Aww man y'all heard of this thing called hockey??? That's this sport that people from Canada and Russia like playing. Being American, I'm not too sure about the rules, but from what I've observed it's basically a cross between figure skating and boxing. There also seems to be a racist subtext to the whole thing, after all it's essentially a bunch of violent white dudes chasing around a black object with sticks. So that prevented me from becoming a fan until I found out that there's this black dude named Wayne Simmonds who actually plays in the NHL! I don't understand why any black person would want to play hockey in the first place, but I still have to give props to Wayne Simmonds for defying the bigoted Gym Crow laws that have plagued the NHL for its entire existence. He is to hockey what Jackie Robinson was to baseball, what Flip Wilson was to cross-dressing, and what the DC Sniper was to serial-killing.
Now that the NBA doesn't exist anymore and all the best basketball players have moved to Turkey and Italy, I figured it would be a good time to cultivate an appreciation for some other sport and decided that hockey was as good an option as any other. And what better way to become a hockey fan than to plant myself in my La-Z-Boy and enjoy the NON-STOP ACTION AND HEART-STOPPING SPECTACLE THAT IS THE NHL PRESEASON?!?!?!?! My boy Wayne was doing really well, scoring in the 3rd period to tie the game up and send it into overtime (sidenote: I was really confused by this, but I guess NHL policy is to skip the 4th period in preseason games? Maybe the NBA should look into this. It would keep players fresh for the rigors of the 3 month long postseason). Anyway, no one scored in overtime so the game then went to a shootout. My boy Wyane (I will spell it that way from now on as an homage to my other boy Dwyane Wade) set up to take the first shot when, and y'all will not believe this, A MOTHERFUCKING BANANA was thrown at him from the stands! Yes y'all, in 2011, in Canada of all places, some idiot racist sports fan (Chris Moorhouse is his name according to police... the name is sort of ironic, isn't it?) threw a banana at a black hockey player. WTF? Oh, and before someone says something about how it's not necessarily racist and that maybe Moorhouse was just trying to ensure that Simmonds' potassium level was adequate so that he'd make the shot or conversely that he wanted Simmonds to miss the shot by slipping on the banana peel, let me remind y'all that, according to the 2011 NAACP Racist Fruit Index, the banana is the third most racist fruit, trailing only the watermelon and the unfortunately named negroberry. So there.
Of course I can't bring up Wyane Simmonds without also mentioning what he did a few days later, when he called renowned metrosexual and gay-rights activist Sean Avery a "fucking faggot". Avery is also a notorious asshole, even by hockey standards, so it may be difficult to feel sorry for him, but Simmonds was targeting Avery not for his assholeness but for the fact that he doesn't exactly conform to the narrow ideal of masculinity expected of NHL players. There are much better ways to retaliate against assholery than to resort to using hateful Kobeisms. Simmonds should have known better. And anyway, so what if Sean Avery were gay? I think that would be cool. He would be what John Amaechi was to the NBA, what Rob Halford was to heavy metal, and what Marcus Bachmann may one day be to presidential spouses.
