What Color Is Your Blood?

The is no hockey in Texas.  I mean, there is, technically; there is the Dallas Stars and the Houston Aeros and various other small-city semi-pro teams with catchy names like "The Tornadoes" or the illustrious "Brahmas" (which, google tells me, is a truculent breed of chicken), and which all employ European and Russian players because no self-respecting Canadian is going to move to Amarillo where they have no snow (eh?), no poutine (EHHH?!?), and if you break your face with a puck (or someone's fist) it costs $allofyourmoney.00 to fix it (ehhh...fuck that).

No, Texans would prefer to smash their bodies into one another under the blistering sun, twice a day at the peak of summer, wearing the same amount of pads hockey players do but running around in weather that is comparable to a sauna.  Texans do not believe in concussions, only "stingers";  it is no coincidence that God made "water" and "weakness" both begin with the letter "w"; high school quarterbacks are stars, are celebrities, are...gods.

My father, no doubt, wanted this for me.  He had high hopes.  I was going to bleed under the bright lights, I was going to throw game winning touchdowns, I was going to get drunk and get laid by homecoming queens and make mistakes that the cops would overlook/coverup and I was going to taste the local fame that only small-town athletes can taste.
 
And then we moved to Missouri, where baseball and football still hold their place as perennial favorites, but hockey had managed to claw its way into the hearts of a small but loyal group of followers.  I couldn't tell you why, exactly, but suddenly I was obsessed with a sport I barely even knew existed before.
 
"You wanna play what?" my father sputtered, seeming to not even know what the word meant.  "Hockey!?  Why would anyone wanna skate around on ice?!?!  Don't they get COLD?!?!"  He was appalled, as any good Texan would be.  His dismay continued when, upon entering the sporting good store to outfit me for my new favorite sport, he realized that hockey is, far and away, the most expensive sport ever invented.  Except for maybe polo.  Or golf.  (A disturbing correlation between "price of sport" and "length of object used to hit smaller object in said sport" has suddenly been discovered.)

Yet, despite his misgivings, he was supportive, and over time I slowly converted him to fandom.  The St. Louis Blues was our team, of course, and throughout my childhood it was one of the ways we bonded as father and son.  Some of my favorite memories of the Boys in Blue include:

• October, 1996.  Game 7 of the NLCS between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Atlanta Braves.  My dad had somehow acquired tickets to both the baseball game and a Blues game, though one was of monumental importance and one was basically meaningless.  "Which would you like to go to?" he asked, surely assuming I would choose the baseball game.  "Duh," I said.  "Hockey all the way." He never tried to talk me out of it, never uttered a word against my decision. Later that night, as the Blues scored their 6th goal (going on to win 6-1) and the small scoreboard in the Kiel Center read: "Cardinals - 0, Braves - 15" (arguably one of the worst meltdowns in professional baseball history), I think he was happy with the call I had made.
• "Perhaps I shouldn't drive home," Dad said.  "I think I've had one too many drinks."  I had not had anything to drink.  I also didn't have a license.  I didn't have any drinks or a license because I was 15.  "You'll be fine," he said as we got into the car after the Blues game, "just head South."  I was terrified, my first time driving in the city...at night...in the middle of post-game traffic.  The windows were fogged from my quickened breaths.  All the streets were one-way, downtown St. Louis being designed with the intention of regulating the flow of traffic but succeeding only in driving people insane.  Somehow, amidst the dodging of swerving vehicles from the thousands of inebriated fans who did not have underaged, illegal chauffeurs, we made it home in one piece.  What doesn't kill you makes you...invincible.
• Brett Hull scores a hat trick on "I'm going to throw this piece-of-shit hat away anyway" hat night against the Detroit Redwings.  It took the on-ice crew 45 minutes to clear the ice.  Favorite sports moment ever.

This year, the Blues, the team of my childhood, played their hearts out.  And we noticed.  Blues fans are different, see.  We do not give up on our team the way Cardinals fans do when they are 8.5 games back with 21 to play.  We do not say "there's always next year" because goddamnit EVERY year is our year and only losers say "there's always next year".  We bleed and we believe because loyalty is about much more than winning and championships and bragging rights.
 
The Blues are my team because they are a part of my history, they are built into the walls of my memories.  They are me and my dad, the smell of the ice rink and the sound of a thousand voices ringing as I fall into a deep sleep.  LGB.  Thks Fr Th Mmrs.