F–k rationality, it’s an ode to Darren Helm

This post should absolutely be a scathing indictment of the media’s swine flu coverage. It could also easily be a heart-wrenching opus about how Manny Ramirez testing positive for steroids crushed whatever was left of a little boy’s love for baseball. Poking fun at Jack Layton’s Star Trek outfit or writing an incredibly offensive parody of Sarah Palin’s upcoming memoirs would also be completely in keeping with the spirit of this blog.

Darren Helm, doing what he does.

But I won’t do it. Because it’s still hockey season, dammit. And I still can’t imagine writing about anything but the Wings. And mostly, just one player.

Beginning with baseball, I’ve been a sports fan since I was about 7, be it the Expos and (for a reason I simply can’t remember, because he hit .172) Casey Candaele, Tony Fernandez (like Casey Candaele, with hustle and skill!) and the Blue Jays, Pinball and the Toronto Argonauts and, of course, the motherfucking Red Wings.

(A True Tangentially-Related Story: If Nikolai Borshevsky doesn’t eliminate the Red Wings in disgusting fashion in 1993, and Chris Osgood doesn’t misplay the puck and give the 1994 series to the San Jose Sharks, and then break down in tears afterwards, I would probably never have become a Wings fan, and my life would be poorer for it. I started cheering for them because they were awesome and I was a little kiddie bandwagon jumper just beginning to discover hockey,and Sergei Fedorov was the best damn player ever in NHL 93 and 94. Then they got their ass kicked twice in humiliating fashion. But by then I loved Stevie Y too much, and it would have been absolutely faithless to abandon them then, when they were getting the hell kicked out of them and people were crying for Yzerman to be traded. I loved them because I watched them fail first. If Borchevsky doesn’t score that goal … 12-year-old me might have ended up a Maple Leafs fan. And I can’t imagine what might have happened to me after that without wanting to drink my face off.)

Anyway. That’s not the point. The point is I’ve always been a sports fan to some degree, an it only got worse when I was introduced to hockey. And usually, on every team, there’s a guy who is the favourite player, and the guy who is your favourite player.

Sometimes they’re in harmony. Yzerman’s an obvious example. More often they’re not. Like now, when the favourite player on the Wings is Nicklas Lidstrom, or Pavel Datsyuk, or Henrik Zetterberg, Marian Hossa or Johan Franzen.

But my favourite Wing? I think, in some weird way, it’s fast becoming Darren Helm.

Helm just won the Wings that series with the Ducks. Sure, Franzen was a beast and Ozzie was clutch and if he was allowed to touch the stuff, every Wings fan in Detroit would be buying Daniel Cleary all he could drink … but without Darren-motherfucking-Helm, it never reaches the point where Cleary can poke at that puck and then (hopefully) spit on his hand and shake Chris Pronger’s.

When this team of wily veterans, superstars and rising stars looked to be out of gas; when they were shying away from contact, taking retarded penalties, coughing up the puck and doing all sorts of dumb things that basically said ‘You want to beat us? Do it.’ …

Smushed.

Darren Helm was not playing that way. I don’t think he could do anything that way.

I don’t think he could stumble down the stairs in the morning and lazily make himself a cup of coffee with his eyes half closed. I think there’s a good chance he’d jump down the last half-flight of stairs, bodycheck the damn fridge open and shove the damn grounds into the filter so hard it rips the first three times he tries.

I would absolutely pay $4.99 to NHL Centre Ice for a game-long isolation cam focused on him, just so I could see if there’s ever a moment he’s on the ice when he isn’t skating faster than every other person on it.

We’re always told to seize the damn day, and so few of us ever do. Well, Darren Helm seizes every single fucking second. It’s incredibly inspiring to watch. And it sends a real message.

Not to the other team. To his own. You cannot watch him go over the boards, spend a full minute slamming himself into anything that moves at full speed and pursuing the puck until he’s ready to drop dead and not want to do the same.

If you watched Game 6, Helm’s line was the only line that brought energy with every single shift. Not only that, but whichever line Babcock threw out there after they left the ice inevitably had a better shift than the one on the ice before them.

Maybe they’re inspired by his play; maybe he makes them slightly embarrassed at their own occasionally weak level of competition, but this team desperately needed someone who was hungry. And intense. And determined to win, whatever the cost. And it ain’t Marian Hossa, it’s Darren fucking Helm.

He won’t stop. He won’t give up. He won’t even stop moving his damn feet. And I am absolutely convinced that, if faced with some sort of obstacle in everyday life — anything from a bouncer at a club, to an epic wall of gridlocked traffic or just locking himself out of his house by accident — Darren Helm’s first reaction would be to bodycheck the bouncer, the nearest car and the door to his own home respectively.

They showed a shot of Babcock yapping in Daren’s ear during one of the games this series, and all  I could see was a thought bubble over Helm’s shoulder that would have said — in the same way you imagine it when you wake up in the morning and your dog is standing at the door, scratching and wagging his tail — “Lemme out, coach! Lemme out, coach! Lemme out, coach! Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!”

I grinned just thinking about it. But the Ducks definitely did not. Chris Pronger, when he finally sleeps, is going to have nightmares. And I’m not talking the oh-no-I’m-back-in-Edmonton nightmares. I’m talking about nightmares in which he is doing something he regularly does — like golfing in May, or washing his ugliest car or tripping old ladies as they walk past him in the shopping mall — and then this little red ball of fury just attacks him out of nowhere. And then does it again and again and won’t go away.

Then, Chris Pronger will wake up screaming, an ugly sweaty mess. And the screaming and the sweat? That’ll be all because of Darren Helm.

The ugly he was, of course, born with.

Anyway, if I’m buying a Red Wings Jersey this year, I’m probably buying a Helm jersey, because without him, the Anaheim Ducks are your Western Conference finalists.

And in the end, I can’t pay the kid a higher compliment than this:

If you want a lesson on how to live your life with no regrets, watch Darren Helm play hockey.

That breakaway goal? Just icing on the cake. But it was some well-fucking-deserved icing.