Snowman On Fire

I got to the rink for hockey practice tonight and saw an empty wrapper from some vending machine snack laying on the brand spanking-new floor tiles. “Not like Mark to miss that,” I thought. I was right. Mark didn’t miss it because he wasn’t tending to our rink tonight.

Mark took his last shift on Earth on Sunday night.

Until today, when I was told of his sudden death, I didn’t even know his last name. He was the kind of guy immediately and always associated with the rink: Mark the Zamboni guy, the Zamboni guy, or just plain Mark. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone. I’ve seen him at South Mountain Arena two or three days a week for the past 9 years, and he always asks how my son’s team is doing, how my daughter’s figure skating is coming along, and where we’re off to next with our skates. He knows how my Hockey North America team is faring, and when we might be playing next on his ice.

Mark loved hockey, particularly the New York Rangers. Seems incongruous, in that he cut the ice for the New Jersey Devils practice rink for the past decade, through three Stanley Cup runs and countless last-minute evaluations, rehab sessions and late-running practices. He was the kind of guy who didn’t mind if you skated a little longer if you had the last paid session of the night. If the rink was his home, he showed his pride in keeping it neat. In two seasons of managing youth hockey teams, Mark had returned jerseys, socks, helmets, mouthguards, paper work, birth certificates (don’t ask), and errant sticks to me, rather than sweeping them out with the trash. At the same time, he knew if there was a pro quality stick (courtesy of our NJ Devils) sitting in the back dumpster, and was happy to see the kids cut it and use it. Practice-used memorabilia never had a better route into the hands of those who deserve it most. His worst at-work experience was having Lou Lamoriello, coach and GM of the Devils, yell at him one day after an ice cut for driving the Zamboni while wearing his Rangers hat.

Tonight we’re all sad and shocked that Mark is off the ice. He was the kind of guy who made a (previously) drab county facility feel more like a home for hockey than a government office building. In a lineup of my favorite Zamboni drivers, from Iggy Pop (in the movie Snow Day) to Sergei Starikov (1980 Russian Olympic hockey team, and the first Zamboni driver at the Union Sports Arena), Mark will always get a special mention.

Good night, Mark, we’ll turn off the locker room lights on our way out.

My late grandmother used to say “No ken-a-horas,”, loosely meaning “don’t give early blessings” but figuratively translating into “avoid the evil eye.” Even tangentially touch on a compliment, and “poo poo poo” was the required punctuation to avoid inviting harm as punishment for vanity.

The Devils went 9-0 and I celebrated that accomplishment in these very online pages, poo poo poo. The just-ended 4-game road trip, in which 2 of the “away” games were within 100 miles of home, saw them go 1-2-1, remaining scoreless in the last seven periods played. Seven periods? That’s like watching an entire feature length film without seeing a goal. Shutting out the Islanders is nice; know me and know I have no love for anything on Long Island, including traffic, misnamed parkways, and hockey teams owned by my employer’s sometime competitor. Following that by being shut out twice? Not nice.

What’s wrong? Passes without looking. Too much passing, not enough shooting. How can the Devils have power plays in which they don’t get a shot on goal? How can they have power plays in which the first minute goes by fishing the puck out of their defensive zone? Watching them the tail end of the week, they looked like, well, poo. Hockey is a game of small bounces, like the puck thrown at the net that turned into Thursday night’s game-winner in Tampa Bay. It’s a game of small momentum turns, like Gomez deciding to back skate to the blue line Friday night instead of touching the puck for an offsides. He slowed down, the Panthers didn’t, and the resulting 2-on-1 iced the game for the Devils. The EGG line laid exactly that, checking in at minus-three Friday night.

I’m going to wear a red ribbon. I’m going to throw salt over my shoulder, and spit “poo poo poo”, and turn my Hockey News clipping projecting Patrik Elias scoring 86 points upside down, to avoid the evil eye. Back to practice back at South Mountain Arena, a comfortable old place that should bring back comfortable old habits. No ken a horas.

Petr Nedved has moved to Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, D-cells wrapped inside of snowballs, and some moderately good cheese steaks. They play hockey there, too. I suggested back in November that Petr Nedved might be intrigued by moving east, since Mrs. Nedved (aka Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and really tall person Veronika Varekova) hadn’t moved to the desert with him. Playing for Gretzky probably isn’t as fun as getting to play, period. It’s the guys with whom you’re on the ice - provided you’re on the ice to begin with - that matter.

