By Beth
Sports are great. Men's sports, that is. I suppose women's sports could be great too, I could just never really get into them. Men's sports, all the way. There's just something about a nicely built man in uniform pounding the snot out of another nicely built man in uniform. I prefer contact sports, the more contact the better. Ice hockey ranks right up there on my list with lacrosse and rugby. Baseball doesn't make the cut.
I suppose I should blame my brother for this obsession with violent sports. He played football and lacrosse in middle school and high school and I went to many, many games. When I saw lacrosse for the first time I fell in love. This may be partly due to the fact that Don Seel, a long time crush of mine (K-8th grade) played as well; defense - they had the long sticks. Their job, Don and my brother's who also played defense, was to pulverize anyone who came close to their net and prevent them from scoring. It is so violent that my brother actually injured one of his teammates so badly during practice that the poor guy missed the whole season. My kind of sport!
In 7th grade, when we were allowed to finally play sports for the school, I joined the girls' lacrosse team. This was going to be awesome! I can run around with a stick and beat people with it! WRONG! Turns out girls' lacrosse is a totally different sport. The sticks didn't even look the same and, the worst part - you weren't even allowed to touch the other players! Where is the fun in that, I ask?? I quit. Too bad they wouldn't let me play for the boys' team. Unfortunately, I was not able to play any type of contact sports in school. The area of girls' contact sports is sadly neglected; I settled on running, and watching the boys' teams my brother played for.
I'm sure you can see now where the idea of going to an ice hockey game came from. Lara loves her some violent sports too and hockey is definitely a top 3. So we looked into schedules. Flyers tickets were way expensive, and we didn't really want the cheap seats with all the drunks. So we focused on the minor leagues. The Hershey Bears were the lucky team we chose to grace with our presence.
The day of the game was also the same day Lara surprised me with a trip to the Inner Harbor to meet Duff. It was rainy and I had to buy new socks and sneakers to avoid spending the rest of the night in squishiness and discomfort. My dumb luck, I bought a pair of sneakers that, while very stylish, were not the best for walking the distance from a parked car to a stadium to our seats and back. They were built more for riding in said car and looking cute. I had blisters within two minutes of beginning to walk.
Our seats were amazing, just a few rows from the plexiglass, great view of players getting smashed into it and of the fights when they inevitable broke out. I bought a foam claw, the equivalent of a foam finger, for each of my kids and we got into the game spirit. There were some obnoxious fans of the opposing team behind us and a woman whose hair looked like a bird had nested in it in front (pictured at right) but we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The sound of a 200+ pound man hitting the plexiglass is a wonderful sound and from our seats we could see the sweat fly. Lara and I got a good, healthy dose of sports violence, enough perhaps to last until seeing rugby matches while in Ireland. I thank my brother, and of course, Don Seel, for inspiring me to obsess over violent sports. Can't imagine life any other way!
[Editor's Note: Be sure to go read Lara's account of YOB #7 Go To An Ice Hockey Game]