Hockey is ramping up, with training camp beginning and hockey news starting to trickle back into people's consciousness. This is great news considering that the Rockies have left us for dead, practically begging for anything else sports-related to think about that won't include the words "Tim Tebow." So, hooray for hockey! As hockey begins to get back up to speed, I hope to get back into my self-appointed and self-important duties of commenting on the Avalanche and the media coverage they receive.
Unfortunately, the hockey season couldn't begin without more bad news, from two continents: the sad death of former Av Wade Belak, and the tragic airplane crash that took the lives of an
entire Russian professional hockey team, which included many names familiar to NHL and Avalanche fans. The loss of the Lokomotiv team is so huge that I am not going to try to combine it with my musings on the Belak story.
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| Belak and his daughter. |
Adrian Dater broke the news of Belak's death to many in the region with this
blog entry. In it, he gets an early jump on this story, reporting it when it was little more than a rumor, and due to the "scoop" nature of this blog there are very few details provided about Belak's death. Even so, Dater does a good job giving us a bit of background on Belak who, although he was only with the Avs for parts of three seasons, apparently made a positive impression on Dater, an impression which Dater relays somewhat sentimentally, but not distractingly so, to his readers (including the humorous revelation that, due to their similar appearance, Dater gave more than one autograph to Belak fans who would not believe his claim that he wasn't the Avs' enforcer). My only complaint about this blog is the way he casually ties all three enforcer deaths this summer (Boogaard, Rypien, and now Belak) together as suicides... but more on that later.
