tonight is the nhl season finale for the nashville predators our hometown team. like many of the fan base for the preds i too am a person who had a team that i cheered for long before the predators existed and before my move to nashville. my team is the detriot red wings, which happens to be the team that they are playing this evening.
no i never lived in detroit, but my red wings loyalties lie deep within my adolescence.
i tell people that "i did my impressionable years in the south and productive years in the north." then i tell that i am originally from birmingham alabama. born there and raised till i was about 12. it was then in the '85 that my dad's company transferred us to new jersey. from there i finished out my high school years and what i call my renaissance period as well.
as a southerner moving to the north i didn't like the north and i wanted nothing to do with it. however, as a twelve year old you want friends and you have to do what the friends are doing. what were these twelve year olds doing? they played hockey. so my brother and i played hockey. we weren't that good since we hadn't seen hockey let alone played it (this was before cable tv was prevalent and hockey on atleast every night of the week). so i played goalie and shawn played defenseman.
the one thing a proper hockey player needed was a jersey. as a southerner moving to the north i didn't like the north and wanted nothing to do with it. however, i needed a jersery but i'd be damned if i were to get a jersey like all these other northerners. so instead of the philadelphia flyers i picked out the detroit red wings and my bro picked out the calgary flames. shawn did okay, the flames just won a stanley cup and he had joey mullin on his jersey who was a star within the league. me, well... the red wings were a bottom of the barrel team and i picked greg stefan for my jersey who had only a real short stint of actual play with the red wings. he had a pretty high goals against average for that day and time.
greg didn't last too long in the league, atleast as a starter. luckily i wasn't the ridicule, but i was a regular joke with my jersey not to mention my team stunk. true to any adolscent i talked back "your murray craven jersey stinks too!" with made for more fun and planted deep seeds of loyalty.
it must have because they are the only team that i will follow anymore. luckily it's easy to do that as they've become increasingly successful winning a host of stanley cups and is always the perennial power. funny note, i am constantly called a 'band wagoner' being a wings fan. to this i grab one of my friends who is closest and tell them to share with this person how it is not possible for me to be a band wagoner.
coming to tonight though, i've become quite the preds fan. i take in games when i can, most recently last saturday night. i know the players pretty well. i love to cheer for them when they play other teams. but can i give up the team of my childhood and cheer for the preds? i just don't know if i can do that. then again, the red wings are not with me day in day out. i don't listen to their players radio shows. i only see them once or maybe twice a year at best... so i'm stuck on who to cheer for.
