“Shoot the fucking puck!”
It was almost certainly the importance of the night that inspired those four dreaded words. The night in question was that of April 17 in the year 2000. The Pittsburgh Penguins were hosting the rival Washington Capitals at Mellon Arena in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals. Not only was it my first-ever playoff game, it was also my first-ever Penguins game. Many of the details of the night have blurred as I’ve aged (don’t they always?), but a few still stand out clearly to me.
My first memory of that night was the bus ride into the city. The bus must have been in a race to see who could drive the slowest, because the ride took forever. I would nervously glance around to see if we were moving at all, worried that we would be late to the game—despite being under a mile from the arena with over an hour before game time. Along the route, my eyes landed on the Pokémon cards of another youngster on the bus, and he had a Mew card. Certainly this other kid must have been blessed from above, because that was the most rare Pokémon of all. It was an amazing sight to see that card in person. The envy I felt towards that kid lingers to this day.
The next memory of the game involved those opening four words. It was towards the middle of the game, and the score was tied. The Penguins had the puck in the Washington’s end, but all they did was pass the puck around at the blue line. At the age of ten, I was competent enough to recognize that a strategy like that wouldn’t score many goals any time soon. I started with the old staple: “Shoot the puck!,” yelled by all of the most knowledgeable fans at hockey games. But as the game wore on, I recognized that the players were not heeding my call to start trying to win. The call was so repetitive and the adrenaline was still flowing, and all of a sudden…
“Shoot the fucking puck!”
(The thought behind this was that team captain Jaromir Jagr would hear this and think, “Whoa, this kid’s serious. We’d better start shooting the puck!”)
My next memory was of two sets of hands pinning my shoulders to the seat, and my father’s appalled voice that cried out, “What did you just say?”
Still being on an adrenaline rush, I matter-of-factly replied, “I said shoot the fucking puck!” Tired of this distraction, I went back to watching the Penguins pass the puck, hearing the voice of my grandfather tell my father, “you’re kid’s got some kind of mouth!”
It didn’t bother me at the time. Heck, I didn’t even know what I said that had upset them so much that they would pull me back like that. But as the game progressed, it dawned upon me that I probably said something that was pretty bad. I thought about what word could have upset them, and it was pretty clear after eliminating the possibilities of “shoot,” “puck,” and “the.” My last happy moment of the night was when the final horn sounded, signaling the Penguins’ 4-3 victory over the Caps. But as we filed up the balcony steps to begin the long walk to the bus, I softly muttered something along the lines of, “let’s not talk about what happened here tonight,” shuffling away from the seat as if the Penguins had lost the Stanley Cup.
Even the bus ride to my grandparents’ house felt like a wake, as I rested my head against the window, staring into the black abyss of the street, wondering what I had done to deserve this punishment. (Actually, my father hadn’t said anything to me at all; it was the overwhelming feeling of guilt that was my punishment.)
As the weeks wore on, my feeling of self-loathing melted away. I tried my best to put the night behind me, resolving to not let it affect me. But all of that changed a few weeks later, when my mother brought it up to me on a late summer’s evening. What happened was unexpected to me—my mother didn’t get angry at me; she started laughing. As if the punishment I had already gone through wasn’t enough, now one of my parents was mocking me! Scarred by the experience of being laughed at by one of my parents, I began to cry. In this outpour of guilt and anguish, I took a silent vow: I was to never swear again, at risk of being subject to this mockery. While I have only broken that vow twice (and I was quoting someone on one of the occasions), it has left me with a stronger sense of restraint than I would have if I was like many teenagers who liberally use swear words, contributing to the dilution of their impact.
***
The best laid plans of mice and men…
I wrote the above essay during my freshperson year at Saint Bonaventure University. It’s unusual for me to look back on my own works—writing, video, photography, etc. There’s something about it that strikes me as though I’m having an out-of-body experience. I make pains to revise my writing in even my first draft, just to keep me from having to re-read things over again.
I won’t indulge my writing habits further, though. That’s not the reason for this essay. What I’m really interested in is finding out how my habits and feelings towards swearing have changed over the years.
Working with the Rats put me pretty close to the players…
To be honest, I’m surprised I didn’t turn into a potty mouth well before this essay. Starting in my sophomore year of high school, I began working for the Albany River Rats, the local hockey team. After a brief stint as a stickboy, I began working as an off-ice official, a role that involves gathering stats for the team. The crew remains the same for the most part, and a decidedly old school crew it is: filled with swagger, masculinity, wit, and a risque edge.
The experience reminds me of Slap Shot, the iconic ‘70s film with Paul Newman. Although I tend to criticize Hollywood nostalgia for glossing over major problems, Newman stands out. When you get on Richard Nixon’s enemies list, you’re doing something right. When you consider it a great accomplishment, you make Frank Sinatra look like the George W. Bush of classiness.
