Hockey: It's worth fighting for!

If you weren't raised on the frozen ponds of the Midwest, East or North of this great country, with a hockey stick in one hand and a puck in the other, you may only know the great sport of hockey as a venue for brawlers with broken noses and missing teeth to beat the living crap out of each other. That's all you see on Youtube and other video blogs. You see the high-sticks, the blood, the broken necks, legs, arms, feet, hands, faces and heads. You don't see the skill. The athleticism it takes to fly down a sheet of ice on blades at twenty-five miles per hour while dangling a puck on the end of a six foot long stick inbetween six-foot-four monsters that can stop you dead in your tracks with a quick displacement of weight and then placing that little piece of galvanized rubber in a slot no bigger than itself and into the back of the net - at over one hundred miles per hour mind you. That's what you don't see. I love hockey and always have and always will. Fighting is a part of the game and I love it when two bruisers drop-the-buckets and exchange blows, don't get me wrong. But I like it for the right reason. It's about energizing your team. Getting them pumped up to take the lead and win the game! Football players raise their arms to the side and pump them upward to get the fans going...hockey players fight. They do it for their home crowd. They do it for their teammates. They do it for the sport. Because hockey is worth fighting for...so take another look.