He remembers his goals. Both of them. You ask Kris Draper if he can describe the two times he scored during the regular season and he gushes, “Oh, yes, of course. . . . You want me to describe my assists, too?”
My philosophy of life is simple: Anything you can do lying down is OK by me.
Which is how I came to be here, Joe Louis Arena, pulling a mask over my nose and mouth and sliding into the infamous hyperbaric chamber that now sits behind the Red Wings locker room. The chamber has made quite a stir as the latest techno edge in sports. As I understand it, you put injured or fatigued hockey players inside, they breathe pure oxygen for around half an hour, and they come out as Michael Jackson.
No chance, you told yourself. No way. Nicklas Lidstrom wound up for a slap shot, just a few feet in front of the blue line, and you whispered, “Forget it,” because that’s nearly 60 feet from the net, and in a game like this — a sweaty, hard- checking, goaltenders-like-flypaper affair — a shot like that, at best, only serves to set up another, right?
Lidstrom swung anyhow. The puck went screaming. Suddenly he couldn’t see it.
“Have you ever made a winning playoff goal before?” someone would ask later.
“Never before,” he would say.
The last time the Red Wings went this far, his hair was dyed, it was red, white and brown. Looked like a half-gallon of supermarket ice cream. I felt like pouring hot fudge on his head.
“We only did that because someone said, ‘Let’s grow playoff beards,’ ” Shawn Burr now admits, “and I didn’t have enough facial hair to grow one.”
Today, seven years later, Burr has facial hair. Not a lot. Enough for a blond mustache, which, thickness-wise, is somewhere between Larry Bird and Rik Smits. In other words, not completely finished.
But then, neither is Burr.
When Connie Chung was given one of the most powerful jobs in America, she didn’t ask questions. She took it. She didn’t care that she was made coanchor of the CBS Evening News mostly because CBS wanted to beat NBC to the punch of hiring a woman. She never said, “That’s the wrong reason to hire me.”
Ratings were at stake. She took advantage.
When people hear that Dennis Rodman wants to blow his brains out, sleep with men and play his last game in the nude, they say to themselves, “Wow, that guy is crazy.”
I say, “Must be another magazine article.”
Rodman is a magazine publisher’s dream. For one thing, he’ll pose any way you want. Because magazines sell mostly by their covers, getting Dennis to photograph in hot pants and a dog collar — as he does on this week’s Sports Illustrated cover — is their idea of heaven.
In an effort to bond with our hockey friends from California, let’s try this exercise at home:
Look quickly over your left shoulder.
Now quickly over your right.
Now left, now right, now left, right, leftrightleftright . . .
Congratulations. You now know how a San Jose Shark feels.
What was the combined score from Games 1 and 2 of this playoff series? Detroit 12, San Jose 2? That’s not hockey, that’s target practice. One rumor says the Sharks left town on a plane Tuesday night.
A bigger rumor is that they were here at all.
As a man who would like to see a Stanley Cup come to Detroit before Bruce Willis makes “Die Hard IV: My Hair Falls Out,” I propose a deal with the city of Birmingham. That is the city in which the Red Wings’ goalie, Mike Vernon, lives. Birmingham.
Here is the deal:
If the Wings reach the Stanley Cup finals, you stop drilling your sewers until they capture the title, OK?
Or better yet, how about stopping right now? Today? In the second round of the playoffs? Shut ’em down. I’m serious here.
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