Snowman On Fire

The more I blog and mention “the book,” the more questions I get about it. So here’s a summary of the book, in outline form, based on current course and speed. This is completely serious, including my sidebar comments about content and tone. Your mileage may vary, the actual contents may appear smaller than described, no bailment is created.

Chapter 1: The Jeff Halpern Story. In short, why I started keeping a journal and thinking about a book, based on the true-life story of Jeff Halpern, Jewish NHL player who also attended Princeton. I hit 4 pages and stopped. But some of that content is in here. [done, but weak]

Chapter 2: Number 8. The real story of the whole snowman riff, my fascination with the number 8, Willie Stargell, and youth sports. [done]

Chapter 3: A Great Miracle Happened There. The 1980 Lake Placid Olympics “Miracle on Ice” story, as told by a high school senior who was forced to spell “Czechoslovakia” once a week and cheered when the Czechs got pounded by the Americans. Numerous Hanukah references included. [done]

Chapter 4: Hobey’s Rink. Playing hockey in the shadow of Hobey Baker, Patty Kazmaier, Laura Halldorson, and Coach Bruce whose last name I now forget. How ignorance of tradition isn’t fatal, especially if it forms a story of its own.

Chapter 5: An Expensive Afternoon. What happens when your wife tells you to entertain the kids for the day, and you end up at an ice skating rink, with Devils season tickets and a Stanley Cup picture in the mix. A near-death experience involving Bubba yelling at Philadelphia fans creates dramatic tension.

Chapter 6: Today I Am An Adult. Why I started playing hockey again even though all of my equipment was encrusted with mold. Skating with a bunch of Jewish guys on a team named the Saints, and why that was less humourous than the picture of an asthmatic stallion on our jerseys.

Chapter 7: Travel Hockey. My indoctrination to the life of a travel hockey parent. Literally having the snot frozen out of me, but thinking it was OK. My first ever hockey tournament, and why silver cups are important.

Chapter 8: The Hagiography of Saint Patrik. The life and times of our favorite Devil, Patrik Elias, and how Lord Stanley’s Cup ended up in New Jersey one more time.

Chapter 9: The Physics of Hockey. Yeah, really, physics like melting points and inelastic collsions. But also what holds teams together, and why I’m thrilled to come home at 1:00 AM with rink stink and bruises.

Chapter 10: A Two-Way Game. Our first lesson in the school of hard hockey knocks, involving a nickname and scoring on your own goalie.

Chapter 11: Beer League. Playing on Friday nights, Sunday nights and in between with men of my own age but far better skill. What happens in the locker room, and why Cheap Trick sucks.

Chapter 12: Love Covers Pain. We go to Lake Placid but there’s no Miracle on Ice. It happens on the car ride home. [done]

Chapter 13: Welcome to Management. My life in the scorekeeper’s box where time is malleable at the press of a button. How to prevent locker room disasters with 10 year olds: the facts of life, Santa Claus, and who brings the bad donuts.

Chapter 14: A Poem In The Cards. The life and times of my entire pasteboard empire, from sticking baseball cards in the spoke of my bike to discovering that I was tied to an NBA player’s son through a Topps card given to me by my grandfather. Inspired by Cory Doctorow’s short story Craphound. [done]

Chapter 15: Silver Anniversary. 25 years after the Miracle on Ice, another form of silver enters our house courtesy of the NJ state hockey playoffs.

Chapter 16: Snapping My Twig. Jewish men, their sports equipment, our Russian heritage, and why Scott Niedermeyer’s stick changed my life.

Chapter 17: A Great Miracle Happened Here. Yes, it’s a dreidel joke. It involves Lake Placid again. [done]

Chapter 18: Finding Pops. Return of the son of the snowman, in a different form. What the book should have been about from the very beginning. [done]

So the book has a beginning, middle and end. It could qualify as a novella, if there was continuity and context provided. I consider this my meta-writing exercise for the day, if i write about writing maybe I’ll be stimulated to write my 500 word allowance. But for now, the day job is calling.

It’s tht time of year when we’re about three weeks away from politics, heated debates, long arguments, claims of nepotism, favoritism and special interests overshadowing the real issues at hand. I’m not talking about anything going on at the Federal Reserve, in the Capitol Building or along Pennsylvania Avenue: I’m talking about hockey tryouts, conditioning clinics and the annual circus that accompanies them.

Here’s my three-part guide to dealing with this in a rational and reasonable manner. I realize that for some people, there is no definition of “reasonable” if it doesn’t include a spot on a AAA roster or a preferred team. For everyone else, here goes:

1. Understand why your kid wants to play hockey. Maybe that seems obvious, but there are a bunch of kids playing who really don’t want to be wearing skates four days a week. They would prefer to be doing something else, and are only playing because their parents insist, or they feel guilty about stopping about a long (and frequently quite expensive) “investment” in their hockey. These are classic cases of “good money after bad,” the gambler’s admonition to not continue chasing when the going isn’t going your way. If your kid doesn’t want to play, that should be the end of it, or you’ll have an unhappy kid making coaches, teammates and frequently opponents unhappy as well. Second, if your kid wants to play with his or her friends, or wants to play for a particular team, honor that as much as you can, even if it’s not as good a deal, competitive a team, or appealing to you. You’re not on the ice with those other players. Better your kid plays on a “B” team that he likes than plays on an “A” team as the last forward, skating for a team that wasn’t his first choice.

