It may be the Finn in me, but I seem to take missions seriously. Well, mission is too grand a word, really, when I mean favors people ask me and tasks they ask me to do. If somebody suggests getting a cup of coffee “tomorrow”, I hold my day free from other engagements. If I’m asked to find a good restaurant to have dinner at in Helsinki, I ask around and try to find the best one.

And if somebody asks me to deliver three golf shirts to some hockey people when I go on vacation in Vancouver, I deliver those shirts no matter what.

» Continued

I don't know for sure what goes through Mikhail Grabovski's mind when he scores for Belarus, besides general feelings of happiness and pride, but I wouldn't be surprised if a part of the mental images his brain produces are of a Belarusian man, named Yas, let's say, out on the field mowing clover, dreaming about Yanina, a hardworking girl!

That's what I will be thinking about, anyway, now that I've learned what the Belarusian goal song, "Касіў Ясь канюшыну" (Kasiu Yas' Kanyushinu) is all about. Now, I would have known that earlier had I understood the title of the song, which is, in short: Yas mows clover.

» Continued

Let’s start with a fact. I am officially 170 centimeters tall. I don’t know what that is in feet and inches, but whatever it is, it’s below the average in most Western countries. It is the average height for males in Brazil, and above the average in countries like Bahrain, Chile, and Gambia. In Indonesia, where the average height for males is 1.58, I would be considered tall.

(Seriously, Google tells me I’m 5 feet and 6 inches and fifty-nine-sixty-fourths tall.)

» Continued

For the next three weeks, I’ll be in Helsinki, Finland, to cover the hockey world championships. It’ll be my longest stay in my hometown since 2004 when Wife and I moved back to Stockholm after a two-year stint as a Swedish-Finnish couple in Finland.

I was born in Helsinki, I started school there, I went to university there, and I got my first real job there. I’ve also moved out of Helsinki four times.

» Continued

My grandmother liked to talk about death a lot. The turning of time seemed to be very much present in her life, and in her relationship with everybody, including her grandkids. One of her favorite topics, as it related to death, was the inheritance.

When I was about ten years old, I fell in love with a brown, leather coin purse of hers. I played with it, opened and closed it, put it in my pocket, pulled it back out again, feeling very cool. My Grandma watched me play with it, and she asked me if I liked it. I did, I told her.

“Risto, I’ll give that to you. As an advance inheritance. So when I die, you can tell the others that I gave that to you, and that it’s yours,” she told me.

» Continued

I saw this photo (below) on Twitter, and sent a link to a buddy who then reminded me of a blog entry I wrote about Shanahan six years ago for the nhl.com. So I went and dug it up. Here it is:

Shanahan The Man

As you’ve probably already seen, Rangers forward Brendan Shanahan was named the inaugural winner of the Mark Messier Leadership Award this week.

Brendan Shanahan truly is a leader. He stands out from the crowd. He’s different. He’s smart, he’s a great athlete, he’s rich, he’s famous, he’s got it all. When he gives interviews, he actually answers the questions he’s asked. He looks the interviewer in the eye and delivers his thoughts in a careful manner. He’s tall, he’s dark and, yes, he’s handsome.

» Continued

You know, I was thinking...

“It’s obviously more important that Israel survive, you know, than probably some other random set of six million people elsewhere survive.”
– David Plotz, Slate’s “Political Gabfest”, April 20, 2012

Ahem…

Over here? No, not Israel, look a little further north. A little more. Here, in Europe. Just go straight north from Israel and when you hit the Arctic Ocean, look to the west. See? Just another random set of 5,363,624 people.

That’s right. Finland.

» Continued

HELSINKI – Of all the skills that Mikael Granlund has, and of all the gifts he has, the ability to be in the moment, to live in the now, may just be his biggest, and the most important one.

That’s why he was able to hone his stickhandling skills for hours on end as a kid. That’s what’s helped him keep his feet on the ground during the media frenzy around him the last few years, and that’s why it’s easy to believe him when he says that he hasn’t thought about playing in front of his home fans at the World Championship in May.

