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Ovechkin Beats Gretzky
He’s the greatest at one task, it’s
putting biscuits into baskets.
He scores goals from awkward angles
after making dekes, and dangles.
He’s a hockey fan amazer,
wearing blades sharp as a razor,
that ensure he skates with style on
past each stationary pylon.
After picking player’s pockets,
he will launch explosive rockets,
which quite often, but not solely,
find the five-hole of the goalie.
He smiles with each shot his stick lets
loose, exposing missing chiclets
loosened when hit by a club, or
when his teeth met frozen rubber.
It’s his skills that do his talking,
and they leave opponents gawking.
Don’t expect a deep discussion,
that’s unless you speak in Russian.
Lighting lamps while laying lumber,
he’s now notched the highest number
of goals, also known as ginos,
as each hockey devotee knows.
In the goal contest, Great 8 won.
Ovi just surpassed the Great One
but the record he still grapples
with is beating Gretzky’s apples.
In the pantheon of hockey
it’s clear Ovi is a lock, he’s
stuck as number two best ever,
unless he can play forever.
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Poet’s Note
Wayne Gretzky (a.k.a. The Great One) retired from hockey in 1999 after playing 20 seasons in the National Hockey League. Over his career, he set regular season records for scoring goals (894) and assists (1,963) that no one thought would ever be broken. This is especially true since rules and equipment are very different today, and the average level of scoring in the league is lower now than when Gretzky was at his peak. Despite that, Alexander Ovechkin broke Gretzky’s career goal-scoring record on April 6, 2025. However, no player will ever come close to Gretzky’s record for assists. He remains more than 700 assists ahead of the second-ranking player and is over 1,000 assists ahead of Ovechkin.
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Glossary of Hockey Slang:
Apple: An assist (i.e. a pass that leads to a goal)
Biscuit in the Basket: Another term for a goal
Chiclet: Teeth
Club: Another term for hockey stick
Dangle: A fancy maneuver to get past an opponent (see Deke)
Deke: A fancy maneuver to get past an opponent (see Dangle)
Five-Hole: A name for the space between a goalie’s leg pads
Frozen Rubber: A hockey puck (see biscuit)
Gino: Another term for a goal
Great 8: Nickname for Alexander Ovechkin
Laying lumber: A great hit
Light the lamp: Yet another term for a goal
Ovi: Another nickname for Alexander Ovechkin
Pylon: A defensive player who is easy to skate around
Rocket: Another term for a slapshot
The Great One: Nickname for Wayne Gretzky—still the greatest hockey player of all time
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Warren Bonham is a private equity investor who lives in Southlake, Texas.
Quite an amazing achievement – both Ovechkin’s record, and your poem, Warren.
Thanks for the read – and the glossary!
Thanks! I was sad to see the record go, but Ovechkin definitely deserved it. He broke his leg during the season this year and missed 16 games. Despite all that, he still scored more goals (at 39 years old) than all but a handful of other players this season. He found what he was born to do and accomplished something no one thought possible.
This was both highly entertaining and educational. The flow was like being on one of his rockets. One has to be a great fan of hockey to write such a detailed and vivid description of the accomplishments of Ovechkin.
I was always drawn to the sport as a kid (hard to avoid in Canada). I was never any good at it but I can appreciate how difficult it is to do what they do perched atop thin metal blades. Given the speed at which they travel, the impact of any hit is much greater than even in the NFL. The speed also makes their finesse that much more amazing. Ovechkin took it all to another level.
Whatever the subject, Warren, your rhythms are flawlessly entertaining. With the hockey lingo here, reading is like learning a new tango where the swings and sways are enhanced by the unexpectedly perfect double rhymes at the end of each line. It’s a great one all the more when the angle is not just a sport, but the tale of a historic rivalry between its greatest players. The icing on the biscuit is that you did this with news only one week old. Congratulations on your win!
Thanks! Hopefully you’ll be a hockey fan for life. This in-depth study imperfectly follows in the footsteps you laid when teaching us all about puffins, weaving, Queen Esther, etc.
Thanks, Warren, but I still have much study to do on the one sport about which I wrote a poem. You missed it, I think, because it appeared at SCP a few months before you did.
https://classicalpoets.org/2022/07/sumos-winning-ways-by-margaret-coats/
Warren, this is dazzling–and delightfully so, because I can follow your rhyming virtuosity as I simply cannot the course of the puck across the ice. As Margaret points out, those rhymes are flawless and unforced: even the hockey-lock, he’s pairing, since the following letter s negates its presence in he’s.
I also love your glossary’s self-exemplifying pairing of dangle and deke!
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I was wondering if some of the more unusual rhymes would actually work. I really struggled with a rhyme for “chiclets”.
This is a fun poem, Warren. In my younger days, when the burly Bruins (like Bobby Orr) reigned supreme, I was a major puck-head; yet I didn’t know most of the lingo you use in your poem. Remember when they didn’t even wear helmets? Yikes!
The Bruins were my team as a kid as well. If Bobby Orr’s knees hadn’t given out, he may well have ended up being the GOAT. On the helmet front, there was a time when goalies didn’t even wear face masks. Those guys were certifiably crazy.
Even though I know virtually nothing about hockey, I found this poem very entertaining. My favorite element here is your mosaic rhymes, like “task it’s / baskets”; “style on / pylon”; “stick let’s / chiclets.”
It was fun trying to fit the hockey lingo into the structure of the poem, but whoever came up with hockey’s slang terms didn’t select words that are easy to rhyme. I’m glad you enjoyed the poem, but I’m sensing you’re unlikely to become a convert.
I liked this poem more than I like ice hockey, because where I grew up hockey was not a major sport, and I never really played it.
Hockey is definitely a very niche sport. We couldn’t avoid it in Canada but it barely registers here in Texas even though our local NHL team is usually pretty good.