MANITOBA—With the game nearly two full days behind him, radio color analyst Gordie Wilson is only now realizing that many of the listeners of his Hockey Night in Manitoba radio broadcast might not have fully appreciated or even understood his numerous references to abstract artists, baroque pianists, and German existentialist thinkers during Game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals Tuesday night.
Among the many examples cited include one call where Wilson said Pittsburgh winger Max Talbot’s first period goal possessed “the abstract beauty and intentional disjunction of The Blue Rider.” Later, Wilson described the positional work and skating of the Detroit Red Wings in their own zone as resembling, “the point and linework synthesis that, after a brief stay in stylistic purgatory, came to represent the Bauhaus School.” Opinion on his commentary has been mixed.
“I’m getting a lot of thumbs up from art majors and grad students,” observed Wilson, while reading a book on the architectural designs of Rem Koolhaas in preparation for game four. “But the suits upstairs don’t seem to be happy. They’d prefer I’d talk more along the line of ‘biscuit in the basket’, ‘wicked slapper’, and sprinkle my observations with references to sandpaper, grit, and waffle boards. Or just yell 'goal' like a Mexican soccer announcer. I don’t know, maybe I’m talking over the heads of the audience. I just assumed most hockey fans had fine arts and/or philosophy degrees.”
Wilson has decided to scale back his observations a bit, keeping his references solely to the Romantic Period of classical music, early jazz works, Picasso’s blue period, and Kafka’s more widely known works. He hopes that though this he will be able to make the game of hockey more accessible to a wider base of fans.
George Carlin died one year ago today. Susan Sisko Carter has a nice piece up at HuffPo detailing a random encounter with Carlin wherein they discussed, of course, language. Far as I'm concerned, not much can top Jerry Seinfeld's New York Times op-ed, published last June 24. Do yourself a favor. Take a few minutes out of the day and do some YouTube fishing. Couldn't hurt.
