How a kid from rugby country fell for the Brutaful Game
A guest post, plus the teachers' union features in a short The Week That Was and a long Weekend That Will Be
Chances are that you haven’t heard of Joe Durie but you’ve interacted with his content. As digital content manager for the Alternative Commentary Collective, Durie puts out hundreds of posts across the various soshmed channels that occasionally make you laugh out loud, occasionally make you wince and occasionally make you go, “How old are you, 16?!” (He’s not, but he knows a decent chunk of his audience is.)
His output is extraordinary, but he’s more than a purveyor of humorous and bad-taste clips. There’s not one part of the ACC’s vast empire that he is not across in some respect, doing all the legwork that enables the glory boys on seven-figure retainers1 like Matt Heath, Mike Lane and Manaia Stewart to look adequate.
He is also, by my reckoning, the most knowledgeable NHL fan in the country. In fact, that’s a little too narrow - he’s the biggest ice hockey fan, period, because I’m sure if he had to, he could tell you a bit about the European leagues too. In this guest essay ahead of the Stanley Cup finals, Durie outlines how a kid from the grassy heartland fell in love with the wonders of a sport played on frozen water.
Enjoy.
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THERE IS one question that I’ve been asked more than any other in the last 25 years of my life.
Actually, there’s two, but we’re not going to worry about, “Pint of Knife Party2, is it?” The answer to that should be obvious.
The other question I always get is: “Ice hockey? How’d you get into that?"
The answer is also surprisingly obvious.
There are a few things that first come to mind when people think of hockey, sorry, ice hockey (we can’t confuse things with the ‘other’ hockey).
Wayne Gretzky.
Fighting.
And, for most people living on this part of the globe, The Mighty Ducks.
The 1992 movie starred Brat Packer Emilio Estevez - in a role that somewhat mirrored his decline as a Hollywood force - as a hot shot lawyer, whose fall from grace and redemption story coincides with the rise of a loveable bunch of rejects who, against all odds, become Minnesota state champions. It’s the most Disney of Disney clichés.
But why was Disney making a hockey movie?
Because they had just been awarded the rights for a new franchise in the latest NHL’s expansion. The fee was a mere US$50 million, which seems like loose change when you consider that the owners of the NHL’s latest team, Seattle Kraken, who came into the league last year, paid a fee of $650m. The plan for Disney was simple: use its behemoth promotional power through their theme parks, merchandise and movies to build a fanbase for the new franchise, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (renamed in 2006 to the more user-friendly Anaheim Ducks).
It’s unlikely a group of kids in Rangiora, a satellite town of Christchurch, was in Disney's fan-cultivation plan but there was a perfect storm brewing. There’s not a lot of ice in Rangiora but there were new subdivisions with freshly laid, flat and smooth asphalt. The perfect conditions for roller hockey. No ice needed. Just some rollerblades and a stick. Rather than spending Saturdays at the rugby club with every other kid in town, my mates and I would skate on an empty lot pretending to win our own Minnesota State Championship.
The other key element to this hockey petri dish that was being cultured was the volume of games being shown on TV at the time. If you were lucky enough to be in a family who had one of Sky’s original UHF decoders, ESPN would be showing NHL games every other day during the season. These games were watched live during the summer holidays, or on replay with sections removed to fit the programming block. The lines, “Due to time constraints, we now move ahead in this program,” should awaken dormant memories for sports-loving kids of the ’90s.
The sport was like nothing I had watched before.
Fast. Brutal. Skilled. Did I mention it was brutal?
Players went from skating faster than anyone could dream of running on a rugby field to smashing their opponents into the ‘boards’ that formed outlines of the rink. The sound was deafening and the plexiglass that sat atop the boards would shake and bounce back and forth. There was no escape. Like an ’80s action movie. Like a video game. Like a car crash happening at high speed, only to then see the cars put themselves back on the road and drive off in different directions before regathering to collide again.
My introduction to hockey and the NHL was right in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ of the NHL’s presence on ESPN and therefore here in New Zealand. It was around this time, following the New York Rangers3 Stanley Cup win in 1994, that the august magazine Sports Illustrated ran the cover story, “The NHL’s Hot. The NBA’s Not!” This would not prove to be prophetic and when you look today the NHL is miles behind the NBA in the race for eyeballs, ear holes, likes and reposts of the sports media landscape.
That was in the future, though, at the time I couldn’t have agreed with SI more. It was the era of the savage blood feud between the Detroit Red Wings and Colorado Avalanche, which was spurred by the Claude Lemieux and Kris Draper incident…
… which ultimately led to Fight Night At The Joe.
