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Moogs
Hates the Infotainment
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: NSA Archives
 
2004-12-20, 22:23

Rowing takes serious quad and upper body strength, no doubt. As for skating, you can make the "playing since he was 5" argument with any sport. Look at Tiger Woods.

I would also suggest that skating as if it were "second nature" is tougher than you might think, even if you've been doing it for years. While your muscles never forget a learned and repeated skill like that, it is very easy for even accomplished players to become rusty on their skates.

They call it "getting your legs under you", and quite literally that's what it means. If you skip even a few weeks and head back out to the rink and try to go full-tilt, most likely you end up on your ass in a well-played game. That or you just get left in the dust (errr, shavings).

Anyway, we all know my bias for the sport. But I will never forget (generally being able to pick up every sport I've played pretty quickly), how much respect I *immediately* gained for the better hockey players, after I suited up the first few times, thinking I would pick the sport up quickly like the others.

Hockey humbled me in a big way, and kept on humbling me. Every time I thought I had mastered enough of the skills to actually go out and compete, I got humiliated. It took basically a year of intense instruction (even though I knew how to skate generally, I didn't start playing hockey seriously until my late 20s) and three years of skating [on a regular basis] to get to the point where I don't look like a fool amongst good players. And I'm still just a role player at best on the teams I played for.

There's no other team sport I can think of that put me in my place so quickly. Even golf (a notoriously difficult "skill sport" to master) has a shorter learning curve than hockey IMO, and I carried a single digit handicap for a long time (though probably no more; I play twice a year).

I think the thing of it is, with hockey you have to do so many things well to even be good enough to stand out there with the other guys, that it's just totally impressive to me what someone at the NHL level can do.

And as a side note, most NHLers are cut in stone these days. You're not going to find many hockey players with spare tires I can tell you that. It's not like the days when Gretz was in there at 170 lbs going gonzo, either. Even the smallish guys are in the 6'0" 200 lb range. I'd say the average forward is about 6'2" 215 lbs. The more impressive specimens are 6'4"-6'5", 230 lbs. These guys are built a lot more than they were 20 years ago.

I venture to say - fighting tendancies aside - they could pound the crap out of most basketball players... though football players and baseball players are surely larger breeds these days.

...into the light of a dark black night.
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