Chicago Blackhawks

This post is a couple weeks overdue. It also happened while Kevin was in town. We all took a trip out to the United Center where the Chicago Blackhawks play hockey. My buddy Ken joined us as well, and served as the navigator. Tickets were $15 apiece and parking was $11. Not too bad, especially compared to the Detroit Red Wings. Our view was still pretty good (see the two pictures to the right).

I don't know much about soccer, but I'm told the rules of ice hockey are much like those of football (i.e. soccer if you're American): you try to score goals and not go offsides. It's soccer for people that live in snowy weather. Canada usually produces the most and best hockey players, but there also many Russians, Scandanavians, Czechs, Slovakians, Americans and some other nationalities that play in this league, the National Hockey League (NHL), which most would agree is where the best players play.

Keren took a bunch of pictures and put them in Picasa, here, if want to see them. The United Center holds about 20,000 people. About 1/2 were Chicago fans, and 1/2 Detroit fans, including Kevin and me, so there were a lot of insults traded between fans which I won't reprint here.

Hockey is a violent sport; people run into each other fast and get penalized for it by sitting in the penalty box for 2 minutes, or as Keren says, "they go to jail". In fact, people often say "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out". The hockey game broke out alright, but we got lucky and saw a nice fight: a 30 second bout between Parick Sharp (red - Chicago) and Tomas Kopecky (white - Detroit):

From left to right, you can see the 1) fight start, fists flying 2) the players fall to the ice, and are broken up by the referees, and 3) blood from Patrick Sharp's forehead staining the United Center Ice. Play was stopped briefly, as both players were sent off to "jail" and the blood was cleaned from the ice. If you want some in depth analysis of the fight, who people thought won, and a nice YouTube video of the whole fight, I encourage you to go here, a whole webpage for the fight, maintained by Hockey Fights. "Hockey Fights" is indeed one of the truly great products of the internet age. Now I remember what I was thankful for at Thanksgiving.

Although the Red Wings player (Kopecky) won the fight, Chicago won the hockey game, 3-2. All in all, this is a pretty good bit of entertainment. $40 for two people for major sporting events in the U.S. is definitely cheap, still a little more than a movie, but not outrageous.

Some people may be suprised to know that the United Center, where the hockey game was played tonight, is also home to the Chicago Bulls basketball team, Michael Jordan's old team - that's right, they play basketball on the ice. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good link or pictures of the process, but after each hockey game, they place giant wood partitions over the ice, remove the wall around the ice, and play basketball! This had to be perfected. In the 80's and early 90's when they first tried this, the basketball floor would get too cold and water would condense on the floor, forcing cancellation of the game due to players slipping and being injured.

Just in case you don't belive me, look at Keren's photo album (you can see the statute a lot better), or see my blurry picture with Keren in from of giant Michael Jordan statue just outside the United Center: