Offside Sucks
I had a lover once, and her name was hockey.
I loved skating, shooting pointlessly, passing. The art of it was Canada's national past-time, and I was Canada's national boy while playing it. It's a wonderful game, one of those things that is truly Canadian, even if it's not our national sport. Fuck Lacrosse. If Lacrosse were a man, I'd shove that netted stick up it's ass.
But hockey fell out of favour with me. Mostly because I couldn't score a goal on an open net from twenty feet away, but there were two other reasons.
Offside and icing.
What is the fucking deal with it? Seriously.
I could never understand offside and icing. When I play a game, I'm a mad Viking warrior - I get the shots into the net. Bodycheck the other guy. Get into fights. Don't slash the guy. Skate faster, get to where the puck's going to be.
But these rules totally screwed up my game. I never knew what the deal was, why my skating would somehow force the game to go back to the neutral. It deterred from the purity of skate-shoot-skate-shoot. It wasn't what it was meant to be.
By the way, just so you know, offside is when somebody going for a goal (like me) enters the goal area before the puck does. But I never knew that. All I knew was why everybody didn't like me and why they didn't keep a man behind in the shooting part. But oh, that's offside. Stupid offside.
Icing is when you pass the puck from the middle to past the net. But I didn't know that, all I knew was that I tried to shoot the puck, to pass the puck, and get it into the other guy's net.
I knew none of these complexities, but I did know the troubles and tribulations that these complexities wrought. And because I didn't know it, everything became offside - I had to analyze every move in order to figure out what the offside was. Even if someone explained it to me, I still couldn't get. I desired victory, but the war was in a place that the soldier that I was couldn't understand. And that's why I lost the war, and why the war lost me.
Maybe I should've gone with football.
I loved skating, shooting pointlessly, passing. The art of it was Canada's national past-time, and I was Canada's national boy while playing it. It's a wonderful game, one of those things that is truly Canadian, even if it's not our national sport. Fuck Lacrosse. If Lacrosse were a man, I'd shove that netted stick up it's ass.
But hockey fell out of favour with me. Mostly because I couldn't score a goal on an open net from twenty feet away, but there were two other reasons.
Offside and icing.
What is the fucking deal with it? Seriously.
I could never understand offside and icing. When I play a game, I'm a mad Viking warrior - I get the shots into the net. Bodycheck the other guy. Get into fights. Don't slash the guy. Skate faster, get to where the puck's going to be.
But these rules totally screwed up my game. I never knew what the deal was, why my skating would somehow force the game to go back to the neutral. It deterred from the purity of skate-shoot-skate-shoot. It wasn't what it was meant to be.
By the way, just so you know, offside is when somebody going for a goal (like me) enters the goal area before the puck does. But I never knew that. All I knew was why everybody didn't like me and why they didn't keep a man behind in the shooting part. But oh, that's offside. Stupid offside.
Icing is when you pass the puck from the middle to past the net. But I didn't know that, all I knew was that I tried to shoot the puck, to pass the puck, and get it into the other guy's net.
I knew none of these complexities, but I did know the troubles and tribulations that these complexities wrought. And because I didn't know it, everything became offside - I had to analyze every move in order to figure out what the offside was. Even if someone explained it to me, I still couldn't get. I desired victory, but the war was in a place that the soldier that I was couldn't understand. And that's why I lost the war, and why the war lost me.
Maybe I should've gone with football.
posted by Marshall McMahon at 11:49 PM
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