All I Know About Hockey I Learned From Blades of Steel

FIGHT! Now this is Hockey!!

It came to me all at once like a hard rubber puck to the side of the head. The Kelowna Rockets were up 3-0 on the hometown Seattle Thunderbirds; there hadn't been a fight in over 30 minutes; I had seen zero knuckle pucks, and the T-Birds' goalie had stepped off the ice.

It was at that moment I realized I know less about hockey than R.Kelly knows about statutory laws. My 8-bit education system had let me down.

Prior to this T-Birds game, my knowledge of hockey was severely limited. I was under the impression that only meathead Midwesterners, sub-human Canadians and crazy communist Ivans played hockey. Getting into fights as often as possible and violently slamming someone into the boards were the only good reasons for lacing up a pair of skates, near as I could tell. Terms like holding, roughing, holding the stick, spearing and slashing all sounded like something Gary Ridgeway would do with a working girl on a Saturday night. I was blissfully ignorant to the intricacies of hockey because everything I knew about the sport was gleaned from playing it on my Nintendo. That's right, everything I know about hockey I learned from the Konami classic "Blades of Steel."

Until recently, I thought there were only 8 teams in all of the NHL: four from Canada and four from the States. Imagine my surprise when I found out that fights don't just start after bumping into the opposing player three times in a row. I was baffled when a fight was broken up and BOTH players were sent to the penalty box, not just the loser. Reconciling these inaccuracies was just the start of my hockey reeducation.

When playing "Blades of Steel," icing occurs almost every other play due to the constant fighting in the game and thus the inability to track the puck down before someone gets a penalty. Not so much in real life.

I was also shocked to see that there almost never fights in "real" hockey. If fighting wasn't the purpose of the game then what exactly was?

I'm told you're supposed to score goals and, apparently, the game isn't as chaotic as my childhood game system had led me to believe. After gritting my teeth and trying to figure out what this game is really all about, I realized I'm completely unwilling to learn "real" hockey. I have neither the time nor the patience to understand why, seemingly, at random players come in and out of the game. The concept of the penalty box in beyond me even as an abstract. Why punish someone for breaking his stick over another's head? Isn't that the point of having a hockey stick in the first place?

Even in it's 3 period structure hockey is jarringly un-American. What kind of whacked out game goes with odd numbered periods? All good sports are in halves or quarters not some farce of a format like 3 periods. Everything about "real" hockey clashed with my rational mind. The stress and strain my brain had endured whilst attempting to grasp the rules had left it deflated like a post-coke bender Michael Irvin.

After the game I sat down and played a game of BOS, and beat down the Edmonton Oilers with my New York Islanders. But something was wrong. I noticed the discrepancies between my game and what I had witnessed earlier. Rules were glossed over, strategy thrown away, gameplay horribly altered. I kept thinking to myself "This isn't how 'real' hockey is played!"

Thanks, "real" hockey. You've ruined "Blades of Steel" for me. Forever.