IIHF.com: Long way to the top

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Risto

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.

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Rebel yell

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Risto

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.

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A birthday card

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Risto

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).

What would I do if you walked by this coffee shop right now?
I know what I’d do.
I’d smile.
I smile when I see you walk home from the gym,
and I smile when I see you sitting behind your desk when I come to visit your office.
I smile when you get home from work each day
and I smile when you call me and I see your photo on the screen.
And when I watch you stand in line for a rollercoaster ride, and again
when I see you walk back to me from the rollercoaster.
I smile because seeing you reminds me of a story I want to tell you.
I smile when I watch you sleep. (Not the creepy way).
And I smile when you drop me off at the airport,
and when you pick me up,
and when my subway train takes off from the station and
I look out the window
and see you walk the kids to school.

I smile when you smile.

Did you just walk by this coffee shop?
Or was it just the thought of you that made me smile?

Cart tricks

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Risto

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.

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Wrist and shout

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Risto

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.

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Salmon soup for the soul

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Risto

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.

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Toy story

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Risto

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.

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Under the stars

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Risto

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.

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Do talk to strangers

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Risto

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).

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Highest pranking officer

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Risto

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.

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