After all, Mikael Granlund says that when he’s in the zone, he doesn’t even remember his last shift, and doesn’t hear what the crowd’s yelling, or what the other players are saying to him on the ice.

» Continued

The best part of spring - which has definitely sprung here now - is putting the winter clothes away, and brining the summer clothes back into rotation. Not only are there always some nice surprises, jackets you’ve forgot, there’s often the added bonus of finding money in the pockets.

And that, I say, feels like winning the lottery.

» Continued

“Just take it from the top, read it through to get a feel, and you know, remember that you’re partly thinking about this out loud, but that there’s also an audience out there so you have to make sure you reach them,” said the producer.

I nodded, and pulled the microphone a little closer to my face. I leaned on the desk with both my hands, and stared at my script in front of me.

“Anytime you wanna go, just go,” he said.

» Continued

My idea of a perfect afternoon is going for a bike ride with the family. We all get on our bikes, and before we take off, one of us raises his or her right hand and yells, “Let’s ride!” You know, like the Three Amigos did in the movie.

And then we ride to the mall or the library - next to the mall - or to a nearby park. The bike rides don’t take an entire afternoon yet, but by the end of the summer, we might even make it all the way to downtown Stockholm. With a couple of stops to eat our sandwiches, of course.

» Continued

Before the weekend hockey trip that turned me into a fan of a Finnish new wave band, and before I started to grow my hair long, accordingly, but after my favorite band was Alvin and the Chipmunks, I got into rockabilly. Of course I wasn’t alone in this, because that was an era when the 1950s came back in style.

Even Elvis was still alive, although, at that point, I was basically still rocking to the sounds of a chipmunk band, and loving it. I caught the trend a couple of years after his death when a friend of mine and I saw Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s movie on Elvis. And we thought Kurt Russell was perfect as Elvis, but then again, we already knew Kurt was cool, because The Quest, a TV show, had been a big hit in Finland.

» Continued

Last week, when I saw the YouTube video of Scott Hartnell making his then-famous now-forgotten - nothing personal, Scottie, that’s just the way things go these days - Hulk Hogan impersonation, I thought of a friend of mine who did the same thing 20 years ago.

Only, he wasn’t doing it in front of 15 000 people, or to a guy dressed up as Hulk Hogan. He did it in an ice cold hockey rink 50 kilometers west of Helsinki, Finland, in front of 200 people, and purely out of frustration and to get back at every single one of those 150 people in the stands.

» Continued

Last weekend, Wife and Daughter packed their bags and drove south. Now, because it had been snowing when we got up, instead of driving to the cottage, as planned, they only drove south for ten minutes, parked the car at the In-Laws’, and spent the weekend at their imaginary cottage, giving Son and me the male bonding weekend we had talked about. (And the female bonding weekend to them).

This was to be a weekend of life lessons, something they would make a Hallmark movie about. Son and I would talk and hang out, watch movies, eat hamburgers, and while doing that, I would drop some words of wisdom his way.

Like, “Did you know that they just found the Apollo 11 engines?” or “Did you know that there are actual flying cars these days but they’re now called roadable aircrafts.”

And Son would nod, and take notes like I was going to ask him to. That was the plan. But first, we had to run to the train so we’d make it to the 12.10 showing of the 3D version of “The Phantom Menace”.

» Continued

I don’t know if we were friends anymore, although I’m pretty sure we were. I know we weren’t enemies, which is natural since we were teenagers, and at least for me, there were just buddies and other people. When I look back now, I think we had been pretty good friends because we went to the same school, but I also know that we only went to the same school for about a year and a half, two years maybe, and I had lost track of him a little bit.

Maybe I liked him because he seemed to be always smiling, or because he was nice to me, a new kid in town, or maybe because he shared a name with my father, which made his name unusual for somebody his age.

» Continued

“You’ve got big dreams? You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying in sweat.”
– “Lydia Grant”, dance instructor in “Fame”

Yes, I’m old enough to not only admit to remembering “Fame”, the 1980s hit TV series, but also having liked the show. Now, rushing home on Sunday afternoons so I could watch Danny and Bruno and Leroy, and of course Valerie, Coco and Lori work on their art, and get their lives straight, wasn’t something I told my teammates, but then again, since nobody talked about it, maybe I wasn’t the only fan of the show. All I know, “Fame” was never discussed in the locker room.

