One day it's the sophisticated Canberra Symphony Orchestra in the spacious grandeur of the Llewellyn Hall. The next it's the rugged gladiators of the Canberra Knights ice hockey team in the shabby old (circa 1970s), intimate rink of the Phillip Swimming and Ice Skating Centre. Canberra, city of contrasts!
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The great joy of living in today's Canberra is that it's never been so diverse. This week your Canberra Symphony Orchestra, in shimmeringly good form, has been performing Mozart and Beethoven. This Saturday, performing for a very different fan base (although your columnist is a fan of both) the Knights, your team in the Australian Ice Hockey League, rocket out on to the ice for their first home game of the season. Then they play on Sunday too.
They've won three out of their four games on the road, thanks in considerable part, manager John Raut enthused yesterday, to dashing imported US goaltender Mike Brown, who has played for US teams such as the South Carolina Stingrays and the Amarillo Gorillas.
The Knights represent an unfashionable, battling (they are only semi-professional and even their imports all have to find local jobs to keep body and soul together), wild and working-class dimension of Canberra that this city's detractors think doesn't exist here. But every broad-shouldered city needs an ice-hockey team and a symphony orchestra and Canberra, like Chicago, does have both of them.
The Phillip arena is unfashionably old and scruffy and you sit (rugged-up and in beanies and gloves and on cushions you've brought from home to upholster the bare benches) hard up against the ice and the action. Every now and then a player is thrillingly crashed and crushed hard up against the perimeter right before your face.
Raut, the venue's owner, is right when he says of it ''It's certainly got an atmosphere. It intimidates all the teams that come here. The crowd gets so engaged''. He says that some other teams play at newer, swisher venues, but somehow the matches there seem to get watched in virtual silence while at Canberra somehow the fans become ''so stoked''.
Yes, for those of us who're glad Canberra's tightly-corseted days seem to be behind us, the Knights' fans are always impressively stoked. But then even the CSO's fans are moderately stoked these days and applaud spontaneously in ways never seen before. There is something highly stoking about ice hockey, whether or not you care who wins. Even this columnist and his wife, usually the only over-50s there, do become stoked by it.
It has something to do with the exciting velocity at which the sport is played. By contrast, football seems like a contest among slugs.
Watching a great ice-hockey match leaves a fan a bit revved-up and hyperactive so that for a while afterwards everything in life seems infuriatingly slow. Waiting two minutes for a drive-through Big Mac seems an outrage.
One of the great virtues of the ice-hockey spectacle is that to be able to skate on ice the way the players do, hurtling, weaving, swooshing, is already a feat, a great entertainment in its own right. One marvels at it. Football lacks this magic since all of us, like footballers, can run a bit. But good ice hockey players are, skating like that, doing something as far from the average person's experience as, say, performing on the flying trapeze.
Another pleasure of the Canberra ice-hockey games is that one feels part of a boutique clientele. Other than the fans who show up (Raut said yesterday that there's seating for only about 700 although another 300 sometimes squeeze in to stand) hardly anyone else seems to know that the Knights exist. Most Australians, football-blinkered, don't even know that there is an Australian Ice Hockey League.
But they're forgiven since as one of this paper's sports reporters has found and reported, not even Brown, though so worldly a player (as well as being a Boston Bruin and an Amarillo Gorilla he's had stints in Canada, Germany and in Russia) had heard of it till he signed up to play in it. ''I knew nothing about it,'' he said. ''Coming over here I didn't know one person that had played. Whatever happens, happens, so I'm kind of going in blind.''
He's been a star so far this season. The Sydney press has called him ''Canberra's stellar goalie'' and the former Amarillo Gorilla has been winning matches for the Knights by keeping his goal impregnable so far in three hair-raising match-deciding penalty shootouts.
Ten of the first 14 games of the AIHL season have been decided by one goal or less with five decided in extra time shootouts. So it sounds as if at this weekend's matches at Phillip fans will usually be on their feet with excitement. But just in case there is any sitting down please take your cushions for the arena's old and probably heritage-listed benches are unforgivingly hard.