You can throw out that perception of Newman if you see Slap Shot, though. Here’s one of his first scenes—note that it’s very NSFW:
There’s no denying the shock of the video, but I look at it as a brilliant parody of masculinity in hockey. For Reggie Dunlop (the character Newman plays) to use those insults for victory is complete farce—nobody in their right mind would lose at sports over a petty insult. Yet the team’s success in the movie is because they use an extremely violent and insulting brand of hockey, one that wouldn’t work in real life!
The problem is that the film is not universally viewed as a parody of hockey—in fact, fans and participants alike often think that’s how the game should be played. Consider this clip of Washington Capitals coach (and an extra in Slap Shot) Bruce Boudreau who, with a team mired in a losing streak, tries to incite them to play harder in a profanity-laced tirade:
“If you want it, don’t just THINK you want it, go out and F**KIN’ want it!” It’s hilarious but true, to an extent: you have to go and give your all if you want something big in your life. That doesn’t make it a ridiculous thing to say, though. For most of my hockey life, I kept on what I considered the suit-and-tie end of things: keep the wit, but put it in a purely logical reference. That includes my language, and I made sure never to use a bad word.
And it worked for a long time. Through 2010, I could count on one hand the number of times I dropped an f-bomb: three. The lone addition followed Zach Parise’s game-tying goal in the men’s gold medal hockey game at the Vancouver Olympics. (What is it about hockey and this word?) It was a fun slip in the heat of the moment, and although my blood boils that the U.S. lost that game (a linesman too lazy to move out of the puck’s path practically kicked it to Jarome Iginla) I thought a roughly once-every-decade track was nice for that word.
Then Super Bowl XLV happened.
Since I became a sports fan, I realized how badly I wanted to see in-person my three favorite sports teams (the Pittsburgh Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers) win a championship. I consider it a lofty goal, but one worth pursuing as a sports fan—if you want it, go f’n want it, yanno?
My family’s held Steelers tickets since the ‘70s. My uncle nearly gave them up a few years ago, but my father stepped in and purchased them to keep them in the family. We don’t go to many games—once yearly if we’re lucky—but we share them with family and close friends so they can see games without having to pay exorbitant rates to ticket brokers. With season tickets come options for playoff and Super Bowl tickets. We’d passed on them in earlier seasons—once when the Steelers finally won one for the thumb, and another time when they won arguably the best Super Bowl ever played. With the team looking sharp, we decided that it was time to give the Super Bowl a shot. Lo and behold, the Steelers beat the Jets, and we packed our own bags for Texas. Not only was I going to see a championship in person, I was going to see it in enemy territory, the Death Star of the NFL—Cowboys Stadium.
Things don’t always turn out as you hope, though.
The trip began inauspiciously. Never has an airport as milquetoast as Memphis International Airport looked as wonderful and adventurous than it did through my eyes that day. I had an extra spring in my step, and I mean that literally: the moving walkways in Memphis have a unique construction that let you bounce up and down like a trampoline. Like a hokey scene from a movie, an airport worker with a Steelers lanyard stopped us and tried to turn us around.
“Hey, you’re going the wrong way!,” he said. “You gotta catch a flight to the Super Bowl!”
“We aren’t going the wrong way,” my pop replied. “We’re driving to Dallas!”
Driven enough that we skipped Graceland (in terms of rock-‘n-roll founding icons, we’re probably a Little Richard household) we began the long drive from Memphis to a hotel about 90 miles outside of Dallas (again, saving money) through the Mississippi Delta. Most shocking to me was just how flat everything was—it took about an hour before we finally reached an incline in the highway.
We met our first harbinger of doom along the drive: snow. Being a native of New York, I’m used to driving in snowy weather. Driving to and fro Saint Bonaventure my freshperson year, I became acclimated to the power that changing terrain can make for weather, so this was an easy task. You wouldn’t know it from the places we visited, though. Just west of Little Rock, we stopped to gas the car and grab a bite to eat. It took us three tries to find an open restaurant—two were closed due to the weather, which was an inch of snow at that point. The snowplows we passed along the highways looked nothing like the dump truck behemoths along the thruway—instead, they resembled farm tractors with broad shovel-like contraptions in the middle. We laughed it off, thinking it wasn’t a big deal.
