#Paul Tetsuhiko Kariya | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rabbitcruiser · 1 year

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On June 6, 2007, the Anaheim Ducks defeated the Senators 6–2 at Honda Center to claim their first Stanley Cup in franchise history.

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csykora · 6 years

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Hey if you want an excuse to write a long rant post about selanne and kariya, this is it: i dont know anything about them and i would love to (if you dont wanna write a post feel free to ignore this!)

I would like to write about nothing else forever, but I’m going to control myself and do this in bits while I watch the ceremony.

The Thing About Paul is that he was a fairytale prince for hockey.

He was handsome and humble and had that Ivy League vocabulary. He was graceful and gracious on and off the ice; fabulously fast, fun to watch and furiously effective in international competition.

When Disney released The Mighty Ducks, made a generation of children sign up for skating lessons, and decided to buy a hockey team in Southern California, all they could have asked for was a Paul. His play-making, non-physical style appealed to kids, and as a Japanese-Canadian (his father, Tetsuhiko, who went on to play rugby for Team Canada, was born in the Greenwood BC internment camp), Disney figured he was their bet to sell hockey in SoCal. They won him with their first-ever pick in 1993, 4th over-all.

This is a point where I might introduce his nausea-inducing anxiety attacks as a crack in the shell, except that that’s something we seem to do in hindsight. Knowing the Paul we know today, I think we look back for ways he was always a little cursed, to settle the question of why Paul Kariya?

But the fact he shook before games didn’t end his career, it’s just A Thing About Paul. He lived with it, through becoming the youngest player on the U-20, then the youngest in the history of Team Canada at 18 and a half, scoring 9 points in 8 games. He decided to finish college at the University of Maine, so he was called up to the 1994 Olympics as an amateur and dragged the bottom-seeded team to silver.

He was called straight back for World Championships two months later, youngest again, the only Olympian Canada wanted there badly enough not to give him a break, securing Canada’s first Worlds gold in thirty-three years. When he came back ready to sign with the Ducks, 9,000 fans showed up to watch him practice. 16,000 watched his first exhibition game. He would go on to play for 16 years, 9 with the Ducks, 7 as their captain, 1 with the Avalanche, 2 with the Predators, 3 with the Blues.

Today Paul can feel like hockey’s death-in-the-family, a story that was inevitably about loss, but he wasn’t always, isn’t really, and the bad that did happen to him was never inevitable. There’s no reason that What Happened to Paul happened to Paul and not somebody else or worse. (And that’s the rant I may or may not inflict on you, we’ll see.)

#paul kariya

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daisiesmakingchains · 7 years

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