SLUGGO SPORTING HOCKEY RASH

Suns drop opener 5-2 to Minnesota Club wearing Air Force NCAA jerseys...go figure.  I think they were the equivalent of understudies to defending champ Heartland.  Down 3-1 entering the third, Suns' John Miller sniped early, bringing SV within 1 and then the club did some buzzing, generating a handful of grade-A chances to tie what was becoming a gripping contest.  But the Gopher wannabe's popped one in late, added and empty netter, and then it was over.  Nothing left to do but some serious processing while replenishing the carbo load.

U Maine coach Tim Whitehead, a virgin Sun who's always dreamt of wearing the black and red, got his wish and played well with his Hamilton pal Sparky.  He designed a power play breakout against a metal locker in the pre-game meeting that glazed a lot of eyeballs, a highlight in a night that was found lacking. Coach Cubby Burke won "best dressed" with his Al Sharpton style warmup track suit adorned with his name, number and Suns logo. 

Final analysis, we were literally introducing ourselves at faceoffs, and it showed.  Feeling out period (or two) cost us a lot of initiative, and placed us in a hole we couldn't quite dig out of.

Now we play a local club fortified with Detroit's finest skaters. Perfect. Got em right where we want them.

Game Day!

HENEGHAN & BANJO AT THE PREGAME LUNCH

Arrival Day... Heneghan says the Beard is a couple weeks old. Banjo guessed he had been working it since stepping off the ice last year. about 8 new faces will be wearing Suns jerseys this weekend down at the Tampa Senior Nationals, including "Sparky" and "Whitey,"  illustrious alums from Hamilton college.  As Glenn Hunter said at lunch, "There are three kinds of people, Suns, Suns wannabes, and people who haven't yet discovered they are Suns wannabes."  Terry Heneghan piped in, "Don't forget the fourth category, Suns that no longer want to be associated," so I guess we are up to 4 categories.  Sluggo Johnson did some quality recruiting, picking up an excellent puck-handling goalie named Tony Benson, and a tireless "young'en" John Miller.  Sluggo was scouting the Michigan club getting in a practice session in Brandon. "They can all skate...they picked up (NHL sniper) John Ogrodnick also." Suns will catch Michigan Sting on Friday, but have to take care of the Hosers from Washington D.C. Thursday night.  In these tourneys, opening night victories take you a long way toward that elusive medal round.  Glenn Hunter has a 6:30 meeting in the lobby and then we're off. No Goody Bag this year, no water bottle and lipbalm giveaways, just a chance to meet Whitey, Sparky and the rest of the Suns wannabes that will be full fledged Suns by the end of the night.

From the Ashes

PICKING UP THE PIECES

It was the worst accident in the collective memories of the hockey world. All 36 team members from Lokomotiv Yaroslavl, an elite team from Russia's top hockey league (KHL), perished on the September 7, 2011 crash. Eight different nations lost sports heroes (including long time Red Wings assistant and former NHL All-Star Brad McCrimmon) in an accident blamed on aging equipment, pilot error an even the presence of banned drugs. Incomprehensible, astonishing, yet all too real for those involved. This was reminiscent of the shocking Marshall football tragedy of 1970, except that so many more nations were affected in the Russian plane crash.

Decisions needed to be made quickly. League president Alexander Medvedev offered to draft 3 players from each team in the league to quickly fill the Lokomotiv roster and get the team up and ready for the regular season, but team president Yuri Yakovlov said no, the community needed time to heal. Not a soul entered the team locker room until the end of October. A decision was then made: maintain the junior team in Lokomotiv, and enter another squad into the minor league just below the KHL, to play an extremely limited schedule of 22 games, once against each opponent. They were allowed a special draft of young players 23 and under throughout the league, two qualified from the Lokomotiv junior league. And in December, a new Lokomotiv team stepped onto theYaroslavl ice in sold out "2000 Arena," and played a hockey game. They won 5-1.

Yakovlov was offered a free pass to get his team into the playoffs, but he declined. The young Yaroslvl skaters have a high enough winning percentage to get into the playoffs on their own merits. Yet he is accepting the millions of dollars in aid from Mother Russia for the victims' families, and on Friday Lokomotiv is playing in an outdoor game exhibition to generate more funds for the loved ones left behind.

