Friday Musical Interlude: Manny Mota Edition

“Pinch-hitting for Pedro Bourbon, Manny Mota, Mota….”

Dave von Ebers is, as you know, taking the week off and has green-lighted my request to fill the Friday Musical Interlude void created by his absence.  It is a decision I am sure he will regret.

I’m posting this early because if it’s Friday I’m playing hockey and today I have a hot date right after so I won’t be around to post until, well, who knows.  (Mrs. Kincaide is okay with this, just so you know.). I’m seeing an old friend after the skate and I’m really looking forward to it.  Lori’s a great gal and I haven’t seen her in ages.  I’ll tell you one thing, if I wasn’t old enough to be her father and if she wasn’t physically repulsed by me, well, we would have been quite an item. 

Let’s hope what happened to me Tuesday doesn’t happen to me today.  Back when I was starting out, back when I was a mere wisp of a goalie, I heard of another netminder getting his collarbone broken by a shot.  If you know what the upper body protector we goalies wear looks like, you’d be like I was when I heard that.  You couldn’t believe it could happen.  The thing’s made out of Kevlar and it covers you right up to the top of the neck.  But still, some poor, hapless goalie goes out there and gets his collarbone shattered by a slapshot.

I couldn’t figure out how.  Sort of like the time I was out for warm-up and the goalie at the other end went down in a screaming heap.  He’d taken a puck strike to the knee.  I couldn’t understand how it could have happened.  Between the goal pad itself, and the knee protector I’d had sewn on to the underside of the pad, and the knee pads that are stitched to the hem of my goalie pants, I couldn’t understand how a puck could hit you on the knee.  Then one day I’m out there and this guy Rat (that’s what everybody called him, “Rat”) fires from right out in front and I turn my right skate so it’s parallel to the goal line and kick out my leg in desperation and, viola, the puck hits me and stays out.  A kick save and a beauty.  A game-saver, in fact.  But at that point I didn’t care about the game anymore because I was a screaming heap in front of my net.  When I turned my foot I exposed the inside of my leg and the puck hit me square on the inside of my knee.  Right there where there’s no muscle or fat to absorb the blow.  It was like having somebody hit you on the knee with a ball-peen hammer.  It hurt for about six months.

So I’m out there Tuesday and I go down to block a shot but the thing rises on me a little more than I’d expected (ideally you’d like to take it right in the sternum and then catch it on the carom off your chest with your trapper) so I jerk my left shoulder up to make the save.  Which I did.  And I was really proud of that for about a nanosecond until the pain hit.  Apparently when my shoulder went up, my chest protector stayed down and my collarbone was left unprotected and son-of-a-b---- it hurt.  I went down in a screaming heap.  We actually had to stop the game for a couple of minutes, which almost never happens.  I’m pretty sure I sounded like the guy Joe Pesci killed with that ink pen in Goodfellas.  All I can think is that the puck was on edge or it clipped the neck protector which is tied to my mask (that piece of equipment was invented after Buffalo’s Clint Malarchuk had his jugular sliced open by a skate, thanks Clint!) and deflected straight down.  No matter.  I thought I might have to go and get it x-rayed yesterday but it’s better today.

I’ve been playing about 18 years now and it was the first time it’s ever happened, so we should be okay.  The shooter apologized to me and I told him there was no reason for him so to do.  After all, I was trying to get hit by the puck.  It’s the point of the position I play.

Now, finally, today’s musical selection.  Dave always has a story about what the song means to him and stuff like that there.  Like a couple of weeks ago when he went with “Growing Up” by Bruce Springsteen which I thought was an amazing coincidence since it was pretty much my favorite song all through college and one of my best friends can vouch for that because I must have made him play it for me on his stereo four or five hundred times when I was A). Hammered, B). “Reflective”, or C). All of the Above. But not today.  I picked today’s song just because I happen to like the way it sounds.  However, having seen the music video for the first time while preparing today’s FMI, (I’d only heard the song heretofore) I’m (shhhh….) pretty sure it’s about LESBIANS.  Really!  I think it is.  People LOVE lesbians.  And as a result of the ruling by the Iowa Supreme Court today declaring homosexual marriage legal, we have a nifty tie-in, after all.  The court ruling, issued today without dissent, reads in part:

In short, for purposes of Iowa’s marriage laws, which are designed to bring a sense of order to the legal relationships of committed couples and their families in myriad ways, plaintiffs are similarly situated in every important respect, but for their sexual orientation. As indicated above, this distinction cannot defeat the application of equal protection analysis through the application of the similarly situated concept because, under this circular approach, all distinctions would evade equal protection review. Therefore, with respect to the government’s purpose of “providing an institutional basis for defining the fundamental relational rights and responsibilities of persons,” same–sex couples are similarly situated to opposite–sex couples.

So, on to the tunes. The girls, from Russia I believe, call themselves T.a.t.U. 

I hope you enjoy it and keep a good thought for Dave who I am sure will be back with the FMI next week.  Heck, once he catches wind of this he may create the “Monday Musical Interlude”!