I’ve quoted “Lydia Grant’s” - played by Debbie Allen - words many times over the years, sometimes jokingly, but most often seriously, because it’s true. Fame does cost, and the price is sweat.

» Continued

FADE IN.

INT. CAR - EVENING. RISTO’S driving on a highway, SON sitting in the backseat, playing Angry Birds on RISTO’S iPhone. The radio’s on, playing Ulrik Munther’s “Soldiers”.



RISTO cranks up the volume.

» Continued

Stuck On You

They’re playing Elvis in this coffee shop. The barista behind the counter is singing along, and when the song reached the end, she was really belting it. Don’t look now - I can’t - but I know she’s even doing the moves.

This must be the best coffee shop in Stockholm, this “V. Street Coffee” almost across the street from the main station. It’s small, but it’s got character - like you know who - like all the cool coffee shops in the world. It’s not a franchise, not a copy of somebody else’s idea, it’s its own thing. On the walls there are posters from the 1950, the price list looks like it’s from the 1970s.

And of course, the barista knows everybody.

» Continued

“Hockey is simply the best sport out there. This coming from someone who did not grow up with hockey (Miami Beach is not exactly your hockey Mecca). I place being at Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals and watching Dave Andreychuk lift Stanley over his head just beneath the birth of my children!”
– Cookie, May 27, 2007

The kids thought it was a little funny that we’d be visiting somebody named Cookie, or “Kakan” as Son called her, translating “cookie” into Swedish. Wife and I thought it was a little exciting, almost a little wild, to make travel plans to Florida and include in them a night at a complete stranger’s house, even if she is a retired school teacher, and a redhead named Cookie.

Of course, Cookie wasn’t really a stranger, she was just somebody we had never met. After all, I had been emailing with her since that first message in May 2007 which she sent as a reply to a blog post of mine on NHL.com. And, we’re Facebook friends.

Over the last five years, she had sent us hats and posters, and her favorite children’s book - “The Giving Tree” - and I had helped her write signs in Finnish and Swedish and I, too, had sent her books (of mine that she had bought, but still), and in the process, we had become friends.

And of course, we did know that she was a hockey fan.

» Continued

HELSINKI – The stars were almost perfectly aligned on Monday night when the Anaheim Ducks played against the Colorado Avalanche. Teemu Selanne scored his 22nd goal of the season, with a wrist shot from the faceoff circle like so many times before, passing fellow countryman and childhood idol Jari Kurri on the NHL's all-time scoring list to become the highest-scoring Finn in the history of the NHL.

The game was also Saku Koivu’s 1000th regular season game in the NHL, the 274th player in the league history to reach that point.

Between the two of them, Koivu and Selanne have been a big part of the finest moments of Finnish hockey history, both individually, and together. Koivu was an integral part of the historic 1995 World Championship team, Selanne broke records in the NHL, and together they’ve won 1998 Olympic bronze, 1999 World Championship silver, 2004 World Cup silver, 2006 Olympic silver, 2008 World Championship bronze, and 2010 Olympic bronze.

» Continued

In Finland, there are thousands of jokes about the Swedes. Entire books have been dedicated to the art form, and one of my all-time favorite jokes actually comes from one of those books. I read it when I was about 12, and I’m not really sure why I still think it’s sort of funny. It’s almost not even a joke.

“A Swede shot an arrow to the sky. He missed”.

Anyway, Finns like to tell jokes about Swedes, and often it’s the Swedish man who’s the butt of the joke. In the jokes, the Swedish men are slow, thick, and often, if not homosexual, then at least soft and feminine. They discuss things.

» Continued

”Come on, Daddy, come stand in line with us. You said you wanted to high-five Pluto.”
– Daughter to me, today, at Disney World

Who knows what has led me to believe that I have a special relationship with Disney, but that’s just what I’ve felt all my life. And my connection isn’t just with the Disney characters, not just Donald Duck and Goofy, but with Walt Disney himself, a man who died before I was born.

