I saw ‘Slap Shot’ a year or so ago, in a bare apartment into which I’d just moved, during the throes of a shit break-up, as if there are good ones. So, there’s the mood: stark walls, a microwave box for a coffee table and constant, bitter acrimony. It has led me to commit sacrilege.

Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for the movie, which was — in some ways — quite brilliant, but not in the way I expected. I think of it more as a tragedy than a comedy. It is a dejecting snap shot of pathetic losers bound for nowhere, their dysfunctional lives and relationships in a bleak, working class hellhole of a town.

I think the movie’s crucial flaw is that it is purveyed as humor. It is not funny. At least, it wasn’t funny to me. I thought the cheap attempts at comedy were either cringe-inducingly brilliant examples of how unfunny real, boorish and uneducated people are … or just shit writing that fell flat.

The whole strip tease at the end, not funny. If it was intended to make me wonder what the guy’s mental defect was, then it worked brilliantly. The ponce from Princeton was my least favorite character. Maybe that was the point. I liked the moronic French-Canadian goalie best. I love Paul Newman by default, but his Reggie Dunlop was tough to get a bead on.

By the time the movie was over, it just made me more depressed. It made me think of all the poor fucks who are good enough to play professional hockey, just not at the elite level. And what kind of a really poor fuck must one be to play hockey at the lowest professional level, making what a low-level HR rep makes, if they’re fortunate?

Sometimes, I think I’d gladly take 40K a year to play hockey, but I’m not even 40K good. I wasn’t before I blew out my knee and I sure as fuck am not now that I’ve got dead people parts in me and I’m older. But I went to high school with a kid who toils in the East Coast Hockey League while his older brother plays NHL hockey.

The ECHL consists of some clubs that feed the American Hockey League farm teams that feed the NHL franchises, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the third tier of professional hockey. The very best players in the ECHL might someday become studs or OK players in the AHL, but very, very few ever break into the NHL.

Wouldn’t it suck royally to know that your career can never advance beyond a certain point, no matter how hard you try? Granted, maybe you should shut the fuck up and not complain that you get paid to play a fucking game for a living, but outside perspective is often a jaundiced one … and the view from inside is often devoid of the larger scope.

I do think the world could use a serious hockey movie, though. I know, no one likes hockey and no one gives a fuck about the sport itself, so why the fuck would anyone bankroll a movie about a sport this dumb-ass country doesn’t follow? Fuck you. It’s a hypothetical, okay?

I think the world needs something better than “The Mighty Ducks” and “The Cutting Edge” and “Slap Shot” and “Youngblood” — though, from what I recall when I watched it 23 years ago (god, 23 years … do you hear that, Rob Lowe, you old fuck?), “Youngblood” was the most credible of all hockey or hockey-related movies I’ve seen.

Tags: 'Youngblood', AHL, Charlestown Chiefs, ECHL, ennui, hockey, NHL, Paul Newman, Princeton, Reggie Dunlop, Rob Lowe, Slap Shot, The Cutting Edge, The Mighty Ducks

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 7:07 PM and is filed under creativity, entertainment, hockey, miscellanous bk, piss poor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.