Let me tell you a little something about rednecks, a society in which I am a proud member: We don't really care for hockey.
I can't tell you exactly why this is but for some reason it just doesn't really appeal to us. We like football, we like baseball, we like football, hell! Even some of us like soccer but nobody really knows why but we just don't care for ice hockey.
Years ago, when I was still in college, we got a professional NHL team moved to our state and initially they even had their stadium about an hour away from where I lived and I don't know a single person in the redneck community that was even aware of this.
They are called the Hurricanes and that is a truly wonderful and relevant name for a North Carolina team seeing as how our state is absolutely ravaged by at least one hurricane just about every single year.
I recall some people on campus that were non-redneck friends of mine that talked about how excited they were about it and I think they moved here from Hartford, which I think it is Connecticut. The very first year that they were playing in NC they did really well and I think in the first couple of years they actually went to the playoffs. I still didn't care.
I am one of those old boys that feels this sort of natural draw to root for the home team even if they are terrible but here we were, back in the 90's, with a team that was absolutely killing it and I didn't know a single person that so much as owned a jersey. There was a time near the end of the season that a friend of mine who was from New York, which is a very unlikely place for someone to be from that is a friend with a redneck, and he offered me a free ticket to go to a game with him and I came up with some reason that I couldn't go with him.
I didn't lie, it's not really in my nature to do that, but I genuinely did have to go to work when the game was going to happen. I could have gotten out of it by moving my schedule around, I just wasn't really thrilled about the prospect of driving for an hour, paying for parking, waiting around for the game to start, and then cheering for a sport that I don't really care about. This was over 20 years ago.
So why is it that rednecks wouldn't care about this team? I think it has a lot to do with tradition and being stuck in our ways, which rednecks tend to do and something that is played on ice using specialized equipment that is really expensive is a big part of it and also because the games tend to be very low scoring. Also, when I have bothered to try to watch a game on TV with a friend of mine that was into the sport, I seriously struggled to even be able to tell where the puck was, let alone why a particular move was considered a good one. I also had to have a great many of the rules explained to me because I didn't understand why play was stopping because someone passed too far away and that is not allowed for some reason.
Now, this being said, I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone that can do something this complicated in any sport. I'm not trying to say that it is a talentless sport, because that is definitely not the case.
Another non-redneck friend of mine was from the New England area and we were all hanging out on the porch when a friend of mine turned up with some roller-blades. My New England friend put on the blades and hit the street and then proceeded to skate round and round and even backwards and it just blew my mind. This was something that this guy had never spoken of before but as it turns out he was brought up in an ice-hockey family in an area where they have natural ice for a good part of the year. Therefore, he was growing up in a part of the world where kids would go out and skate and the natural progression of this would be to get some sticks and a puck involved and play the sport.
We are all products of our environment after all. The reason why I am good at yardwork, fishing, and hunting, is because my own family was involved in these activities so it is understandable that he would be good at the things that his family encouraged him to do, just like me. This was the guy that got me to watch some Bruins games with him and I would cheer along and have some beers if for no other reason than to support my friend and have something to talk about. I still would admit to him that this sport was not for me and I was only watching it for his sake.
I do have to say that I did enjoy the fights though and I think this is a wonderful aspect of the game that fighting seems to not be a horrible aspect of the game but is also embraced and is just part of it. I thought it was pretty fantastic that as long as you fight in a certain "allowed" sort of fashion that you don't even get kicked out of the game or fined and it isn't even really frowned up. I could be a little bit wrong here but after the fight, both of the players that are involved in it have to go and sit in the penalty box for a few minutes and then they are allowed to come back to the game.
I think it would be wonderful if we could introduce this to other sports as well. It would certainly make soccer a lot more interesting.
So if you are a hockey fan, I commend you. I tried and that is about all you are going to get out of me in regards to the sport. To this day I could be offered free tickets to one of the Carolina games and I would still choose to not attend.