Twenty-five years after the Wings and Avs were locked in a fantastic, relentless and breathtakingly violent winner-take-all battle for NHL supremacy, Avs enforcer Claude Lemieux still likes to point out the prodigious bump on his skull left by Darren McCarty’s knee. There’s a similar keepsake on Adam Foote’s forehead, another one bisecting Patrick Roy’s right eyebrow and even a slight indentation remains on Kris Draper’s cheek. To this day the scars the two rivals inflicted upon each other serve as a kind of road map to the epic stretch between 1996 and 2002 that resulted in three Stanley Cups for the Wings and two for the Avalanche.
Watching that, seeing the superstars of the game, 50-goal scorers, 100-point scorers, Vezina Trophy and Stanley Cup winning goalies, during an otherwise meaningless regular season game, racing to centre ice to beat the absolute piss out of each other was like the high you’d get from an endless supply of crack cocaine (and by crack cocaine I mean candy - and by candy I don’t mean MDMA, but K Bars).
It would be like Andrew Mehrtens and Carlos Spencer facing off on the halfway line in the heat of Canterbury and Auckland’s NPC rivalry in the NPC, and throwing punches until there was no more blood left to draw.
Now if a kid from Rangiora could get into ice hockey there’s no reason why others in New Zealand couldn’t. The speed, skill, and unbridled violence is everything that Kiwi sports fans love.
The problem? It’s f***ing near impossible to see the puck on TV. HD broadcasts have helped, but unless you kinda know where you’re meant to be looking, it can be very difficult. The best way to get people into hockey is to take them to a live game. Get them up against the glass and have them go face to face with an unlucky defenseman who has been crushed on the forecheck by an opposing forward.
Back in 2017, when New Zealand and the Ice Blacks last hosted the Men’s Division II Group B World Championship, I saw something that should have happened years ago. Buses of teenage kids from Auckland schools were invited to come along and enjoy the action positioned up against the glass.
Forget about shoulder-charging people on the rugby and league field when they run it straight at you; instead how about shoulder-charging people into a wall whenever they touch the puck, even after they’ve passed it?
Did that experience turn all of those kids into hardcore hockey fans like me? Nah, unlikely, but if just one decided to head along to a learn to play or learn to skate programme off the back of that then who knows what happens next.
New Zealand is ripe with incredible natural athletes and if just one decides to pick ice hockey over rugby or league that could be the snowball that rolls down the hill to expose other potential fans to the sport.
Many of our best present and past Ice Blacks have come from similar non-traditional introductions, like former Ice Blacks captain Nick Craig who grew up in New Plymouth playing roller hockey. What was his introduction to the sport? A movie from 1992 called The Mighty Ducks...
The best-of-seven Stanley Cup finals begin this weekend, with the traditional ice hockey hotbeds of Florida and Las Vegas facing off to try to lift the greatest trophy in sports.
I’ll be in front of the telly for all of it, which would have been impossible a few years ago after ESPN lost the rights from the 2005-06 season until 2021. Coverage was in the literal wilderness as it moved to the Outdoor Life Network, which made it almost impossible to watch here. Having no games on TV in New Zealand for almost 15 years did not help the footprint of the sport here, which doubles back to that question...
“Ice hockey? How’d you get in that?”
Vegas Golden Knights v Florida Panthers, Gm 1, Las Vegas, Sunday noon, ESPN
THE WEEK THAT WAS
As expected, quite a bit of correspondence followed on from yesterday’s newsletter regarding a couple of school rugby stories that have made the news over the past week. Thanks to all from the notes, including a couple who have been inside that CBHS-Christ’s maelstrom themselves in the past.
As regards the Auckland schools and their battle to take some of the unwanted heat out of 1A, one subscriber noted that one of the traditional powerhouses of that competition - I won’t name the school because I haven’t independently corroborated it - has informed its rugby stakeholders that 2023 is a “rebuilding year”.
A what?!
Surely every year at school is, technically, a rebuilding year? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? The wonderful boom to bust to boom cycle of school sport is affirmed on the basis that if everybody is playing fairly, some annual intakes of Year 9s are bound to be stronger and more talented than others. It was schools that tried to subvert this naturally occurring phenomenon by recruiting that got schoolboy rugby into such an unholy mess in the first place.
When applied to sport, the term “rebuilding year” is a professional concept.
In school rugby it is not a rebuilding year, it’s just a year.
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On a related tangent, this is why many of the greatest rugby coaches in the world have teaching backgrounds.
The list is impressive. Just scratching the surface you have World Cup winners in Wayne Smith, Graham Henry and Jake White. You’ve got international giants in Eddie Jones, Ian McGeechan, Warren Gatland and Joe Schmidt and domestic title winners in Dave Rennie and Stuart Lancaster. The greatest Welsh coach of all, Carwyn James, was also a teacher. This is unscientific, but there is surely not a profession in the world that churned out so many great rugby mentors.
Most, if not all of them, cut their coaching teeth at school level. Because of those natural vacillations in talent levels, they become incredibly adaptable. If they have a year where they have tremendous speed and talent in the three-quarters, but not much up front, they devise game plans with width to maximise their strengths. If there’s a year where they have size and strength, but not much skill, they tighten things up. They become identifiers of talent and how they might build schemes around them, rather than coming up with a scheme and trying to fit square pegs into round holes.
