Alternatively Titled: An Accidental Thank You Letter to Nicklas Bäckström
“BAAAAACKYYYYYYY BAAAAABEEYYY!!!!!!”
This is the text message I sent to approximately seven friends at minimum, devoid of any context or further explanation, and that even baffled the select few that did know about hockey as compared to the majority of recipients.
It was April 20, 2019, and I technically wasn’t even watching the Caps game. I was at a concert at The Sinclair in Cambridge, in between sets, frantically checking Twitter for updates on playoff games. If you can recall this years’ playoffs, you’ll know why. Monstrous teams collapsed, underdogs prevailed, and quite frankly, the entire first round was just plain hell on everyone’s brackets. This post-season proved we still don’t know anything about “playoff hockey” — but regardless, it’s so fun to watch. As part of that, I was just trying to keep track of everything.
So, the next thing you may have noticed about this uh, enthusiastic, message– Backy as in… David Backes? Because I don’t recall him playing the last few games of Round 1 for Boston that year. That’s because he didn’t. And, despite me fully living in the heart of New England and therefore being an insufferable Bruins fan, David Backes was not the person for whom I was flooding my friends’ inboxes.
Over the course of maybe a week tops, my dearly beloved friends got to witness me lose my mind while I remembered how much I love Nicklas Bäckström. Yes. Nicky Backstrom, center for the Washington Capitals.
We’ll come back to Nicklas and the Caps, but first we need to back up a bit for context.
How exactly did we get here?
Hockey was always on the periphery for me growing up. I was (not to brag, but genuinely for accuracy’s sake) a highly competitive alpine ski racer. That meant, since roughly 10 years old, I had practices every weekend from about 8AM to 3PM. A full day of driving to whatever mountain was hosting the race, racing, tabulating times, disqualifications, and scores, and then driving home could mean leaving the house at 5 am and not coming home for another 12 hours. From there it was a race against the exhaustion clock to haphazardly order some takeout from whatever restaurant was open downtown, tune skis again, collapse into bed, and mentally prepare for training the next day. This was a cycle that continued into my late teens with more intensity, a greater time commitment, and a hell of a lot of Tiger Balm and Advil. I was about sixteen years old when I started racing on the FIS circuit (Fédération Internationale de Ski if we want to get fancy and European with it because I know the trusted hockey men love that). Soon, long weekends bled into multiple weeknight training sessions. I would train with my independent club on the weekends from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM, my high school team from 3:00 PM to 5:30 PM on weekdays, and then my club team again three nights a week AFTER high school practice, from 5:30 PM to 7:30 or 8:00 PM.
So, to put everything into perspective, I was sixteen and I was racing twenty-three year old Europeans athletes brought over to help strengthen the New England D1 college race teams. I was still going to school (mostly) because I was freaking SIXTEEN and as fun as it was to skip school every Thursday and Friday for the big FIS races I did maybe have to stay on the school’s good side enough by showing up for three to four days of the week, in order to graduate and go to college. I was staying on top of my classes — in fact, I was pulling straight A’s — and I was dedicated almost every shred of non-school time I had to better myself and further my athletic career.
Looking back on it, as much fun as it was to feel important and talented—and more importantly, to work hard at something and BE GOOD at it because of those years of hard work—it was also really hard on my body and my brain. I’m lucky to have had the support system I did. My parents (as regimented as they could be) were always there to shuttle me around to practices and races, help me with my gear and upkeep, and keep my head in the game when I started to go off the rails. I had good teammates at school and in my club program that made the grind of 5-6 days of training a week more bearable. And beyond all that, I had a really great best friend turned significant other (who I won’t name because unfortunately we’ve parted on pretty rough terms) with whom I spent any free time I could wrangle. I bring that person up in particular because they become integral to the next part of this story.
It was spring of 2013. For some reason, and I really wish I could tell you exactly what it was but I can’t, I had thrown myself into watching the Eastern Conference Finals of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It may have been because I had decided hockey was a Cool Thing™ like skateboarding or punk music that I wanted to engage with, or maybe it was just that my dad would toss the games on when we got home from training. The Bruins were playing the Pittsburgh Penguins and it was a series they were supposed to get curb-stomped in, if I paid attention to the panelists correctly. Pittsburgh had a solid core, documented playoff experience, and more importantly – Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby.
Flash forward 4 games, and Boston had swept them. I remember sitting next to my dad, grinning and grinning and not being able to stop smiling and giggling.
“Oh my god. Oh my god they DID it.”
I texted my best friend a message pretty analogous to that.
