I can honestly say that when I plunked down my $45 for a seat at the Hurricanes game, the last thing I anticipated was having a bull-shaped dirigible crap coupons onto me during its strafing run over section 101. Then again, that's hockey in North Carolina, which is unlike hockey anywhere else I have ever seen. And no, it isn't pretty. A little background is in order here. While not a hockey fan myself, I have some appreciation for the sport as a result of having grown up near Philadelphia back when the Flyers were both good and entertaining. (For you purists out there, that means the pre-pre-Lindros days, when frankly no one could tell if half the guys on the team had concussions because they were pretty much all incoherent maniacs anyway.) Furthermore, as a Yankee living in North Carolina I find myself almost forced to profess a knowledge of the sport simply because, well, ice is one of those northern things that they hear about down here, but don't really believe exists most of the time. When the ground in Raleigh gets coated in flakes who aren't part of the state congress, the local supermarkets run out of bottled water, batteries and condoms in no time flat. As for the local hockey scene, well, it's a bit odd. The local team, the Carolina Hurricanes, is a transplant like myself. Until a few years back, they were known as the Hartford Whalers, which pretty much explains why they ended up moving to that noted hockey hotbed, Greensboro NC while their new arena was built. The Hurricanes' best player, Ron Francis, is the same guy they wouldn't pay back when the team was affectionately referred to as "the Whale;" now he's a half decade older and slower, but getting paid more than he wanted when they let him go back in the day. In addition to the move and the name change, the Hurricanes ditched their blue-green-and-white uniforms for something in a fire engine red that makes them resemble the third teamers for Moscow Dynamo. Unfortunately, the sartorial splendor doesn't help these guys play like Moscow Dynamo, unless we're talking Moscow, Idaho. Last year, the 'Canes missed the Eastern Conference playoffs, which you frankly have to work hard to do, even after the NHL has placed expansion teams in hockey hotbeds like Atlanta, Nashville, Florida, Tampa Bay and presumably my hall closet.

The Hurricanes currently reside in the quaintly named Raleigh Entertainment and Sports Arena, or as the locals call it, "The Reeza." (This, incidentally, has nothing to do with RZA, also pronounced Reeza, of the Wu-Tang Clan, who probably suspects that hockey in North Carolina is part of the 10% white devil conspiracy. But I digress.) The RESA, to which the naming rights have not yet been sold (saving us from the hideous spectre of having to watch hockey at the Liggett-Myers Smokatorium) also hosts NC State basketball and gymnastics, and various traveling Disney ice shows, and from the footage I've seen, the 'Canes' back line would probably be shored up by a few of the skating elephants from Tarzan on Ice. When I moved up here, the local airwaves were abuzz with white-hot RESA-related controversy: Apparently the seats had been installed in the wrong shade of red. It wasn't NC State red, it was...umm...some other very closely related one. Now why A)this wasn't caught before all 18000 seats went in, B)anyone cared, and C)they felt it was necessary to tear out the naughty seats and replace them with appropriately tinted ones was beyond me, especially since no one can see the color of the bloody things when there are fans sitting in them. And last time I checked, the goal was still to sell out every game and thus put a suitably opaque fanny in every offensively red seat. So that sets the stage, or at least some of it. And tonight, at loose ends as my vacation winds down, I decided to join a friend and coworker at the RESA for the evening's tilt between the Hurricanes and the Flyers, in hopes of deriving an evening's entertainment. Carl holds season tickets in the 101 section, which is down close by one of the goals, and while he didn't have an extra ticket, he did suggest swinging by the ticket office to see if there were any seats in the section available. So at 7:00 PM, I pulled into the RESA's parking lot in quest of winter sports and, hopefully, a sound thrashing of the locals to witness. Unfortunately, I had no idea precisely where said ticket office was, and so was reduced to asking the parking lot attendant as she took my six dollars precisely where I should go. When the parking lot attendant gives you a look of pity, you know you're in for it. In this case, it was because I'd found the precise furthest point from the ticket office to pull in. So with a muffled curse, I parked and set off across the chilly Carolina night (Note: "chilly" in Carolina equates to "gosh, maybe I should put on a *(&*(!!@ing sweater" weather in Philadelphia, or "Good God, y'all, it's a glacier on the Margaret Mitchell House!" weather in Atlanta. It's all relative) in search of succor and seating. Tickets in section 101 go for $45 a pop, which is vaguely reasonable these days. It didn't take me long to find it, and I settled in near my friend and a friend of his. And then the insanity began. One of the few concessions they make to hockey purism here is the fact that you are not allowed to take your seat while the action is in progress. You have to wait for a stoppage of play before you find your seat. Unfortunately, the folks who've already found their seats have apparently demanded some sort of entertainment during those few seconds between puck drops, and that's where the horror lurks. It's bad enough that they play the usual collection of stadium songs at the RESA - "We Will Rock You," "YMCA," and so on. It's even worse that they include "The Chicken Dance," just to remind you that you are in fact in a state that William Tecumseh Sherman once passed through with unfriendly intent. But while all this is going on, the scoreboard shows you a animated Elvis doing his best Riverdance impersonation. The first time I saw it I refused to believe it. The conversation that resulted went as follows:

ME:	Is that really Elvis up there trying to be Lord of the Dance?
CARL:	Yup.
ME:	Well, fuck.
CARL:	Yup.
Somewhere in Iowa, a rotund, elderly gas station attendant has just put down his jelly doughnut and cried.