But the problem with snow is that, if not removed in time, it becomes a sheet of ice. I’ll never forget passing the ‘Welcome to Texas’ sign and seeing in front of us a car fishtail along Interstate 30. From that point, we were roughly an hour away from the motel. But a few miles more and traffic came to a dead stop. Almost an inch of ice coated the highway, and drivers unused to the conditions couldn’t handle the traffic. Instead of arriving at the hotel at 7:00 p.m. that night, we arrived at 6:00 a.m. the next morning. Our plans to eat dinner in Dallas? Gone, in favor of a midnight meal at an IHOP in some rural Texas town.
I was miffed. Twitter updates from the Texas DOT mentioned road crews using sand to help the roads, despite sand providing no useful measure against that kind of problem. The idea of sleeping in a car offended my sense—I’m a college man, I said. College men don’t sleep in cars, I said. And I didn’t until about two in the morning when I figured it acceptable for college men to rest their eyes in a car.
One interesting thing about stopping was that, because the storm moved through during the day, the skies were cloud-free at night. I like to think the Adirondacks and parts of rural New York provide low light pollution, but nothing beat the number of stars I saw in that night sky. Adding in massive sleep deprivation and a bizarre travel routine that involved our car moving a few miles every hour or two, and it was far and away the strangest drive I’ve ever been on.
Shell-shocked, my pop and I arrived at the hotel and slept until one in the afternoon. What was supposed to be a day exploring the Dallas-Fort Worth area turned into a jaunt to find the stadium, have a steak for dinner, and get back in time to be rested for the big day. One odd thing we noticed while driving was the number of high-end high school football stadiums. It’s hard to exaggerate how big football is in Texas—these stadiums had press boxes and luxury suites, all to watch teenagers play sports.
Of course, none of those stadiums compares to Cowboys Stadium. I wasn’t kidding when I called it the NFL’s Death Star: it’s a giant gray bubble on the Arlington plains. With a cost in the billions of dollars, it’s main purpose is as an ATM of rich folk—and I don’t mean my family, I mean corporations that can afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on luxury boxes and club tickets annually. We sat next to a couple who fit that bill, and I’m not kidding when I say they were almost worse than the game itself. Unabashed fans of George W. Bush, opponents of NASA—do not talk badly about NASA in my presence.
Outside of awful people, there’s nothing really outstanding about the stadium. Because of its size, it feels like an enormous airplane hangar. There was something a bit fun about walking up to it and feeling a tense anticipation. Something about getting to see the Super Bowl felt like a great accomplishment. The wait inside was a drag, but I felt like I was walking on air. Everything about the game felt right and wonderful.
So young and naive.
Then the game happened.
Things didn’t go well. The Steelers dug an early hole and kept turning the football over. I felt more confident in the early second half, but they blew it against a significantly worse team. In addition, some uncoordinated moron spilled chili on the back of a new (white) jersey of mine. By the time the Steelers’ last fourth down pass failed, everything about the weekend—the travel, the game—went from a wonderful moment into a complete and total disaster. (That’s not even including the halftime show. The Black Eyed Peas? Mercy. And I was in the bathroom half of the time.)
And remember that stuff about trying to not swear ever? Well that went flying out the door. And down the walkway, out the stadium, into the parking lot, the car, the traffic jam, and the hour-and-a-half ride back to the hotel. Needless to say the guy in the video I posted earlier would’ve blushed at me.
From that point on, the wheels were off. After years of saintly language, I began to explore all the variety of swear words at my disposal. Not simply the seven dirty words—I tend to avoid them—but unique combinations of swear words. I find “cockbastards” to have a nice, absurd ring to it, and it’s a favorite to write (not say) when sports events aren’t going well.
(That, of course, is when I bother to care about sports events any more. Since having that dream crushed, I’ve started to take a much more cynical view of sports. Most sports end in failure—there’s only one champion—and there’s no guarantee of enjoyment when winning is tied in. I think sports are as valid an entertainment option as film or stage or music or reading or any other option, but there’s an uncertainty there that makes it hard for me to enjoy. And for all of the rooting I do, it’s never reciprocated—no Pittsburgh Steeler ever traveled to see one of my high school concerts.)
I’d always try to use it for humorous purposes, often adopting a curmudgeonly tone when using them. But my problem is that I never wanted to be that person, even in parody. Swearing adds a harsh tone to what I say, and it’s not the kind of person I’d like to me. And it’s not necessary to swear to make a funny point. The other night, I copped a hilarious insult from the great sportswriter Myron Cope—‘if they don’t like it, they can stick their head in a vat of paint’—and left someone on the verge of crying from laughter.
When swearing is dropped, there’s more of a universal appeal to what people say. It’s why I find ’30 Rock’ to be funnier than any show I’ve seen on cable—the show had to appeal to a broader audience and did so with flying colors. It’s going to be difficult to break the habit, but I’m hopeful that, at some point, I can revert to my younger, more wholesome ways.
Brain Nourishment 