When I was playing with YouTube last night, in order to pull out the music for that wildly dissimilar mix, it occurred to me that essentially everything is on YouTube–a revelation that’s been brewing at least since I found Closet Land on there.
So I decided to see if there was anything there featuring my brother. (See my retrospective post on his hockey career for background.)
Surprisingly, there are. Unsurprisingly, they feature my brother in fights.
For instance, there’s some new coverage of the time my brother, then a 23-year old rookie with Philadelphia, decided to go gloves down with the team’s superstar–apparently he was a bit of a conceited ass, and it never occurred to my brother that the rookie probably shouldn’t potentially injure the highest-paid player on the team.
While it was news at the time–and didn’t surprise me at all–I am kind of shocked that this is still on YouTube eleven years later.
There’s also footage of another of his fights–this time he takes a pretty brutal punch in the head from one of the league’s enforcers, but then comes back to pretty decisively win the fight. I remember hearing about this one, since Steve was sidelined for a while after it.
Again, it’s weird to see this, since it was years ago, and since the “why” of putting this online, much less watching it, escapes me. But that clip has had more than 22,500 views, so someone’s watching.
I actually Googled that story and found an interview
Singer: In regard to you being a power-puncher, a fight that comes to mind is the one you had in the AHL against Steve McLaren. You do a punch count on that one and he easily tops you, but then he skates away and his face is just busted…
Parker: Well, he didn’t play for two months after that also because he had to have surgery I can’t believe he didn’t go down from that first punch. You gotta give him credit for staying up. I was expecting him to go down and when he kept punching, I was like “woah, we’re not done? Ok…” He’s a tough man, especially for him to be able to stand up like that after I gave him that shot.
There’s at least one more of Steve’s fights on there, and probably more–I got bored with looking.
I’m not sure what to conclude from this, except that the Internet is a much bigger place than I understand, even when I’m thinking about how big it is, if it’s got room for archiving local news footage of minor stories from years before the Internet hit the public consciousness, much less streaming video. And that there are some really weird people out there who are really into watching hockey fights, I guess.
