Pro hockey comes back to one of my old homes

Looks good, doesn't it? Wish I could be there.

I saw this from my friend KB the other day.

Night Ranger, Gordie Howe and the Hansons? #diedandgonetoheaven #uticacomets Fan Fest for Utica Comets announced http://t.co/V5o4IB1AuH
— Kris (@Dranks71) September 16, 2013

Her excitement was over the announcement from the Utica Comets, the new American Hockey League affiliate of the Vancouver Canucks, about their upcoming Fan Fest. I'd be excited about Howe and the Hansons, and I'll give KB a pass on Night Ranger, since we're both about that age where that sort of thing might be exciting.

I went to college in Utica, which is where I met KB, and went to several events in the Utica Memorial Auditorium, including our graduation. There was the night when a friend and I went to one of the interminable three-hour "Monday Night Raw" tapings that WWE used to have in those days, and my time in college coincided with the last few years of the Utica Devils AHL team before they left to become the Albany River Rats.

Anyone who ever saw an event in the Aud can pick the "Slapshot" scene filmed there right away. (By the way, Roger Kahn's excellent "Good Enough to Dream" was set in Utica, and read a whole lot differently after I went there than it did beforehand.)



After the Devils left, a few pro hockey teams tried to give it ago, the first of which was the Utica Bulldogs of the United Hockey League ... where at one of their games I would have tripped over Gordie Howe if I had gotten any closer to him, but didn't know until it was too late.

Howe was on a tour of minor league cities, I believe to mark some kind of anniversary, and his son Marty was the coach of the Bulldogs, so Utica was one of his stops. My roommate and I went to the game, and between periods, he signed autographs in a corner of the arena, but as you might imagine, the line was quite long, so we skipped it.

At some point later on, we were walking through the concourse when a group of about four or five guys in suits breezed past us. No big deal, except that we didn't realize until they were past us that the guy in the middle of the suits was ... Gordie Howe himself.

To be honest, I don't know what we would have done if we figured it out beforehand, and I'd say the odds were good that the other guys in the suits would have kept us from doing too much, but it's still a fun story about being a goof.

The Bulldogs begat the Blizzard, who begat the Mohawk Valley Prowlers, but none of them lasted, and the Utica College hockey team has been left to satisfy the local hockey fans ever since, and given that they have led Division III teams in attendance the last seven years, the community has taken to the Pioneers.

Given the way it ended for pro hockey in Utica, I was stunned to read that Vancouver was putting its AHL team there. I'm not sure why they would want to put their top affiliate nearly all the way across the continent, but I'm just happy they did, if only so I can be perhaps the only person in the world to say that two of my favorite places, Vancouver and Utica, have joined forces.

I hope it works out for both the Comets and the Pioneers.

Mascots and morons (with some stuff about certain Red Sox fans)

So ... a Boston Red Sox fan named Trevor James Martin allegedly attacked Raymond the Tampa Bay Rays mascot the other night. You'll be shocked to hear that at least some people are claiming he was intoxicated.

(Side note -- What is the appeal of alcohol? It doesn't taste good, costs more than other drinks and has a weird way of making you do stupid things and feeling like crap the next morning ... even if you don't remember the stupid things you did while you were drunk the night before. But I digress ...)

Now, most civilized human beings would think it's a bad thing to choke another person, and beyond that, it's certainly bad form to try to choke a mascot at a sporting event, but you'll be happy to know that while what Martin allegedly did is wrong ... the person who previously played Raymond was mean to Red Sox fans!

"(Previous Raymond Kelly) Frank is known in the mascot industry for being antagonistic, and during the years she played Raymond, it was the prime of Red Sox Nation, when the fans treated Tropicana Field like a home game.

 'It was 60 percent Boston fans,” she said, adding they would treat Tampa like the minor leagues and get 'vacation drunk. 'So I would do anything I could to annoy the hell out of them.' ...

... Frank is known for 'an acerbic, smart-butt attitude to her characters,' said David Raymond, who played the original Phillie Phanatic for 17 years and now designs mascot brands and trains performers. 'She’s not working there anymore in part because of the in-your-face personality she developed.'”

Yes, Ms. Frank apparently has a history. According to the article, she was fired as the Tampa Bay Lightning mascot after she attacked a Bruins fan with a Taser ... I mean Silly String. Sorry, it was Silly String. (She claims he was being drunk and obnoxious.)

There are a couple of points I'd like to make here. First of all, I understand that mascots can perhaps being annoying at times -- I, for one, am not a fan of the Stanford Tree, and my boy Poopsie was apparently traumatized by the Phillie Phanatic (yeah, Dave Raymond ... you) -- but if your temper operates on such a hair trigger that you feel the need to hit one, perhaps you need to engage in some self-reflection.