2. Have Plans B and C. Plan B should not be to scream at the coaches and board members selecting the rosters. In very rare cases will you ever be offered a spot with that team again. There are always teams that have spots open after tryouts, usually clubs that skate more than one team at a particular level, and I know quite a few players cut by my club that skated elsewhere and had just as much fun, made new friends, and did so with dignity and grace for all involved. Cutting anyone is a tough call; it’s a distasteful but necessary part of choosing a team.

3. Decide to be a good sports parent. Read the ESPN book “Fathers & Sons & Sports” for a collection of essays about what it means to be a father figure. Read Brian Kennedy’s “Growing Up Hockey”, now one of my favorite hockey books, to glimpse how hockey can be a lifelong pursuit and companion, if we teach our kids to nourish their love for the game and not poison the game with yelling, screaming, glass-banging, and pressure. When it’s available in a few weeks, read Mark Hyman’s “Until It Hurts”, a book about youth sports and the pressures we place on our kids to succeed. In addition to being a great sports writer with a long resume of by-lines, Mark Hyman writes from experience and perspective. His dad’s name graces the Little League field where I first played, and I believe one of my first mitts was once used by Mark or his brothers; as the father of a college aged son he has watched a “youth sports career” in an end to end rush that didn’t result in the goal intended.

Most of all, let the kids play. It’s their game, and their team. We’re just there to drive, cheer, and offer a shoulder when things don’t go well. During tryouts, there will be more shoulders than usual required, even if not requested.

The Penguins have just named Dan Bylsma as head coach for the last quarter of the season. Bylsma played CCHA college hockey, played for the LA Kings, and is the co-author of two books on pursuing an NHL career. His “So You Want to Play in the NHL?” is aimed at kids; and “So Your Son Wants to Play in the NHL?” was prompted by parental actions such as banging on the glass behind the goal at their kids’ squirt games. What’s refreshing about Bylsma’s books is that they’re written with a practical sense of demographics; he’s not about cutting dreams short but rather enabling practical dreams. Now if he can only get Crosby to stop moping like an emo-kid. I’ll bet he doesn’t bang on the glass to get his point across.

Been playing with a variety of ways to get my public Twitter timeline integrated here, as much of my tweeting seems to involve time before and after hockey (or eating or work, or eating at work). After playing with the default Twitter plugin for Wordpress (which requires the PHP curl library, which I hadn’t installed) I went for instant gratification: Rick’s plugin to display a tweet-in-time. It’s what I’d expect from a WordPress plugin - simple, one line to insert (although I added some other decoration giving you, gentle reader, a sense of why there are random brain farts on the right) and it worked out of the zip.

After keeping lists of books in notebooks, Mac sticky notes, Evernote and in physical form on a bookshelf, I decided it was time to update my reading record. Part Two of my hockey book list is now on the sidebar, featuring the best of Jack Falla, books on Zambonis, Hobeys, and midwestern youth hockey.

I have a few new ones sitting on the nightstand: Chico’s book of Devil’s stories and “Growing up Hockey,” to name just two. And yes, yes, I’m still hoping to finish my book one of these days; it’s more a matter of mastering what Cory Doctorow calls writing in the age of distraction. With the Devils playing as well as they are, how can I not be distracted?

The Snowman is brought to you by WordPress, open source blogging software that is written in PHP and uses the MySQL database for storing content and meta-data about the content. In short: you get a full-featured, robust, community developed and maintained personal editorial platform for exactly zero dollars. WP is also the engine that drive the Pookie and Schnookie emporium as well as Bill Rosenblatt’s Copyright and Technology. Along with about — get this — 11 million other blogging voices. I’ve been using it for a few years, and I’m addicted. Disclaimer: MySQL is owned by my employer, Sun Microsystems, but my WordPress infatuation predates our corporate courting and consummation. As it were.

One of the downsides, though, is that there’s little in-depth documentation on WordPress. There are books-a-plenty about blogging and formatting posts, but nothing that really tells you how to work in the framework of scripts, templates, styles, themes and database schema. Until now — WordPress TV is a pretty strong collection of “how to” videos, keynotes, ideas, and developer direction. It even includes Matt Mullenweg’s keynote from WordCamp NYC, hosted by yours truly in October.

Worth watching when the Devils aren’t on TV.

