Here we go again. My first NHL Blog Central entry of '07 is right here and below:
You are my destiny
”I quit.”I’ve told my friends just that past months. I quit hockey. I just don’t have the energy or the commitment anymore. Hockey just doesn’t seem to do it for me like it used to.
I’ve spent most of my life trying to get into the hockey business, get into the inside ring of things. I remember the actual moment that I set my sight on just that. My junior team had come home from a road trip on the West Coast of Finland in the middle of the night. I hadn’t played particularly well or much. I was just about to grab the door on my way into our arena to dump my hockey trunk there when a voice inside me said: “Time to move to the other side.”
That was twenty years ago.
Between that night and today, I have, among other things, been translating hockey magazines from Norwegian into Finnish, selling computer software to hockey coaches – “Hockey Manager,” developed by a former Finnish coach who was ten years ahead of the curve –, been Ivan Hlinka’s interpreter on his team’s Finnish tour, worked a summer at hockey pants manufacturer Tackla Canada in Orillia, Ontario, written a paper on how fans see their rivals’ sponsors, and worked for the NHL during the 1994 International Challenge event in Helsinki, Finland.
It was the day before my 26th birthday, I was sitting at home, thinking about the same thing I am thinking now: What is it that really draws me to hockey? I decided that I really wanted to get in, wherever it may be.
I sent a letter to every single NHL team – there were 26 at the time – and to the league offices in New York, Toronto and Montreal. The rest of December I waited for the mailman to deliver the news.
And he sure did. Most of the teams replied, and it was a thrill to come home and see an envelope with an NHL team logo waiting for me on the floor. Those five seconds before I opened it, and saw how the letter began, seemed long. In those five seconds, anything was possible, the dream was still alive, the doors were still open.
I got nice letters from Edmonton, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, well, you name it. I also got a very nice phone call from the NHL that got me involved with the Winnipeg Jets’ Helsinki visit in 1994.
In addition to the things I listed above, I have, since 1994, also painted a hospital wall white, and then hung a white sheet with the tournament logo a friend of a friend had painted on it on the wall (so that everything would be perfect when then-new commissioner Bettman came into town), done market research on European hockey cities for a European hockey league that never materialized, coached 12-year-olds for a couple of seasons, played semi-semi-competitive hockey in Finland and Sweden, traveled to numerous World Championships as a hockey tourist, translated a hockey magazine from Swedish into Finnish, helped an agent find contacts in Finland, almost got a job at the NHL, translated three books about the NHL, and nine youth hockey books.
In the past three years, I have given birth to and killed my own hockey magazine, and written for a bunch of hockey magazines and websites around the world.
I’ve covered the World Cup of Hockey, World Championships, and I’ve written way over a thousand blog entries about hockey on my own HockeyBlog – daily, through the summers – and another Finnish website I write for.
Maybe I’m just tired. Tired of lockouts, salary caps, coaches screaming at refs, tired of refs that are really bad, tired of obnoxious GMs and journalists who always know best, tired of not having a team to cheer for. Tired of reading dozens of hockey blogs every day, tired of keeping up with the third and fourth liners in teams I can hardly ever watch play.
On the other hand, as I write this, I think of the cold winter’s day in 2003 when I took the tram from outside my Helsinki apartment to the hotel where the Russian junior team stayed at, waited twenty minutes for the Russian team manager to come down and help me get in touch with Alexander Ovechkin, and then wait another twenty minutes for the two of them to reappear in the lobby for the interview.
It was in the same lobby I two years later interviewed Timo Jutila, the captain of the 1995 Team Finland that won the World Championship, for a book about the team. I drove around Finland for two months, meeting every single player and the coaches to tell their story.
That same winter, an old teammate of mine and I sat through a Scotty Bowman presentation at the Swedish Hockey Symposium in Stockholm, mesmerized. I interviewed him afterward while my friend took photos. They were all blurry but I wanted to use one in my magazine anyway because that’s what teammates do.
Looking back feels good. I just can’t think forward and feel the same pleasure.
And yet, I gravitate to hockey all the time. Last week I drove 300 miles to meet a Swedish coach for an interview, watched a game over the Internet, and two other games on TV. Today, my son and I wore Finnish national team sweaters, he the blue Tuomo Ruutu one, myself a white Arto Ruotanen one, and played some floor hockey. (That’d be the floor of my office).
Maybe it’s the January blues. The fact that the sun seems to have disappeared completely gets to me.
I am like Forrest Gump, only just not as successful. I am Michael Corleone fighting his destiny: “Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in.”
And I can’t really quit hockey.
How could I when there’s the friend asking if I could help him find tickets to games. There’s the fact that I have about a hundred hats with different hockey club logos on them so I’m always wearing one. And there’s that other friend going out with a hockey player and her asking me if I know him.
But mostly, though, it’s about seeing Canadian kids jumping on top of each other, and the Russians just staring ahead after the gold medal game. It’s Teemu Selanne in his new, long hairstyle being celebrated in Anaheim, and then getting a couple of goals. It’s the Stars’ Patrik Stefan missing an empty net and the Oilers scoring seconds from that.
And it’s the crackling sound of the ice when you first step on it. The sound of the boards when you shoot the puck across the rink. It’s the game.
Hi, my name is Risto, and I’m hooked on hockey.