As for my other point, there's that whole thing Frank mentioned about Red Sox fans being drunk and obnoxious during the days when "taking over" someone's ballpark was something that they bragged about like they're the only fans ever to have done such a thing. (The Yankees say hi.)

Well, Frank had a little more to say about that.

"Frank played Raymond from 2004 to 2008, during the Sox glory years, and antagonizing Boston fans was the most thrilling thing to do behind the fur, and also the most dangerous. After the Sox won the World Series in 2004, she said, Boston fans invading the Trop became 'less knowledgeable, more obnoxious,' and some of the drunkest she’s ever seen. Raymond went at them, she said, but approached it like scaring someone in a haunted house -- quickly, before they threw a punch, because many people think it’s OK to punch a mascot."

Apparently, there's a lot of self-reflection required. Who knew?

As someone who lives among Red Sox fans, some of whom I'm pretty sure honestly believe I have a mental disorder for being a Yankees fan, I can tell you that they don't realize how badly they blew it in 2004. The sports world was their oyster. They won their first World Series in 86 years, vanquishing their ancient rivals in dramatic, historic fashion along the way, something that traumatized me the way the Phanatic traumatized Poopsie.

And so what did they do? Well, a lot of them went from zero to obnoxious in less time that it takes to chant the "Je" in "Jeter sucks," something which, by the way, even though I've heard it for years, I've never heard anyone admit to. "Oh no, I don't approve of that sort of thing," they say. "I respect Jeter!"

If I may over-generalize for a moment, I'd say the worst offenders are the bandwagon jumpers, the ones I call "lifelong fans since 2004" and others call "pink hats," which is probably sexist because pink hats implies women and believe me, the ranks of newbie, uninformed Red Sox fans include lots of guys. They're the ones for whom 2004 was not the joyful, satisfying culmination of a journey, but a coronation proving their awesomeness, and it has only gotten worse since then.

In short, the most obnoxious among Red Sox fans ... like a guy who would allegedly get stupid drunk and attack a mascot ... are what they believe Yankees fans are like.

Just don't say that out loud.

The NFL can apparently even change the holidays

Merry Christmas, everyone.
— Jimmy Traina (@JimmyTraina) September 8, 2013

When I saw this, I got a little nervous.

If today is Christmas, I thought, where is my family? Where is the tree? Where are the presents, and what did I even ask for? Why can't I remember seeing my in-laws last night, and where did we go? What happened when Mrs. Last Honest and I went to England, and where are the photos and videos I took? How was Thanksgiving?

On the other hand, the Christmas-morning weather, especially for Massachusetts, was all kinds of awesome.

Then I realized, silly me, that the "Christmas" being referred to was not actually Dec. 25, but rather the first Sunday of the NFL season. I even managed to figure that out without putting on all 9,000 pregame shows that were on today. I swear, every sports network other than MLB Network, NBA TV and the NHL Network has one, and that's coming, I'm sure.

The national mania surrounding the NFL has fascinated me for several years now. How has a sport grown so much in popularity that it dominates the landscape not just during its season, but 12 months out of the year, to the point where the first Sunday of its schedule is cited as on par with the biggest holiday of the year?

There are probably a lot of factors, but the one that strikes me is that the NFL, over the course of the last 50-plus years, if you want to consider the start date to be when Pete Rozelle was named commissioner in 1960 (or, if you're so inclined, the 1958 NFL Championship game), has built to this point where it has convinced the sporting public, with a lot of help from the media, that everything it does is very important.



Between the draft, free agency, various mini-camps, actual training camps and exhibition games between seasons, there is NFL-related activity pretty much all year, and all of it is treated as vital, and therefore worthy of attention, even above sports whose actual seasons, and in some cases playoffs, are happening at the same time.

Another part of the narrative is that the NFL is very hard, and therefore requires intense preparation and maximum effort at all times all year, in a way not unlike the president has to approach the job. It's to the point where a beloved teammate and team leader being cut is only worth noting briefly, lest it take away any focus on the job at hand.

"When a veteran gets cut, we may discuss it privately amongst ourselves, but there’s no ceremony, no coach’s acknowledgement of the missing man. I never saw Mike collect his things from his locker, and I didn’t get to shake his hand. The next morning, it’s as if no one had ever occupied the locker that once read No. 26. In meetings, the agenda is the same as it was the day before: Win today. And somebody who’s no longer in the room isn’t a part of today."

The end result of the NFL taking itself so seriously and emphasizing the importance of everything attached to it, and making sure everyone knows this, is that the media and therefore the fans treat it the same way. It builds so much anticipation that the games are not events in and of themselves, but culminations, the end results of all that came before.

To be clear, the NFL didn't create this from nothing. Football has been popular for decades, but the NFL has done a masterful, textbook-worthy job of stoking that popularity to the point where it sometimes seems like nothing else matters.