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BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published September 30, 2010

The design of a hockey rink is a beautiful thing. No, I don’t mean how it allows so many fans to watch the game unobstructed or even how it brings winter sports to desert climates like Southern California. For me, what makes its design so great is a much more overlooked attribute: the perfect placement of opposing teams’ benches, too far to actually reach across and hit a guy, but close enough to feature some serious screaming matches. And if you think players don’t take advantage of this proximity to fit in some extra trash talk, just look at video of Ilya Kovalchuk and Sean Avery at last week’s exhibition game between the New Jersey Devils and the New York Rangers. Things got so heated between the two that Kovalchuk had to explain after the game that the hand gesture he made at Avery was innocent and not a throat slash, a suspension-worthy offense. “I just told him to zip it,” Kovalchuk said. “I didn’t tell him I will kill him, so don’t suspend me.”

Ah yes, grown men in ice skates, inches from one another, exchanging profanities and obscure hand gestures. It must be hockey season. With regular season games only a week away, players and fans alike can hardly wait to start down the road to the next Stanley Cup. Yet Swarthmore seems to have escaped this preseason excitement. Students get hyped for the start of football and college basketball, but hockey seems to go unnoticed by most Swatties. Thus, in my never-ending quest to prove hockey’s merits to non-Canadians, here are five reasons why all Swatties should tune into the NHL this season.

*5. Live vicariously through hockey: *

Some weeks, life just doesn’t go your way. Your seminar professor has assigned more readings than would be possible to finish in a month let alone a week, your group members won’t get their act together for an upcoming presentation, and, on top of everything, your mom is on your case about not calling enough. But no matter how frustrated you get or how much they might deserve it, it is just not OK to check your professor or classmates into a nearby wall. However, it might make you feel better to watch someone else do it. Release your frustration over life by living vicariously through every check, hit and fight on the ice, all within the confines of a socially acceptable form of anger management that won’t get you kicked out of school.

Who says counting to ten is the only solution? Last week’s preseason match up between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Columbus Blue Jackets is proof that this season will have just as much ice-stained red as in the past. The game had five fights and 72 penalty minutes, including a bout between Evgeni Malkin and Rick Nash. It might not have been the prettiest fight, but two veteran players going at it for a preseason scrimmage can only mean good things for when games actually count for something.

*4. Boost your self-esteem by listening to hockey interviews: *

Just got a D on an orgo exam? The WA laughed for ten minutes before he was able to actually edit your paper? It happens. But if you need a little self-esteem boost about your intelligence, tune into a post-game hockey interview. Sure, those guys just spent 60 minutes doing godly things on the ice that for most of us are physically impossible, but their grasp of noun-adjective agreement is a little more tenuous.

Even if you forgive the grammatical missteps, a must considering that for many in the NHL English was not a first language, put a hockey player unscripted in front of a microphone and you are guaranteed a few laughs.

Whether it is injury treatment suggestions (defenseman Borris Morinov’s solution to a hurt ankle: “I just tape four Tylenols to it”), recaps of important moments in the game (Washington Capitals’ Donald Brashear on his game-winning goal: “It just bounced there and I went to the goal. It looked like a big piece of cheese to me.”), or stories from off the ice (goalie Glenn Healy on travel in the IHL: “One road trip we were stuck on the runway for seven hours. The plane kept driving and driving until we arrived at the rink, and I realized we were on a bus.”), hockey quotes are bound to make anything you wrote on that Spanish paper seem more coherent.

*3. Hockey players are people too: *

As opposed to the over-inflated egos and prima donnas that are so prevalent in other professional sports, hockey players are for the most part normal people. Sure, there are always those players who are a bit over-the-top and, for example, try to sign 17-year $102 million contracts, but these are the exceptions and not the rule.

Perhaps it is because hockey is just not as popular in the US as football, or maybe it is because teams are populated with an unusually high number of Canadians. Whatever the reason, hockey avoids a lot of the superstar craziness of other sports which makes you hesitate to open the sports page around young children.

Evidence of this down-to-earth attitude is not hard to find. Last season on one of the San Jose Sharks’ pregame shows, an interviewer asked players when the last time they called their mother was, and they all answered yesterday.

On top of being nice to their mothers, the ultimate evidence of hockey players’ human side is that not even they can avoid the recent vampire craze. Patrick Kane in an interview last month admitted to having read the latest Twilight book and enjoyed it. I can’t even imagine how much he heard about that the next day in the locker room.

*2. Everybody else is doing it: *

Although it might not be Sunday Night Football, hockey has amassed a much larger following in the US than you might think. The Minnesota Wild had a streak going of 409 consecutive sellout games, every home game since the team became part of the NHL in 2000. This kind of fan loyalty has become so expected that the fact that only 16,000 people came to a preseason scrimmage this year was newsworthy in the New York Times’s hockey blog. If all those Wild fans keep coming back year after year, there must be something worth watching happening on the ice.

*1. Hockey has more drama than the Jersey Shore: *

Forget reality TV; sports are where the real drama is. A PuckDaddy blogger once described the NHL as having “more plot twists than a JJ Abrams story, except NHL plot lines actually go somewhere.” And most of this drama happens off the ice. Take this off-season for example. After the Chicago Blackhawks knocked his team out of the Conference Finals, Sharks GM Doug Wilson did not hesitate to take advantage of the Hawks’ salary cap problems and get some much-needed revenge for his team. Aware of how much the Hawks wanted to resign Nicklas Hjalmarsson this season, Wilson signed Hjalmarsson to a $14 million offer sheet that forced the Hawks to match the salary offer and pushed them further into money problems. Then Wilson stole their Stanley-Cup winning goaltender Antti Niemi after the Hawks were no longer able to afford him. Payback’s a bitch!

Whoever you choose to root for (though if it’s not the Sharks, I don’t want to hear about it), hockey can be a great distraction from the day-to-day grind of Swarthmore.

You never know. Innocently tune in for a game and five years later you might find yourself writing 1500-word odes to how great hockey is.

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