A great coach at school level might take more pride in a year where they go 5-10 rather than one where they go unbeaten because they will know they maximised the talent they had at their disposal. This creates a level-headed treatment of success and failure - and empathy.
School coaches who use recruitment as a tool to flatten out the troughs are not just, in my opinion, corrupting the ethos of school sport, but also stunting their own development.
There endeth the lesson.
I’ve exposed myself to bitter vitriol over the years with some unpopular or poorly considered takes4 but I don’t think I’d ever be brassy enough to write a piece for a rugby website, telling its readers why they should support the Just Stop Oil activists that invaded Twickenham during last weekend’s Premiership final, not condone them.
I’m not saying Daniel Gallan is wrong - he makes a few sound points in there - but that he’s chosen a bold forum to espouse these views.
THE (LONG) WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
I’m away at a volleyball tournament in Napier this weekend, so it’s a bald-faced lie that I’m going to watch much of this live - but I’ll try.
There is a large part of me that just wants the playoffs to start already, but there’s another part of me that thinks perhaps we need a few more games to enjoy the sight of Sam Whitelock, who announced his departure to France this week, smashing into rucks and getting aerial in a red-and-black jersey. The Hurricanes need a win, too, if only to convince themselves they can compete against the best New Zealand teams. It could also be a home swansong for Dane Coles.
Hurricanes v Crusaders, Wellington, tomorrow 7.05pm, Sky Sport 1
Just saying that I’m starting to have that familiar feeling with the Warriors. At least this week they’re back in their proper home. That’s good, just ask the inimitable Dai Henwood by double-clicking on the below image (it’s well worth a couple of minutes of your time).
NZ Warriors v Redcliffe, Auckland, tomorrow 5pm, Sky Sport 4
It’s a northern derby in the ANZ Championship final after the Northern Stars upset the Central Pulse 53-52 in Porirua last weekend. Weirdly, the two Auckland-based teams will face off in Hamilton, with no suitable venue available in the country’s biggest city. According the Mairangi Bay Netball Oracle, the Stars will be the people’s choice as neutrals get bored of the Mystics’ (brutally effective) tactic of lobbing the ball into the almost unstoppable Grace Nweke.
Mystics v Stars, Hamilton, Sunday 4pm, Sky Sport 1
The FA Cup final might be the last realistic chance for anybody to stop Manchester City winning the treble. They already have the Premier League title, Inter Milan don’t look in the same class for the Champions League final and while it’s a stretch to say that Manchester United are a match for their crosstown rivals, funny things can happen in derbies (horrible cliché, but I’m owning it).
City v United, Wembley, Sunday 2am, Sky Sport 7
I didn’t think a Celtics-Lakers rivalry finals was too much to ask for, instead we get the Denver Nuggets and the ‘gritty’ Miami Heat in the NBA finals which started with a big win for the Nuggets today and continues on Monday. Go… Denver? Nah, who am I kidding - I don’t care any more.
I’m not sure who to get emotionally invested in for the French Open. I like the way Carlos Alcaraz plays but I figure he’s going to win a lot of these and I’m not sure we need another Rafael Nadal-like dynasty to start just yet. In the women’s draw, I’m backing ABAR5, so on that basis I’ll take Tunisian Ons Jabeur, last year’s losing finalist at Wimbledon and the US Open.
Max Verstappen concedes it is possible Red Bull will win every F1 race this season. This weekend’s stop is Barcelona, which doesn’t often produce exciting racing.
England’s Ashes buildup started last night in the first test of the ‘summer’ at Lord’s. The hosts take a strong position into the second day (on Spark), resuming at 152-1 in reply to Ireland’s first innings 172. Stuart Broad took five wickets to lead an inexperienced England seam attack. Often in the shadow of the ageless James Anderson, Broad is now within touching distance of becoming just the fifth bowler to 600 test wickets.
NEXT WEEK
I’m mooching around the mighty Manawatu next week doing some research for a writing project. I will have my laptop in hand and will be newslettering, but there might be a random landing time or two.
There might be a decimal point in there somewhere.
Nectar of the gods.
Arguably the most glamorous of the Original Six NHL franchises, which also includes the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Chicago Blackhawks, Boston Bruins and Detroit Red Wings.
This mean-spirited column on why the All Whites should not have won the Halberg Award for 2010 was silly on two counts: ridiculing the judges’ subjective bias while promoting your own is dumb; but mostly it’s because I really couldn’t give a toss about the awards, but this silly column led editors to turn to me for comment in the following years.
Anyone but a Russian.
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Totally with you on the mid 90s ice hockey craze. Have memories of me and my friends mixing actual roller hockey sticks we managed to score from Kmart with cricket pads and gloves. Great times. I have also slipped off ice hockey now sadly but it is a great sport