tsexrex does hockey

Think about this…

Right now both Gary Bettman and Pierre McGuire have raging boners.  Gross.

#CindyCrosby

ya i’m excited for the Tigers

but my favorite part of the Tigers’ games in September, are the advertisements for Wings season ticket packages, because a pre-season Wings game is better than any Tigers game.

Brad McCrimmon

I know all I have been posting about this week is the tragedy in Russia, but it hit me really hard.  Yes I am a Red Wings fan, but I am a hockey fan first.  If the Wings no longer existed for some reason, I would still be a hockey fan.  I watch every game possible without paying for the NHL network.  I get FSD games in Detroit, I also watch the VS. games, and all of the CBC games.  Sometimes, when I can find links, I watch KHL games and World Junior games on my laptop.  I make it out for a few Jr. Whalers games each year, and I follow what my friends are doing in the AHL and ECHL.  It is pretty much my favorite thing to do.  I watch an unhealthy amount of hockey.  Aside from music, my favorite thing in the world is hockey.  I played for 14 years.  I criss-crossed this country playing my favorite game.  I had invites to Jr. camps when I was 17, and I thought really hard about going, and then I tore my ACL in a pickup basketball game at the end of my junior year of high school, and it all ended.  I no longer had the option to take part in summer camps for those Jr. teams.  I decided to focus on music (I was always a better musician than I ever was a hockey player), and I went to college.  Wait, how did I make this about me?

When I was a kid, I was a huge Wings fan.  For years my favorite player was Rick Zambo, I always loved the stay at home defensemen. So I was so happy when the wings signed Brad McCrimmon.  He was eventually teamed with the player I was most excited about at the time, a young Swede named Nicklas Lidstrom.  I had watched Nick play in the World Championships, and was really excited for him to join my Wings.  He was paired with one of my favorite stay at home defensemen, Brad McCrimmon.  In that first year Brad not only taught him a lot, but he also took care of him.  Nick never had to worry about any of the rough stuff, because he had Brad.  We learned through this tragedy, that they were roommates that year, and that Beast taught him how to be a NHL player. 

I met Brad McCrimmon in a tiny sports card shop in the winter of that year.  The shop was called something like ‘Tough Sports’ or something like that, and it was run by a huge middle aged man with a mustache.  He didn’t know what he was doing at all in the marketing game, but he booked Beast to come and sign autographs.  The only marketing he had was telling all the kids that came into the store two weeks prior to the signing, that Brad McCrimmon was going to be there from this time to this time on this date.  When I showed up on a snowy night with my dad, we walked in and started looking around for the table, and the line of people.  We were literally the only people in the store except for the owner and Brad.  Brad was playing a stand up video game.  It was probably Galaga, or Pac man, or something like that.  There were a few different games in there.  My dad looked at me and said something like ‘are you sure it was today’ and I said ‘yeah that is Brad right there playing video games’.  I walked up to him and asked him to sign my assortment of cards, and a pennant I had.  He was so happy to see someone come out to meet him, that he spent about an hour talking to me about everything.  We talked about hockey strategy, the Wings, how much promise he saw in Nick Lidstrom and Vladimir Konstantinov, and everything else that came up.  I was the only person to show up for him, and he appreciated it. 

A couple years later I was at a hockey school for defensemen.  The school was really hard to get in to, and it was expensive.  It was the only thing that I asked for my parents to get me that year for Christmas.  It was the only thing, besides the tickets to a Wings game they got me every year, and I was on my way to a star studded defensemen school.  The school had a lot of big names.  Al Iafrate, Al MacInnis, Phil Housley, Steve Chiasson (who also died tragically in a plane crash), and Brad McCrimmon, amongst others.  We ran drills with these guys everyday.  They skated us into the ground.  It was 6 hours a day for two weeks.  It was usually an hour on the ice in the morning, then classroom work for an hour, then lunch, then off ice conditioning and skill building, and then an hour and a half of ice time, before we crawled off of the ice and got undressed and went home.  A few days into the school I asked Brad if he remembered me, and after a few questions back and forth he said that he did, and after that he really took me under his wing when he was there.  He was only there like 6 of the 10 days, but when he was there, he would pay extra attention to me.  He taught me a lot of things that I used everytime I stepped on the ice.  I followed his career after that through the Whalers and a brief stint in Phoenix.  I was happy when he got the assistant coaching job for the Wings, and I was really happy for him when he got the head coaching job for Lokomotiv Yaroslavl.  Like I said I’m a hockey fan, I don’t just follow the NHL.  I follow the OHL, ECHL, AHL, KHL, etc.  I read how he turned down jobs in the NHL, because he couldn’t get the contract he wanted, and finally found a home in the KHL.  I don’t think that it was an accident that Ruslan Salei was a part of that team.  Rusty was pretty much Brad 2.0. 

Either way, this tragedy saddened me on the level of the Konstantinov tragedy.  From the time I spent with Brad, as a kid, I can only imagine the amount of people really torn apart by his loss.  I mean really for all I know he went home at night and watched Everybody Loves Raymond reruns and kicked puppies in the face for hours and hours, but I would be willing to bet everything that I own, that he was the same wonderful man in his everyday life that he was to me as a little star stuck kid.

Rest easy Beast, please know that at least one person will never forget you.