The special feeling didn’t end when I grew up. Disney was one of three companies on my very short list of places I wanted to work at when I graduated from the business school. Disney, Coke, and Nike was my complete list. I applied for jobs with all of them, interviewed at Coke and Nike, but never at Disney. Not yet, anyway.

» Continued

A couple of weeks ago, when we were out skating, I saw a group of middle-aged men play a game of shinny at one end of the big ice. What really caught my eye was the fact that they all, every one one of them, wore helmets.

Back in the 1980s when I was a kid, people wore just cool sweaters, and nobody wore a helmet playing shinny.

We didn’t wear helmets when we went sledding, or skating, or for bike rides, either.

» Continued

Pressure – pushing down on me
Pressing down on you, no man ask for
Under pressure - that burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets
– Queen, “Under pressure”

The playoff race is on, and for many teams, that means that the pressure, too, is on. But going for a playoff spot and missing it, while sure a disappointing experience, is nothing compared to the pressure that a team trying to avoid relegation feels.

Even with the pressure, a missed playoff spot is just a missed opportunity to get to the throne. Life goes on.

A relegation from the top division, on the other hand, is the end, a complete dismissal from the court, a disaster on all levels.

» Continued

Every year, stars are born. Many of them against some long odds.

A few years ago, a 24-year-old goaltender named Jonas Gustavsson broke the Elitserien shutout record in his first full season, having played mostly in Swedish second and third divisions before then. He finished the season with a bronze medal around his neck as he returned from the 2009 IIHF World Championship in Berne, Switzerland, and then signed with the Toronto Maple Leafs as a free agent.

He wasn't the first great goaltender to emerge from out of nowhere, and he likely won't be the last. Just last Sunday, after the final game of the Oddset Hockey Games between Finland and Sweden in Stockholm, the teams stood on the blueline waiting for the best players of both teams to get their prizes at center ice. As it happened, both stars chosen were goaltenders.

» Continued

It’s funny how some small things from the past stick to mind when, especially in retrospect, there’s nothing really truly special about that particular moment. For me, one of those moments came in a road hockey game in the backyard of our apartment building in Helsinki.

I didn’t usually take the sticks I used in real games to road hockey games, because I wanted to save them, but that one Koho had the perfect blade for me, and it made my wrist shots better than ever. And I thought I’d need my best shot in the game that awaited.

Well, it wasn’t really a game, it was just me and one friend, my best friend, taking turns shooting, and being in goal. Armed with just hockey goalie’s gloves, but no shin pads, the best bet would have been to shoot low, but who wants to shoot low when you can go topshelf?

Especially with a good stick.

» Continued

Today, Valentine’s Day, is Wife’s birthday. This morning, Son woke me up, then woke up his sister while I went downstairs to prepare breakfast. And we walked into the bedroom, singing, carrying a tray, and presents. Son and Daughter had made birthday cards, too, but I forgot mine. So here it is. (I centered it so it’d look like a poem).

Last week – or, six days ago, to be precise – I was, once again, walking to the gym listening to a hockey podcast, like so many times before, when I suddenly noticed something out of the ordinary in front of me.

There, parked by the side of the bike lane, was a shopping cart.

A #%#€”& shopping cart, I said to myself, under my breath, naturally.

I looked around to see if I could find the culprit, but it was as hopeless as my efforts to memorize the face of a seagull shitting on me. And yet, when that happens - it’s happened to me twice in the last ten years - I always look up, wave my fist, and point a the bird with my finger, as a warning.

» Continued

Recently, I’ve been tracking down former Team Finland players, collecting their stories of how they broke into the national team. Last night, at a game, I sat next to Petri Skriko who played his first national team games thirty years ago, in the spring of 1981. He was one of the last players to get cut from the Helsinki World Championships team in the 1982, so he set his sights on the 1984 Olympics instead.

“In December 1983, we played an exhibition game against Czechoslovakia in Finland, before leaving for the annual Izvestija Cup in Moscow,” Skriko said.

