Geeks and Hockey

There is nothing weird about this picture.

I am a geek. I'm a computer programmer by trade. I watch anime. I play games. I read books. All that and more. But being a geek isn't a bad thing. Being a geek just means that you like something to actually invest yourself into it, and the term itself is mostly appropriated to refer to something that is about pop culture or something more cerebral. There is often a rivalry or mutual disdain portrayed between jocks and geeks in films such as Revenge of the Nerds. But to me jocks are just sports-geeks, and geeks are just brain-jocks. It's all good. Just do your what you like and let others do the same.

One of the geekeries I do is Magic: The Gathering. For those who do not know, it is a collectible card game and it has a huge player-base. The largest public tournaments are called Grand Prix. There are about 50 Grand Prix a year, and each draws upwards of a thousand people pretty easily. For example this past weekend was Grand Prix Vienna 2014 in which I was one of 1208 players.

Since I am a geek and I have an obvious interest in hockey, I'm also always looking for intersections between the two, and the GP was a treasure trove for it. First I came into talk with one of the vendors who was sporting a Canadiens hat. He asked me about the Flyers Winter Classic cap, at first assuming I was from Philly. Turns out he is from Montreal but was at the event to do some work for a french shop. He however had already noticed that there was a lot of NHL paraphernalia in the room.

Over the weekend I spotted a guy wearing a Penguins sweatshirt, two diffferent Canucks T-Shirts (one being laser-spaghetti, one being in the current design with Daniel Sedin's name and number on the back), a Kopitar LA Kings jersey (from before the most recent redesign), a Sharks hat, a Sharks T-Shirt, and an Islanders sticker on a messenger bag. (Speaking of the Islanders, here's the Islanders blog Lighthouse Hockey having some fun with Magic cards). And yes, the inevitable matchup between me and the guy in the Penguins sweatshirt did happen, and I prevailed.

For context, I saw nobody wearing any football shirts, which I would have thought much more common in Austria (and by football I mean the sport where all the players kick a ball with your feet). I also saw no NBA merchandise except for one person wearing a Sixers hat. The same person also wore an Eagles NFL jersey, and making the rounds with a friend who was wearing a Seahawks jersey. On the final day of competition one player also wore a Ravens jersey. However, that's about it for sports merchandise, the NHL having the upper hand there as far as I saw.

Now maybe this is me having a selection bias, but for a while I've noticed hockey to be a sport more frequently being picked up as an interest by geeks. I several online-acquaintances who travel in similar circles as me and studied at RIT. They either became hockey fans there, or already were and brought some of their friends with no prior relationship to hockey into the fold.

It is also one of the reasons, if a very minor one, I think hockey succeeded and gained a steady fanbase in places like San Jose (smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley) and Raleigh (center of the Research Triangle) as students from North-Eastern Tech schools such as MIT or RIT that also have a hockey program often migrate to those places. It's also a minor reason why I think hockey would succeed in Seattle, though the city being placed in the north, having an untapped and enormous population, and the proximity to Canada with the built in rivalry with the Canucks far outweigh it.

In any case, I find it great that hockey has such a wide appeal, even in places where stereotypical it would be believed to be shunned.