Long before Up The Pucks existed, HockeyPunx was the undisputed source for all things punk rock and hockey. Born in early September of 2009, HockeyPunx was a blog with big aspirations. Dreams of regular news-posts, analysis, interviews, and a general exploration of this strange but fascinating link between punk rock and hockey were just the beginning of what was imagined for the site.

Other ideas were entertained. Some, like a web forum were kids could get together and belittle each other’s tastes in punk music and hockey allegiances were executed with some success. Others, like a podcast discussing punk rock and hockey, were stolen by a rebel faction of visitors to the site, and branched off into its own entity altogether.

Enter Up The Pucks. While KW (of imadethismistake fame) and I were merely kicking the tires of the idea of a punk rock/hockey podcast, discussing primitive plans on our site, some kids that had a lot more drive, a better plan, and much more time on their hands went out and got the job done without us. Peter and Brandon launched Up The Pucks with their very first episode in September 2010.

It didn’t take long for UTP to take off. The podcast medium lent itself to a much more captive audience than the old written word that a simple blog allowed for, and Up The Pucks managed to pick up quite the following. And success begets success: Having a real audience helped UTP net big name guests on their show, like ESPN Insider’s/Washington Post’s Neil Greenberg, or Puck Daddy’s  Greg Wyshynski, and having big name guests on their show helped UTP retain a real audience.

For a while, a lazy HockeyPunx and a motivated Up The Pucks were able to coexist. Though the blog medium is certainly not as attractive as a podcast, the archaic written word had a home on the HockeyPunx blog, while fans of the auditory world found comfort in Up The Pucks. But eventually, despite the best efforts of writers like Bryan, HockeyPunx just couldn’t compete. Updates were too infrequent to retain an audience, and in the event there was an actual article posted to the site, it was often half-assed and uninspired.

Soon, HockeyPunx.com simply became a weekly reminder to listen to that week’s episode of Up The Pucks. The blog failed to attract any new writers, and without real content it failed to attract any real audience.

With HockeyPunx barely surviving on life support, Peter informed me a couple months ago of his intentions to add a motivated collection of writers to the Up The Pucks family, and launch a regularly updated UTP blog. With an audience already built in from their podcast sucess, and actual unique and fresh content already in the pipeline, I knew Peter’s plans were the final nail in HockeyPunx.com’s coffin. Today, the revamped Up The Pucks site, blog and all, has been launched.

An idea that HockeyPunx.com attempted to pioneer and innovate has been surpassed by the efforts of its successor. HockeyPunx has become the MySpace to Up The Pucks’ Facebook.

Now, although Peter and Brandon are undeniably two of the biggest dream-killing shitheads that you’ll ever meet, I certainly can’t blame them entirely for the death of HockeyPunx. As mentioned above, content and quality fell dramatically, and I was clearly not motivated enough to even attempt to bring it back to life prior to Peter’s news. Had I invested the time and effort to build an exciting HockeyPunx experience, today’s post might go a little different. Perhaps an announcement of the new incarnation of Up The Pucks that welcomed a new era of corroboration between our two sites. Two different takes on a shared idea. Regrettably, I can’t pretend this to be the reality.

While I do plan to participate in the new Up The Pucks, stopping by occasionally to write an article here and there, perhaps being invited on to future podcast episodes, I cannot say that HockeyPunx can reasonably coexist. There’s simply no room for it in a world where Up The Pucks does everything HockeyPunx was envisioned as doing (and more).

With that in mind, consider this HockeyPunx’s eulogy. It’s been an interesting couple of years, and I’ve made some good friends through the endeavor. I’m excited to see where the legacy of what I created takes Up The Pucks, and I’m excited to be a part of the new version of UTP (even if marginally so).

I’ll leave this post on the main page of the HockeyPunx website for now, and eventually I imagine the domain name will simply redirect to the UpThePucks.com website. I can’t imagine finding a better use for such a domain name, but if for some reason something comes up, perhaps Up The Pucks will keep you up to date on any new endeavors.

