With hockey season just around the (metaphorical) corner, (and, at home, an almost literal corner), I decided to exhume this post that I started working on in October 2010. Yup, I had started this post and got caught up in the wedding, people visiting, surgery, honeymoon, hockey season, playoffs and everything else in my hurricane-esque life that it’s been sitting in the depths of WordPress ever since.
The catalyst to jump-start this post again, was probably, although I don’t like admitting it, the deaths of three very talented hockey stars over the last few months, and as of the 7th September, the horrific plane crash in Russia which claimed the lives of almost forty hockey players.
These are mostly players who I’ve not seen on the ice, players can’t claim to be a fan of… my only knowledge of them, has come from various blogs and articles I’ve read following their deaths, friends who have seen them play, who have been fans of them and their teams and a vague pre-existing knowledge about where they have played in their careers.
Derek “Boogeyman” Boogaard, played for my ‘new home’ team, the Houston Aeros for two seasons he died May 13th. Rick Rypien, a Manitoba Moose, the same league as, and an opponent of my beloved Aeros (In fact, I probably have seen him play, but as I write this I have no recollection of it) he died August 15, and now, most recently, Wade Belak, a career NHLer, who played, from what I’m told, a cracking season with the Coventry Blaze during the NHL lockout, died August 31st.
The plane that crashed, was filled with a variety of KHL players, some ex-NHLers, some ex-AHLers, but one thing’s for sure, it was a talent-filled plane and it’s a great tragedy that this happened.
I may not have ‘known’ these men, like I ‘know of’ any number of EIHL, AHL and NHL players, but their deaths have hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m sure if I was a die-hard fan of any of those players, or if were any of my favourite players who had passed away, I’d be a blithering mess.
These deeply saddening events of the summer have cast a dark, ominous shaddow over hockey, and have made me yearn for something positive to cling on to about this sport, my sport, a sport that I have loved for the guts six years…a sport which seems to have, of late, become the harbinger of death.
I need to remind myself of it’s positive force, of all the good it’s brought into my life, and as such, I shall share my story, of how I came to love such an ‘un-Irish’ sport, in a country where football and rugby are dominant and no one cares about a bunch of Canadian blokes skating around chasing a rubber ‘ball’.
- A group of our hockey peeps at home, in Rockies after a Giants game
So, people always ask me, ‘Why do you like hockey?’, (at least those who don’t go ‘IRELAND HAS HOCKEY??? When did THAT happen?’).
They probably expect the answer that everyone gives when they are asked why they like anything. I mean, what can you say when someone asks ‘Why do you like that band/artist/sport?’, eh, because I do? It’s a difficult question to answer for a lot of people, not for me…at least not about hockey…
My love for hockey started fairly recently actually, I, like most people across the globe, had no idea that Ireland had hockey. Until 2005-ish I’d never heard of the Giants and the only hockey I knew was from my favourite film trilogy ‘The Mighty Ducks’ (still my favourite films by the way, much to everyone’s disapproval – well, aside from my sister’s boyfriend James!).
Through my online journalling, I met a number of friends online, one in particular, a Canadian, Anne, who I emailed regularly. After a while of being friends, I invited her to come and visit – she booked a two week holiday to Ireland. It was about now that I started to panic about what to do while she visited, where do we go? what do I show her? where can I take her? kind of thing.
It was then I discovered that Belfast had a hockey team. Not only that, but they had two games in three days while she was in town. I bought tickets for both games, because what else would you do with a Canadian other than take them to a hockey game? LOL!!!
- Anne and Rowan at our first game in the Odyssey
I didn’t drive, so we had to get the bus from Newry Bus Depot to the Europa Bus depot in Belfast and then, since I didn’t know Belfast at all at the time, get a taxi to the Odyssey (in rush hour so it wasn’t cheap) and we had to leave early to catch the bus home.
But it was worth it.
From the moment the first game started I was totally hypnotised. I couldn’t understand how 6ft, false toothed or toothless, burly, (mostly) Canadian guys could see through the small window in their helmets while skating (upright to boot, cause Lord knows they need to have great balance!) on an ice pad wearing a ton of gear, carrying a stick, chasing a 3 inch disc of rubber trying to get it past the sumo wrestling goaltender standing in the net. (of course these descriptions are exaggerated generalisations, but you get the point!)
Talk about talented!
I was hooked.
When Anne left and went back to Canada, my brother Rowan and I went to every game we could. We did the same thing every time, paid for the bus, the tickets, the taxi, leaving the game early to make the last bus back and being collected after 11pm from the bus depot by our dad. It got expensive, especially since I was a student, but, like I said, it was worth it and I used every penny I made in my part time job to go see the team I’d immediatelly fallen in love with.
