Where I Belong

I've been secretly waiting for something to happen for 7-ish years. It finally happened on Friday night: I was chosen to do one of the shooting challenges at the Mavs hockey game during the first intermission.

After watching hacks get picked year after year, it became so frustrating that I stopped going to games. It wasn't a busy schedule that kept me away from the Midwest Wireless Civic Center for over two years; it was watching dompous sausage princesses waste good gift certificate money before God and everyone.

They used to just have two people from the audience out-shoot each other from the blue line. The winner moved to center-ice and had two or three pucks' chances to make it into a smaller goal. Since I stopped going to the games, they added another audience member challenge after that activity. So I'm sitting there watching this sausage princess literally attempt to slapshot pucks into the net as if there'd be no other way to shoot a puck. It was all very disgusting. This girl shouldn't have been allowed into the area in the first place.

In the competition part of her challenge, she tried her slapshot thing and missed pucks right at her feet (like fifteen all in a row just to increase the odds of hitting one). Somehow, she out-shoots her opponent and is moved to center ice for the doomed-to-miss chance to score into a more narrow goal. Bitch winds up her slapshot and misses four fucking times. Then she finally connects... and where does it go? Straight down the gullet of the seven-inch goal. She won $250. The people running the show didn't even know what to do about it since no one's ever won.

Seconds after she makes it in, I get cheerful nods from cheerleaders that it's my turn. I say to Some Guy near the benches, "I can't follow that." But I go out anyway. Later, Benjaminz would say I looked relaxed and natural as I went out on the ice. I just didn't want to fall. I know how eville lousy fans can be.

The first part of my challenge, which had some sort of quit smoking message, was to shoot one puck from center ice into a four-inch slot in the middle of the goal. I knew what I was supposed to do before hand, so when I got picked in the audience, I asked the guy, "What happens if I make the first one?" He said, "Well I guess that would kinda make the whole thing pointless," as if to advise me not to make it. I knew I wouldn't make it since I wasn't a random, carefree sausage princess.

And I didn't make it. The puck would have gone in the normal goal, hitting the ply wood about a foot and a half to the left of the four-inch slot. And the crowd goes "Aww..." I was totally supposed to show that broad how it's done. Oh well. If I was the kinda guy that comes up with excuses, I'd point out that the only right-handed stick they had was meant for a 6' 4" dude... wearing skates. So it was pretty long in the handle for even me.

They moved me up to the blueline and rolled out this impossibly wide goal that completely enveloped the regular goal. I think the message was supposed to be that quitting smoking on your own (center-ice shot into four-inch goal) was next to impossible, but if you use [insert new stop-smoking-drug here] it would be impossible to fail. This time, I shot the puck almost directly into the center of the goal, but I still probably would have missed that damned four-incher.

Props to Jess for the high-quality pics. She just happened to be in another section of the area, a closer section than all the way from the student section from whence I was plucked. In the second pick you can almost see the puck just to the right of the first glass separator. My shot is so hard, however, that the puck was blurred between space and time, a trick I learned from Chuck Norris.

Jess asked me if I won a lifetime supply of prostitutes. She was close. I would have won a lifetime supply of cheerleaders had I made the four-inch shot. Instead, I won a Zamboni driver named Ned. They supplied me with a Ned-sized water bottle like in hamster cages, the kind with the spout and the metal ball on the end. Now I just hope I remember to feed and water him.

Note: Benjaminz thought it was pronounced Zam-bami.