A blur of Red & White
On Tuesday night, I attended the Detroit Red Wings’ preseason intrasquad scrimmage, the Red & White Game and had a great time. My photos are here.
Some bullet points from the night: (Keep reading…)
I’m planning to attend tonight’s Red & White Game, the preseason intrasquad game between the members of the Detroit Red Wings. I hope to post some twitter and flickr content during the game. Watch for a wrapup post here afterwards.
Wayne Gretzky is the one who is most often labelled with the words “hockey ambassador,” but Modano was nearly as great of a statesman. The similarities to The Great One didn’t end there. Just as Gretzky’s half-tucked-in jersey would become his sartorial trademark, Modano’s loose and oversized sweater — puffed up with air as he power-turned, billowing behind him like a superhero cape or an American flag as he blazed down the ice — is one of hockey’s more enduring images. And while Gretzky remains the game’s leading scorer, Modano has more points than any other American player. … Read More
(via Grantland)
The first newspaper I read seriously and regularly was the Wall Street Journal. A test preparation company gave me a free print subscription, and I milked it as long as I could by doing things like stopping delivery when I was away, which had the effect of tacking more issues onto the end of the subscription. When it finally dried up, a friend on his way out at Dow Jones, the family driven organization that used to control the Journal before News Corp took over, lined me up with an online subscription, which carried me another year or so. By that time, newspaper websites were in full bloom, and a subscription really didn’t mean anything. When the family split and Rupert Murdoch took over, a digital lockdown followed closely on the heels of a substantial (if sometimes misguided) increase in content. No worry, though, as a free and easy workaround makes it simple to get behind the Journal’s paywall. All you have to do is…. Well, I don’t want my cell phone hacked, but, as Jimmy Cliff said, you can get it if you really want, and frankly, it isn’t even that tough.
Uh, hockey? Right. The WSJ has a regular feature called The Weekend Interview, a full-page study of one person, accompanied by an illustrated portrait by Ken Fallin. For reasons that make sense to me, Fallin inspired my photographic selection for this post, above. Because ALDLAND is neither the Journal nor The National Sports Daily, though, more often than not, the interviews are going to have to be imagined.
Chris Osgood is the right subject for this site’s first Weekend Interview. When the Detroit Red Wing goalie retired last month, my immediate reaction registered on the sadness side of the line. It wasn’t totally shocking, although I had thought he’d be around another year or two, especially given Captain Lidstrom’s decision to stay on. And Osgood is likeable, if not a perpetual fan favorite (but few goalies are). Osgood also is the type of player for whom the immediate hall of fame question is more than an element of the motions through which to go the media has obligated itself for every retiree; for him, it’s a real question, an interesting question, a debatable question, and possibly ridiculous that it is a question at all, and like Jim Gray, I promise I’ll promise you I’ll get to that question right away. Here goes… Keep reading…
Last night, radio and television host Jim Rome lamented the fact that, following the NFL’s recently resolved labor conflicts, the “NBA is running the same playbook.” I understand that, for people like Rome, whose livelihood depends on there being actual NFL and NBA seasons for them to talk and twit about, even the specter of a season cancelled is a valid reason to fret. But for those of us with a little more distance from the sport, the NFL’s off-season negotiations were just that– off-season negotiations. Sure, Tennessee’s Bud Adams had to formally hang onto Vince Young a few months longer than he wanted, but nobody else was making moves either, and VY landed in what now may be the illest of delphs with no more skin of the Titans’ backs, and the season will start on time, this compressed free-agency period is more exciting than infrequent summer updates (“Sportscenter’s top story for June 21, third-string DT to K.C.”), and most of the players held training camps on their own despite their complaints in the negotiations about having to do off-season training camps (and there’s no need to flood the comments about cancelling the Hall of Fame Game). I’m not saying we ought to do this every year, but I am saying that if you tune back into the NFL when it’s supposed to be getting underway again, things look pretty normal. Keep reading…
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