Skate Where the Puck is Going

Welcome, frosty reader, as this week we've spent some time enjoying ice-based entertainment. Yes, we completed our tour of the "Big 4" sports here in America by finally making it to a(n) (ice) hockey game!

Our previous attempt to make it to a hockey game had been curtailed by the COVIDs, but this time, nothing could stop us. California might not be considered a hotbed of hockey activity, but the local San Jose Sharks play in the NHL which is the top-level national league, even if they've not been tremendously successful for the last few years. We were frequently reminded, however, that Charles Schultz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, spent much of his life in California and in fact built a rink up in Santa Rosa.

Hockey appears to sit somewhere on the continuum between basketball and minor league baseball, in that it's got more than its fair share of daft diversions going on during intermissions (mostly involving folks from the audience being invited down onto the ice to fall over and make idiots of themselves). The Sharks make their entrance needlessly dramatic by entering the arena through a large fibreglass shark's head which looks like something a GCSE art class churned out. Given the large Canadian influence on the game (most of the players are from Canada, or the Nordics, or Eastern Europe), we got the Canadian national anthem as well as the Star Spangled Banner before the game started, and unusually we got quite a bit of audience participation for those anthems.

Now the last time I went to an ice hockey game was in Southampton in about 1986, and it's safe to say that this was a pretty different proposition. The game is almost incomprehensibly fast - players come on to the ice and sprint around for typically less than a minute before being subbed off. If anything, the crowd was more subdued than I remember from my youth in Southampton, although that might have had something to do with the state of the rink (Southampton didn't have those fancy perspex screens; just netting, which was increasingly holed, so getting a puck in the mouth was a pretty realistic proposition, especially as Southampton was so small that there were only 5 or 6 rows of seats), and the fact that in this game, San Jose conspired to concede two goals within the first 30 seconds, making winning distinctly unlikely. The Sharks did eventually manage to pull it back to 3-3, but frantic attempts to win it resulted in a lot of defensive holes and eventually a 7-3 scoreline to the visitors.

Of course, this was not our first visit to the SAP Centre, the home of the Sharks: we also came here back in April to watch an indoor football game. As a result, I had some useful experience of the culinary options, meaning that my card was marked to steer clear of the nachos. The mere mention of the word "nachos" makes Helen pull faces, mostly because of the yellow plastic liquid which the Americans insist on pouring all over them. I say yellow plastic; it's described as "cheese sauce", which is absolute confirmation that America isn't part of the EU: something with this little cheese content would have to be called "emulsified dairy residue" or similar in Europe. In fact my friend from Wisconsin, whose father is a cheese scientist (thus reinforcing many stereotypes about Wisconsin), insists there is no cheese in it at all.

I have this dream of nachos being a wonderful, near-perfect combination of tortilla chips, jalapenos and salsa, with perhaps some real cheese grated on them, but folks, if that's what you're looking for, maybe don't eat the nachos at a sporting event. Especially not at SAP Center. So this time we settled for the chicken tenders, which are pretty difficult to get wrong. I would rate them as perfectly acceptable on this occasion, if a little desiccated.

So that's it; we've done each of the Big 4 sports. I think baseball remains the favourite, with hockey and basketball a close second. I think football kinda passed us by, mostly because you spend a lot of time sat in the stadium waiting for the TV advert break to finish so the game can restart.

At the other end of the spectrum, we also went to see Stanford women's basketball team play their local rivals from Berkeley this week. What's interesting about college sport here is just how organized it is at the top level: Stanford are coached by Tara VanDerveer, the "winningest" (note to Americans: this is actually not a real word) coach in women's college basketball, and her 37-year legacy of success at Stanford means the very best players want to come and join the team. This was pretty obvious against Berkeley: the Stanford team had to be averaging about a foot taller, and were able to pass the ball around over the heads of their opponents and block shots at will. Stanford also have the good taste to apparently not sell nachos at their sporting events, so it's all good.

And to cap off a wonderful week, the Sharks even managed to win a game on Thursday. It must be Christmas time!