agreed to try and attend a Caps’ game.
“It’s still a little scary trying to get through the crowd in front of Verizon Center,” McKinney noted. “I may as well have a target on my back.”
Inside Verizon Center McKinney isn’t known by many except in his section as “the blind guy,” but he does have important help. Season ticket holders “Bonnie and Mike” sit immediately behind McKinney and make sure he gets everything he needs, and that unsuspecting, newcomer fans in the section don’t infringe on his experience.
“I turned around to high-five them one night and we’ve been fast friends ever since. They really watch out for me,” he told me.
He gets regular help from the arena portal attendants, ‘special’ care from some arena bartenders who pour his drinks, he explained with a broad smile, even aural guidance from an otherwise silent Slapshot.
McKinney of course can’t follow the action on the ice as do the rest of Verizon Center’s patrons. When the Caps wore black sweaters he could make them out a bit with his left eye. Now, he’s only able to tell when a goal has been scored by the flashing red goal light, and the euphoric eruption that follows.
“I basically see ghosts on the ice — ghost figures moving back and forth.”
“Red ghosts, I hope,” I offered.
“Yes,” he replied, smiling.
“I feel like the team helped me out a lot. A lot. They are so nice to me. All the players, all the staff in Verizon Center.”
“All I care about is hockey,” he said.
Today McKinney has a passion for sharing his passion for hockey in his neighborhood.
“I want to get the neighborhood kids into it. They’re going to be fans after we’re done. So I get kids who are six and ten and twelve in my neighborhood to come over and watch Caps’ games, and I take them to games.”
Hockey, the game McKinney fell in love with at first sight, pulled him up out of his darkness by virtue of the people in it, its atmosphere, and the challenge of passing along his passion for puck to his community’s youth.
Coming Tuesday in Part II: Collin McKinney’s remarkable request of the Washington Capitals
[Admin edit: There was a problem with the web site that did not allow for the full rendering of the page. The comment section should now be available.]

Fairfax's Collin McKinney Sees Life Through Hockey

The OFB Team — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:26:00 +0000

The Selling of a Six Pack to a Southerner

The OFB Team — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:31:27 +0000

A brand new colleague in my office, Victoria, not yet six weeks in her new gig, hails from Gulfport, Mississippi. She’s a young twenty-something, bright and engaging, and while college on the West Coast and two brief employment stints in D.C. have well dulled her Mississippi drawl, it’s still abundantly clear that she’s a seriously southern girl. We’re happy to have her. Like others her age, Victoria enjoys meeting friends after work for cheap beers at happy hour. As you might imagine, her family, most of whom still reside in Mississippi, has zero connection to the sport of hockey. Victoria has a boyfriend named John who hails from Oregon and who works for the Department of Energy, and Victoria has reported to me that he has no interest in hockey whatsoever. All of this made what the two of them did on Thursday rather startling to me.
I pass Victoria’s work station each morning en route to my office. Thursday morning near 9:00 I was startled to see on her computer screen the Washington Capitals’ web site. She was perusing it. Naturally, I asked her why.
“I didn’t make it to a single game last year,” she told me. “I don’t want that to happen again this year.” Victoria the Delta darling was searching the Caps’ site for hockey tickets for her and her boyfriend.
Turns out, Victoria had been to a Caps’ hockey game before, in 2006, during her first-ever visit to Washington. It made an impression.

“It was fast-paced, high energy, and I loved the way the crowd got into it,” she told me.
“I got the bug I think,” she added.
A bug for hockey!, said the Dixie doll.¬†
Now Victoria’s ticket search became my search on her behalf. Prior to her lone NHL game two seasons back, Victoria had attended a Mississippi Sea Wolves hockey game as a young teenager back home. The Wolves, of the East Coast Hockey League, were once coached by Bruce Boudreau. Fate, I thought.
“That was the first I’d ever seen an ice rink,” she noted with a smile. But it was her experience years later in a big-league rink in the big city that made the lasting impression.
I asked Victoria why she hadn’t made an appearance at a Caps’ game last season, when they’d become so hot a story in town.
“I changed jobs within DOE last year, changed offices, and I was just so busy with all the changes.”
I never push hockey as a cultural experience among my co-workers, but if they stop by my office and ask questions about the sport, I answer, in generous, often gratuitous detail. I’ll give them two-and-a-half hours of my time, if I’m busy, and discuss my game-playing scars, my fake teeth, ‘Slapshot’ and Killer Kaminski. Last season a nuclear engineer from London from our third floor, a very slight former rugby player named Adrian, stopped by my office the morning after watching Alexander Ovechkin for the first time on television.
“You can’t take your eyes off him,” he explained, highly animated, his eyes wide and arms gesturing wildly. “We’d have loved to have had him on our pitch!”
I guided Victoria to the Caps’ ‘Six-Pack’ plans. They seemed budget friendly to a young professional couple. We perused all of the plan options, comparing the ratio of weeknight to weekend games. We decided that the ‘Original Six’ slate was the most appealing, offering as it does both next Saturday’s home opener against the ‘Hawks (sold out) and that snazzy late January Saturday matinee against the Wings.
“Are the Wings good?” Victoria asked me, reminding me, forcefully, of her regional naivete.
She still had to sell the investment to John, but first I wanted to make sure that she could still land that Six Pack, cause I knew tickets were flying fast. I told Victoria to find seats first and make the selljob to John second.
My suspicions were well founded. A Caps’ sales rep informed my Project Puck Convert of that plan’s unavailability. Victoria, I could tell, was close to crestfallen. Now this really became my mission.
“Let me reach out to a friend,” I told her. “No promises, but let me see what I can do.”
Actually, before I could have a phone chat with a Kettler Capitals friend that same sales rep pinged Victoria with the idea of going to the Original Six set but sitting in different seats for the games. Perfect.
“I’ll go with you if John won’t,” I assured.
Victoria’s boyfriend actually put up no resistance at all. In fact, Victoria reported his being excited by the investment.
“He’s excited because I’m excited,” she said.
“Last year, I saw everyone on Metro dressed in their red sweatshirts and their red jerseys,” she explained. “Sometimes, I couldn’t even get on the trains they were so crowded.
“I wanted to be one of them.”
She is.

