Around the League with Rich Kincaide

• We’ll start in our daughter’s high school Civics class where last week the teacher played for the edification of her captive audience a video of one Bill O’Reilly, prompting my young one to exclaim, “Oh, look.  It’s the Big Giant Head!”  (I love her so.  My daughter, not the teacher).  The teacher demanded, “What did you say?”  “It’s Bill Orally,” she explained.  “That’s what Keith Olberman calls him.  “Well,” said the teacher, “I wouldn’t watch him.  He’s biased.”  It is, I know, to laugh.  For those of you concerned about the future of the Nation and about the quality of contemporary education at the secondary level, there is this:  In the same class during a recent “open-book exam” (how is it an exam if you can just look it up, anyway?) some kid asked my kid for help.  The question was, how many Justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court?  Not wanting to just flat out give up the answer, my daughter suggested he eliminate the obviously wrong choices in the multiple-choice set of answers.  He said, and I quote, “I know it’s not 32, because that’s an even number.”  Ta and da.

• I suspect many of you think I did not write about last week’s hockey game just because I happened to give up 10 measly goals.  This is not the case.  I will bore you with the gory details whether I give up a dozen or none, so have no fear.  The thing of it is, I didn’t think I played that bad.  Now, I’ve been around professional hockey at the highest levels for virtually my entire professional life, so I know for a fact that there is an industry-specific term which covers this exact mindset -- the feeling that things are going okay when the scoreboard clearly indicates that they are not -- and it is denial.  In my defense, I must point that didn’t have any in front of me.  Defense, that is.  At least of a discernable nature,  Most of the goals resulted from plays in which the offense managed to isolate two players down low in front of the goal without a defenseman between them and the goalie (in this case, me).  This is known as a two-on-oh situation, if you want me to employ more industry-specific jargon. My skill set does not result in my making many saves when the cross-crease pass means I have to cover the six-foot goalpost-to-goalpost distance quickly enough to stop a one-timer from a yard in front of the goal line or a deflection or any of that stuff.  I only gave up one goal that I thought was a bad one and that was because my skates were newly-sharpened and one of them caught as I was trying to butterfly (splaying one leg or both as far out along the ice as they can reach) causing my leg to remain somewhat upright as the puck slid beneath it and into the net causing me to do what I almost always do when I give up a goal I thought I should have had, unload half-a-dozen f-bombs in quick succession.  And there is this:  after the 10th goal, the goalies switched ends meaning I was now playing for the team which had scored all those goals against me and after the change I won 4-1.  So I knew it wasn’t totally my fault.

• I’m back out there again tomorrow.  I will spend part of my morning and all of the drive to the rink visualizing myself playing well: good stance, low and square to the shooter; aggressive, coming out to play my angles; stick on the ice, stick on the ice, stick on the ice, goddammit get your stick on the ice (it’s a bit a fundamental thing, if you haven’t noticed); and play confident!  All of this visualization stands in stark contrast to the prep I put in on the other day in play which is Tuesday.  On Tuesday’s I just try not to think about it.  On Tuesday’s we have fewer skaters and I’m the only goalie and we play half-ice.  That means the puck never goes down to the other end and, as a result, I never get a rest.  It’s a real test of my endurance and all I know as I’m getting dressed to play is that it is going to hurt.  A lot.  But I survived so far and after all is said and done it’s good for more.  Nothing, in fact, has done more for my mental acuity (such as it is) and my emotional well-being (such as it is) as playing hockey again.  I won’t go on a treadmill for five minutes to save my life, but I will give the last full measure of my devotion to try and keep a puck out of net in a game in which the final score means nothing.  And for the record, I played the best I’ve played since coming back out there last Tuesday.  I made a lot of saves and, for stretches at least, felt pretty close to my old self.

• I just thought of this.  Here’s a story for young reporters which they can make of what they will.  After a loss one night I asked Red Wings goalie Greg Millen what he thought of his performance.  The next day after practice he threw his helmet at me.  I mean, he flung it.  Hard.  I had to duck.  He screamed, “Don’t ever ask me what I thought of my performance!”  I was flabbergasted inasmuch as I thought it to be a perfectly legitimate question.  So, I still don’t quite know what to make of it, just that it’s something to keep in mind.

• I gotta write a quick note about finding out somebody de-friended me on MySpace and I’ll get to that in good time but right now it’s time to get to bed.  Big game tomorrow, right?  Gotta get my rest…