sportsjabber.net

Every hockey fan has heard it at least once. Most have heard it a handful of times. The “it” I’m referring to is the lamest excuse to not watch the NHL on the planet.

It’s the “I can’t pronounce the player’s names” excuse. I’ve heard it everywhere. From family members who watched me grow up playing the sport to national sports figures and writers who are just to lazy to get involved. The excuse has spread its talons so deep into the sports culture that it has become more than an excuse, people actually think its true. There are sports fans out there who actually think that nearly every player in the NHL has a name that is a facial workout just to say. Except for one tiny fact: It’s a myth.

Yep, the whole thing is a big fallacy.

The names in hockey aren’t any tougher than any other professional sport in North America. Not when you consider that names like Favre, Ginobili, Nowitzki, Nnamdi Asomugha and Daisuke Matsuzaka have become easily pronounced in the other sports. The problem however is that NHL was one of the first leagues to truly welcome international players into its teams. The league expanded and so did the search for talent in Europe which meant that the NHL faced an influx of players with Northern and Eastern European backgrounds. Russian, Czech and Finnish players seem to sport the most difficult names to initially pronounce but just as with any name, a closer look is usually all it takes. Take a name like Ilya Bryzgalov. At first glance that looks like a mouthful of consonants. But a second look shows that it really isn’t that hard (Ill-Yah Brizz-GAL-off) to pronounce at all and after a little practice it simply rolls off the tongue. In fact that is the case with nearly every European name in the NHL (with the exception of Zybnek Michalek… that one takes some work).

That doesn’t mean there aren’t names that are truly tough to pronounce (even after seeing them spelled out) or make you scratch your head altogether, but those names largely belong to North American players. Names like Stastny (Stas-NEE), Toews (Taves), Phaneuf (Fah-NOOF), Bouwmeester (BO-Mee-ster) and my personal favorite Byfuglien (BUFF-linn) nearly always take someone else to pronounce them the first couple times so you can remember them. So if those names are from within our own borders or from our neighbors to the North, there’s no reason we can’t learn their names’ right? I mean we put up with a guy from Mississippi who pronounces his name FARVE but spells it FAVRE, don’t we?

So I think it’s time to put this whole name*pronunciation*thing to rest so that we puck heads can start focusing on the real reasons all you other folks don’t watch the most entertaining sport in the world.

You can also find Peter Christian’s “Rink Rat’s Cheese” blog at The Washington Times Communities

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