Remember that partner I mentioned a little while ago? It turns out they knew how to skate and had both played and watched hockey when they were younger but had fallen out of it over the years. Regardless, they were willing to jump onto this bandwagon of mine in our sophomore year of high school, and this playoff run fell right in the middle of a time period when our friendship had really taken off.
I can’t remember if it was after the Eastern Conference Finals that I tried to really read up and learn more about the team or if it had happened in the lead up to the Pittsburgh sweep. All I know is that suddenly I was locked in. I learned about young phenom Tyler Seguin, perennial Selke contender and general all around angel Patrice Bergeron, and Tuukka Rask the coolest goalie in the world (in part because he loved Metallica). Most importantly, I learned just about everything there was to know about Zdeno Chara. He speaks seven languages because he never wants players in the locker room to have no one to speak in their language with, he doesn’t let the team call first year players rookies because of the associated power dynamics, he’s six foot nine and has a special regulation breaking stick because of it, and he had a really interesting take on his father pushing him growing up to be the best hockey player he could be. Chara will always hold a special place in my heart, and beyond any tangible accolades or legacy he leaves behind in Boston, it’s in large part due to what he symbolizes for me in a formative period of growing up.
Zdeno Chara: Patron Saint of My Athletic Career
Zdenek Chara, Zdeno’s father, was also an athlete – an Olympian in Greco-Roman wrestling to be precise. He had gotten to that point through discipline, hard work, and a lot of personal sacrifices. Kevin Paul Dupont wrote a piece about it for the Boston Globe, back in 2010. I highly recommend taking a look at the article, it’s worth the couple minutes it’ll take to read. The article really struck a chord with me, likely due to the headspace I was in when I found it. I felt like someone had reached into my brain and my cluttered thoughts and feelings about how much I was giving up to train all winter, and how to come to terms with that. Also, it pointed out that it was ok to have those feelings, and to really be bummed out about missing fun times with friends sometimes. That’s part of being a hardworking athlete.
Two things came out of that article. The first, being that it cemented that Zdeno Chara would always be my first favorite hockey player. While I’ve come to really love a lot of others, he holds a special place in my heart and my hockey development.
The other thing that came out of the piece (and my rambling about it to all my friends) was my dad’s new nickname. It’s been six years, and I still use it. It’s still his name in my contacts, it’s really wedged itself into existence pretty well.
Zdarnold.
Is it a shoehorn? Absolutely – it’s just shoving a Zd- onto my dad’s first name (Arnold), replicating the Zdenek/Zdeno trend. The thing about it, is that it’s so awkward that it works and has gone strong for six years. There’s more to why I gave it to him – I didn’t just want to have a silly nickname for him. Honestly, when I read about how Chara’s dad pushed him growing up and kept him to his goals and regimen, it really felt like someone was talking about my life. My dad was hugely important to keeping me on track, and he pushed me to be my best. Some days were better than others, but I wouldn’t have gotten to where I did without him.
As much as I want to take credit for the inception of Zdarnold, it might actually have been my best friend’s creation. As were a lot of the more comical hockey insights of high school. We would send memes back and forth, silly photos of players, bits of awkward Jonathan Toews interviews, basically everything hockey fans on the internet decided was most important about hockey. And as a part of the internet, there was tumblr.
The Amorphous and Notorious Blogosphere
I would be lying if I said Tumblr wasn’t a pretty big factor in me getting to know the league in a way that made sense to me. I had navigated the space before as a fan, but that had been for TV shows, Lord of the Rings, and things of that nature.
Hockey tumblr was a TRIP.
Somehow I managed to end up with favorite players on teams all across the league, even turning the newly-converted-in-the-playoffs-fan vitriol I held for the Penguins into a deep attachment. Hey, passion can tip really easily between hate and love, or so I’m told.
Tumblr has been credited with a lot of weird stuff over its tenure as a social media platform, and I’ll admit that there are definitely some corners of it that deserve a serious side-eye. The one really positive aspect that I want to highlight about this particular platform, though, is that it’s a platform where voices that generally aren’t heard in mainstream media get to cut through. In addition to all of the memes about players or gifs of cellys, hockey tumblr let young, generally women, gender variant, and queer fans create meaningful commentary on gameplay and the league without facing quite the same backlash or barriers that were present on other parts of the internet. While there were a fair share of shitty fans on tumblr (as there are with any platform or fandom), that aspect was overridden by the ability to voice an opinion and engage in conversations around the game without the hordes of “trusted hockey men” and their fans coming at you and invalidating your opinion due to your identity. This was something that was integral to my growth in understanding the sport. Engaging with discussions about different analytics or liveblogging along to games helped me learn more about the game itself, and helped me to feel more confident in my commentary. All of that combined with the aforementioned gifs of cellys, bits from interviews, friendly rivalries between differently affiliated blogs, or in-jokes with team fanbases was responsible, in my opinion, for bringing me to where I am today in my love for and education of hockey.