It is a Devils revolution. Elias has 4 goals in 8 games played (he missed one with a cold), along with six assists for a total of 12 points. He’s on pace for 20 goals and 60 points, not quite another 40-goal season but given what he’s been through health-wise this year, extremely impressive. Nine in a row, coming up on lucky 13, the franchise record for wins set in January and February of 2001.

Meanwhile the rest of the horn and tails crowd has stepped it up, especially Jamie Langenbrunner, Paul Martin and David Hale. I’m wearing my Golden Gophers hockey t-shirt, alternating with my North Dakota Fighting Sioux shirts, in their respective honors.

I’ve been goofing with one of our Devils youth bantam players that Langenbrunner’s scoring seemed to pick up since she “borrowed” one of his sticks and cut it down. Those pro stock sticks have a great feeling of heft in the hands, especially when they say “Lags” on the model stripe — mine says “Niedermayer”, although my dumpster diving doesn’t seem to have helped Scott one bit in Anaheim.

Don’t know whether it’s a new stick or some other voodoo-shaking move that has pumped up Zach Parise, but he’s also on a tear. His cross-crease backhander to Brylin today was the kind of thing you wish you could do if you play this game, but instead end up shackling your hands as the puck slides between your skates and you crash into the end boards. Number 9, indeed.

This is what a Devils practice looks like, at least from the scorer’s table at South Mountain Arena’s rink two. The players are in color-coded practice jerseys: red, green, grey and blue, sorted by lines, and defensemen in black. If you don’t recognize the faces up close and personal then you can use the player numbers on the back of the helmets as a key. They run drills, they skate laps, they take drink breaks, they abuse each other when a drill doesn’t complete as it should.

Highlight of the young new year: got to have breakfast today with Cory Doctorow, one of my all-time favorite writers and just a brilliantly funny guy.

Read more at my Sun blog including an unflattering shot of yours truly, but hey, I’m standing next to Cory Doctorow.

It’s the first time I’ve spoken to a Canadian (of any flavor) and not talked hockey for at least 10% of the time.

The NHL has put up a rather short and edited blog roll on nhl.com. I’ve been of the impression that blogs are the vox populi, what the average puck head offers as an assist to the other hockey fan. Or just blunt commentary on why it costs $25 to feed two people at the Meadowlands, or why the Devils keep holding out for Scott Stevens to return to the team even though they’ve announced a date to retire his number.

It’s not the the NHL blogs are bad — Robbie Merrill (bass player for one of my pre-game fave bands Godsmack) is funny and articulate. A recent post about Guy Kawasaki captures some of the very reasons I started playing again after an 18-year off season. But what about the other millions of fans, worldwide, who have something to say?

Note to NHL online execs: open up the blogosphere. Run ads in our blogs, it’s fair, but give the fans a voice and an outlet again. Otherwise the NHL blogs are simply columns written by folks who miss a sports beat.

8 points

4 games

4 wins

2 goals

8th place in the Eastern Conference - playoff eligible

0 skaters wearing the captain’s “C” on the sweater

Devils beat the Flyers 3-0, Elias notches two more assists, he’s +3 on the night, and the Devils can see hockey in April. Having Elias back on the ice for the Devils is better (and less fattening) than bringing home the chalupa at a Mavericks game.

It started out quite simply: We were going to collect every Patrik Elias hockey card in print. This started after my son received several packs, boxes and piles of hockey cards as gifts for Hanukah and his birthday one year, and accelerated after I re-discovered my love of collecting things. Having eBay as a place to browse and discover what’s new certainly put fuel on the fire.

More than 30 years ago, card collecting was pretty simple. Cards came out in wax packs with bubble gum inserts, sometimes a small comic or a coin thrown in as well by the world-famous Topps company. You traded cards with your friends, flipped them before school and during recess, and built up a small pasteboard empire. The third estate of that same kingdom got stuck into the spokes of your bicycle wheels, held in place by clothespins that we deny, to this day, we stole from our mothers’ laundry rooms. There was no after market for cards other than the kids you knew from the neighborhood. Scarcity simply didn’t exist as long as the local 7-11 had Topps boxes strategically located near the cash registers.

