Hockey Rhetoric

This is going to be another one of those posts where I jump around like crazy. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I promise a smile by the end though.

I’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating: I honestly don’t care what professional athletes do with their personal lives so long as they’re not engaging in activities that would lead me to believe they could be psychopathic. Don’t harm or kill people/animals, stay away from the heavy drugs, and avoid sexual situations that Chris Hansen takes interest in. That’s pretty much all I ask. Arrogance, narcissism, that type of stuff, I can live with. As sad as this may sound, I haven’t found narcissism to be all that uncommon of a characteristic. Why would I expect rich, sports figures to be above that? What does athletic talent have to do with emotional maturity? » Read the rest of this entry «

I should first say that I’ve never meet Patrick Kane. We are the same age and share some mutual friends but I’m not in any better position to talk knowingly about his character than is any average reader of The Buffalo News. When I first heard about Kane’s incident with the cab driver, words like maturity and ego started floating around in my head. I heard the testimonies and I saw the bruises on the cabbie’s face. There’s no excuse for someone, anyone, to respond that violently towards a 62-year-old man. If I had sat down to write this three weeks ago, immediately after the details became a matter of public record, the tone of this post would have been a lot like this paragraph: judgmental. » Read the rest of this entry «