LA Daily: Miniature Golf and the Goddamn Volcano Hole

Having realized my own creative limitations, my contributions to the LA Daily will now be bi-weekly, instead of weekly. Let’s all celebrate with this week’s story, which appears to be about playing minigolf with my wife.

“Fucking Pagoda hole. That was bullshit. The volcano hole will be the great equalizer!” I declared.

She laughed as she teed up.

I looked around and tried to overlay my memory of this particular course over what I saw. My ponds were clean, my fountains were blue-tinted geysers, my little boats and seaside town didn’t have peeling paint or broken windows. The carpet on each hole was smooth and pristine, and the arcade inside the castle behind us was filled with dozens of different video games and pinball machines.

“I can’t separate how this place really looked in the ’80s from how I want to remember it,” I said. “I wonder if I’ve just idealized it, or if it really did look and feel fitter, happier, and more productive when I was a kid.”

She drew her putter back, and left herself in as good a position as any to get the inevitable six on the goddamn volcano hole. Behind us, the freeway was a wall of white noise, occasionally broken by the rumbling of a downshifting semi. The pond to our left was covered with a blanket of brown foam, broken by the nozzle of a dry fountain.

“Of course it looked better when you were a kid,” she said, “it was new then.”

“I can’t believe I never thought of that before. You’re exactly right.” I put my golf ball, yellow and worn, on the middle tee, feeling heat radiate off the heavy black rubber against the back of my hand. A gentle breeze carried children’s laughter and the unmistakable smell of that particular kind of pizza they only serve at minigolf courses past us.

I whacked my ball down the fairway. It rolled up the little volcano at the end and down one side, coming to rest in a corner next to some pine needles.

“I’m really bad at this,” I said.

“Don’t beat yourself up. I hear the volcano hole is the great equalizer.”

I gave her the stink eye as we walked down to finish the hole.

When I’m the king of the world, I’m going to buy a city block, and convert the whole thing to an 80s fun zone. It will have a classic arcade with vintage games, a single-screen movie theater, a waterslide, and a perfectly-maintained minigolf course.

my god, it’s full of unicorns

A little known fact about me: I'll do just about whatever my friend Chris tells me to do, just because I want to be popular*, so a half an hour ago, when he told Twitter to go to espn.com and type the Konami code into the search box, I stopped performing life-saving CPR on a hobo and did exactly that.

Here's what ensued:

Every time you hit a key after pressing enter, a new unicorn would pop up. It was so fucking glorious, I made sure it was the last thing the hobo saw before he died, because I knew he would have wanted it that way.

Whoever wrote that code deserves a medal. Whoever forced them to take the code out (almost as quickly as it was discovered) deserves a boot to the head**.

*not true.
** and one more for Jenny and the wimp.

goalies gone wild

This seems like an appropriate way to finish the week.

And, speaking strictly as a goaltender, I can say with a completely straight face that every single one of these goalies was entirely justified and did nothing wrong. Ever.

(via puckdaddy, which every hockey fan should read, every day.)

HOLY CHRISTABLES, @STEPTO! KINGS WIN

The Kings and Stars played a game tonight that could best be described thusly:

INT. Hockey Arena.

TURCO

No goals for you! You come back, ONE YEAR!

QUICK

NO YOU CAN NOT HAZ GOALZ. NOT YOURS!

Seriously, the goalies were insane. So the game goes to overtime in a scoreless tie (which delights my inner goalkeeper) and ends up in a shootout.

The Kings’ leading scorer, Anze Kopitar scores a sick, sick, sick goal on Marty Turco, but Jack Johnson can’t seal the deal, and Dallas ties it. Here comes Justin Williams for the Kings, who is 0 for 7 in his career in shootouts.

I prepare myself for yet another Kings loss.

Williams takes a weak shot, but somehow Turco (who has been damn flawless and just a MONSTER the whole game) ends up sliding into his own net, taking the puck with him.

There’s a review, and the Kings win. Quick gets the shutout he deserves, and I swear to baby Jesus, the whole team better buy him all the beers he can drink after the game, because he’s the only reason they ever had a chance in this one and we all know it.

Here, now, is the whole point of this stupid post:

My friend Stephen is a Stars fan, which makes watching Kings v. Stars games infinitely more fun than they ever were before, especially since we have Twitter to do things like this, and like this:

LA Times: through a goalie’s eyes

Ask any goalie, in any sport that has them, and they’ll tell you about The Secret Goalie Brotherhood or The Keeper’s Club or some variation of that theme. I didn’t know it existed when I started playing, but once you’re in, you’re in for life, and it’s wonderful. Whether it’s a little kid on a pond, an adult in a beer league, a Vezina trophy winning veteran, or a 22 year-old playing his rookie season, we all have this mystical sense of kinship that unites us. When I was 17 or 18, I met Kelly Hrudey at Tip-a-King, and asked him to sign my goalie glove. He took it, and said, “You’re a goalie, too? That’s great. How’s your game?”

I couldn’t believe he’d said “You’re a goalie, too,” and not “you’re a goalie?” so I just mumbled something about how it was okay, but I wasn’t as good as he was. I’m sure he forgot about me the second I walked away, but I’ll never forget it. I met other goalies who played in the NHL, and it was the same every single time.

If my post about Open Net piqued your interest in goaltending, you’ll probably enjoy this story from today’s Los Angeles Times about what it’s like to stand between the pipes in an actual NHL game:

Large, often toothless men wielding sticks routinely blaze toward you, hoping to jam a fast, hard hockey puck an inch from your groin and into the net.

Sometimes, they come alone, with speed-of-sound slap shots that bend and blur. Sometimes, they come in packs. It’s your job to stop them.

You contort your body: pretzel-like, crab-like, spider-like. You push, pull, fight, claw, slash, and take beatings. All game long, you stop shot after shot. Then a puck caroms off an opponent’s helmet. Goal. Grim.

“It’s all very black and white. . . . Maybe that’s what draws people to it,” observed Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick, who is 23 and a bright spot in a season that has offered a nice surprise: Though fading fast, the Kings mathematically remain in the playoff hunt.

Quick was supposed to be in the minors. Instead, he became a midseason call-up who thrived. He’s the first to admit that he’s no Martin Brodeur, who recently notched his record 552nd win. But Quick is sharp, humble and — here’s a critical part — reflective.

“Make the big save that wins the game, you might not be the hero,” he said. “Don’t make the save. Lose the game, and if you’re feeling like it’s all your fault, yeah, it’s like you’re on an island.”

For the rest of the column, Quick and sportswriter Kurt Streeter watch the third period of a recent Kings game against the Minnesota Wild, and Quick tells him what’s going through his head at various points in the action. While I read it, my heart began to pound with the memory of third period adrenaline that I haven’t felt in over ten years.

The Kings aren’t going to make the playoffs this season, but they have the makings of a team that will go deep for years, maybe even as early as next season, and I so dearly wish I could afford season seats again. I’m not an expert, but I think having Jonathan Quick and Erik Ersberg in goal is a huge reason they can become contenders.

Resolved: I will play ice hockey again before the end of this year, and I accept that I won’t be able to tend goal the way I did when I was 18. I just miss it too much to keep not playing.