Promising stars from Russia's medal-winning junior teams have moved to Yaroslavl to play with Lokomotiv, and will wait an extra year to play in the KHL. Russia's government, it's people, and the entire hockey community have come together to help heal this collective wound. Yuri Yakovlov has chosen a wise course of small steps, to upright this proud franchise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7Mg1LxjW_0

Hill of Beans

DIGESTI-BILL??

With the finals a foregone conclusion, Boston's annual Beanpot hockey tournament needs some juice. As B.U. coach Jack Parker pointed out, fans are arriving late for game 1 and leaving early in game 2. The BU-BC game, whether it's the championship or a rare first Monday game, is ultimately the Championship game, rendering the other 3 games as anti-climactic. There is one sure-fire way to make this tournament relevant again, but it requires the "R" word...relegation! Can you imagine the jump in interest in the annual Northeastern-Harvard consolation snooze-fest if the two squads were playing for Beanpot survival? Let's explore.

There are two Division I teams close enough to the Hub to make a Monday game downtown a reasonable commute: Merrimack and Mass. Lowell. That's 6 teams, two outsiders play for a chance each year to make the Big 4. Earn the privilege, that's the American way, yes? No entitlements here. Loser of the consolation game--out, but gets to host the play-in game. Likely scenario is that Harvard finds itself on the outside looking in at Merrimack in 2013. How much would that affect the atmosphere of the first Monday of February? Probably a lot more energy in the Garden next year, and the competition would be intense, Five games worth, instead of 1 or 2.

Times are changing. Let's bring some competition into our competitions. Bill Cleary, your thoughts?

Willis redux

ANKLE SPRAIN FROM KRYPTON

NFL fans have seen how a high ankle sprain to Ben Roethlisberger derailed this year's Steeler's Super Bowl dream. Phil Simms said it was the most painful thing he's ever been through, taking him 2 years to get over. Rob Gronkowski has two weeks. The Patriots need their hyper kinetic, 90-catch human highlight film who redefined the tight end position this regular season to be at his cartoon-hero best, just to keep up with the Giants aerial show this Sunday. This has evolved into human drama on a scale appropriate of the Super-setting, maybe even bigger.

It's worthy of any of the Boston - New York sports-zenith clashes, a Superbowl rematch spearheaded by two likely H.O.F. quarterbacks, yet Gronk is the man of the hour, make that man of the fortnight. One cannot overhype his importance to the Patriot's offense this season: 90 catches, 17 TD's over 1300 yards receiving. Yet his stats pale in comparison to HOW he achieved those numbers: helicoptering into endzones, outracing fleet defensive backs, shedding sure tackles punctuated by those signature TD spike explosions. His manic zeal allowed the Boston sports nation forget 4 years of NFL playoff dread. In this age of full-faucet media, on the biggest stage in a sports-mad world, the guy is a supernova beyond comic book proportions. He's GRONK, check the Youtube videos produced out of Boston. That spike of his is the latest craze in the Hub, they call it "Doin the Gronk." The guy is more popular than Brady right now, a rawboned irresistible force with a perpetual smile.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE_Isf49Pp8

For Sports fans conditioned to instant gratification and a constant flow of live telecasts to slake their thirst for live action (umm, I think that's all of us), these two weeks prior to Supe XLVI have been arduously slow. Yet for Gronk and his recovery, it hasn't been nearly enough. We've heard daily comments from those in the know that the pain will be in full force on Sunday, no amount of enthusiasm and ADHD will mask it. Other than the QB's, he'll be the most important player on the field, and based on his potential impact on the game, a good case could be made that he is the most important player, certainly on the NE side.

And with hundreds (thousands) of side stories being generated in this media blitz from New York and Boston, essentially the entire Northeast United States has a firm rooting interest here, the outcome of this frenzied spectacle boils down to a single player's ability to conquer his personal pain threshold. With him racking up catches, YAC and TD spikes, the Pats will compete; without him they are simply overmatched.

