Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

There are many reasons why I consider hockey to be the perfect sport - it’s cold (I hate the heat), fast, graceful, physical, and it has great traditions.  I love the fact that the team that wins the Stanley Cup hoists it for laps around the ice, and every player gets to take Lord Stanley's Cup with him for a week.  But you have to win it first, or you can’t touch it. 

As the NCAA minor league professional basketball tournament comes to its finale (before all the players flunk out of college), and the basketball and hockey postseasons are about to get underway along with the baseball regular season, I’d like to put in a pitch for what I think is the coolest tradition in all of sport - the hockey handshake. 

After a playoff series is decided, no matter how nasty the games have been, both sides line up and exchange handshakes.  Every player acknowledges his counterpart on the opposing team in a solemn act of gallantry and esprit de corps

This stands in sharp contrast to other sports.  In baseball, the losing team sulks in their own dugout and cries for the camera.  In basketball, the losers put towels over their heads and sob while the winners thump their chests, climb on tables, and otherwise strut like peacocks amid a crush of people streaming onto the court. 

(March Madness Post-script:  I noticed that the UCLA and Florida players exchanged a reluctant "hockey handshake" after Florida's trouncing of UCLA in the Final Four, though some players were wearing towels on their heads.  Hopefully, this practice will trickle up from the semi-pros to the NBA since half of Florida's team is likely to turn pro next year.)

In football, the winners try to get the best “I'm going to Disneyland” shot with their helmets off while the cameras are still rolling and their agents are renegotiating their contracts. 

Only in hockey, the fastest and most physical sport of all, where the players are actually armed with lethal weapons, do the teams line up to shake hands.

Canadians invented hockey.