Game of choice for semi-literate male cement-heads that supposedly reveals the Canadian national character: Young men dressed in plastic-reinforced polyester suits sliding around on sheets of ice at blinding speeds chasing a disk of circular black rubber, slashing themselves and imported Europeans with aluminum-fiberglass weapons, and punching one another in the face at the slightest provocation. Until recently, the management and marketing of the sport has been the most incompetent in the history of professional or amateur sport, and the players union was operated as a divine right monarchy by a man who once tried to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during a tournament game in Moscow. The game is of no intrinsic interest to the United States, notwithstanding the recent flight of NHL franchises southward.