With that, I leave you with the best of HockeyPunx. I’m determining the “best of” by a variety of factors, from most read stories to simply my personal taste. They’re posted here in no particular order.

Enjoy.

Some of my personal highlights, written by me:

• Reason #379 why Hockey is better than Baseball
• 3 Doors Down: How the NHL got it wrong during All Star Weekend
• Is Going Back to Winnipeg Really All That Wise?
• Dear NHL, Nickelback Sucks.

Everything Bryan ever wrote for us:

• Attitude: the Story of Eddie Shore.
• Humble Magnificent: the story of Jacques Plante.
• The Boy Done Good: the story of Lanny McDonald.
• Raw Power: the story of Gordie Howe.
• White Boy: the herstory of Abby Hoffman.

Submissions from assorted other writers:

• Happy Birthday Wayne: Kevin Smith on Gretzky, Hockey, and Life stolen from Kevin Smith, with intro by Jer
• Affirmative Action for Women in Hockey by Becca
• Thoughts on the Loss of Brendan Burke stolen from Wrap Around Curl, initially without permission
• On Being in an Elevator with Teemu Selanne by Becca

HockeyPunx has made us of other social networks to help promote our small niche community. As you know, we’re on both facebook and twitter (please go like/follow us on those networks!)

We decided to plunge deeper in the social networking world by joining tumblr a few days ago.

Click Here for HockeyPunx on Tumblr

Please follow along with us on tumblr. We’ll be using tumblr as a microblog. It will in no way replace this main site, but we will let you know on our tumblr microblog when we’ve updated back here on our mainpage. We’ll also be posting cool things we find around the web that might be of interest to hockey and punk fans, but that don’t merit a full writeup here on the mainpage. It’s worth following if you like what we do here.

Don’t forget the other social networks we have a small home on.

It’s the offseason, so in lieu of watching hockey, I’ve taken up reading about hockey.

After finishing up another one of his books not too long ago, I just recently picked up Dave Bidini’s The Best Game You Can Name. Dave Bidini is a former founding member of the indie rock band Rheostatics (and currently in BidiniBand). And although he doesn’t do it with a punk slant as we might hope for here, he does do a great job of connecting music and hockey. And that is exactly why I thought I’d share this passage with you here on HockeyPunx:

“…Chris [Brown, ex-keyboardist for Barenaked Ladies,] told me that he realized how much professional hockey players in the 1960s and 1970s were like musicians: both took long bus rides, earned sparse incomes, spent endless time in bars, stayed in countless bland hotels, ingested a mountain of bad food, and played to half-full houses. All of a sudden, I felt closer to players who once seemed as unknowable as the cosmos.”

Replace “bus rides” with “van rides,” and “bland hotels” to “friends’ houses, sleeping on the couch,” and take “half-full houses” literally as opposed to using it as a theatre term for the audience section of a big venue, and you’ve definitely just described the link between punk bands on the road and 1960s-70s hockey players.

Is it October yet?

Up The Pucks! cohost and Iafrate frontman Peter Evans let us know a few days back that his band has some classy looking shirts available.

If you like Iafrate, or the Washington Capitals, or bands that blatantly infringe NHL copyright to produce their own logo, you should definitely get one of these:

The black shirts are $8 (plus shipping), white shirts have two-color ink and so cost a little more at $12 (plus shipping). Shipping will vary based on your location, but should be about $2 domestic. If you’re interested, contact Iafrate frontman Peter Evans by email at ninety7poundwuss [AT] hotmail.com, or on twitter @Real_PeterEvans

While you’re at it, go download their free EP from Anti-Creative Records.

Go listen to the latest UP THE PUCKS! to hear me drop in for a brief segment to discuss the Plan-It-X Fest and some hockey. I’m throwing a couple pictures into this post because I discussed them on the show.

Listen to the podcats for some context.

Lines were drawn at PIX Fest. We, as staff, were told to strictly enforce this rule!

