I was asked about six months ago to write a blog for Center Ice News.com. I jumped at the chance but soon found it difficult to write about the sport I love. I'm not good at writing or thinking like a sports analyst and doing recaps of games was just boring. I needed to find a way to write about hockey in a format I enjoyed.
The idea came by accident really. It was during a Sabres game that I was reading posts on their facebook page and noticed one was from a guy in Austria. I wanted to know more about him and what it was like to be a hockey fan outside of the U.S. I asked him if he would consider doing an interview with me and he thought is was a great idea. I wasn't sure it would work or lead to anything someone else would want to read about. To top it off, I had never interviewed a person in my life. We set up a date and time to chat on facebook and within the first five minutes I knew this was the way I wanted write about hockey.
I wanted to write about the human connection to hockey. In the past, the things I enjoyed writing about the most were my family and other people I knew or observed. As far as my blog went, it didn't have to always be in an interview form as long as I could write about a person and how hockey was a part of their life. I figured I could find fans from other countries, local hockey people in my area, and maybe, if I got a lucky, I might get a chance to interview a famous hockey person (I had visions of the opening scene in the movie Slap Shot).
When coming up with a title for my blog I wanted the word connection to be part of it. You can't be a Sabres fan and not know about how the word connection was used in the past. We had just lost Rick Martin (who was part of The French Connection line in Buffalo) and the title for my blog was simple... The Hockey Connection. I know it's not catchy and doesn't uses some hockey term in a witty way but it fits and I love it.
I just wanted to leave you with a few more things. I'm not claiming to be a great writer or some new sports blogger that will blow your mind with my superior talent. I'm a poor speller who would be lost without spell check, I forget the rules about when I should start a new paragraph, and I can get stuck trying to decide what word to use in a sentence. I have health issues that can keep me from posting as often as I would like and inherited the procrastination gene from my mother-Thanks Mom!. But I write from the heart and promise to get better with each article. So I hope you'll stick around and join me on this crazy journey, wherever this blog takes me.
If you have an idea or think you would make a great interview feel free to contact me. My email is thehockeyconnection@hotmail.com
