She Wants to Sell My Monkey

I've been following ice hockey since the late 80s. It was a lucky time to start, being in Pittsburgh, because I got to follow the whole storyline of the Pittsburgh Penguins' back-to-back Stanley Cup wins.

Play-by-play announcer Mike Lange has been with the Pens longer than me. When I started watching, not all the games were on TV, and Lange did radio. KDKA-TV, the local CBS affiliate, had the broadcast contract, but if the game didn't sell out, they wouldn't show it. There may have been a cable deal, but we didn't have cable, so most games, unless we had tickets, I listened to the radio. Eventually Lange moved on to doing the TV games when that got to be the more popular way to see the games, and he's even in the Hockey Hall of Fame now, I suppose for being so cool. He's quite a good announcer and hockey analyst, and of course he has encyclopedic knowledge of the team. It's pretty common for him to say something about a particular player being due for a goal a few minutes before that player scores.

But my point actually was to explain the URL. See, Lange has these bizarre catch phrases that he uses to celebrate Penguins goals. "She wants to sell my monkey." "Scratch my back with a hacksaw." "Let's go hunt moose on a Harley." "Buy Sam a drink and get his dog one too." "Call Arnold Slick from Turtle Crick." "Oh no, Eddie Spaghetti." "Great balls of fire." Sitting here trying to find an open Blogspot address that had something to do with my life, I fell back on Mike Lange. I guess it also could have something to do with that hockey game on TV across the room right now, too (though it's the Olympics, not NHL).

So, monkey sales are open.

I heard that some hockey friends of my dad's tried to get the officiant to work a Langeism into their wedding ceremony, back in the early 90s. He apparently wasn't a hockey fan, though, because he said something about spanking his monkey instead.

I still have Penguins season tickets, though it's been a lot tougher being a Pens fan in the last few years. Those of us who made it through the fire sale of 2003, when every player I'd ever loved was traded away for peanuts (mainly young prospects and cash) in the course of about two weeks, had little left to lose. Bankruptcy is old news, as is Lemieux's hit-or-miss health. It may be optimism, but I think Pittsburgh politicians would be too embarassed to let us lose the team altogether. After last season (two years ago, before the NHL lockout), I have learned some coping skills to deal with an abysmal record, but this season's failure to deliver even with established talent has been a bit hard to take. Still, Crosby and Fleury are awesome even when the team does poorly. And, I mean, what are you going to do, not watch hockey?