Shark Fins and Royal Perseverance

Los Angeles is a notoriously fickle town. Perhaps it comes with the territory to overhype the shit out of something and then bail the moment it underperforms.

That’s the tragic nature of modern-day entertainment. When the going gets tough, we change the channel, whether it’s a TV series that’s America’s Favorite New Show until it’s canceled, or a sporting franchise with a legacy of victory uncharacteristically struggling for wins. There’s just too much to choose from to waste a minute with a loser.

But what kind of character can you build without the schadenfreude of deep suffering?

Such was the case last week when the Los Angeles Kings hockey club was getting trounced three games to none by the San Jose Sharks. Empty seats littered the arena, especially in the luxury boxes. The fans and the papers had written off the Kings. It just wasn’t our year.

But this is the same team that went to the mountaintop in 2012, hoisting the Stanley Cup for the first time in LA history. They were losing, but not just losing. They were being blown off the ice. But something about it didn’t seem right. The Kings were better than this, and they knew it, negative chatter be damned.

The Kings won game four, decisively. It was a relief not to get swept. It was almost like the Sharks let them have one to avoid humiliation. And then, unexpectedly, the Kings won a close game five, in San Jose, no less. The pressure was suddenly on the Sharks to close this series out.

By game six, back in LA, the bandwagon was standing-room-only. If the Comeback Kids doubted themselves, it never made it out of the locker room. But it must have been pin-drop quiet in there down three games to none. Where does the confidence to continue come from?

In the history of the NHL, only four teams have overcome such a deficit. The discipline to stay focused on the present task, in the face of such daunting odds and humiliating losses, takes nothing short of Zen mastery.

Ignore the solar glare of snarky LA sports writers. Ignore the personal humiliation of letting in fifteen goals in the first three games. Ignore the crowd apathy and empty seats. Ignore the baseball coverage on the cover of the sports section while playoff hockey is relegated to page eight.

Lace ‘em up and hit the ice, boys. The fat lady has yet to sing.

The biggest cliché we hear athletes sputter in interviews ends up being a fundamental truth: “We’re taking it one game at a time.”

So very facile to say. So incredibly hard to actually pull off. But the more you shrink the deficit toward evening a series, the easier it is to get inside your own head and derail yourself.

We’re close. We’re closer. We can tie this series. We can actually win this thing.

And the fans start getting hopeful. And the columnists start getting hopeful. And there’s nothing more toxic when striving to fulfill a goal than the hope of fair-weather fans. As the iron-willed Nietzsche advised, when faced with “a hard truth,” what we need is not hope, but “courage in the face of reality.”

The Kings’ actions spoke louder than their words. And here in Tinsel Town, the city of perpetual bullshit, that’s a truly praiseworthy achievement. They entered the shark tank without fear and carved those man-eaters into sashimi.

Now it’s onto the next odds-against challenge in Anaheim and hopefully, a well-cooked Duck à l'Orange.