Being given an opportunity to introduce the world of the great sport of ice hockey into the WhatCulture's vast canon of subjects didn't come without its own set of problems. Specifically, how do you start? With an explanation of the rules? Boring. Perhaps an overview of the top players and teams? Only if you already knew the game. The best fights in one of the only professional sports that condones fighting? Potentially next time... How about the way that Hollywood
has portrayed the sport? Now, we are getting somewhere.
Now to associate it with Star Wars in some way... Being a predominantly UK-based pop-culture website, it can be understandable that most of our sports coverage discusses football, what with its rabid fan base, history of passion, the occasional riot and world-wide acceptance. In North America there is a sport that has many of those characteristics and it's not American football or professional baseball. The one sport that parallels football, at least in countries in where it snows, is hockey. First lesson; hockey is not referred to as 'ice hockey' by those that know the game, much as football is not referred to as 'foot-soccer'. Just getting that out of the way. Simply stated, the goal in hockey is to beat your opponent's team by getting an object (the puck) into their net more times than they do in yours. To make the game move faster, the puck is propelled forward by a stick, the surface is covered in ice and players strap blades of steel to their feet called skates. Basically, it's football on meth, as designed by people with short tempers and limited attention spans. Due to the high rates of speed, players can either turn quickly in a circle (if they are European) or hit into each other and start again (if they are North American). As a primer to the introduction of this great game and the dysfunctional league under which the top athletes of the world come to make vast (or little) amounts of money (depending on who you talk to) a comparison of hockey's modern day history to the greatest movie franchise of all time seems as good as way as any to its introduction to WhatCulture's readership. Star Wars is a movie steeped in tradition, with heroic figures, interesting side characters, evil shadowy villains and run by a large unknown group of marketing executives who would do anything to make a buck, hiding behind the public face of the franchise, George Lucas. The National Hockey League (or NHL herewith) is a league steeped in tradition, heroic figures, interesting side characters, evil shadowy villains and run by a large group of team owners who would do anything to make a buck, hiding behind the public face of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. For example, just last year, after declaring record league-wide revenue hockey team owners unanimously decided to lock out their own players from training camp because they felt the players were making too much money, which would eventually destroy the league. This is like saying making too many Star Wars 'collectibles' would ultimately result in no more Star Wars movies. Yet Disney just bought the entire Star Wars franchise for all the money in the known world because anything with a Star Wars logo on it seems to make more money. The NHL team owners claimed to be on the cusp of bankruptcy, despite the same owners recently beginning to shell out decade-long contracts for decent players that have little collectible value, like a present day David Beckham jersey. If you look at the history of hockey compared to the original Star Wars trilogy that's not where the similarities end. Here are 8 more ways hockey is the perfect sport for Star Wars geeks, in particular because of a certain Wayne Gretzky... Click next to begin...