dirtygames.ca

Are you watching? Good. Because this is me, not panicking six games into the 2009/10 hockey season.

See? I’m breathing deeply, sleeping well and eating full, balanced meals. I’m drinking delicious Canadian beer in reasonable quantities and am not under any circumstances swigging straight from the bottle of American whiskey and cursing at my television set for Todd Bertuzzi to hit one of these goddamn motherfuckers already.

Nope. Not me. I am the picture of serenity. You know why? Because this is the fucking preseason. I’m sorry, but it is.

I know that if you asked Mike Babcock if this was the preseason, he would first glare at you like you were too stupid to be drawing breath, then roll his eyes heavenward in the same manner he does when Jason Williams is attempting to utilize a hockey skill that Babcock has termed “backchecking”, and finally he would tell you in no uncertain terms that these games count for the same amount of points as games in March and that the Red Wings must approach every one of them with the same attitude.

And he’d be lying to you. And he’d know it, so you should know it.

Hockey is a physically demanding, emotionally taxing, psychologically gruelling sport. You have to psych yourself up to take the hit, then you have to take the hit to make the play, then you have to convince yourself that taking that hit to get the puck out of your zone in the first period of an October game against the Sabres was so definitely worth it that you’ll do it again 30 seconds later.

Then you have to do it again two nights later against the Kings. And then again and again and again until the playoffs finally start, at which point you have to do it some more, only with fewer mistakes and while taking harder hits.

And you’ve been doing this the maximum amount of times it is possible to do this for two years straight.

So yeah … you’re not as committed right now. Your teammates aren’t as committed right now and in all likelihood, with the Olympics looming, neither is the coach.

And I am relaxed, because this is a positive thing.

Last year, the Red Wings coasted through parts of the regular season, but only some of them — Osgood, Cleary, Filppula, Zetterberg (though he had injury issues) — were visibly not performing to the best of their ability. As well, some of them — Helm, Ericsson, Leino and Abdelkader in particular — weren’t even on the team most of the time. There were, however, a solid group of Winged Warriors who were determined to follow the coach’s mantra of giving it their all every single game and treating the October games as though they were just as important as the April ones.

Those guys? Datsyuk, Lidstrom, Holmstrom, Rafalski, Draper…

Hey, wait a sec. That sounds like a list of the guys who were either unavailable or less effective in the later rounds of the playoffs, costing the Wings an easy victory over a top-heavy Penguins squad and the glory of back-to-back championships.

And who were the surprisingly solid players involved in that playoff run? Well, I remember Osgood silencing doubters and Dan Cleary winning a few fans. I remember Helm and Ericsson opening eyes and Leino looking fairly dangerous everytime that hungry — and rested — dog was let out of his pen. Why do you think that could be?

Do you think that playing two full seasons and two full playoffs of all-out hockey with the pressure of carrying on the winning tradition of the Winged Wheel every single fucking night might have taken a small toll on some guys, and the more relaxed atmosphere of Grand Rapids or the lackadaisical work ethic of Osgood and Cleary might have left them with a little more gas in the tank?

Yeah. Probably.

So I don’t care. I’m good with it. This hockey — from now until, say, January 30 — is the preseason. Fuck everything else. Pavel’s stomach hurts? Sit him. Zetterberg’s groin is wonky? Tell him to stay home and have Emma work on it. Nick Lidstrom’s wife wants him to go to Disneyland with the kids for a week? Buy him a plane ticket and some sunscreen and tell him you’ll see him bright and early next Monday. Franzen needs surgery? Perfect. Let him work that shit back into shape sloooooowly. He should play his first game no earlier than March 15.

I know it’s not conventional wisdom, and many will tell you that it didn’t work last year. But it did work last year. The team just didn’t embrace this concept enough. They’ve already proven that they’re a veteran group capable of turning it on when the games count, so let them do that. Save their bodies and minds for when it matters. Let me sit back, drink beer and watch a .500 hockey team … at least until the season starts on Jan. 31.

It’s back everybody. After much frustration last night I was finally able to make internet-based radio work and the dulcet tones of Philadelphian sports announcers filed my ears. Then Jeremy Williams scored and I almost came in my pants. I held off, mostly because I was at work, where that sort of behaviour is, I think, frowned upon.

Regardless, it was hockey. It was preseason hockey so it wouldn’t have mattered if the Red Wings lost. But they won, so it is absolutely a harbinger of victories yet to come. I can’t say I saw any of the game, and I can’t say I heard more than about 25 minutes of it, but regardless, the Wings emerged with a 3-1 triumph, a 1-0 record in the preseason and no new injured players, which when you’re playing a team that dresses Chris Pronger is like a victory all its own…

And we learned some things, not about the team, but about the nature of preseason hockey in general. Here’s how you know its an exhibition game:

• When Derek Meech has no goals and no assists but is named the game’s first star.  (Note: You can also file this fact under ‘how you know you couldn’t watch the game and had to listen to the opposing team’s radio announcers.)
• Andy Delmore touches the puck at a meaningful point in the game and Mike Babcock does not immediately leave the bench, grab him by the scruff of his neck and drag him back to where he can do no harm.
• An ex-Maple Leafs prospect scores!
• A Red Wings prospect fought somebody … and may even have won the fight. (Note: The last part is rumour, but it sounded like he got some good shots in. I’m just going to pretend it happened the way I saw it in my head.)
• Nicklas Lidstrom played nine minutes and 22 seconds of hockey. Meech played 18:49, Delmore played 12:03.
• Pavel Datsyuk played only eight seconds on the penalty kill.
• Someone, I don’t even want to know who, let Kris Newbury (another Leafs castoff) wear a Red Wings jersey and sit on the bench. A few times, Mike Babcock accidentally brushed his shoulder while walking by and he jumped on the ice. Babcock, being a polite Saskatchewan man, didn’t have the heart to burst his bubble so Kris Newbury played more than eight minutes of hockey with a Red Wings jersey on his back. THAT, my friends, is preseason hockey for you.

Next game: Tomorrow, against the New York Rangers at 7:30 p.m. I’m not promising anything, but since the game will be on the MSG network in New York, you might want to check your favourite streaming sites. Personally, I lean toward a-t-d-h-e.net (take the hyphens out of the name and don’t tell too many of your friends).

Please.

I haven’t written about politics on this blog in a fairly long time. There’s a reason for that. All it accomplishes is to piss off some readers who come here for the sports, and confirm all the beliefs of those who do come here for my liberal, commie-loving, viewpoints.

But mostly I haven’t written about politics because it’s too goddamn depressing.

I thought that might be ending. I figured that maybe this whole health-care business in the United States would settle down now that the dog days of August were over. I hoped that maybe the media would move on to portraying the more sane parts of the opposing sides of the debate and discussing the issues and that perhaps Americans would understand that, just because the guy in charge is a negro, there’s no reason to hate him for everything he does.

Nope. Didn’t happen. I still can’t bring myself to write about American politics because to do so would basically amount to a screed of several hundred words calling a large portion of American “Conservatives” and “Republicans” things like racist, disgusting, hate-filled, bile-spewing, vindictive, petty, simplistic, gullible, fear-mongering, willfully ignorant, borderline retarded, happily illiterate, mindbogglingly stupid, supremely disingenuous, rabidly nationalistic, proudly xenophobic, fallacy-loving, morally bankrupt, spiteful bullies who are developmentally disabled to the point where they might harm themselves were they to wrestle with any thought more complex than whatever fascistic pablum has most recently been spoon-fed into their mostly atrophied excuses for cranial lobes.

I honestly don’t understand how else to explain things like this. The very fact that these people below think they are accomplishing something for their nation, state, party, family or anybody anywhere in the world is a testament to how brainwashed an idiot can be if reared in an environment where dangerous levels of ignorance are accepted and even prized.

Enough babbling about these half-wit, off-brand, mentally retarded impersonators of politically-concerned citizens. Watch the damn video:

By the way, they claimed there were two million of them at this event, and started passing around pictures to prove it. But you know how this story goes.

Everyone aside from these idiots watched them lie and repeat the lie and believe the lie and take it to bed with them at night and shove it up that dirty little place where only disgusting gay people are supposed like it but that they secretly, desperately need to fill.

By the way, fire officials estimated off the record that about 60,000 people showed up. Which is more than enough to staff a small country dedicated to upholding the right to ignorance, hate and good ol’ fashioned xenophobic rhetoric as their own twisted, pathetic version of a declaration of independence.

This will be my last post on politics for a while, probably. Or maybe not. That felt pretty good. God I hate these retards.

Apparently, athletes wearing red are more likely to succeed. It’s all psychological.

Experts believe that red could make individuals and teams feel more confident as well as being perceived by others as more aggressive and dominant.

No kidding. Could that be because red is an ass-kicking colour? The colour of blood, and flame and sports cars purchased by near-impotent middle-aged men the world over?

Obviously, we here at DirtyGames, and at other sites written by Red Wing-friendly bloggers, believe this wholeheartedly. Red is bad ass. It intimidates. Teams wearing red are awesome and destined for success and glory.

But even the best uniform colour in the world cannot cover for tremendous suckage.

A good team wearing red can gain the upper hand and perhaps the other team is a little less likely to mount a challenge. Or they can throw their weight around and perhaps cow their opponent into submission. Or maybe they’re just so awesomely RED that the other team doesn’t even bother playing the damn game.

But what happens when a red team plays a red team? Does whichever team forced to wear the dreaded home whites lose? Of course not.

As much as I’d love to believe that choosing the jersey colours all those decades ago gave my favourite hockey squad a built-in advantage … c’mon. It’s subjective psychological bullshit.

From this study, I can conclude that red does indeed intimidate … judging officials. Which is the way the research for this study was done:

The study, by German sports psychologists at the University of Munster, was reported in New Scientist magazine. They showed video clips of taekwondo bouts to 42 experienced referees. One combatant wore blue, the other red.

