Underrated players

I'm trying to post every week for a few months, and sometimes you're going to get one that's mailed right in, in an envelope that smells a bit like Blue Buck. You get what you pay for.

Last week I made a throwaway remark about how good a player Ken Linseman was. For the under-35s, Linseman was ubiquitously known as "the Rat" and that's about all you need. He was an incredible player, for a certain meaning of "incredible," all filthy stickwork and imaginative torments, every shift, nineteen minutes a night, seventy games a year. When he finally said just the wrong thing, and you turned on him with your glove slipping off your hand, then unless you were 6'0" and didn't fight much it was not Ken Linseman waiting at all but somehow Dave Semenko or Jay Miller or some other cement-handed ruffian. Oopsie-poopsie.

The man even skated like a deadbeat, trundling along in an Aqualung hunch; his teams should have issued him a trenchcoat. He played hard, he goaded hard, his very face was infuriating, and he was never happier than when he agitated you into a mistake that his team could exploit. He wore #13 in Edmonton and Boston. Even playing alumni games he somehow managed to show up with the most ridiculous swimming-goggles glasses you've ever seen like his very aging process was goading the opposition to take an unwise swing at the Rat. He knew exactly what he was. Linseman was also, incidentally, by all accounts a boisterous but solid human being, and a really good hockey player. In Edmonton he was obviously a cut below the really great players, but still an awfully good second-liner because the first-line centre spot was just plain off limits, and in Boston Cam Neely was definitely his superior, but from the scoring record Linseman was a solid, solid first-line centre for decent teams. No sport other than hockey could produce a player like Ken Linseman. He was an astonishing specimen.