My Strange Addiction

I have an unusual compulsion that I have to share to people...

"Oh boy, 3 am":

UK Yotes 🐺🇬🇧 @AZCoyotesUK

Me rn:

A question that I tend to hear a lot usually goes something like this:

“So, how did you become a fan of the Arizona Coyotes?”

It’s a good question and one that is rightfully asked. This is a team that has never done much of note in their history. A team that will have facilities next season that are comparable to hockey teams in Britain. A team that thought drafting a racist bully would be a good idea. A team that gets hit piece after hit piece written about them by Katie Strang and her colleagues at The Athletic. And yet despite this, I keep coming back to them. I keep choosing to watch them. It’s a strange addiction in which I willingly haul my sleep-deprived ass out of bed at 2 or sometimes 3 in the morning on weekdays to watch them - sipping coffee, eyes half sunken, phone in hand ready to tweet. I love it.

It’d be so much simpler to say that I was a fan because I had some family connection to Arizona but life is never quite that simple. My first interaction with hockey was when I was about 11 years old and I played the video-game NHL13 on the old Xbox 360 my Dad had in Birmingham, England. I can’t remember how I managed to obtain a copy of that game. Maybe it was some divine gift from the Hockey Gods to get me into the sport. They must be so disappointed that I became a ‘Yotes fan.

Since that time of sitting at home playing NHL13, I’d always been fairly interested in hockey (or ice hockey, as I called it back then) but was never really a fan of it. It was more of a passing interest to me. That was until 2018, when Team GB won the IIHF Division 1A in a game against Hungary that still gives me goosebumps thinking about it to this day:

“This is a sport I could get into”, I thought. But who to support? It just so happened that later on that summer, Liam Kirk, one of the members of Britain’s squad would get drafted by the Arizona Coyotes. “Playing hockey in the desert is also very funny”, I thought, “and that brick red and black jersey looks so clean”. It was a no-brainer. From that moment onwards I became a Coyotes fan. Four years later, I’m still here.

“What? Arizona has a hockey team!?”:

Whenever I tell anybody in the UK that I support the Arizona Coyotes it’s usually met with some confused expression. They just don’t know what an Arizona Coyotes is. Even one of the friends I made at university, who is Swedish and supposed to know hockey from birth, didn’t know that Arizona had a hockey team - “How does Arizona have a hockey team, what the f*ck?”.

I first started watching the early morning games at the beginning of the 2019-20 season just as I started my second and final year of doing A-Levels (For you Americans reading this, that’s the courses you take from 16-18 before you go to University). I couldn’t watch every single game but I’d usually watch the ones over the Weekends as well as the occasional Weekday game every fortnight or so. Looking back, this probably wasn’t the best idea. I would walk into school after being up since 3 am, and, as one of my mates would later go onto say: “you would look absolutely dead”. One day in particular stands out. I walked in wearing a cardigan over a shirt-and-tie and it wasn’t until two hours after I got in that someone pointed out that my cardigan was on backwards and had been all day. Not my finest moment that.

It was not like I never had fun with it though. One of the best memories I have of that season was the game on the 16th November against the Calgary Flames in which we ultimately won 3-0. The game started at 9 pm here in the UK, and I was at a party at one of my mates houses (we’ll call her Alex). She had, and still has, these four small boisterous dogs, one of which (called Diego) is completely blind. Me and the lads before the game all agreed that if we scored, we’d all take a shot of vodka to celebrate. This was in spite of the fact goals were usually hard to come by with the dump-and-chase system Rick Tocchet implemented during his tenure at the team. I was starting to get nervous as the scoreless first period came and went but 5 minutes into the second period, Derek Stepan potted the first goal. Naturally, my first reaction was to scream “YES!” in celebration, which I did. The dogs though, were not happy with this sudden, unexpected noise. They all immediately shot up, none more so than Diego who started sprinting around and knocking things over all whilst furiously barking into all corners of the house. Alex, understandably, was not happy with this and was equally annoyed when the second went in a few minutes later as I completely forgot about her warning to not make any subsequent sudden, loud noises. But yeah, good party nonetheless.

COVID would, as I’m sure you’re all aware, cut that season short. But it did both the Coyotes and myself a favour. If it wasn’t for COVID, I would have failed my A-Level in chemistry. The UK government gave us all predicted grades, which they based off mock papers. Originally, I was given a U (which is Ungradeable) but after loads of people complained that the government were being too harsh, they bumped mine up to an E, which means that I passed Chemistry. Somehow. Similarly, if it wasn’t for COVID, the Coyotes wouldn’t have made the playoffs that year and that overtime goal from Brad Richardson would never have happened. That would mean one of the best memories I have of the Coyotes, just wouldn’t exist.

“Why do you do it to yourself?”

One thing that no one I know will ever fully understand is why I choose to wake up at ungodly hours to watch the Coyotes of all teams. This year, I’d have a recurring conversation with a housemate that would go something like this:

“I watched hockey last night”, I’d say

“Did they lose?”, he’d reply

*sighs* “…yeah”

“tsk, tsk. All the teams you support are sh*t. Why do you do it to yourself?”

If you look at sports from a purely winning and losing perspective, there is absolutely no reason why you would choose to support the Arizona Coyotes. But Coyotes fans are above this simplistic view of sports as just being about championships and trophies. No one is here because they expect us to win the Stanley Cup anytime soon (albeit that would be very nice). If that were the case, then they’d be wearing Bruins or Penguins or Lightning jerseys, instead. Don’t get me wrong, winning is nice but that’s not the main thing I look for in a team. Supporting a team is as much about the memories you make and the people you meet and interact with than it is about winning.

Sport is more than just a game. Being a Coyotes fan is like being apart of some dysfunctional secret club where we all congregate in a pub in which the ceiling leaks, there’s mould on the walls and there’s one light that constantly flickers on and off. You all wish you could meet in a better pub, but that’s the only one you’ll ever be in.

My strange addiction is that I keep waking up in the middle of the night to watch something that ultimately hurts. But yet at the same time, I don’t think I’d have it any other way.

Follow @AZCoyotesUK on Twitter

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