It's been nearly 42 years since Willis Reed blew the roof off the world's most famous arena: shooting up, limping out and swishing two J's before sitting down in a 1-game winner take all for a championship. Stakes are higher now--bigger sport, bigger game, bigger stage, bigger role.

Watch carefully starting at 6 pm ET Sunday for the Willis limp-out. What will Superman do after full exposure to Kryptonite? It could make for a good read by flashlight in a tent in your back yard. Except this is real, live, and in hight def. Consider yourself lucky. Not all baby-boomers reading this can expect to be here in 42 years the next time it happens.

Your lyin eyes

ORWELL'S JUDGE AND JURY OF PRO TENNIS

It begins with a subtle flick of the finger pointed upward, like a Sotheby's veteran signaling a bid to the auctioneer. Fans follow with rhythmic clapping, getting louder as they wait for justice from the sky. All eyes turn to the video board, and an animated tennis ball swoops down from above, down onto an animated court. The outline of a ball is pressed against a sideline, and then magnified. The crowd invariably oohs and ahs, the chair umpire updates the score, announces how many challenges remain, and play resumes. It is both timely and tidy, it is unquestioned, but it can be wrong. Ot at least I think so. But we may never know if what is known as the Spot-Shot Challenge system (commonly referred to as its predecessor 'Hawkeye,') is ever wrong, it is never questioned or held accountable by the broadcasters, who have incredibly sophisticated technology to do just that.

The following match might have been a watershed moment for the GPS Challenge system in tennis: Australian Open women's semifinals, Sharapova and Kvitova battling in an epic struggle, a rematch of the Wimbledon final. The match is excruciatingly close, 4-4 in the final set. Kvitova's edge in power and fitness led to her surge late in the match, but Sharapova's superior concentration and focus kept her in the hunt for Grand Slam glory. There was literally nothing to separate them going into the 9th game. Sharapova's serve, long considered the Achilles heel in her otherwise magnificent tennis armor, falters in that fateful 9th game. Down love 30, she sends a groundstroke apparently long, the linesperson calls it out, and it is now at 0-40. Her shaky service game is facing 3 break points. Kvitova is rolling, a point away from serving out the match; she exudes confidence and is ready for the kill. Shoulders slumping, Sharapova throws up a finger for the appeal. The players, live audience and fans at home had no reason to think that the shot was in was in; the request was simply a stall and a prayer, part of this match's end-game.

All eyes fixed on the scoreboard, Hawkeye's animated yellow ball swooped down accompanied by the (religious?) ritual clapping and chanting, and BOOM, the cartoon showed the ball on the line. Love-40 was now a manageable 15-30. Sharapova righted herself, served out the game and now led 5-4. Kvitova, shaken if not stunned, never recovered. Five points later she was in the showers, vanquished from the tournament.

The broadcast rolled in no video evidence to support Hawkeye; it's ruling is always final in today's tennis. ESPN and the Australian Open's world feed has video replay devices with 500 frame per second technology called X-mo. Let's put that into perspective for those outside the live broadcast genre. The video you see on live TV has 30 frames per second, the "Super Slo-Mo" introduced on Monday Football in the 1990's had 90 frames per second which was a real breakthrough in terms of resolution and clarity. In 2004 CBS tried a Mac Cam at the U.S. Open, with thousands of frames per second, but its resolution suffered due to inadequate lighting. X-mo has solved all that, replaying images from 500 to literally thousands of frames per second with stunning focus and clarity. The resulting images from 2012 Aus Open have been mind-blowing: fuzz coming off balls, eyes blinking, leg muscles flexing, ankles rolling. Never before seen in such clarity. The location of a ball on the court would be routine based on the available technology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkoWII-ukg&feature=fvst

But there was not a single voice questioning the call. I knocked on several doors of social media, tweeting like mad to all the top tennis writers, sending out alerts to ESPN's Interactive Facebook site. The few who did respond were generally negative, they didn't need the distraction because Hawkeye had spoken. So faced with the choice of what to believe, Hawkeye or your lyin' eyes, the overwhelming majority chose the former. The tennis community preferred to trust the animated cartoon of the truth, rather than call out for an X-mo replay. Can you imagine an NFL fan accepting digital animation rather than a Hi-Def replay of a disputed touchdown?