They then showed them the same clips but digitally manipulated the clothing to swap the colours. The fighters wearing red were given an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were blue.

So yes, if the sport in question were one in which subjective judgement is used to determine a large percentage of the outcome, then I could believe that red offers a significant advantage. It’s not hard to imagine that sort of bias would make itself evident in this kind of study.

And I could even believe that a slight amount of that bias would translate to sports where the play is one-on-one, and the conflict is between two individuals in close proximity. In those cases, the psychology of red might gain a few more points on the intimidation scale.

Like, perhaps, in the case of this dude:

But when you move on to large teams, with a couple of dozen millionaires working together against the enemy, any kind of advantage offered by a colour is minuscule at best and — I would argue — nonexistent.

Not that I’d be disappointed to be in the wrong. I know that, personally, I would always buy the red Wings jersey over the white one. But that’s also because I enjoy wearing a hockey jersey in the few social situations in which it is acceptable. And most of those situations involve chicken wings, pizza and beer … and jerseys are too expensive to risk visible stain.

English soccer fans rioted yesterday.

People’s faces were messed up, hundreds of beer bottles were broken and crooked, yellowing teeth littered the ground. None of these things had anything to do with the soccer riot. That’s just London on a Tuesday.

I could write, were I so inclined, about the emotional intensity of “big” games, and how it brings out the worst in fans. We could all pretend that this mayhem was the result of a hard-fought match that was decided by a controversial play in extra time and those passionate, crude-but-lovable fans just couldn’t accept the result.

But let’s be real. It’s soccer. These fans are poor and mostly unemployed; they’re drunk and disorderly and miserable and it’s probably raining — and all they want is an exciting sporting event to take their mind off their troubles. And somehow, instead of that, they ended up at a soccer match.

It’s long been a theory of mine — and this just solidifies my beliefs — that the amount of fan violence is inversely proportional to the excitement level of the sport they’re watching.

Fans don’t riot after hockey games. Even in Detroit. Because the game is so exciting they’re all too emotionally drained to burn cars and fight cops. And if you can’t burn cars and fight cops in Detroit, you know you’re exhausted.

Fans don’t riot during basketball games, unless they’re forced to watch the early 2000’s Detroit Pistons, which were possibly the most boring team to win a championship that wasn’t based out of New Jersey.

Fans don’t riot during baseball games, either. But I personally think that’s because barely anyone even goes to baseball games anymore.

This theory also goes a long way towards explaining how the Tiger Woods era finally brought an end to golf’s long history of bloody conflict.

Okay, so maybe not. But still, when the fights afterwards are more entertaining than the game itself … your sport has a problem.

This is why soccer should take a cue from hockey and allow the players to fight during the game — perhaps then the scores could be settled on the field and the fans could perhaps refrain from destroying the city after the match.

We are, of course, assuming that British soccer fans would not promptly find another reason to destroy the city.

You see, this is what happens when empires become impotent. They turn inward, looking for new frontiers to conquer … and find nothing but immigrants, police or fans of a rival sporting organization.

Now this is all in good fun, I admit. I know for a fact that there are some pleasant and sane sports fans in London. These fans gather together on a regular basis to watch the match, appreciate the excitement of a fine contest, well-played and down copious pints of some of the most delicious beers the world has to offer.

You can find them at the Maple Leaf pub in Covent Garden on Saturday night around midnight, drinking Sleeman’s and hoping fervently but futilely that the Canadiens can find a way to stop the Red Wings.

On a more serious and slightly profane note, these soccer ‘fans’ can lovingly cradle my nuts. Have some respect for the sport you profess to love and stop giving assholes like me excuses to spend 20 minutes ripping ‘the beautiful game’ to shreds. Every time someone convinces me to give soccer a chance, something like this happens and my scorn for everything about the game reasserts itself.

A soccer player just finished reading this article now, and he’s rolling around on the floor by his computer, looking for the ref to pull out a card.

A few days after Michael Vick showed everyone that you can pretty much do everything short of actually killing people and still deserve a second chance, a couple of former sports heroes decided to follow his lead.

First, Brett Favre, who never did anything illegal, is apparently ready to join the Minnesota Vikings. While Favre may have not committed any crimes, by the strict policework-based definition of the word, he has certainly used the last two-plus years to give a seminar on How To Destroy A Reputation in 24 months. If you asked Wisconsin residents who they hold in higher regard, the dude who tortured dogs or the dude who quit rather than share his job, then unquit, then signed to a different team, then quit again, then almost unquit, then decided to stay quit, then unquit again to sign with the Vikings (of all teams) … they’d probably lean toward the dude who just strangled and drowned puppies.

Second, Todd Bertuzzi, who very nearly did kill someone, signed with the Red Wings. Again. For a cheap contract because they were one of what was presumably a very, very small number of teams who demonstrated interest. Big Bert was not entirely useless last season, is a big semi-physical presence and can be an effective part of a winning team if he’s healthy. As a Red Wings fan who only wants to see the team succeed, I think this is a pretty good signing. Keep reading →