In The Words of Blink 182, “I Guess This is Growing Up”
The journey from that moment of pure joy and hockey enlightenment to now in 2019, however, is a bit trickier to describe. It’s hard to imagine that I could go from being so incredibly in the thick of hockey, to having it be a constant companion that was there, but wasn’t really something I was following with the same sort of passion over the span of a few years. College and young adulthood is a time of growth, or at the very least, that’s what I’ve been told over and over again. Because of that, college was a struggle for me, especially at the beginning. It was mainly because I had become so cozy with what I had in high school. I had a good group of friends, I had a great partner I was dating who loved hockey like I did, I had my teammates on different sports teams, and all in all, I was pretty comfortable.
Making friends in college was tricky for me, because I didn’t have a built in support system of a sports team right away. I couldn’t find people that liked the same stuff that I did (let me tell you, finding fans of my emo music at a NESCAC school in Maine that prided itself on hipster outdoorsy stuff – not ideal), and I was really missing the easy camaraderie that I had in high school. Soon enough I wasn’t really making an effort to catch games that were on TV because it meant finding an open lounge in the dorms and watching alone. At the same time, I was falling out of touch with the person I was dating– my favorite person to talk hockey with– and was sliding toward a fairly inevitable long-distance breakup. Things ended up working out okay, despite getting dumped and thinking the world was ending. I ended up trying to be more present with the people around me and I started the long process of trying to figure out who I was without the sheltered structure and environment of my high school. It was full steam ahead, forging a new self, and grudgingly admitting that it was going to take some time to be able to enjoy things that I had when I was younger and that were now tinged with the bittersweetness of a bad breakup. One of several casualties of that development, however, was hockey.
Since falling in love with hockey at sixteen, I have always been adjacent to it. I follow all sorts of beat writers and team accounts and I listen to every episode of the Steve Dangle Podcast. But if I’m being entirely honest, hockey faded from the bright supernova it was for me in highschool as a result of that awkward finding myself period. That’s not to say I detached from it — like I said, I was always plugged in and connected. I could rattle off stats and playoff predictions like a champ, but the joy I had gotten from it had gotten sidelined. In large part, I think that happened originally because it still kind of hurt to see a great play and not be able to text the person I always had about it. In short, hockey became something I could knowledgeable talk about, and something I engaged with due to routine, but I didn’t quite… love.. It anymore.
This is the trickier part to explain, because like I said, as the years went on hockey was always a part of my life and I actually wrote an entire senior thesis about it. In fact, I flew to another country to present part of that thesis at a conference. I’m not entirely sure how I could write a 75-page senior thesis about Russian hockey players and still somehow, not be wholeheartedly in on hockey that semester, but somehow I managed. I would catch games on in bars and talk to my dad about it, but I wasn’t the same fan I was in high school where I knew everyone’s business and would be ready to go to war on their behalf. I just didn’t feel the same connection. Hockey was cool, I liked it, I had opinions about it, and it was a part of my life because that’s just how I had come to operate since I was 16, but I had forgotten how to love it.
How I Got My Groove Back
Flash forward to the playoffs of the 2018-2019 season. I had a lot going on. My honors history thesis was due to be uploaded to our college’s database as a final copy on March 20th, 2019. Two weeks after that, I had my 2 hour long oral defense of it, on April 6, 2019. I knew playoffs were coming, I started cracking jokes about it, and I actually started to get excited. Hey, I may not have been the same fan I was when I was 18 but it’s playoff hockey, you’re legally obligated to at least be kind of excited about it! Furthermore, by April, anything was better than the gruelling hours I was spending finishing my degrees.
“The main thing powering me through thesis is that when it’s all done I can watch so much playoff hockey” – Me via Twitter, circa April 5 2019.
As it got closer, this became more heartfelt. Suddenly my undergraduate projects and work were done and I was watching more hockey because a.) I could and b.) something needed to take the space of the finished thesis work. Boston and Toronto were embroiled in one of the tightest series I’ve ever watched, and it gave me heart palpitations. I may not have been the fan of my youth, but it would be impossible to watch that series and not feel anything.
Hockey snuck back up on me. I started really getting into some of the other series. I got smug about Tampa getting swept, mainly because I knew a huge Lightning fan and I was being unflatteringly vindictive. The Isles swept the Pens and that hurt, but they had back to back cups so it wasn’t that bad. Vegas and my boy Marc-André Fleury were pulling out wins in the West, and Jamie Benn, Seggy, and the newly adopted Zuccs were holding it down for Dallas (and by Jamie Benn, Seggy, and Zuccs I mean Ben Bishop).