Card collecting today is a hobby with a capital “h”. “Hobby,” of course, means it’s a child’s activity in which men spent inordinate sums of money because it’s given an air of seriousness and legitimacy. Those quasi-noble qualities come about from scarcity — in addition to the mass produced cards of nearly every player, today you can get cards with autographs, pieces of jerseys, sticks, gloves, pads, pucks, or nets, or “short printed” cards that are serial numbered. Shoving Richie Hebner into the back of my Schwinn wasn’t a crime because there were another 40 Richie Hebner cards around the corner; when you are holding one sample of a card that has only a few peers, you are a bit more careful. We can’t use the Way Back Machine to create more Honus Wagner baseball cards, but we can compete like crazy for the Patrik Elias Upper Deck Ultimate Artifacts Dual Patches Silver insert cards. Only five of them exist. Each one is worth (in collector terms) about the price of a good steak dinner. In New York City.

There is a market for such things. The economy of sports card collecting is created by the card manufacturers, the leagues, the players’ unions, auction sites, online card dealers, and grading services. Yes, you can have your sports cards graded, like a piece of fine art, and encased in an airtight container for posterity. Ten millenia from now, when a future civilization picks through the detritus of some avid card collector’s home, they’ll decide that these plastic-enshrined pictures of men in uniforms bore major religious significance in our lives.

Which isn’t that far from the truth.

But I digress from giving a mid-season report on the Stern Family Hockey Pasteboard Empire.

We began our informal Patrik Elias fan club in my home office around 2001, putting together a photo history of his career in 3×2 cardboard rectangles with occasional thumbnails of fabric. “How hard could this be,” I naively thought, proposing the collecting goal before adequately researching what I was promising to my 8-year old. Four years of online subscriptions to Beckett’s Hockey Card Monthly, several thousand eBay searches, approximately a dozen shopping sprees in Beckett’s marketplace, and two partial collection buyouts (one from Calgary, one from Finland) later, I have an idea of the degree of difficulty to which I subscribed.

With the most recent releases factored into the population, taking out the singular exceptions (anything that exists as a 1/1, or a single instance, is excluded from our collection due to financial reasons), adding in the interesting European print and some card show short print specials, there are (as of January 1) about 800 Patrik Elias hockey cards. Yes, 800. Of those, a full third are short print, serial numbered to 1,000, 100, 10, or whatever artificial limit creates an artifical pricing market for the wares. We own (as of today) about 680 unique Elias cards, including almost everything from his first 4 years in the NHL. A dozen of the cards have print runs of 10 or less, and one of them I believe to be one of only two discovered from a supposed print run of 10. Just because the manufacturer printed them doesn’t mean they’re in circulation; the cards may still be buried in sealed packs, in sealed boxes, in sealed cartons, in a warehouse somewhere in California.

What’s the point? It develops over time. Each card tells a story. Like the first-ever card of Elias, in which he looks like a fresh-faced teenager — it was printed about the month my son was born. Or the aforementioned extra-rarefied card, containing a corner of the Czech flag from Elias’ World All-Star Jersey in 2001. I have a grainy, blurry picture of my son standing in front of the glass at the Staples Center, Elias in the background, that particular jersey whizzing by during warmups. The card gives us something in specific focus. Or a hard to find rookie card, which was part of the collection I purchased from another Patrik Elias fan in Calgary. He sold me half of his collection to pay for a Stanley Cup finals ticket.

I don’t expect to retire from the net worth of three binders’ worth of hockey cards. But as I relate the stories of my baseball and basketball cards to my son, and together we uncover more of our hectare of glossy print sports memorabilia, I’m conveying storytelling skills. All of our stories have a king of the empire, of course — the little kid (of any age) around whom the cards are scattered.

That’s the point.

Even better “Six” by Boston’s own Neats (circa 1984), Elias has six points in three games during which the Devils have gone three-for-three in the win column. Woo-hoo. It’s better (now) than discovering “Three in Nine” on Roxy Music’s Country Life (then) with the uncensored cover.

To top the weekend off for Patty, his buddy Sykora is now just across the river after getting traded to the Rangers.

If I were MaryMary I’d give a big “swivel, swivel, snap, snap” but that sounds like me getting my suspenders tangled around my ankles when pulling on the XXL hockey pants