But as sad as that sounds, Elvis Flatley isn't the weirdest bit of it. He's not even top five. You see, in their infinite wisdom the Hurricanes' marketing wonks have decided that hockey ain't enough to sell hockey in the land of pulled pork sammiches and Jesse Helms. The game has to be surrounded by spectacle. And that's why we got the Beef.com bull-shaped dirigible zooming around the arena. Twice. Apparently the purpose of the bull is twofold: To drop coupons out of a flap in its stomach onto the crowds below (and yes, that is as disturbing as it sounds), and to excite memories of Thomas Harris' Black Sunday in the parts of the audience old enough to remember it. That's also why we got Claude, the Happy Trumpeter. Claude is a pleasant-enough looking fellow in a Hurricanes jersey numbered "0", and hoo boy, did they get that one right. Claude's job, apparently, is to dash from section to section of the RESA, playing "Charge!" and suchlike (his mutant version of Hava Nagila may in fact be convincing proof that God is dead) at the top of his tuneless lungpower. He's not very good, to be honest -- all right, he's bloody awful -- and somewhere, a high school marching band is missing him terribly. But he is loud, and the Hurricanes have thrown their support behind his escapades, which is why the scoreboards around the arena read "Claude the Happy Trumpeter" every time he galumphed down to the bottom of a section in hopes of summoning tone-deaf cavalry. Fans of irony will be amused to note that Claude couldn't even pull off a chant of "Let's Go Canes," though he did his best. Tonight's game featured the return of a former Hurricane player named Keith Primeau, who is not remembered fondly in the area. It's amazing how easily ten thousand vindictive hockey fans can make "Primeau sucks!" fit with just about anything. (Note: This chant was alternated with "Primeau - Primeau - Primeau - you suck!" Watching a happy parent bounce his toddler on his knee -- the in-arena cameras are fond of showing kids, perhaps to demonstrate that this is in fact "family entertainment" -- while bellowing "Primeau, you suck!" sends what can be described as a mixed message, as best. It may be family entertainment, but we're talking about the family from The Hills Have Eyes here.)

The between-period floor show is also way out there. The first intermission saw a "goalie race," as three guys in half-kit goalie equipment skated around the rink a few times for no good reason. Now, the reason guys get stuck playing goalie in the first place is because they can't bloody skate as well as the rest of the team; having imitation goalies do their best Eric Heiden is about as silly as it gets. And yes, the goalie in the white sweater (hockey shirts are called "sweaters," despite the fact that they haven't been made of wool in decades. Trust me on this one) fell down a few yards short of the finish line. He still won, though. Go figure. Second (and mercifully, last) intermission brought something a bit more visceral. A fan was brought onto the ice, blindfolded, and then turned loose (on the rink) to try to find an arena employee hiding behind a giant Midway Airlines ticket voucher. He was aided, and I use the term loosely, in this task, by the shouts of the crowd, who were under strict instruction to bellow "warmer" or "colder" as the hapless hero wandered about. To no one's surprise, he ended up almost diametrically opposite the giant ticket when time ran out. However, in the true spirit of the greatest game on ice, he then figured out where he was going and launched himself in a late, illegal and probably bone-crunching run at the prize. And unlike the white goalie, he stayed on his feet the entire time. It wasn't the loudest ovation anyone got all night, but it was certainly the most enthusiastic. Possibly the most disturbing aspect of the sideshow was Stormy, the 'Canes' mascot. In both his incarnations, he's apparently a boar of some sort (as opposed to a boor). When personified, he wears work clothes and what can only be described as a mullet; in his electronic incarnation he's bald, and wears a fetching little shorts-and-sweater combo. What any of this has to do with hockey is beyond me, except that it seems to be a continuation of the Carolina tradition of advertising BBQ joints with lovably overweight pigs. Apparently if you decide that your dinner was morbidly obese, you'll enjoy it more, or so the theory would seem to go. Incidentally, there was a hockey game mixed in with all of the insanity, one which the Hurricanes won. The first goal came on a power play (former Hurricane Kent Manderville was in the penalty box, which demonstrates pretty clearly why they got rid of him in the first place), and sparked a riotous celebration that included a scoreboard montage of dancing Seinfeld clips (I kid you not) and a spike-haired, bleached blonde yokel bellowing "It's a Canes Goal! Whoo-hoo! Whoo-hoo!" Now, this may pale in comparison to the so-called "demonic snorting goat head" that one sees unload on those rare occasions when the Buffalo Sabres score, but even so, I think it's safe to say I've never been so terrified at a sporting event in my life. The second goal was an empty netter, with a minute or so left. Somehow, the Carolina fans found a way to taunt Keith Primeau for this one, too - those who remained, anyway. The rest had headed for the exits a while back, the better to beat the vague intimations of traffic. Carolina has the lowest attendance in the league, but even that doesn't keep patrons from doing their best Chavez Ravine and scurrying for the exits early. It may be a 1-0 game against one of the top teams in the league, but hey, you don't want to spend five extra minutes waiting to turn onto I-40, it would seem. Me, I hung on until the bitter end. But as I've heard said, "You ain't from around here, are you?" Nope. And every so often, like at a hockey game, it shows.