All It Takes Is One Player
I’ve never been a hockey fan. I’ve been around hockey my entire life – insert Canadian joke here – but I’m just not even though my Dad played, my brother played so I spent my childhood being dragged to every rink in the lower mainland, and if there was a Canucks game being played it had priority on our TV. As a side-effect of living with ardent hockey fans I could always casually name a Canuck or two, but I never sat through a game without a book in my lap and I didn’t understand how icing works. Until the Canucks acquired one particular smiley Russian player with hair like an old-fashioned boom mic and a penchant for bananas.
They say you never forget your first and Andrei Kuzmenko was mine – favourite hockey player that is. Sure, he didn’t really even play for the Canucks for very long before management gave up on him (during what I maintain to be nothing more than a sophomore slump) and traded him to the Calgary Flames, but I still watched every remaining game of the Nucks 23/24 season.
Kuzmenko was fun to watch even off the ice, something about his giggle-filled interview answers made me want to root for the guy more than a hundred dry-as-week-old-saltines Q and As with Demko (all due respect to the guy’s playing abilities). I didn’t need to understand the intricacies of power plays or board battles to enjoy watching Kuzmenko’s fist-pumping, mile-wide-grin celebrations. It was just so clear how much this guy loved playing hockey – apparently it was infectious. Even after the first season once it became clear that he wasn’t a long-term fit for the team, I still crossed my fingers and clenched fists every time he touched the puck, maybe it’s just that I like an underdog, but this guy actually made me care. And that give-a-you-know-what about this team must’ve just spread from that one player on outwards because this year? This year I’m actually excited to watch even the Kuz-less Canucks contend for the Stanley Cup, this year I’ve spent my summer with a tab open on my phone to the latest Canucks news and I will probably be able to name more than one guy that they traded for this season, and this year I’m ready to have vehement opinions about jersey colours. Something about The Kuzmeister just got me, he drew me in and got me hooked on the game in a way that two decades of constant exposure to the game never really did – even if I still don’t understand icing.