» Continued

One winter day nine years ago, I walked four blocks from our apartment to the restaurant where I was supposed to meet a young Finnish hockey player named Tuomo Ruutu. He was 20, had just turned 20, and he was one of the most-sought after prospects in Europe. He played for Helsinki IFK, but had been drafted by the Chicago Blackhawks in the first round, ninth overall in 2001, and he was expected to sign with the team and leave Finland after the season.

I was meeting him for an interview, but not just any old interview. It was my first assignment for The Hockey News, (one of) the most respected hockey publication(s) in the world.

» Continued

I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.
– Jonathan Coe, author

“Risto always says he didn’t have any toys when he was a kid,” Wife told the three other people gathered around the table, and around the birthday cake with a big number 1 on it.

Then she laughed and the others laughed, too. He’s such a joker, she said, and we all agreed, but for different reasons. Maybe the others thought the idea of somebody having no toys was really funny, ridiculous even, but I just happen to think I’m a pretty funny guy and a fine joker, generally speaking.

And I do tell people I didn’t have any toys when I was a kid. Or, at least Wife and the kids, and my mother.

Because it’s true.

» Continued

And that was the second Finnish Winter Classic. A real Helsinki derby, with the reds, IFK, taking on the whites, Jokerit, in front of 35 000 people in the Helsinki Olympic Stadium. The home team, IFK, won the game in a shootout, 3-2. And you know there’s magic in the air when the nicest play of the game is Jarkko Ruutu’s forehand-backhand deke in the shootout.

Last year, the home team - then Jokerit - lost the game so IFK is now 2-0 in their outdoor games in the SM-liiga.

While the February 2011 derby was the first outdoor game in the Finnish league history, it wasn’t that long ago the Finnish top teams still battled for points while battling against snow and freezing cold. The league was founded in 1975, as an entity divorced from the federation.

Back then, the first indoor arena in the country was just ten years old. In the early 1970s, several of the rinks were converted into arenas, and surprisingly many are still - after renovations - home arenas to Finnish league teams.

» Continued

Exactly four meters below me, there are two piles of LPs, sitting on a shelf in our basement. If the floor of my office suddenly opened up, so that I’d fall straight down, and then through our hallway floor as well, I’d land on a photo of three dogs in the backseat of a limousine.

Those two piles of vinyl were a big part of t my teen years, which were my most active music listening years, and what seem to have defined my musical taste for the rest of my life. Every once in a while, when I go downstairs to look for something, I stop to look at my old records, and my old turntable sitting next to them in a plastic bag. Every time, I realize that I have most of those LPs also in other formats: First CDs, and then those imported onto my laptop as mp3s, and now somewhere in a Spotify cloud, as “The Only Playlist You’ll Ever Need”.

(That, in a word, is pathetic).

» Continued

Yesterday, on my way to the gym, I thought I saw a 50-krona bill in the snow on the pavement. I stopped to check - of course - and realized that it was, indeed, a mustard yellow bill with the singer Jenny Lind on it. I quickly picked it up, and then, before slipping it inside my red mitten, I looked to my left and to my right, to see if somebody was watching me.

I’d like to say I did so to find the poor old lady who had dropped it so I could return it, but that was my second thought. That did come before “I can’t believe my luck!” My first thought, though, was: Who’s pulling my leg?

Now, I’m a joker. I sometimes tell a joke, although I can’t seem to remember very many of them at the same time so I mostly do puns, wordplay, and sarcasm. In fact, I monitor my development in Swedish by seeing Wife’s reactions to my puns. Ten years ago, she used to say she’d heard my puns before. In third grade. These days, I seem to be making 7th grade puns.

My Dad, on the other hand, is a prankster. He’s the kind of guy who hides eggs in other people’s pockets, or sticks pepper inside a chocolate bar.

» Continued

“Social anxiety is the fear of interacting with other people, which can bring on intense feelings of self-consciousness. Put another way, social anxiety is the fear of being judged negatively by other people, leading to feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment, humiliation and depression.”

Let’s just face it. Sharing is a little scary. We all know the feeling when the teacher singles you out for talking in class. You do not even realize that she is staring at you. Once you do realize it, and look up, the teacher looks you in the eye and says: “If it is such a great story, would you like to share it with the rest of the class?”

