TSN – that’s Canada’s ESPN, for the non-hosers – is running a poll of its readership right now to determine the best goalie mask in the league today. Before getting to the contenders, however, TSN tips its hat to the man recognized as the originator of the modern goalie mask, Mr. Jacques Plante. Pictured above, Jacques was no lame. But he wasn’t a fool, either – he knew that pucks could kick the shit out of his face. Eventually, one did – as evidenced by the blood in the picture, taken almost fifty years ago today – and so the prototype mask he had developed made its NHL debut. Here’s the story, from TSN:

On Nov. 1, 1959, the goaltending position in the National Hockey League was forever changed when Montreal’s Jacques Plante debuted the first goalie mask in a regular season game.

The story of Plante’s mask really began prior to the debut game. Plante developed and tested a plastic mask in practice and in preseason games, and wanted to use it in regular-season matches. Alas, Canadiens head coach Toe Blake prohibited him from wearing it for fear that it would limit his vision of the play. On Nov. 1, in a game against the New York Rangers, Plante was hit in the face by a shot from Andy Bathgate and required seven stitches to close cuts to his nose and lip. There was a 20-minute delay of game while the repairs took place and Plante refused to return to the ice unless he could wear his mask to protect the injuries.

Not having a back-up goalie, Blake was forced to either agree or forfeit the game – and allowed Plante to wear his white mask. Plante finished the game with 27 saves and the Canadiens beat the Rangers 3-1.

Plante continued to wear the mask for the rest of the season, and played very well while doing it. His success in goal combined with the enhanced safety he enjoyed soon inspired other goalies to adopt masks as well.

Plante’s invention has come a hell of a long way since in the past fifty years. As fucking awful (!!!) as the guitar on this video is, press mute and check out this slideshow:

For more old-timeyness, here’s a pretty thorough compendium of classic goalie masks, past and present. And Hockeymasks.com maintains what’s essentially an online museum of masks, a must-see.

But back to the current state of the art, and TSN’s poll. Lots of flash on every mask here, but check out Senators backup Brian Elliott’s mask – he’s got TMNT’s Casey Jones splashed all over his piece, just like on his last one.

And lookit Jason Labarbera’s new Metallica mask for the Coyotes.

Most are too busy for my taste. (Ayo Marty Brodeur, why’d you ditch the classic for this tired design?) But I can’t help kinda liking Nabokov’s skeleton ghoul for the Sharks, Scott Clemmensen’s big panther for Florida, and Mike Smith’s pirate ship mask complete with treasure chest for Tampa Bay. Remember, Smith’s one of the dudes who had an ad for “Saw V” on his mask last year, because Tampa Bay co-owner Oren Kroules’ company produced it. Whatever though. Nowadays, you can get damn near anything on a mask, even Sarah Palin. But my personal favorite out of all the custom jobs that I’ve seen so far has to be this Bloom County bootleg:

Not sure how Berkeley Breathed would feel about it, but I like it. Somebody touch it up in Sabres blue & gold and ship it to Ryan Miller for tonight’s game in Jersey.

Already I can tell that I’m gonna have to author a sequel to this post, since I’m already 500-some words in and I haven’t even really scratched the surface of the art of goalie masks. Before I close up this initial exploration, here’s a link to The Hockey News‘ Top 10 Scary Goalie Masks, since we’re close to Halloween. And in that vein, I’ll end with Gilles Gratton’s classic animal mask. Hit me with gems I’ve missed – there are many – in the comments.

This fixed gear thing is worldwide, just like Mishka. When we put out the D.A.R.T. team a few years back, it was hard to tell what the fixed gear and track bike scene would do and even more difficult to tell what the D.A.R.T. thing would do. Well, here we are, present day. The scene is huge and D.A.R.T. is getting some world-wide love!

