For a time I thought the Washington Redskins’ Hogs – a cadre of burly men who cross-dress as female pigs – had provided me with a Ph.D. level understanding of the extent to which people will stretch themselves in the name of group pride.
But my mind was opened to the larger and deeper dimensions of this human tendency two years ago, when I ended a 40-year pause in my hockey playing career to take to the ice at Springfield’s NTPRD Chiller.
I should start out by noting that no one but me was aware of the 40-year pause, and for a simple reason: I’m not a real hockey player, never was one and never will be.
I did play pond hockey while coming of age in suburban Detroit of the 1960s. That was when the Red Wings played at the old Olympia and Gordie Howe was in the latter stages of his historic career.
To understand Howe as a player, and real hockey in general, it’s necessary to know two things:
1. A traditional hat-trick is accomplished when a player scores three goals in a single game.
2. A Gordie Howe hat-trick, named for the venerable star, is accomplished when a player scores one goal, is credited with one assist and is involved in a one fight in the course of a single game.
I should add that, in addition to playing pond hockey, during junior high and high school years, I did fish into my pockets to scrounge for the $3.50 or so then needed to join groups of friends pooling resources to buy ice time at highly sought after time-share slots like 3:30 a.m.
After the games, we would repair to the local equivalent of White Castle, and, while having our fill, provide the place’s early shift with an opportunity to listen to yet another group of high school kids talk about the need to stay upwind from one another during our class periods later in the day.
While it’s true that hockey can be a rough sport, at 61 and my level of play, the greatest danger I face is from gravity, which can yank me down to the ice more quickly than my wife’s eyes can wordlessly say “I told you so” if I return from a game with any hint of injury.
As a lifelong hockey fan, however, I do have an appreciation for the culture of real hockey players.
Real players, for instance, refer to their teeth as Chiclets, which is what teeth look like when they fall out of players’ mouths after a close encounter with a puck.
Most people also know the saying, “I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.” That’s actually a less fair characterization of the game these days than it once was.
New rules and closer officiating require that today’s NHL “goons” be multi-taskers, meaning that, in addition to fighting on skates, they also have to be able to play hockey on them.
Although I know this will largely be lost on non-fans, I feel compelled to mention an example of hockey toughness that’s an artifact of the recent cultural past: The Hockey Mullet.
I do so because the courage required to sport that sawed-off version of the original spoke volumes about the stout character of the Western Canadian players who helped to make it an NHL staple.
I knew all these things about hockey before I returned to the ice two years ago. But what I didn’t know – what has now been revealed to me – has taken me beyond the Dawg Pound.
It involves the strange pride some take in what’s known as Hockey Stink.
Like preachers in the wilderness, there are those who roam locker rooms and moralize about the depravities of Hockey Stink. These social reformers go so far as to advocate the washing of shoulder pads, shin pads, uniforms and hockey pants on a regular basis.
As highly principled as their arguments are, they stand, alas, in the minority.
There also is a cadre of non-believers advancing the argument that hockey stink shouldn’t be capitalized because isn’t all that different from the stink that emanates from any middle school locker room late in any school term. It takes over about the time an inflexible urgency creeps into the voices of gym teachers and coaches as they exhort students to take their gym clothes home for washing over winter break, spring break, or at least, for God’s sake, summer vacation.
“They’re not clean if they stand up on their own, boys” remains one of the pearls of wisdom offered up from a long ago coach/teacher who, on the basis of that fundamental insight into the principles of health, earned state certification to teach a semester class on the subject.
Unique or not, hockey stink remains a formidable enough force that I’ve come to believe may have influenced Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, from the hockey state of Minnesota, to pencil in the cloud of grime that always floated around his character Pigpen.
Inside a hockey locker room, most of the large bags filled with gear begin to emit a Pigpen like cloud when the zippers of the bags are opened.
Because the bags are strewn on the floor, the heaviest stench is concentrated at mid-calf level and below, like the smog that clings to the ground in Beijing just as it filled the Los Angeles basin in the bad old days.
However, the hockey stink level can spike if someone has forgotten his jersey and a fellow teammate reaches into the depths of his bag to pull out an extra that has been festering for months and then air-mails it across the room.
The tossing of such a garment results in the hockey stink equivalent of a walk past the perfume counter in a department store: The odor clings to you momentarily but, blessedly, dissipates in the time it takes to hold a long breath and advance into purer air.
That polite baptism in hockey stink contrasts with the total immersion experience I had last year when, in my travels, I happened to make a quick visit to a college hockey team’s locker room to find a friend.
After my initial gasp, I realized that team members had signed the same anti-laundering compact I observed as a student, something that had allowed the hockey stink to fill the entire chamber of a locker room whose handsome decorating scheme I strained to appreciate through watering eyes.
It was then that I began to understand the special allegiance some have for Hockey Stink, again capitalized, as well as its compelling logic: It’s hard not to have a sense you should stick to something you know will always stick to you.
Look, I know it’s not altogether rational.
In my mind, I can understand that a full set of football pads impregnated, then as densely encrusted with sweat as a tilapia encrusted with pecans might produce a similar stench.
But having experienced this stink the cultural milieu of hockey, I’ve come to appreciate and take some special pride in it – the kind of pride expressed by those who endured the Great Depression or the Time of Mullets.
I’ve even come to see a Biblical basis for it.
All know the saying “Pride cometh before the fall.”
Well, as those those who take pride in it know, nothing will knock you down faster than Hockey Stink.
And that’s God’s truth.
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