Of course not.

» Continued

Here's the year 2011 as chronicled in the opening lines of stories published in the New Yorker throughout the year. What a year!

» Continued

Last week, just as I was about to make a long-distance Skype to America, my laptop quietly died. Well, before it died, it froze, and went into a coma. I don’t know if it could hear me, but it didn’t react to anything I did. Not mouse movements, not my tapping on the keys, not even Escape.

I had to switch it off and have it examined.

Two days later I got a call. The man had some good news and some bad news. The bad news was that the hard drive had, indeed, died. The good news was that they were able to retrieve the data.

“I’ll put a folder called ‘backup’ on your new disk then,” said the man with the message.

» Continued

When I first moved to Sweden, I was more than shy to speak Swedish. For a non-Finn that may have seemed a little strange, since I had seven years of Swedish studies - with good grades - under my belt, and I had translated hockey magazines from Norwegian and Swedish into Finnish. And yes, I could read the papers, watch the late night news on TV, and every now and then, I would even send an email in Swedish to my colleagues.

But every Finn knows how difficult it is for us to speak Swedish. Partly because the Finnish accent always gives us away - and Finns would like nothing better than to blend in - and partly because while that fantastic educational system did teach us Swedish grammar, it didn’t teach us how to speak.

» Continued

When I was 17, many moons ago, I lived in a small Finnish town called Joensuu, in the eastern part of the country, about an hour from the Russian border. Except that it wasn’t the Russian border, it was the Soviet border, and it wasn’t such a big of a deal. There’s nothing on the other side of the border, anyway, just forest. There’s nothing else in about a hundred mile radius from the city.

There was no Internet, and therefore no YouTube, but there was rock’n’roll so my friends and I spent a lot of time sitting in each others’ rooms listening to tapes and records, and swapping tapes and records with each other.

And trying to learn those first few chords to Smoke on the Water.

(As it happens, still the only chords I know).

» Continued

[Professor Hood’s] researchers convince the pre-school-age subjects that their special item will be put into a machine that can produce a copy of the object which is identical in every way. The infants, who are offered the choice of having the original or the "perfect" copy returned to them, strongly prefer the original. – BBC, 2004

Every once in a while, when I’m writing longer pieces, my fingers seem to swell, and I take off my wedding ring. It’s something of a pause to collect my thoughts as well, and a minute or so later, I slip the ring back on because I’m worried that I might lose it.

Before Wife and I got engaged, we were fake engaged for a while. Or, I know that I was. We’d only been together for about a year when we moved in together. She had sold her apartment wanted us to take a really nice, long trip somewhere with the money she had made so we took a trip to Mexico. For a week, we traveled around the Yucatan peninsula in an air-conditioned bus with an active group of mostly retired people.

» Continued

Even before my father had uttered a word, I knew what he was going to say next. I had heard it before, and always in a voice about two octaves lower than his own because that’s the tone he had heard it in the first time, some 30 years ago.

We were at a hockey game, when I mentioned to him that I'd be going to Turku to interview Juuso Wahlsten. As soon as "Wahlsten" had left my lips, I saw the twinkle in Dad's eyes, the lightbulb over his head, just like I had seen many times before over the years.

“It’s not every day you see a junior team play such good hockey,” Dad said.

» Continued

First time you feel it, it might make you sad
Next time you feel it it might make you mad
But you'll be glad baby when you've found
That's the power makes the world go 'round

In the winter of 1985, JVC handed out free tickets to see a movie about a young kid traveling back in time. I had read in the Rolling Stone that Huey Lewis and the News had a couple of songs in the movie, but didn’t know much else. I didn’t even know that JVC handed out free tickets, but when my father asked me if I wanted to go, I said yes.

It was a special afternoon matinee, starting at 4.30, which was perfect, because it meant that I would still be able to make it to the hockey game the same night. The game started at 6.30 so if I ran or walked briskly, there was still a chance to make it to the rink before the opening faceoff.

» Continued

Last week in Sweden, some 600 000 people stayed up or got up in the middle of the night to watch the World Juniors final between Sweden and Russia on TV. The average was 530 000 and by the time Mika Zibanejad beat Andrei Makarov in the Russian net, 600 000 people had tuned in.