Iave from Dodici reppin the sold-out D.A.R.T. New Era. Dodici is an Italian bicycle frame and component company. They make some killer rims and a gnarly track frame. Head to their blog and check it out. It’s great seeing the younger generation picking up where their older predecessors left off.

This weekend was the Pedal It Don’t Push It trick competition in Taipei City, Taiwan. Toku and Marco from W-base, a shop in Tokyo were flown out there to participate. Here’s Toku (eyes closed, dowh!) rocking his DART New Era. Picture via cogWei. Later that day Toku fell during the competition and landed on his heel, putting him in the same boat I was in my first night in Tokyo. Heel (heh) up buddy!

Big ups guys! Keep pushing what you’re doing!

Minor league. Real Phillies fans know you gotta flip the car.

I want the Yankees to close out the Angels Saturday night so the 2009 World Series will be worth something. The seething animosity between Philadelphia and New York needs a championship stage to get properly aired out.

Halloween always brings around a TON of alleycat races. Just about every major city in the world is throwing one. That includes Rochester. Check out that flier! Nice bands too. Make it out if you’re upstate!

I stayed at my man Jed’s house last weekend. Jed’s a Nikehead who has a huge framed Bo Jackson poster – gotta be like four or five feet wide – and it’s a print version of the ad above, where Bo’s geared up for everything from cricket to surfing. I forgot what weird franchises Bo was with – KC Royals and LA Raiders? Damn. And I love that the hockey Bo is in a Canadiens uniform. I hadn’t thought much about Bo since I found my old copy of his autobiography a few years back – the classic Bo Knows Bo, containing Jackson’s childhood memories of killing a pig, beating kids up and finding a bag of weed at grade school.

Anyways, seeing ol’ Bo all ready for crosstraining got me thinking: What’s the best sport?

It’s a chewed-over chestnut of an argument, as old as playgrounds and the junior debating societies that inhabit them. I resuscitate it here not just on account of Bo, but because we’re days away from hitting the sweet spot of the calendar when all four major pro leagues (apologies to NASCAR, soccer, tennis, golf, competitive eating, etc.) are battling for the continent’s attention at the same time. Plus I just read a convincing polemic written by this dude from Pittsburgh who argues that hockey is king – and I agree.

Here’s the Pittsburgh guy’s relevant (and possibly inflammatory) takedown of the other sports:

Baseball spreads half its players across a pasture, hides the rest in dugouts, and then, proudly aware that it is the only sport without a time clock, proceeds apace as though its fans do not have one either. Football, played on one hundred twenty yards of distant field in increasingly canyon-esque stadia, packs twelve minutes of balletic violence into sixty minutes of game time and two hundred minutes of real time. Basketball provides near constant action and often intimate attention, but when scoring occurs every twenty seconds, only the last hundred or so seem to matter, and they often unfold over such an excruciation of stops and starts and fouls and timeouts and team meetings that even the most dramatic finishes unfold like athletic arrhythmia. Soccer drops one lost ball amidst twenty joggers, offers almost as many riots in the stands as goals on the field, and is beloved only by a loose affiliation of drunkards, Europhiles, and overprogrammed eight-year-olds who have yet to convince me I’m missing anything of interest.

But there’s something about hockey.

Ha! Drunkards and Europhiles, you’re on notice.

Insulted soccer (”football”) fans aside, I recommend reading the whole thing. Yeah, the writing is kinda precious (”they skate with equal parts power and poetry”), and I don’t share the author’s cranky disdain for what he terms “showboating.” But on the whole, I’m sold:

There are no huddles, no audibles, no waiting for plays to be radioed into their empty helmets; plays and formations are called on the fly, run from memory, and most often improvised in brilliant bursts of athletic creativity. Each team gets only one timeout. There are fewer television timeouts in a whole game than there are in any quarter of an NFL game. The time between prime scoring chances is usually measured in seconds, not in innings or minutes or hours.