A Name No Longer Mentioned

The OFB Team — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:23:26 +0000

One player’s name certainly is emerging from training camp’s first week — by virtue of its omission.
That of Olaf Kolzig.
You don’t hear it mentioned among the press, by fans in the Kettler stands, certainly not by Capitals’ players or coaches. Everybody seems to have moved on from the April agony and the summer transition trauma.
HockeyWashington, so consumed by the drama of L’affair Nameplate five months ago, five months later seems to have reacted to a Kolzig-less training camp with a collective “Meh.”
I for one am a little surprised. I expected some manner of media frenzy (particularly on Day 1 of camp) pegged on “this the first day of hockey without Olie in Washington in more than a decade.” But it didn’t happen, and it isn’t going to, and it’s worth reflecting on why.
There are I think a handful of factors accounting for this striking silence for a hockey hero, but foremost among them is the fact that the Capitals in goal this September have an abundance of exciting talent. Over the past three days there were three highly competitive scrimmages that took place — with jobs on the line and highly skilled players littering all three competing rosters– and yet no team ever tallied more than 3 goals in any of them. I saw scores of breakaways and a pair of shootouts, and I saw goalies winning the overwhelming majority of those showdowns. And specifically, in the likes of Simeon Varlamov and Michal Neuvirth, I saw a tandem of talent I’d never seen before at a Caps’ camp. Observers of this Capitals’ training camp, I believe, are too preoccupied with a fresh and great storyline in net to think back to that of even the recent past. Which, in Olie Kolzig’s case, represented a fading talent.
Capitals’ fans in the final third of the 2007-08 regular season saw a significantly improved Olie Kolzig in net, and with late February’s trade with Montreal they also saw scintillating virtuosity in his rival Cristobal Huet. The regular season’s final loss was on Kolzig, in Chicago, and it was ugly. Thereafter, Head Coach Bruce Boudreau rode Huet, who started and finished the team’s final seven games — all victories, culminating in a near miraculous Southeast division crown. They may not have admitted it then, but Kolzig’s defenders had to have seen the writing on the wall.
Indeed, even when new contract talks with Cristobal Huet fell apart, re-signing Olie Kolzig was never an option. The team needed to move in a new direction.
But the old netminder himself apparently didn’t see any such signs, and this leads to my third reason for the collective, quiet acceptance of his absence. When Kolzig very publicly postured that he had still no. 1 minutes and a no. 1 contract for a contending club ahead of him, he needed, for credibility’s sake, at a minimum, one or two contending summer suitors to make a play for his services. Instead, he ended up in Tampa Bay, for Matt Bradley money. The market spoke. Capitals’ management, which endured a torrent of message board tirades over their perceived handling of Kolzig, was vindicated.
Initially, most rightly viewed Kolzig’s public swagger and competitive perseverance as the byproduct of a special athlete’s pride. And most fans I think were inclined to cut Olie the Goalie a heck of a lot of slack in light of his enormous community contributions. That too is understandable. But Kolzig never articulated any acknowledgment of the team’s turning the corner, for the markedly, durably better, at a time when the rest of Washington had quickly gone hot over hockey. Instead, he remained in a self-centered posture. That I think in turn allowed many Capitals’ fans to turn the page.
A fourth and perhaps pre-eminent reason I think exists for this quasi-forgetfulness of athlete: the thirst for lasting victory. Fair or not, Kolzig, save for one Cinderella season in ’97-’98, was associated with an organization’s mediocrity and rebuilding. For a decade solid Olie Kolzig was the face of this hockey organization, and it was one Washingtonians could be proud of. But the team — his team — always fell short. Today Alexander Ovechkin is the face of the Washington Capitals, displaying a charisma the likes of which we’ve never seen in a hockey player in this town — maybe not among any pro athletes ever in this town. Part of the primal appeal of this current Caps’ team is its being led by the greatest hockey player on the planet, but nearly just as important is its being comprised of a young and exciting core that’s going to be around for a while.
A season ticket holder I spoke with on the Kolzig subject back in April put it best: “I love Olie Kolzig,” he told me, “but I love winning more.”
Olie’s gone but of course not forgotten. How could he be? These days, we’re just too busy going about the business of following winning. We’re overdue that — and damn it’s fun.