And the way the game ended, it was obviously worth losing some sleep.

After the game, Sweden’s Jeremy Boyce-Rotevall said that Zibanejad had told him before the game that he’d "finish this game off." A bold prediction coming from a player who had scored just three goals in the tournament, against Latvia and Slovakia – but he backed it up.

"I [repeated it to Boyce-Rotevall] before the overtime too so it was good to get that goal," Zibanejad said. "You have to decide if you want to win this. In the morning, it was a joke, but obviously it’s not a joke anymore."

No, it’s no joke. And every time we repeat it, it becomes a little more of a truth until it becomes a true legend.

» Continued

Longtime German national team player and national coach Xaver Unsinn passed away on Wednesday, January 4, 2012, in his hometown of Füssen at age 82. With 107 games at World Championships and Olympic Winter Games as a coach he was the coach with the second-most international games behind only legendary Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov.
– IIHF.com

One September morning in 1977, I was in a rush to read the sports pages of the Helsinki morning paper, even more than usual, because the Finnish SM-liiga had kicked off the night before. I turned to the back of the newspaper, and saw a headline about Lauri Mononen scoring a “Canadian hat trick”.

I had never heard of such a thing, but I learned that it was not just a regular hat trick, but a double one. Six goals.

» Continued

Dear world,

Jimmy didn’t do it. He didn’t steal those billions of dollars. Trust me, I know. I am his grandmother and he was with me that whole week a couple of years ago because I had a sore throat and I needed love and attention. That and Jimmy’s special tea with honey. That usually cures any sore throat in just 24 hours. That time, however, it took me a whole week to get better.

» Continued

NEW YORK – It was worth the hype. Just two days after its launch, “2012”, the latest version of Year, a life experience interface, has collected over seven billion users, making it the most popular Year in history.

Year has managed to add new users in most of its existing markets, a feat not many analysts thought was going to be possible. Also, while Year has dominated the global marketplace, it hasn’t always been embraced by the Chinese, leaving one of the biggest markets untapped, but “2012” seems to have broken that barrier.

The new Year is built on the same platform as the previous version, the “2011”, but users now can make slight modifications, such as opt for better nutritional and workout habits, a feature that the 2011 also initially had, but that disappeared mysteriously in early February in what is suspected to be an attack by the Anonymous.

» Continued

Hockey’s pretty much a year-round sport these days. Finnish teams, for example, play their first exhibition games already in early August when the rest of the world is still at their barbecues. Today, the players seem to be in shape all the time, August or April, they’re no slackers, and the Mario Lemieux kind of training – “not ordering the fries with my sandwich” - has gone the way of the Bobby Hull toupee.

I’m with Mario, always have been, but still, summer always feels like a new chance to get in shape. I don’t seem to succeed, but every summer, I still try. I even do some of the old conditioning drills back from when I still could. And when nobody’s watching, I try to run up a tree. I always have to get at least three steps up the trunk to feel good about myself.

» Continued

While I was never one of those guys who could visualize their dream car, their dream house, or their dream woman, I always knew that Rita Hayworth was the perfect woman. You may not agree with me, but in that case I will have to respectfully let you know that you’re wrong. And I will tell you why. Rita Hayworth was the perfect woman because he was the star of my Dad’s favorite movie – which I assume was his favorite because she was the star of it.

The movie is Gilda, a 1946 film about an Argentine illegal casino, its owner, his right-hand man, and Gilda, the perfect woman, and the owner’s new bride who appears to share a past with the right-hand man.

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I’ve never understood why John Lennon would sing “another year over and a new one just begun” in a Christmas song. There’s still a week between Xmas and New Year’s and anything can happen.

For example, six years ago, Wife didn’t have any idea on Xmas Eve that a week later I’d propose to her.

Twelve years ago, we wished each other merry Xmas and a happy new year a couple of days before Xmas Eve because I spent that one in Finland, and wasn’t sure if I’d be back for her New Year’s party.

But I decided to come back because I wanted to be with her. That much I knew then, and that much I know now. Everything else has just happened.

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