Hockey is home to grace and grit, to brains and brawn, to prolonged periods of brute force followed by sudden explosions of astonishing elegance. It elevates teamwork and celebrates self-sacrifice. It bestows an annual award for sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct. It inspires awe and honors tradition and does both at once, at the end of each season, when its two best teams meet to win and hold and see their names engraved upon the most hallowed, the most regal, the most revered trophy in all of professional sports.

All true. Plus, hockey has Bobby Orr and Rob Zombie.

Alternatively, I guess you don’t have to choose, like Bo. Hell, I like all of em, really. But arguing about which sport rules them all is more fun. If this was a “Choice Is Yours,” I’d have my answer without hesitation. You?

Ride the Republic from Daniel Garcia on Vimeo.

AJ from Texas emailed me this nice little edit from the Third Coast fixed crew. DART-rider Eric Puckett is laying it down with some smooth-ass lines. Lookin good guys! See you this winter (as soon as this fucking foot heals up!)

THIRD COAST

I think you’ll be hard pressed to find a more impressive display of stick handling than 9 year old Joakim Wahlstrom on this one-on-one goal. Even if you don’t give two shits about Hockey this trick goal is really impressive… Josh Womack’s swing impressive! Now we know who to tank for come the 2010 draft.

Via Puck Daddy

Laek House, Prolly is Not Probably and Hold Fast have teamed up to produce a give-away called Asphalt.

Head over to my site to read up on the rules on how you can win 1 of 2 pairs of Hold Fast FRS!

The airwaves were thick with ballgames and beer commercials last night because we’re deep into October and North America is approaching sporting saturation. Late into the night, Philadelphians were sparking victory smokes as the MLB champs advanced, Cincinattians were reveling in the relevance of their resurgent Bengals, and the Los Angeles Kings were atop the West, if only for a spell.

Meanwhile, the Dolphins and Jets stayed busy trading outrageous haymakers in Florida on national TV, with Henne and Sanchez chucking up bombs like 10-year-olds playing Madden. Pretty damned entertaining, and as the dust settles, this sporting observer notes that the East is wide open. But it was kinda hard for me to watch quality professional football teams competing at a high level last night without being racked by debilitating pangs of jealousy and resentment – this past weekend, I drove 1000 miles to attend a game wherein a quarterback completed just 2 of 17 pass attempts and still won.

So while the Fish celebrated their victory, I was mining classic crosscheck gold on YouTube with the TV on mute. Here’s three for your consideration.

1. The Flyers’ Dave Brown obliterates Thomas Sandstrom’s face in October of 1987. Clearest replay is at 1:10.  Listen to Gene Hart and Bobby Taylor’s dismissive response to the brutality – “Acting school,” say the Flyers commentators. “He’s dead on the ice again.”

2. You gotta wait a minute for this one – the video kinda establishes a little context for the violence – but Pavel Bure leaves the ice to drop Edmonton’s Bryan Marchement. Must have been mid-90s. Hilarious the way Marchement really sells the superfluous second hit, as if it just destroys him.

3. Saved the most vicious for last. Detroit’s Jiri Fischer bloodies Hurricane Tommy Westlund in the 2002 Cup Finals, a savage piece of stickwork that earned him a one-game suspension.

Rip Zinger is a well-known street-culture photographer in Tokyo. In fact, he just had a book launching for New York City in Shibuya and all kinds of skateboarding celebrities showed up.

While I was in Japan, all battered and bruised up, he kept wanting to go shoot pics with me. Finally I was able to ride one day and we set off to a few spots I had seen while riding through Shibuya.

Some spots were busts, like this one, where I only got one run on it.

Other spots were in parks and aside from the waves of pedestrians passing through, were pretty much fair game. I was surprised to see this pic after I blasted a 180 off a sidewalk hip. Pretty high!

Here’s a pretty popular BMX spot. A nice steep bank, perfect for a 3 tap.

Thanks so much for taking me around Rip! When you come to NYC, come hang out!