Before we get to some hockey things, I’m going to start with something soccer-related.
If you’re a long-time reader of this site or my work, you’ve probably picked up that I’m a pretty big Tottenham Hotspur fan. I’ve written a bit about it before, in fact back in 2023, I somehow connected Shohei Ohtani, fandom, and Tottenham in this piece here:
To re-hash that a little bit, my Tottenham fandom was born during the 2015-16 season and grew into fanaticism during the 2016-17 season. Spurs are the one thing in my life that outside of work and family, I alter my schedule for. I do my best to watch every game live and I’m irrational, and perhaps most dangerously, believe in the team.
If you are familiar with the Premier League at all and the state of the team right now, it’s pretty easy to make fun of my Spurs fandom, which I actually welcome in good fun, if you’d like.
While it’s been a personal passion, watching a soccer team on the other side of the world like it’s a religion, it’s also been important to my growth and development as someone who writes about sports.
Sports are about passion and fandom, about that human connection, and as I like to say, without fandom and human stories, all of this is nothing more than organized exercise.
I love hockey, it’s my favorite sport, but I don’t have the passion for an individual team that many of you have. That’s a side effect, for better or worse, of the job, and when you look at hockey through that lens, it becomes easy to disservice readers who live and breathe with the results of one team.
Having my connection with Tottenham has better connected me with readers, I try to write for hockey fans the way I would want someone to write about soccer and the team I follow with a passion.
That’s why, when I found out back in August that I was going to Sweden for my work with Elite Prospects, and Tottenham happened to play Coventry the Monday after my last day in Sweden, I scheduled a two-day detour to London to see my favorite team.
The trip also worked out well to connect with an old friend from college, who lives in London, but the English leg of this trip was solely planned to go watch Tottenham and to watch them play live for the second time in my life, and the first time since August of 2017.
Since I was traveling alone, I was also able to find a single ticket in the south stand at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, 14 rows up behind the corner flag, and in the massive standing section, which is built to look like a wall of humanity.
I didn’t know anyone else going to the game, this was a completely solo trip. I took the train by myself to the game, explored the neighborhood where the team resides — I’d never been there before, when I attended a game in 2017, Spurs were playing at Wembley while the current stadium was being built to replace White Hart Lane. And did my best to kind of get lost in the moment, soaking in the atmosphere on my time, finding local murals of club legends Ledley King and Son Heung-min, before grabbing a pre-game meal at a tremendous kebab place that my pal Bob Sturm had suggested.
I went in when the gates opened at 6 pm, got a beer and walked around, finished the pint before finding my seat (in England, you can’t have beer within view of the field, old hooligan laws), and then allowed myself to become part of the mass of humanity, mostly season-ticket holders, that stand throughout each Tottenham game.
I yelled a bit and attempted to keep up with chants and songs that others around me delivered with full voice. I got irrationally happy watching James Maddison scoring a worldie of a goal in the first half, before getting irrationally distraught while Coventry tied the game early in the second half, and then got irrationally happy again (or maybe it was all rational?) when Spurs scored twice in the second half, right in front of me, to win their first league game of the season.
The vibe continued after the game, into the streets of Tottenham and eventually onto the train, where it felt pretty damn cool to be part of that moment. Spurs are still in a relegation battle, I’ll stress about it watching on TV next weekend, but yesterday for a couple hours, everything was perfect.
That moment, that feeling, is something I thought about it this morning while on the tube to Heathrow Airport for my flight back to Detroit. It makes you think about how much a single win can mean to someone, how much fun one game in the whole process can mean everything to someone, even if it’s fairly obvious to the outside world that a team isn’t going to win a championship that season.
In a weird way, this line of thinking, made me think a lot about what Calgary Flames goalie Devin Cooley said this week in a post-game interview. If you haven’t seen the clip, which seems unlikely because it’s one of those rare hockey moments that has virally transcended outside the sport, Cooley talks about his mindset during the game.
This part, in particular, stuck with me.
Every second that you spend thinking about yourself through your conscious brain, it distracts you from what’s happening out in front of you, and that’s what I’ve been doing.
Cooley is essentially describing one of my favorite parts about playing the position, which I still attempt to do on Wednesday evenings and Sunday morning. I’ve always referred to it as “blank brain,” where everything feels calm and right in the world, where if do I end up thinking about something, it comes with a sense of clarity as opposed to the normal messiness.
I’ve talked with my therapist quite a bit about trying to find ways to bring this into my every day life (therapy is very cool by the way, that’s another thing that’s really helped me in my life and being open about it has also helped), and it’s part of the approach I took watching Tottenham play on Monday night. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb, only took it out for a couple pictures, and just lived in the moment.
Finding a way to do this more often, in both my writing and every day life, has turned into more of a constant goal, and I think it’s helped me both better connect with people and myself, again through both a personal and writing perspective.
Thanks for reading. We will have more later this week from back in North America.