from Ken Dryden at The Washington Post,

Vladimir Putin likes hockey. Every year, he builds an ice rink in the middle of Moscow’s Red Square. For any occasion he can devise, he puts on his hockey equipment and plays.

It’s not a surprise that Putin feels as he does. Russians love hockey for the same reason Canadians do. It comes straight from their landscape, from winter, from cold. It punishes us, but at the same time absorbs us, so we almost don’t feel its pain. To play hockey, you have to be tough, in lots of ways. And Russians are tough. Tough enough to survive their history. To survive Leningrad.

But there are a few things Putin doesn’t understand about hockey. One is that when he dresses in his hockey gear and skates with real players, and those players let him skate by untouched, and goalies flounder to one side, letting him score five, six, seven times — real hockey players, real goalies, don’t do that. Except maybe once in awhile, and not for anyone over the age of 5. A real hockey player would never ask it, expect it or allow it.

Putin also seems not to understand about hockey something that might relate to this moment: The tough are initiators, they deliver hard, devastating hits, but the really tough take those hits … and keep going, to win in the end. Just like in Leningrad. Obliterating the Ukrainian city of Mariupol doesn’t make you tough.

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