San Francisco

According to a recent census, there are officially three redheads in the state of California. And, just my luck, I got to go to a hockey game with two of them. As you can see in the pic below, two redheads and two deadheads (follickly speaking). Left to right that’s Poppy Loopy, Sweet Loo, Rooster Cogburn and yours truly carrying an unprecedented amount of heft just so I won’t feel so out of place in the super-size-me U.S. of A.

The Sweet One is incandescent. He rotates between Wanchai and Polk Street. One minute he’s in Hong Kong, the next he’s lounging in his palatial San Francisco digs. And yes San Francisco, Sweet Loo is indeed bi. Bi-coastal, that is.

This is a picture from high above Loo-ville somewhere off Polk Street.

Things have certainly changed in this hood, at least they have since the close to 20 years ago when I last lived in San Francisco. Polk Street was a tad rough, in an S & M way. Now it’s full of hopped up java hounds hoping to catch a sideways glance of their chiselled reflection in a shiny hubcap or two. There are scads of trendy bistros and a couple of chi-chi health clubs, which are magnets to the legions of shapely female hipsters uniformly clad in black-tights. But there is little eye contact from most folk on Polk. Where Sweet Loo, the merry fartmaker, fits in to this gentrified genome is anybody’s guess. Ah, but that’s far too much introspection for this hillbilly cat.

Fortunately, we found a pretty damn crisp sports bar no more than a minute or two from the Sweet One’s pad. There had to be about 20 TV’s beaming and they were featuring everything from high def college hockey to a command performance of Snooky and his paunchy mate’s throwing darts somewhere south of Newcastle in what passes for riveting viewing in England.

Back to the puck. As mentioned earlier, we did make it to a hockey game in beautiful downtown San Jose between my once beloved Chicago Blackhawks and the local Sharks. The Sharks are a very good team who are well supported (way too much money in the Silicon Valley). The Sharks still seem to be missing some sizzle and hockey is hardly on the radar in the Bay Area, anyway. So it’s no surprise that The San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper whose mediocrity has clearly stood the test of time yet is still the largest rag in the region, no longer has a full time Sharks beat writer.

And it’s also no surprise that both Poppy Loopy and Sweet Loo were attending their first live NHL game while the Rooster claims to be a long time Rangers fan, which is not to be confused with an actual hockey fan.

So it was with great relish that I had to tutor my less enlightened friends, although Sweet Loo claims I grew impatient when he asked me if there was a reason why three guys jumped over the boards together to replace three guys coming off the ice. I told him they had something called forward lines in hockey (a center and two wingers) and defence pairings (self explanatory). He didn’t like my tone and claimed that the players could hear me ridiculing him. Here’s why:

We sat in the first row behind the players bench. But eventually Loo was feeling so emboldened by my hockey tutorials that he started giving a hand to Sharks coach Ron Wilson (in pic above), helping him with line changes and the like. Well it was all so much fun, don’t you know, that we had to order us up a slew of beers and get blind, which was very appropriate considering we couldn’t see a damn thing on the ice with all the players and coaches in front of us anyway.


The funniest part was watching the Sharks Jeremy Roenick, who is about 108 years old and was once a colossal star for the Hawks back in the 80's and 90's, playing about two minutes all game and getting roughed up when he was out there.















I know most of you have no clue who this guy is, or was. But I always liked JR and was shocked to see him sitting one foot away on the other side of the glass. I thought he had retired three years ago and judging by his lack of ice time, the Sharks coach must have figured he had retired as well.

Maybe we were having too much fun, I don’t know, but towards the end of the first period I saw the Hawks Martin Havlat, a paragon of futility because he is the teams highest paid player and also their laziest, standing in front of the Sharks bench and staring right at me. Next thing I know out of the corner of my eye comes a flying puck heading right towards us. Now there were 17,496 people at the game and only one got hit in the head with a puck. Any guesses who? No, not me. Despite my altered state I have been to enough pewee and junior B games over the years to know that you duck first and ask questions later. But Sweet Loo, well this was his first game.

The puck had been deflected up over the bench and came screaming down right on us. Loo saw it at the last second and managed to get his hand up to his coconut in time to take the brunt of the impact. But it still hurt. I picked the puck up and thought, wow, first time I got a puck at an NHL game. Stood up and waved it at the crowd, looking for my TV time, while medics rushed in. But next to Loo was some kid with his dad and the most longing look in his eyes. He was almost tearing up. I asked Loo if there was any blood and he said no. So I gave the puck to the kid. Really, I had no friggin’ choice because half the arena was watching us now on the Jumbotron.


We said goodbye to Sharks captain and former MVP Joe Thornton and joined Poppy and the Rooster in some primo seats five rows up from the ice that had been occupied by a couple of techno-corpo-Silicon Valley-wankers from Google or Yahoo who knew nothing about hockey, never even bothered to look at the ice, but still had to put in a token appearance anyway and were gone two minutes into the second period.

These are odd fans in San Jose. By the third period of a tie game, they were kind of quiet. But not me. I was up on my feet giving the Hawks shit for most of the game and god knows they deserved it. Dainty Duncan Keith, the Hawks lone all-star and a smooth skating defenceman who is adverse to any bodily contact it seems, kept passing up open looks at the net to make the perfect pass. I couldn’t take it any longer and finally stood up and yelled at him: “Shoot the puck, you can’t score unless you shoot the damn thing!” Well of course he heard me because the joint was basically silent and everyone sitting around us was staring at me. “Look at that crazy guy, drinking beer, screaming and yelling. Must think he’s at a hockey game or something.” Sure enough, next time down ice dainty Duncan tees up a shot from the point right in front of us and pounds in a goal to tie up the game. Naturally I had to take a bow and was going to go check with the official scorer to see if I got an assist on the goal. Some knucklehead two rows up started yelling “Shoot the puck, you can’t score unless you shoot.” And he started laughing and so did everybody around him. And he kept it up and kept it up and kept it up. ZZZZZZZZZZZ. Hey junior, I told him, it was funny two weeks ago. Let it go. The Rooster said no problem on the Hawks goal, “We’re still going to beat you.” We?

The teams went to overtime, then a shoot-out which the Sharks won because the Hawks suck. Oh and 108 year old Jeremy Roenick scored the winner for the Sharks in the shoot out. Ha. Damn.


But a good time was had by all, with Poppy and Sweet Loo saying this was the most fun they had ever had at a sporting event. OK, enough puck. The Hawks suck. But you already know that, don’t you?