In Spring 2006 hockey started to bring friends in to my life, another gal, Kerrie, who I’d met on LiveJournal.com who came up to me at a game and said ‘Are you icemaiden013 on LiveJournal?’, as it happens I was and we became pretty great friends, pretty quickly. Not the typical ‘puck bunny’ type, we more enjoyed squee-fests about the game itself, although we did appreciate the ‘finer’ aspects – such as just how freakin’ hot I found one Mr Chris Pronger….*phew*
In September of 2007, I think it was, one of the Giants came to the Quays Shopping Centre in Newry for a meet and greet. What the G.Org didn’t know was that very few people in Newry actually knew who the heck he was, meaning the number of fans who turned up for the meet and greet was like, 6.
This worked out in our favour as it meant that we got to talk to the other fans who turned up. It was at this point that we got talking to a local man and his daughter, they lived less than 5 minutes from us and travelled to Belfast for every Giants game and he offered to take Rowan and I to the hockey every week – an offer which we grabbed with both hands, and have been eternally grateful for ever since.
From that moment on, the Mallons became like family to us, and without their lifts to the games every week, I’m not sure just how long I’d have been able to afford the cost of being a Giants fan. I’m a big believe in fate, everything happens for a reason and the Mallons were serendipitously brought in to our lives at a time we needed them most, they helped keep our new ‘hobby’ alive.
It wasn’t long before we made friends with other fans, I saw a banner at a game one night advertising a fan forum online. Fortress Odyssey. I joined and began posting, they were welcoming folk, helpful at explaining the rules that I hadn’t quite gotten yet and before long (I’m sure you’ll all be surprised to hear) I was one of the most vocal posters on the board and always had a lot to say.
One weekend in particular I posted on the boards about how quiet the fans had seemed that night at the game. I commented how it sounded like a library in the stands and that people should be a tad more vocal (probably because I looked like a total nut-job screaming and hollering on my own). At the next game, in full Las-gusto, I was hollering during the game, turned to the other fans in my section and politely (LOL) informed them that they were not, in fact, as they may have believed, in a library and it was quite ok for them to make some noise for their team.
At the period break a duo of ladies came over to visit me and asked if I was Icemaiden013 from Fortress Odyssey as they’d seen my comment about the library and had heard me (who at door 21 didn’t?!) yelling about a library at the game. I told them I was and it was at that moment I gained a trio of big sisters. (There was one who came sporadically to games as her job made it difficult to go to all of the games).
We became great friends and these 3 amigoes quickly became the core of our social gatherings, hockey nights, sing star nights and any other excuse for a gathering these gals were up for it!
It’s something Col and I sorely miss about hockey at home, our friends that we’ve made along the way. It’s just not the same kind of culture here at games so it’s harder to make friends at the games – and even if we did make hockey friends here they couldn’t replace our gang from home, they’re one of a kind and always up for a laugh. It really is a shame that they can’t make it over this year to see our wonderful cheese-fest Aeros games!
I also quickly started to realise that the Giants were about more than just hockey. The Giants were brought in to Northern Ireland in 2000 as a bridge to peace within the country. The only non political sport there is, no flags, no anthems, no politics, hockey colours only and an all encompassing atmosphere where everything typically ‘Norn Iron’ is checked at the door.
“In the land of the Giants, everyone is equal”
It was the perfect arena to make friends and to step outside the confines of the narrow minded Northern Irish point of view.
I jumped straight in feet first! I won’t deny that in the beginning, I was wet behind the ears (and religiously made a new banner for each game – earning the nickname of Banner Girl). I was over zealous, over excitable and committed the odd faux-pas, landing myself in the occassional embarrassing situation (and at one stage even the dreaded label of ‘puck bunny’) – the most famous of which being ‘Edinburgh gate’.
In spite of being chow for the wolves on KotG (another forum for Giants fans), I kept watching, learning, asking questions and screaming like a lunatic at the games. I also kept making friends – even with those who in the beginning of my Giants fan-ship were my crucifiers for being so ‘green’ on the sport and etiquette of being a ‘proper’ fan.
Moving slightly further afield, a short hop across the channel, thanks to both hockey and a live journal community dedicated to hockey, I met two more of my long term close friends – Becky (Manchester) and Sarah (Edinburgh) who had also became friends with Kerrie.
I can’t begin to tell you the fun the four of us have had over the years! Trips to Manchester, trips from Manchester and pit-stopping in Edinburgh any excuse we can find, to pick up a Greggs and some Red Cola 😉
Between our trips to visit each other and our often daily round robin emails between the 4 of us (which would give most people a headache!) we’ve become great friends over the years and they always make for great weekend visitors when one of us gets bored and decides to randomly book a flight somewhere!