I’ve been looking for a bit of writing inspiration lately — blogging has been slow, I haven’t had the energy or creativity to devote to working on the hockey book, and work has been, well, more than a job. Perhaps it was the rainy day today, or perhaps it was the fact that I got the urge to clean up my office (it happens, usually once every 3 or 4 months). About two years ago I managed to find an autographed 1980 Olympic Men’s Hockey Team jersey, with silver autographs of gold medal winners, all save the late Herb Brooks. There was a fairly large set of them released around the 25th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice, and one ended up in my jersey collection. I finally had it framed for my birthday this year (thanks to my mother in law) and it quite simply looks nicer than the motley collection of Devils swag on my “jersey wall.” As much as I like my BC jersey with Gionta’s handwriting, the Jay Pandolfo jersey I won in a raffle, the Patrik Elias jersey with a really funny autograph (before he got serious about signing his name) and a Scott Gomez/Jamie Langenbrunner dueling penmanship sample, they just didn’t “feel” right.

The Talking Heads’ David Byrne once said that art is something you should rotate, something you should like, not permanently mount on your wall as if it’s part of the building. I think jerseys fit that profile even more tightly than paintings or posters; jerseys each tell a story, have a life or a background, give you a snapshot of time and space. Give or take a few years, the Miracle on Ice marked the first third of my life; becoming a father to a son who would later help me rekindle my passion for hockey marked the second third. There’s a nice symmetry in that, and perhaps the backwards looking perspective will get me motivated to work on the next big forward looking projects.

Sometimes you need to change your focus, and that’s what I did in hanging the 1980 sweater over my left shoulder.

Patrik Elias has his own Twitter page. And it’s 80% him, a bit from his management team but for the most part it’s unedited Patty-streams. There are a whopping three people following him - c’mon, folks, when you get a glimpse into the daily grind of a professional athlete, it’s “Real Life” meets “Slap Shot” in electronic form - digg in.

Twitter is rapidly replacing my daily scan of blogs for news and personal updates. In additition to a more dense information flow (you can do a lot with 140 characters), there are half a dozen Twitter adjuncts that propagate updates to Facebook and other social sites. The value of something like this is a pure study in the strength of networks: the more people who are following Elias, the more valuable his updates become in terms of defining his brand and fan outreach; the more he communicates directly to the public the more he builds up that fan base. But it’s like fax machines in the 1980s: having just three fax machines is pretty useless. You need hundreds to make it a valued communications channel.

Tweet up, peeps. And if you’re looking for yours truly, I’m freeholdhal on Twitter.

When my kids were little and tele-marketing was all the dinner time rage, I used to put them on the phone with the hardiest of cold callers. I thought of it as fair play; they were interrupting my family team and my dinner for some unwanted spiel about credit cards, home loans, timeshares, or other bad uses of my money (looking back: leading indicator of today’s messes!). Instead, they got a 3-year old who asked them what their favorite color was, what they were wearing, if they liked hockey (that would have been Lil’Bubba) and other questions, in a true test of wills to see who would hang up first.

Mid-afternoon today I got a call (on the home line, no less) from the NJ Devils asking me if there were any Devils fans at home. Mistake. They got the maturity-equivalent of the little kid on the line, and instead of buying from them, I sold:

To quote the Gen Y employees trying shake up NASA, everything you know about community, demand creation, marketing, distribution and audience is wrong. Today’s hockey fans aren’t the same ones who grew up watching games on WOR or WPIX (thankfully, because most of them became Rangers fans, for the much-proffered reason that “they were on TV.” If Gilligan and the Skipper played hockey, Rangers fans would follow them, too). We get our news, data and updates online. We have friends we haven’t met or heard, but enjoy their self-published voices. We join groups because they seem like a good idea, even though only one in ten has some utility once the first laugh has damped down.

Now I’m waiting for the second call from the Rock: you obviously know where to find me.

I discovered that Elias has a Facebook fan page a few weeks ago, and while it’s short of content (for now), it takes you to some interesting places and seems to be populated somewhat regularly with syndicated news feeds. A few emails back and forth, and perhaps some trackbacks from his sports management team, and I ended up on Elias’ blog roll; his Facebook page now has a badge on the sidebar of this blog.

If you’re on Facebook, check it out, become a fan, and be vocal. Or at least feed the Czech language comments through an online translator if you want creative Rock signage ideas. If you’re not on Facebook, then you don’t know that Elias has his own church. He probably doesn’t know that either, which is partly what makes it fun.

Increasingly, Facebook is being used to create vibrant communities ranging from a few people (check out those of us who favor “mixed crustaceans” on Facebook) to a few thousand - the Washington Capitals use Facebook and other social media to alert fans when there are last-minute tickets available for a game. It’s a great way to keep your most die-hard fans in the loop, and at least make them feel like they’re getting direct access without media filtration, time constraints, language barriers, or non-hockey aware editorial types intermediating the bit stream. Octagon promises that Elias will begin putting up content on a regular basis.

In the meantime, he’s had a great two games - Friday night’s goal was a thing of beauty, the kind of play that made Bubba and me move him to the top of the favorite Devils list; Saturday’s 3-point night made all of the difference in the game. Maybe it’s me; maybe I just haven’t been watching enough Devils hockey with my travel schedule, but Elias was moving more, creating space and time with the puck, being aggressive on the forecheck, and playing well, like Patrik Elias. It’s the kind of (TV) face time that we love.