Editor’s Note: Welcome back to Out of the Box! As a reminder, this is a monthly column where our amazing, layered contributors take a few minutes to discuss the non-speculative things that they love! This month, join Merrin as she discusses how a Texas girl came to love ice hockey as much as she does. Enjoy!
I haven’t always been a hockey fan.
Like most children raised across the entirety of the South, I’d heard the legend of Wayne Gretzky and watched The Mighty Ducks. It took about fifteen years or so for me to realize that the movie coincided with the introduction of the actual NHL team, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.
No, I was raised on a steady diet of UVA football, the occasional baseball game (usually the farm team of wherever we happened to be living at the time), World Cup soccer, and, when we finally settled in San Antonio in 1997, Spurs basketball. I realize now that if the Premier League had been available to my dad in the 80s and 90s I would have grown up watching literally all of the soccer, and I can’t tell if I’m grateful or disappointed to not have firm soccer opinions as an adult. I do love a good firm opinion.
Hockey came many, many years later via my best friend, who was raised in Michigan as a casual fan of the Detroit Red Wings. Despite being literally surrounded by the sport from a young age, she never really connected much to hockey until the Jonathan Toews era of the Chicago Blackhawks. (There’s another player that also piqued her interest but since he has since been accused of sexual assault, we both like to pretend he just doesn’t exist.) What really got her (and then me), were the human interest type stories about hockey players.
One story that got me back then is about two friends who played for the Philadelphia Flyers. Both of them were traded to different teams, one to the Los Angeles Kings and the other to the Columbus Blue Jackets. The guy in Columbus was absolutely miserable, didn’t want to show up to team meetings and practices (if I recall correctly, he also had an injured foot at the time). Columbus eventually traded him at the deadline (the last Tuesday in February) to the Kings, after which the friend already on the Kings tweeted “reunited and it feels so good #needaroommate.” They went on to win the Stanley Cup together that season, which felt like icing on the best friend cake.
The feelings that story woke in me really indicated that what I’d actually needed all along is to be introduced to the human interest stories in sports that would make me care about the outcome of these games. Connecting more to the players as people kept me invested in how many goals they score or whether or not they get injured and can’t play in a contract year. I hadn’t realized that sports in general are chock full of these kinds of stories, that they’re happening right now in real time and not just as biopics, glimpses of the watered down versions of the story 20 years later.
Once I did? I fell. I fell hard.
Unfortunately, I fell hard in the summer of 2012, gorging myself on all of the tumblr posts about best friendships and stories about how two of the Oilers players go on ice cream dates before every single home game and two players on the Bruins got matching Stanley Cup Champion tattoos. I say unfortunately, because 2012 was a lock out year, when the contract between the NHL owners and the NHL Players Association ended and they had to negotiate a new one. The regular season didn’t resume until January 2013, but before it did I was able to catch the Oilers top line (their three best forwards) down in the AHL (the league just below the NHL) because they were all still on their entry level contracts and had been assigned to the affiliate. This was in person, mind you, and the tickets at that level are cheap enough (relatively speaking) that I got to sit literally right behind the player’s bench. I spent most of the game watching the guys interacting with each other on the bench and a lot less time following the puck around the ice.
By the time the regular season resumed, I had about 6 favorite teams and 50 favorite players and I wanted all of them to do well and succeed and be happy. That lasted maybe two games before the Chicago Blackhawks filtered to the very top of my list, namely because they kept winning and I liked watching teams that made me happy. I was over the moon when they went on to win the Cup that year. The next season I actually got up to Dallas for a game, saw Jamie Benn, read more about his new best friend Tyler Seguin, and I was done. I signed on to the Dallas Stars hype train and I’ve been riding it ever since.
That story is also pretty great. Tyler Seguin was originally drafted by the Boston Bruins, and won a Cup with them in 2011. Despite maintaining the same level of play while playing outside of his favored natural position, he was traded to Dallas in 2013 amidst rumors that he wouldn’t turn out to be a franchise player (he is) and that he spent too much time partying (probably not). He didn’t want to be traded, he didn’t ask to be traded, and the personal success he’s had in Dallas is delicious to me, a Stars fan who likes to rub it in Boston’s face.
Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports
The same summer that Seguin was traded to Dallas, Jamie Benn was made the new captain of the Dallas Stars after the previous captain, Brendan Morrow, was traded at the deadline to the Pittsburgh Penguins. To that point, Jamie had been something of an underdog in his career. He was drafted in the 5th round, which isn’t where you’d expect to find a superstar, his conditioning had never been the best, and his nickname on the team was Chubbs (for a reason). Jamie texted Tyler after the trade and said, “Let’s prove them wrong.”
So they’re both in the middle of their redemption arcs. I’d love to report that they won the Cup literally the next season, but they made the playoffs for the first time in Jamie’s career, which is no small feat.
2013 is also the year I started blogging about the Stars with a friend of mine, and together we run Deep In the Heart of Hockey, a blog about the Dallas Stars, Fancy Stats, and General Shenanigans, which is also the tagline of our biweekly podcast. I’d written fan fiction on the internet before, but this was the first time I’d ever written about something real that other people would read, and I loved it.
One of my favorite and most memorable posts is the game recap I wrote after being banished to the kitchen for superstition reasons. There’s also the one I wrote in the style of a Dungeons and Dragons game. The time I wrote an ode to Jamie Benn’s hairstyles over the years. Or the time I sorted the 2014-15 Stars into their respective Hogwarts houses.
Our regular posts have fallen off as we’re mostly just posting our podcast now. (If you want to give us a test listen, episode 83 is pretty much the funniest one we’ve ever done.) I’ve since been writing for Defending Big D, which is part of the SB Nation family, and Carolyn took a full time job writing for FanRag Sports, which she’s since left for a different full time job not in sports writing.
Eventually, even without all the surrounding stories about the players, I found I just genuinely love watching hockey. The crisp sound of skates on fresh ice, the sharp ping off the crossbar that can either be sweet relief or a curse (depending on whose goal it is), the precision passing, the faceoffs, the goals. It’s fun to finally have an interest that isn’t so niche (although it still is in Texas) that I can’t talk to other people about it.
The 2018-19 season started the first week of October. The Stars have a new head coach, a couple new assistant coaches, some new faces on the roster, and a lot to prove to themselves and the rest of the Western Conference. I’m so ready.
All logos are © to their respective teams. Image of Jamie Benn via Defending Big D. Featured image by Matthew Fournier on Unsplash. Deep in the Heart of Hockey logo is © of said podcast.
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