all photos by Adam / Journal Star. more found here

“Chicago – this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit.” -Hunter S. Thompson

Welcome to hockey: land of fights, plentiful beer and open-leering at women. It’s perhaps appropriate that I shot my first NHL game last night at the United Center in Chicago.

Chicago Blackhawks vs St. Louis Blues, my editor tells me. I nod and pack my things. It’ll be a long day, most of it on the road. Rush-hour to jostle with, another checkbox to check. Bears, White Sox, Cubs, and now Blackhawks.

It wasn’t all unpleasant; hockey is a fifth-tier sport in the Second City. Pro-football, two baseball teams and the Bulls make up a tangle of worthless teams that clog the pages of the Trib and Sun-Times each day. There might be six photographers total, a measly number in Chicago sporting events. In fact, if you drain 10,000 of the 17,000 fans out of the arena, you might fool it for an AHL game in Peoria’s Carver Arena. Pro, semi-pro and college sports are all congruent, anyway.

Hold on. Joni Mitchell is blaring here in Starbucks and I’m getting on edge. I don’t mind JM at all, but goddamn, why do places crank their music so loud? To stifle thinking men and women, that’s why!

I’m sitting on a cold cement floor rink-side, catching the wet spray of ice as it squeezes through the fist-sized hole in the glass, my picture porthole and a horrific liability should an errant puck decide to pass through. Later, after transmitting photos between periods, I find my little window in disarray, the entire pane of plexiglass knocked loose from its neighbors.

Soon the game is over, a 6-1 blowout over the Blues. A 20-1 game in baseball, a team zeroed in basketball, and a complete bore. I walk out of the arena into an empty Chicago, a neighborhood where thugs roam and the law gives little comfort. I waste no time fleeing.

It’s time to hit the road, traversing that unimportant space between Chicago and Peoria in the middle of the night.