One of the most frequent contributors to the Aus Open Facebook page is Eduardo DeBritto, a former college player and a pro tennis fanatic. He had the best working knowledge of Hawkeye. "It has 8% margin for error and it takes a picture of a shadow of the ball and not actually where the ball touched, since the shadow is bigger than the contact point between the ball and the court it can make errors." Yet no outcry. This might be because of a moment in the 2004 U.S. Open when the CBS cameras showed several missed calls in a Capriati-Serena Williams quarterfinal match that made a mockery of the existing system in which all overrules were the domain of the chair umpire. Having today's system that works 92% of the time, that ends the human drama, was embraced by the tennis world.

So Kvitova goes home, Sharapova moves to the finals, and the establishment chooses not to replay the controversial point because Big Brother had spoken, and not a soul protested (well, one did, and you're reading his work). The corporate cartoon trumps visual evidence, and not a soul speaketh, not even the vanquished.

The beneficiary of the call, Maria Sharapova, revealed on a quiet news day earlier this week that she is reading George Orwell's 1984. It is serving her well.

The Manger of American Hockey

THE ICE THAT BORE AMERICA'S HOCKEY GOD

Canada, the country that allegedly invented hockey (an Iroquois Indian tribe in Ottawa is the best guess) has never respected it's neighbors to the south, even if our Minnesotans are virtually indistinguishable from their northern counterparts. But Canadian hockey snobbery is justifiable: Canada can enter 5 teams in every international tournament and have 5 gold medal contenders if they entered by province.

You can feel the disdain for American hockey in the sports talk at the pubs, the kitchen tables and within the Canadian media; I lived it for a couple of weeks in Edmonton during the World Juniors earlier this month, a tourney in which Team USA did NOTHING to diminsh the Canucks superiority complex. All of the above might merely be stating the obvious, but it gives vital perspective to the century-old article quoted below.

In the 1910's American hockey was fledgling at best, though it was being played interscholastically at Ivy League colleges. American players were groomed by New England prep schools, with St. Paul's of Concord, New Hampshire turning out the majority of the elite players. The most gifted of them all was the legendary Hobey Baker, the man whose name still adorns the trophy for today's college player of the year.

After he graduated from Princeton in 1914, Hobey played for an amateur hockey club based in New York called St. Nick's, a collection of blue-blooded sportsmen who had played for the Ivy League's Big 3 (H, Y, P). In the 1915-16 season. St. Nick's went up to Canada and played their best amateur teams, beating them all. In those days Canada's amateur teams were taken very seriously, rivaling their professional clubs in terms of talent, if not depth. St. Nick's defeated the reigning champion Montreal Stars 6-2 in the opening game of the Ross Cup, which was essentially a World Championship of amateur hockey. Afterward the Montreal Press, the "Paper of Record" in the province, wrote the following:

"Uncle Sam has had the cheek to develop a world class hockey player. We had heard him advertised as a great hockey player, and we had always smiled a cynical grin at the thought. He wasn't born in Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto or the other famous breeding grounds. We refused to see how an American could win over such a handicap and arrive. A few minutes of Baker on the ice convinced the most skeptical. He could catch a place and a star's place on any of our professional teams. The blonde-haired boy was a favorite with the crowd. We didn't want the St. Nick's to win, but Baker cooked out goose so artistically that we enjoyed it." (December 12, 1915)

No other American hockey player has received such praise from Canada in the ensuing 97 years. Baker's performance at the 1915-16 Ross Cup was the driving force in getting him elected into Canada's Hockey Hall of Fame, entering with the inaugural class of 1943.

He honed his skills outdoors in Concord, NH on the same frozen ponds pictured above. He spent 7 winters in at St. Paul's, training religiously whenever the ice could support him, staying on past sunset to perfect his stickhandling in the dark. He entered Princeton a finished product, by far the best player at Old Nassau as soon as he arrived. For American hockey, those ponds of St. Paul's might as well be referred to as "The Manger," the breeding ground of America's hockey deity.