CrashingTheGoalie

by Ron Spence
Sports were all the rage by the ‘90s – the 1890s.
Americans were spending some $150 million per year – the players’ salaries for three NHL teams today – on recreation, and by 1909, $1 billion on recreation and travel combined.
People had discovered this new-fangled thing called leisure, as their work weeks were [...]

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by Ron Spence
Vancouver wasn’t always a hockey hotbed.
A quarter of a century after hockey was highly popular in eastern Canada, many Vancouver fans still hadn’t see a game.
“Most of [opening night fans] had never seen a hockey game before, but they became ardent enthusiasts long before the finish,”The Province wrote in 1912.
Vancouver supporters remained enthusiastic [...]

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by Ron Spence
“A fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind,” Winston Churchill wrote, “and won’t change the subject.”
Sounds like the guys I watch nucks games with.
The name fan – as in a sports fan – came from one of two sources – depending on your bias.
One was the U.K., the other the U.S.A.
A guy [...]

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by Ron Spence
Women’s hockey wasn’t officially recognized until 1982. It was the year of towel power and the B.C.A.H.A. finally threw in the towel and welcomed the “B.C. Girls” into their ranks. It had only taken six decades.
A woman’s game was first played in Ottawa in 1891. Its popularity quickly spread across Canada and by [...]

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by Ron Spence

Senior and minor league hockey have experienced a reversal of fortune over the past eighty years. The B.C. Amateur Hockey Association was formed in 1919 and minor hockey was given a back seat. There were a limited number of covered arenas and it was reasoned that transportation was too slow and expensive for [...]

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by Ron Spence
Take soccer’s better behaved hooligans – not the burn them down and bag their ashes ones – and you’ll have baseball’s kranks from 125 years ago.
They got drunk during games, threw their containers at – and ran onto the fields and assaulted – rivals, plus the umps.
And, of course they always had a [...]

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by Ron Spence
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm,” Winston Churchill wrote.
Seven of the thirty coaches – who started the 2008-09 season – were ousted from their NHL teams – and are enthusiastically looking for another failure to start.
They were:

courtesy of sports.espn.go.com
Two others were dismissed at the end of the [...]

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by Ron Spence
You want to be an NHL head coach.
And you’d really like to have that Stanley Cup resting in your living room – at least for a while.
Even though there’s a stranger sitting – in your favourite reclining chair – guarding it, while you’re entertaining that brother-in-law – and his friends – you can’t [...]

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“…The talk was about one particular hockey player that had turned heads throughout the Vancouver Canucks’ training camp,”  Jeff Bromley wrote on October 11, 2002. “Fedor Fedorov, Detroit’s superstar Sergei’s younger brother.
In Cranbrook on Wednesday morning the Vancouver Canucks announced that the 6′3″, 220lb forward had made the club and would play alongside Trevor Linden [...]

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“It’s September 12, 1999…[and] The team races out with new faces in Steve Kariya and Jarkko Ruutu. However, Crawford and Burke, who have seen Kariya playing with intensity all week in Kamloops, have been caught saying some good words on the 5-foot-7 speedy gonzalez on ice. By far Kariya has been the most productive player at [...]

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