I feel ashamed to call myself a hockey fan when the city I live in is home to the Hockey Hall of Fame. I blame the mediocre Leafs for my lack of enthusiasm of all things hockey. Although I can no longer say that because we went to the HHOF on Saturday.
We received some free tickets courtesy of this fiasco:
(if it’s not quite clear what I’m doing, I’m catching paper money within my chest inside a telephone booth duh.)
That was last year, and we never got around to going until now (and well because the tickets expire next month). Initial impressions of the place is pretty banal. There is a lot of memorabilia and displays for star NHL players and international teams, which in truth do not interest me at all. There is a floor devoted to the various NHL awards with all the real trophies (I guess that floor is very empty when they hand them out at the end of the season) including the Stanley Cup. I found this to be more interesting, especially some of the history around forming the league and awards.
I think the Stanley Cup is only present when the season is on (because the winning team’s players each get to have the Cup for a week?). So I guess you are supposed to go during the season to see it. I was a bit disappointed that Phil Pritchard and his white gloves were not there to make sure you behaved around the cup!
There were also a couple of other activities for hockey fans, you could play some video games (NHL2K10, shoot the puck at a video goalie, save the puck against a video rush) but they are outdated and only fun for kids. You could also do your own play-by-play but I don’t think you could take a copy home with you. For $15 general admission though, I don’t think there are enough activities and exhibits to be worth the visit! Unless you’re a much more hardcore fan than me.
The best thing about the visit was actually a temporary exhibition of Olympic medals from 1896 till now. The majority of the medals had a common theme until about the 1990s when new materials and design were introduced to make the medals more modern.
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