With fight night complete, when does hockey season begin?
Corpus Christi does its level best to take the H out of WPHL
with exhibition that bore little resemblance to hockey
By Bart Wright
Caller-Times Sports Editor
A year to the day after the grand experiment began,
hockey in South Texas started up all over again.
Not necessarily good hockey, mind you, but hockey all the same.
How to describe it? Does the phrase Texas-style minor league hockey conjure
up a certain rusty crosscut saw brand of cold steel on ice just a few steps removed
from a barbed-wire cage match?
It was that kind of hockey.
Wednesday's Western Professional Hockey League season-opener raised the
curtain on the second year of hockey here in the land of wide-open spaces. A handful
of IceRays players are veterans at this stuff, having skated out a year ago to
the day when they started their inaugural season against the same Austin team.
But for the owners, this wasn't 365 days after the first hockey game. For
them, it was truly a first-time experience. They've been official for several
months now and staged a couple of exhibition games a week ago, but this was the
first night their new team played for keeps; the first time they could wake up
the next morning and see an account of a fist-swinging brawl that passed for a
game in the newspaper; the first time they got to hear somebody holler about the
league's highest ticket prices, the first time somebody complained that the coffee
wasn't hot enough or the beer cold enough.
Last year they brought in Corpus Christi-native Lou Diamond Phillips to
help celebrate opening night. This year they brought in Tejano singer Jennifer
Pena.
Different strokes for different folks.
There were a couple of other added twists to the evening's entertainment.
They had a laser light show that brought back memories of its birthplace in indoor
soccer, and a few minutes later something really different - an invocation by
a Padre Island pastor that invoked Jesus' name several times and served as a kind
of ecclesiastical thumb of the nose to recent court rulings that banned such pregame
prayers at high school football games.
These IceRays think of almost everything. And they've been busy.
"These last few weeks have been murder," said general manager Bill Davidson
who looked like he was keeping an eye out for any wrongdoers, dressed up in all
black cowboy-badguy kind of outfit complete with black boots, a long black coat
and a big black cowboy hat.
"I'm trying to live up to my image in the paper," Davidson with a laugh,
referring to a lawsuit that was filed against him, then dropped earlier this year.
"Seriously, it's been a lot of work getting ready for this. We have new
seats (about 30 crammed into the northwest corner of the building), some new suites
(high above the west end of the arena), and about a thousand things to do every
day that you can't seem to get to."
That would include the much-anticipated expansion of the press box area
that never materialized as promised, but nobody cares about wretches of the working
media.
'Better' team a no-show
The IceRays have enough to worry about with what's
on the ice, never mind the seating area and the press box.
"This is a better team this year,' said Davidson, himself a former player,
"a much better team. The word has gotten out about Corpus Christi, what a great
place it is and what great fans we have. This year we just had a much better choice
of players than we had a year ago."
Maybe those much-better players are stuck in Mystery, Alaska and haven't
arrived yet.
Maybe they're here and they just haven't had their games arrive yet.
Whatever the case, the team that showed up in Memorial Coliseum Wednesday
night in IceRays uniforms was a vulgar representation of what good hockey is supposed
to be, even good minor league hockey.
Last year's Taylor Hall-coached team played a nervous opener and lost to
the Ice Bats, 4-3. Later in the season the IceRays developed the graceless habit
of tossing the puck around so carelessly in their own end of the ice you'd have
thought they were playing blindfolded. That prolonged inability to take care of
the puck, combined with their penchant for taking senseless penalties and starting
fights with all the sophistication of the Hanson brothers managed to bury the
team in a heap of fat lips and swollen goals.
Sinking to a new depth
If opening night was any indication, this team seems
to have taken it to a new, lower level.
Granted, their home-ice surface isn't conducive to freewheel skating and
fancy passes.
It is, however, just the right size for a good, old-fashioned alley fight.
If nothing else, you have to credit them for building the right kind of
team for the playing surface. If the old pitching-and-defense Astros were built
right for the Astrodome, if Lombardi's grind-it-out Packers were tailor made for
the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field, then these swing-first IceRays seem a perfect
fit for that musty, loveable dump they call home.
Geoff Bumstead started the evening's first fight not long after the Ice
Bats scored the first goal. Austin fired six past goalie Jason Genik in the first
period, five of them without a Corpus Christi player within a wild-haymaker's
distance. The IceRays followed the puck around like five year-olds playing soccer
and went after Austin players like thugs in a dark alley.
Maybe that's what they want, a team that fights first and checks the scoreboard
after the bell rings.
On first glance, it might be enough to keep the folks coming who want to
see fists flying in the night.
At some point though, you sort of wish they'd send out a team that wants
to play hockey.