This is all well and good, eh? But I’ve saved the ‘best’ part of hockey (for me in particular) to last!
On Fortress Odyssey (the online forum I mentioned above), I met Col, a volunteer for the Giants. We got to be pretty good friends and, at the time, I was coming off of a very sour online thing with a hockey player I had fallen for, so I was cautious. Col asked me out for months, (I said no for months!) but we were good friends and he often brought me polystyrene cups of tea and Marky Mo’s custard creams from the Giants locker room during the game (I guess he was smitten!)
It wasn’t long before Col’s friend Stevie told me that, ‘he must really like you if he’s letting you wear his Hutchy gamer, he won’t even let me wear that!’
For my birthday in 2007, I had, what my friend Charlotte termed, a ‘Flash Bastards’ party. The guys wore shirts, the girls wore posh dresses, we had a lovely dinner and went to a hockey game (yes, still in our dresses!) I remember I’d torn my hamstring from an on-ice fall, so I was hobbling quite badly, but I hung around after the game to chat to Col in the Odyssey and spent most of the evening sending him texts (and using up all of Amber’s credit!)
It was that night that the girls told me I liked him, after blushing a deep shade of crimson, I finally gave in and had to admit that I did like him. It wasn’t til May that we became ‘official’ and, I attribute my meeting him, 100% to the Giants. Coming from opposite sides of Northern Ireland’s ‘Political divide’, I’m pretty sure we’d never have met were it not for hockey.
Our dating relationship included lots of hockey (as we were both fans, and, eventually, both volunteers for the team), so much so, that we had our Engagement pictures taken (yes, I did end up marrying this guy!) on the ice (not in the Odyssey, that’d have been the icing on the cake, but, since we were living in the States at the time, we used a local ice rink to my best friend in Iowa as we had a ‘contact’ there!)
We even wore a couple of our Giants jerseys! A couple of our fave Giants player’s game-worn jerseys…
Risking me sounding like a completely obsessed nut-job, the hockey theme continued into our wedding plans as well. My colours were purple (favourite colour) and teal (Giants colour) and we pretty much had hockey scattered in to every element of the wedding!
(I never get tired of sharing these pictures so you’re being subjected to them again!)
We had a friend design our wedding programmes like a hockey programme, the wedding party were our teams, Col and I were team Captains, McKee (our officiant) was the Referee…it was fun and the programme is AWESOME! There’s even a Q&A section as well!
Our tables were named after hockey teams, the ‘top table’ (I.E the wedding party table) was the Giants table, but no one got a picture of the pennant!
For favours we had little hockey-esque cowbells and little plastic ‘hockey’ rubber ducks – they were very cute! Sad that our ‘coordinator’ didn’t get them out before people started to leave though, so we’ve now got a garage full of them!
Even my garter was hockey themed, I didn’t bring my Giants pins with me from home, so I had to ‘settle’ for my NHL team’s pin, the Anaheim ducks.
And the piece de resistance, our cake topper, this is, by far, my favourite hockey-themed part of our wedding! I commissioned a girl on Etsy to make it for me out of porcelain, so once the wedding was over, we could use it as an ornament forever more. It’s currently on our TV unit in the living room and I love it, as you can see, we’re both in our Giants shirts and our surname ‘McMaster’ is engraved in gold on the ‘ice’. It ROCKS!
Anyways, my point is, the Giants are so much more than a hockey team, and hockey is so much more than just a sport. Going to my first Giants game started a chain-reaction that totally changed my life and brought a plethora of people I’ve grown to love, in to it.
I love the sport, the fans (ok, sometimes I hate the fans), the hockey community at large, the rush from publically screaming abuse at opposing players, at referees (except Morey Hanson and then it’s ‘hands up!’) and for the overwhelming flood of emotion when your team’s captain picks up a trophy and skates around the rink with it in the air.
The hockey here in the US (AHL) is different, most definitely as a fan, I’m hoping to ask a player or two to share their experiences playing in both leagues, but that could well be a fools errand and you’ll just be stuck with my fan perspective! LOL!
If you haven’t been to a Giants game, GO! Whether you’re just in the area visiting or you’ve lived there all your life…check it out…I did and it totally changed my life 🙂
Duh! Now I get why the ‘H’ ‘E’ Double Hockey Sticks your web address has icemaiden in it. I went to a saints game in the Superdome and it changed my life as well. It just so happens that my hubbie is a Colts fan so we had a HOUSE DIVIDED a few superbowls ago… The saints won! Boo-yah!! Whodat?! I can’t follow hockey…my eyes are too slow. 🙂
LOL! I know a lot of people who say the same thing! I can’t stand football (soccer) and have only ever watched one US Football game!