SLUMP.(The Talk of the Town)

Hockey is a roughneck pastime from the Canadian prairie that was persuaded to leave the windswept town it was raised in, among miners and farmers and nuns who rapped its knuckles with rulers, and move to the city and try and hold down a job. Perhaps staring out a window at the lights of Moose Jaw, Hockey envisioned a place for itself among glamorous people and the stirring, chaotic exchanges of metropolitan life--it was, after all, as the sign at the old Madison Square Garden used to say, "The World's Fastest Game."

The city turned out to be only intermittently hospitable to the bumptious immigrant. Hockey now feels morose and forlorn, overlooked at the party. Late at night, Hockey walks down Broadway in the rain. Hockey has dined alone. Hockey has drunk too much. Pausing before the window of a fashionable restaurant, Hockey stares balefully at Major League Baseball, sharing champagne with models. Hockey dials the number of a girl it used to know and gets her machine. "Candace, if you're there, pick up," Hockey says. "It's Hockey." Candace waits for Hockey to finish, then erases the message. A cab approaches. Hockey raises its hand. The taxi passes. The driver stops at the end of the block for Pro Bowling, out clubbing with Monster Trucks and the Ice Capades. In the morning, Hockey stares at its lathered face in the mirror and thinks, I've had enough. I hate my job. I just want to go back to my cabin, do some ice fishing, maybe get a dog.

It's a deplorable period for hockey, actually. A lockout is threatened for next season by all those testy owners who desire a guaranteed return on their investment, which, of course, is no more than any sensible person would wish for his money. Hockey has too many franchises, thirty altogether, the majority of them colorless, plodding, and obstinate teams that play not to lose. Moreover, there is the perception that the sport prefers that its talented players be subject to rules that favor less accomplished players, in order to level the field and protect the portfolios of businessmen who thought it was a shrewd idea to put franchises in Phoenix and Nashville and Raleigh-Durham.

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