|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE
|  |
All-Star Game lacks regular urgency
TORONTO -- When you first arrive at All-Star weekend and you first sense the collective presence of all the great and wondrous players, your pulse begins to quicken. When you spend part of your Saturday among those players -- so many of whom have lifted you to your feet in excitement, brought exclamations of wonder from your lips -- you begin to think: How thrilling this all is? There's Jaromir, and Teemu and the Big E and so many more. How marvelous it will be, you tell yourself (though you've been here before and should know better) to see them all on the ice. All too often the promise and the outcome do not match. Oh, we saw wonderful displays of skill here. We saw Raymond Bourque deliver his pinpoint wrist shots and Valeri Bure scurry like a city roach `round the ice at SuperSkills. We saw Al MacInnis, both lungs up and running, let loose his 100.1-miles-per-hour shot, and we saw Mike Richter make save after split- second save. It was fun, that competition, but it was tame and packaged and we waited still, fooling ourselves as we always do, for the All-Star game to begin. That's when the tension, the edge-of-the-seatness will come, we allow ourselves to think. Why have we not learned? The All-Star game was preceded by many minutes of deafening music that drowned out the player introductions. Green laser beams shot through the air. A herd of mascots came out and ran crazy on the ice. "It's the board of governors!" someone exclaimed. Then Gary Bettman stood beside Wayne Gretzky and said a few things about how great Wayne is and a huge number 99 was hoisted to the rafters. What pomp and excitement there was. Then the game began and much of the gorgeous play we were hoping for we got: Bure (Valeri) to Bure (Pavel) for a goal. Then Pavel again and again. And did you see that dead-on backhand pass by Sergei Zubov into the slot! And take a look at Mark Recchi dishing it off. The goalies -- Roman Turek especially -- proved as entertaining as anyone, transformed by necessity into maniacal contortionists. But before long, you realize that the Toronto crowd seems silent as a golf course gallery. You realize as the World Team continues to pull away, that plenty of people are hardly watching the game. This is little more than a skills competition set up with six skaters on each side. There is no urgency in this game, none at all. Urgency is a casualty in a hockey match in which physical contact is absent, in which defenders offer little resistance, in which no one, neither the players, nor the coaches, nor the fans, really cares who wins or loses. There is nothing to be done about this. This is the All-Star Game's inevitable fate. Hockey simply wasn't built to be played this way. Yet with all those players out there it somehow seems a shame. It seems odd to realize that for all that ability collected on one sheet, you won't get the thrills you might get at a plain old, good old regular-season NHL game. Those everyday games we take for granted, in which players blithely risk their bodies and stand their ground, in which the gorgeous passes come unexpectedly, if at all. Those are games which the players, and of course, the fans care very much who will win or lose. In that, there is urgency. And that makes all the difference. Kostya Kennedy is a Sports Illustrated staff writer who covers the NHL for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
| ||||||||||||||||||||
