Thursday Morning Cupcheck: Why I Hate 1987

by Todd Maternowski

Hola mis pavos grandes: here's hoping the near-lethal doses of tryptophan Big Thanksgiving has put in your mouthful of turkey isn't causing you to drool cranberry-flavored saliva all over your monitors. As you know, last week we featured A Very Extra Special Trade Edition of the Dallas Stars: this week, I was planning on writing An Even Extra-er Special Commemorative Thanks-giving Column, in which I share plump rays of sunshine with you and yours.

But then I realized: I am not a dipwad. So my annual What I'm Thankful For column (#14: Walter Sobchak and Sexual Healing) will have to wait. Regular readers should be thankful for that.

Rather, it's obviously time to talk disparagingly about the distant past. Specifically, ancient times, when Chinamen couldn't vote, keys and kites powered our national electrical grid and hockey was ruined forever. I'm talking, of course, about 1987.

Previously, historians agreed that the worst year for hockey was 772 B.C., when Sargon the Great instituted an Ur-wide crackdown on obstruction and introduced the Stoneout, the goalie-pummelling precursor to the shootout (bronze padding was not available until nearly four hundred years later). Another historical low came in 1481, when Russian league players, faced with a crippling ice shortage, were forced to skate over rinks of plague-ridden serfs.

But those dark times pale in comparison to 1987, which will someday go down in infamy as the Worst Ever Year for Hockey, the year when the effin' Edmonton Oilers had to go and ruin a perfectly good thing.

Previous to the Oilers, hockey was a fast-moving, pay-$20-for-the-whole-seat-even-though-you'll-only-use-the-edge type of pastime. But Edmonton --no doubt following the lead of Kylie Minogue, who released the Oilers theme anthem The Loco-Motion that year-- would unleash something even more insidious, something even more loco, on the unsuspecting hockey fan populace: ridiculous expectations.

The Oilers scored goals in huge bunches that year (yet, surprisingly, were a distant second in the team scoring race to the Calgary Flames, who also won the President's Trophy and pretty much get no love from amateur hockey historians whatsoever) -- but even I could score on some of those defenses back then. And I have to hang onto the walls to avoid falling down (which would technically make me an 1980s defenseman). Just check out these ridiculous highlights of blindfolded goalies and trees painted in team colors pretending to be defensemen, with added bonus of commentary in French.

Small wonder Twisted Sister called it quits that year.

Since then, the league has had a serious problem: trying to remember what real hockey looked like before hokey hockey took over our TV sets. But the damage had already been done: a tiny, impressionable young buck by the name of Gary Bettman at one point came to the realization: "the NBA is high-scoring right now, but I bet if I introduced a bunch of bullshit penalties, and forbade team defense, the resulting half-court game would no doubt result in twice the scoring, and twice the ticket sales! And expanding to non-traditional basketball markets would introduce the sport of basket-ball to generations of people who had never even heard of the NBA. But I must wait here in my dark cell and learn from Papa Stern, biding my time until it is my turn to run the NBA"

I have it on record that Bettman said these words aloud while listening to his favorite record of 1987, Bruce Willis' The Return of Bruno.

Since then, we've had legions of morons pining for the "old days" of 1987, writing endlessly about how hockey needs to increase scoring (funny how they always leave out the insanely entertaining number of bench-clearing brawls in the 80s) in order to solidify it's #4 ranking among North American sports. Secretly, these hockey Einsteins probably also feel Hollywood will never attain the heights it once did until multiple sequels of Moonstruck dominate the shelves, and bands like Winger can once again be signed to serious recording contracts involving non-ironic, actual money.

Truth be told, it's time for hockey writers and NHL commissioners to shut the F up about 1987, already. 2-1 hockey games are far more exciting than 9-7 cheap-goal-fests. If you really want players to score 200 points in a season, have each team pick one superstar, give them a red jersey with the name G-R-E-T-Z-K-Y stitched on the back, and forbid the opposing team from checking or hitting said player in any way shape or form. Then watch the cheap, boring points accumulate, and the cheap scoring records of yesteryear fall like this 1987 icon's career.

That's it for this heart-warming edition of the Cupcheck. Tune in next week when I break down the Dallas Stars: the Beverly Hills Chihuahua of the NHL.