I went over to my friend Mark's house yesterday morning to watch the soccer match between Leeds and Norwich City. It was a 5:30 P.M. kickoff in Leeds, and so the game started at 10:30 in the morning here in Denver. Mark has a lot of friends in Leeds (specifically a suburb called Morley), has visited there several times, attended a game at the Leeds stadium, and is so a big fan of the soccer team there. Leeds wound up losing 3 to 1 and looked pretty bad doing it, to Mark's chagrin. I was also planning to go to the Colorado Avalanche hockey game with my friend Stuart that night. However, Stuart canceled at the last minute, and so I invited Mark to come along instead, and took his photograph in the Pepsi Center before we sat down, as seen on the left.
This was the third professional hockey game I have attended in my life, and I must say it was a lot different from the first two. The team is owned by Stan Kroenke, who also owns the Colorado Rapids soccer team (among many other sports teams) and so I immediately noticed a lot of similarities between the two operations. First, they play the music (a hellish combination of electronic music and rap) so incredibly loud you can't hear or talk to the person next to you. The only relief is when they are actually playing hockey, but the game stops about every 5 seconds or so for various reasons and the hellish songs start up immediately and stay on until play resumes. Second, they have a moderator, who welcomes you to the game and brings you up to date on important team information. Last night was Star Wars Night, and so the moderator was surrounded by two Star Wars Storm Troopers. Mark and I also attended a Colorado Rapids Star Wars night last year. Is it always Star Wars night at these games? The thing that was truly different was the appearance of Snow Shovel Girls, seen in the photograph on the right. They were called out at random intervals (twice within five minutes in one period) throughout the game to shovel the ice. I have never seen this before at a hockey game. Is today's ice so bad that they can't wait until the period is over to fix it? I personally blame global warming.
The most mysterious part of the evening was the Ceremony of the Cell Phones, as seen in the photograph on the left. Between the second and third period, the lights were turned down and everybody took out their cell phones and put on the flashlight option. I am not at all sure what the meaning of this is, and the moderator did not come onto the overhead television to explain it. Was it some sort of homage to the modern cell phone, which has changed the world so much over the past few decades, allowing the world to become your phone booth, not to mention allowing virtually everyone on the planet to text 24/7, even while walking down the street or driving a car? I have no idea, and after the game, when I could finally hear again, I asked Mark, but he had no answer either. The most shocking thing of all was that a can of beer costs $11.00, which is 3 dollars higher than at Coors Field. I often spend less than half that amount to get into baseball games, but the cheap seats at an Avalanche game can cost close to $100 (our seats were freebies that Stuart obtained from a friend). I did have an enjoyable evening, but I must say I am really beginning to feel like a true curmudgeon. I would write the papers, but nobody reads them anymore. Interesting times for sure. And by the way, the Avalanche stink. They lost to the Vancouver Canucks 5 to 1. And just what the hell is a Canuck, anyway?
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