This is me and Doug, cohost of Puck Podcast. Good Hockey/Punk juxtoposition with my Ergs tshirt and his North Stars sweater!

2011 NHL Stanley Cup Champions

http://www.facebook.com/HockeyPunx

So we found out that all of the Kids These Days™ are using something called “the faces book” to have sex with each other and kill their parents. We decided maybe it was time to join the year 2011 and make a Facebook page as well, roughly 30 years after every other entity has made a facebook presence for itself.

So please go “Like” us, because that’s the only way we can value our selfworth in the digital age.

And speaking of being social, don’t forget that we’ve been on Twitter basically since we started this site, and you should already be following us over there.

http://twitter.com/HockeyPunx

I dislike greeting card companies.  I think that they are an evil embodied only by the cardboard rectangles that we shuffle around the world like money, germs, or, more likely, money coated in germs.  To this extent I tend to take issue with holidays defined by greeting cards such as Mother’s and Father’s days and Valentine’s day.  Also, Children’s day, the hell’s up with that? 

So, a while back I lost a bet to Peter from the podcast Up The Pucks. Here, finally, is me paying off the bet.

By the statue of Wild Wing

In front of the Honda Center entrance

Related:

• Wait, you were SERIOUS about that bet?
• UpThePucks (Blackhawks) vs HockeyPunx (Ducks): The Bet

Jer and I were going with his parents to see the Ducks get shut out by the Red Wings. Of course that’s not what we were thinking at the time the highlight of this story takes place, but it was kind of in the back of our minds. Jer’s parents have knee issues and so we get to use the elevators to get to our fourth level, sometimes one row before the last, seats. We’d had a cool encounter in the elevator before– a few weeks earlier we got to ride up to the press box and before the guy who was getting out left, he gave out game pucks to the kids. Though I’m 24, I get carded at every bar I go to, but I apparently don’t look young enough to get a puck.

As we escaped the throngs of obnoxious Detroit fans, and made our way toward the elevator this time, we saw some of the ice girls getting in as well. After some confusion about whether or not there was room for us too, we settled in. I motioned toward one of the ice girls in front of me. Jer nodded his head toward a corner of the elevator and when I followed his gesture, expecting to see another ice girl, or maybe a commentator or something, I found myself making direct eye contact with Teemu Selanne.. I immediately looked away, grinning and blushing. The next 30 seconds to a minute I spent continuing to grin and trying to look nonchalantly at his reflection in the elevator door. If the press guy had been in with us that day, I probably would have gotten a puck.

I’m not one to get star struck– I was more teary eyed after this than when Bill Clinton grabbed my hand as I made a peace sign or when Dick Dale asked to borrow my aunt’s camera and take a picture of us– but the sheer surprise of being in an elevator with someone you just ordered your boyfriend collectible figurines of was overwhelming. After the initial glow died down a little (it lasted through the whole, disappointing game), I realized that what was really cool about this is how emblematic of the connection between punk rock and hockey it was. I mean, it’s still a huge, awesome deal– we were a couple feet away from a hockey legend– but like punk rock legends, hockey legends are far less inaccessible than say…basketball legends or classic rock legends.

And much like it did in 10^th grade when I asked for my first guitar and started a band with two of my other friends who had also never played their instruments before, something clicked. I didn’t just want to be the grinning fan girl who watches games but nothing else. I wanted to be a part of hockey. I wanted to surround myself in it. I wanted to play. I found a semi-local adult league online and emailed the contact and he got back to me right away. The plan is to get some equipment and practice for awhile before attending some pickup games and then maybe joining a team. I doubt I’ll be very good, but it doesn’t really matter. Like punk rock, in hockey there’s a place for people who aren’t very good but want to be a part of it all anyway. Singing Creed songs in your local talent show or getting obsessively into your slow-pitch softball team sounds a little sad. Alternatively, you can collect records and play power chords and really be a part of the punk community and you can collect pucks and play in your driveway and be a hockey fan. I wouldn’t want to be a part of anything that was any different.