Thursday, November 30, 2006

The Game Needs a Little Punching Up

Kevin Paul Dupont writing for boston.com/sports thinks so...

So do I.
Honestly, isn't the politeness of the product killing you? If you are of a certain age, maybe 30 or older, you must remember when every lineup had at least a couple of guys who showed up each night just aching for a fight. Bob Probert come to mind? Terry O'Reilly? Tiger Williams? Games had a pulse, oozed passion.

No doubt, the whole thing got carried away, to the point that we had to witness the sad spectacle of staged bouts that really had no context within the, uh, battle. The whole fight theme got beaten to death, if you will, and wasn't so much disgusting as it was downright silly and boring. A true fight was a spectacle. A staged bout was a farce. If you watched enough, you knew the difference, as sure as you knew art from pornography [...]

Skill is a great thing. The NHL today, as in decades past, is full of dazzling skaters and brilliant stickhandlers. They provide some great entertainment. But the greatest entertainment of all, which is what the NHL can be, and in fact once was, is when dazzling skill and raw passion skate side by side, on a sheet of ice ringed by boards that act as the frame of a heaving, emotional pit.

At its best, the NHL is a bouquet of both roses and thorns. Today, with the barbs plucked from the product, the scent is not nearly the same.
They've sanitized the passion right out of the game. The right balance between the incredible skills and raw emotions of the sport need to be restored to really bring the game roaring back.

In my humble opinion anyway... and that I guess of many others.

Here's a little tribute to those formerly Big Bad Old Boston Bruins Kevin Paul Dupont just mentioned in his above article... with I might add the best rockin song ever written about that town blasting in the background.
I'm gonna tell you a story
I'm gonna tell you about my town
I'm gonna tell you a big bad story, baby
Aww, it's all about my town...

BOSTON!!!



...again best song ever about Boston.... in my humble opinion.



2 comments:

Heather said...

Interesting trivia about "Dirty Water"- the band that wrote it was from California and had never been to Boston.

I am a font of useless information.

Anonymous said...

Wow, I didn't know heather. It's such a great song about that rough and tumble town I figured it just had to have come from there. Learn something new all the time. Thanks.