The Jason Arnott Story

We've never met or filmed anything with Jason Arnott but the man has had a tremendous impact on the 2Man crew.

Here's your opportunity to close out of this window before I launch into a pointless story that you may have had to been there to appreciate. I think Scotty has already told this story. Sorry.

So were all in college playing in the ACHA club hockey championship tourney in Maryland. We drew an opening round game vs. the U of Maryland, a team that we knew nothing about. We were pretty nervous and the locker room was kind of tense and quiet. I was trying to keep things loose by goofing around a little but I could tell that the guys weren't having it.

Our coach wasn't big on the pregame speeches. The most he ever said was a few words about his college days or something to go over line changes. Coach took the first round of this championship tourney as his opportunity to really explore the space with the inspirational messages. He passed out sheets of paper with quotes from famous athletes. I don't remember all of them but one in particular was from Michael Jordan. Coach had us go around the room and read aloud from the paper and then he would speak about the quotes. It was unreal. Here I was minutes away from the national tourney in my senior year and I'm reading quotes off of a sheet of paper.

Coach was well intentioned but this just wasn't working for us. No one was openly shitting on the quote sheet because I think everyone was too nervous to react. Coach's speech was making the locker room more tense and for a team as loose as we were all season long this was a total disaster. I kept thinking that we were minutes away from opening against the hosting team and this speech was draining the room. We were used to going out and curb-stomping teams after having dance contests and other bullshit in the locker room. This quote sheet schtick was totally foreign to us. We needed something to snap us out of our quote-induced zombie state. That something came from Junior defenseman, Scotty.

Scotty was (and still is) known to be a strange dude. One of his many quirks is that he always has to be wet. I woke up on an airplane next to him one time and his head was dripping wet like he stuck it out the window mid flight. Another time he got in trouble in DC because he felt it necessary to go for a dip in the WWII Memorial.

Anyways Scotty leaves in the middle of the speech for the bathroom to soak his head before it was helmet time. While he was gone I remember that all the guys had their heads down listening (or trying not to listen) to coach ramble about the opportunity we had in front of us. Scotty comes out of the bathroom sopping wet sits down and screams out, "Jason Arnott!". The whole room burst into laughter. For some reason Scotty was getting himself fired up and let a Jason Arnott slip out. It was the spark that we needed to pull us out of our nervous funk. We went out and won the first period 1-0 and rolled to a 6-3 win against the home team.

Happy Thursday

- Nemmy