Washington was in a tight series with Carolina.
Like with a lot of this article, I can’t quite pinpoint or articulate what it was that re-ignited my love for hockey other than it was absolutely Washington Capitals adjacent.
I remember watching the Capitals winning the Cup in 2018 – and what I remember the most from that night was just watching an absolutely elated Alex Ovechkin celebrating with a bodysnatched Nicklas Bäckström (look I don’t think anyone has ever seen him smile that much and not been murdered immediately thereafter). I remember having been hoping for a Vegas win because I was pulling for a Marc-Andre Fleury expansion draft revenge tour, but the minute the Caps started celebrating I got over that pretty quick. Finally, finally, they had proved everyone wrong, everyone who said they always choke and couldn’t make it past the second round, and everyone who grudgingly admitted Alex Ovechkin was good and despite having an absurd amount of scoring titles, he would never have a cup and that was the real indicator of his career. That “finally, finally” is one of the most emotionally striking bits of audio I’ve ever heard in my years of being a fan. It’s simple really, it’s just years of frustration bleeding into pure joy and relief as Nicky and Ovi mash into each other and freak out over what they just achieved. Honestly, I don’t think Nicklas Bäckstöm has ever smiled on camera as much as he did that night, and it was a sight to behold.
All Mean Lars jokes aside though, a full year later I remembered those moments all over again, and man there’s just something about Nicke that lodged itself into my consciousness this April. Again, I truly wish I had an explanation, but I too am baffled about how that happened. To quote Eva from Episode 4 of the illustrious You Can’t Do That podcast: “You know how when you get into a new thing and like, the thing that’s in it that’s for you, the one the universe holds out in its little cupped hands and is like ‘This is yours now’” — that happened. Sometimes things just happen because the universe is holding it out to you, and though hockey wasn’t new to me, the universe decided I needed a cranky Swede to be shoved into my orbit to act as a catalyst for the process that would remind me that I love hockey.
When something endears itself to me, I pretty much commit everything about it to memory immediately and in this case that meant learning all about said cranky Swede and every single teammate he has ever had. It helped that I knew a decent bit about the Caps already, but I’ll admit it here and say that once again, hockey tumblr is the real MVP. Suddenly, I knew way too many of the odds and ends of the Caps last few years – different wingers’ quirks, the saga of the Brobeans, all the parental nicknames one could ever hope for, extended chirps, and all that jazz. Suffice to say, after having watched way too many clips of sunshine child Burakovsky, Ovi’s pure joy for the sport, Nicke grudgingly being Mean Swedish Dad, or that one interview where Kuzy rips on everyone because his daughter enjoys his bird celly and no one else’s opinion matters, I was a goner.
I’m not saying that the only reason I like this team is because of their off-ice shenanigans, or anything even close to that. What I’m saying is that through those channels, I learned to love different team members and because of that I looked forward to seeing them in action. And from that genuine enjoyment of a team and eagerness to watch them play, I was reminded of something else.
Hockey is supposed to be fun.
That’s really the core of it. You can throw as many clips of old hockey men yelling about pride and professionalism at me that you want, it doesn’t change the fact that hockey is supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be something that you enjoy watching, even when it doesn’t go the way you want and it makes you want to pull your hair out.
The Washington Capitals reminded me that I could watch a game and have a really good time, instead of feeling like a detached or clinical outside observer I had come to be over the last few years. Suddenly, for the first time in years, I was looking forward to games and willing the day to pass just a little faster so I could watch hockey. I would drag my friends over to my house to make them watch with me and I would be locked in from puck drop to the final whistle.
So I suppose the core of this post is not only a chronicle of my journey through six years of being a hockey fan, but also an extended thank you. Thank you to the Washington Capitals for reminding me hockey is fun, and I that love it. It’s not that the Bruins don’t play fun hockey, it’s just that something had gotten stuck in my brain the last few years and kept me from feeling the way I used to.
All it took to clear that out apparently, was a murder-eyed Swede, his captain who’s only ever played the most joyful hockey, and the rest of that roster to do their thing, and remind me that I can have fun and enjoy hockey at 22, independent of whatever person I used to be at 18 and despite how different a person I have grown to be since then. There’s no “right” way to follow and enjoy hockey, and I think that I had lost sight of that. No matter what anyone tells you, if it makes you feel things it’s important.
So to Nicklas Bäckström, thank you for inadvertently, and entirely unknowingly, helping me remember my love for hockey.