One late May evening eight years ago, Wife and I shook hands on a deal we had just made. She would launch a website for Swedish-speaking parents in Finland, and I, at my end, would try to make the world a better place by launching a hockey publication.
The next few months we sat in our kitchen, facing each other, but both typing away on his and her laptop, with the covers leaning on each other, like we were leaning on each other.
If you’ve read my hockey blogs before, you know that my favorite players include, among others, Valeri Kharlamov, Marcel Dionne, Theo Fleury, Wayne Gretzky, Sergei Makarov, Vladimir Krutov, Martin St. Louis, Håkan Loob, and Mats Näslund.
With the exception of Fleury and St. Louis, they’re all older than me, and they’re all forwards. So, yes, I was born in the late 1960s and, like my idols, I was a speedy forward in my more active playing days.
I wrote my first Tuukka Rask story seven years ago when he was a young, up-and-coming goalie prospect. Now he’s backing up Tim Thomas in the Stanley Cup Final. Five years ago, another Finnish backup goaltender got his chance to play in the Stanley Cup Final, and I wrote about him, too. Sort of. So, here’s one from the archives. From my nhl.com blog:
Monday, June 19, 2006
Streets of Helsinki
Yes, the NHL Final has been completely overshadowed by the World Cup. The World Cup that doesn’t have to have the name of the sport in the title. It’s just the World Cup. You’ve all read the stories about the ratings in the U.S., how the Americans apparently prefer professional eating contests and left-handed poker to hockey, so you know what I’m talking about.
Another JJ story, my last of the season. (From IIHF.com).
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BRATISLAVA – When Jaromir Jagr made his Czech league debut, one of his teammates was Milan Novy, then 36-year-old forward, a key player on the Czechoslovak team that won back-to-back World Championships in 1976 and 1977. Novy had returned to Kladno a few years earlier after a stint in Switzerland and Austria, and had helped bring the famous club back to the top division, before retiring after that year with Jagr in 1989.
If it feels like Jaromir Jagr has always been around, it’s simply because he started young. He played his first World Championship in Switzerland in 1990 as an 18-year-old, and in September 1991, he was on Czechoslovakia’s Canada Cup team – as a Stanley Cup winner with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The huge metal door to the main arena was closed, so I couldn’t see which team, if any, was on the ice. I had come to the arena to see if Russia’s goalie was on the ice, or whether he had really got injured the night before.
I was about to open the smaller door, the one that’s meant for people, not Zambonis, but just as I put my hand on the handle, it went down on its own. I pulled and the door flew open, but not all the way because the person on the other side was holding it. The first thing I saw was a dark blue jacket. As I looked up from the Czech logo on the jacket, I saw the man’s face. I recognized him.
His name is Jaromir Jagr.
A couple of years ago I wrote a chapter for a book published by The Hockey News. The book is called The Pursuit of Hockeyness: 99 Things Every Hockey Fan Needs To Do Before They Die. My chapter was about witnessing a European rivalry, or, a Finland-Sweden game, in particular.
Here it is.
It’s probably the natural grind of a hockey season, and life, that’s made me feel tired of everything. In the line of business that I’ve been in for the last six, seven years, it’s easy to get cynical. The hype around the games, the stars, the general managers, is draining, and in the end, disappointing, because it seems to me that it creates a world that overpromises and underdelivers.
And that’s where cynicism breeds.
I can’t remember the last time I smiled while watching hockey.
Today, I wrote a piece for the International Ice Hockey Federation, about how players returning to Europe sometimes don’t meet the expectations. The transition from one team to another, let alone from one country to another, and from one league to another, can be difficult, and sometimes the high expectations the club management, the fans, and the player himself, aren’t met.
I should know. I was that player once.
It takes a village to put together a Cup fest.
“Country roads / take me home / to the place / I belong…”
The day started at a country road, and it ended fittingly with Niklas Hjalmarsson singing John Denver’s “Country Roads.” But in the young Swede’s case, those roads were not West Virginia, but the heart of Smaland — “small lands” — in the heart of Sweden.
Before the Cup got back into its travel case, on its way to Antti Niemi, Hjalmarsson gave it a whirlwind tour of places and emotions.
Happy places and happy emotions.
Here’s one from NHL.com. Click here if you want to see it as is in the wild, or keep reading below.
Back in the day, when Finns dominated the world’s car racing circuit, an adage was born: “You need a Finn to win.” It hasn’t been as apt in the NHL, with only seven Finnish Stanley Cup winners, and with the first three earning their rings with the same team, the Edmonton Oilers dynasty of the 1980s.
