I’ve always had a mad respect for hockey players. It’s one of those sports that you’re almost born and bred to play. They play in competitive leagues as early as elementary school. They live and breathe it. It’s a hard sport. Not only do you have to be really good with your hands to coordinate with the puck to the stick, you have to keep your head up for some bone crushing hits and the pain that that inevitably causes you—oh yeah, and you have to ice skate. Not just skate, but skate well, skate fast, and skate backwards. It’s an expensive sport for parents to keep up with, especially when you’re young and growing. These guys are playing hockey around the time they can walk. They dedicate their whole life to it, and most of them won’t even make it to major junior, let alone the AHL or the big show. That’s gotta be hard to accept. That’s why you have American and Canadian hockey players playing all over the world. And if you make it to the show, it’s the lowest-paying sport of the big four in North America and one of the most dangerous. You have the knee injuries that you see in every sport. You have the concussion problems like football. You’re constantly being hit. Oh, and you could die from someone’s skate cutting your jugular while you’re laying on the ice. So I’ll never make fun of a hockey player that’s hanging on in their 30s in beer league. They worked for it their whole life and most of the time it ends in a college career before the competitive hockey is over for them.
I’ve always had a mad respect for hockey players. It’s one of those sports that you’re almost born and bred to play. They play in competitive leagues as early as elementary school. They live and breathe it. It’s a hard sport. Not only do you have to be really good with your hands to coordinate with the puck to the stick, you have to keep your head up for some bone crushing hits and the pain that that inevitably causes you—oh yeah, and you have to ice skate. Not just skate, but skate well, skate fast, and skate backwards. It’s an expensive sport for parents to keep up with, especially when you’re young and growing. These guys are playing hockey around the time they can walk. They dedicate their whole life to it, and most of them won’t even make it to major junior, let alone the AHL or the big show. That’s gotta be hard to accept. That’s why you have American and Canadian hockey players playing all over the world. And if you make it to the show, it’s the lowest-paying sport of the big four in North America and one of the most dangerous. You have the knee injuries that you see in every sport. You have the concussion problems like football. You’re constantly being hit. Oh, and you could die from someone’s skate cutting your jugular while you’re laying on the ice. So I’ll never make fun of a hockey player that’s hanging on in their 30s in beer league. They worked for it their whole life and most of the time it ends in a college career before the competitive hockey is over for them.