Hello, My Name is The Royal Half
During the summer of 2002, my good friend and I decided it was time. We had been to a handful of Los Angeles Kings games over the past few years; free tickets from my parents’ connections, a 3 game gift pack from a boss, an Ebay-bought Game 6 playoff ticket versus the Avalanche that sent the series back to Colorado. But now, we had decided to become Season Ticket Holders. Well… Half Season Ticket Holders. Because 41 home games is way too much.
I had been a Kings fan since 1988, when Wayne Gretzky arrived in Los Angeles and changed the landscape of hockey forever. I was 11. The thrill of making it to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1993 was the high that I have continued to chase for the past 16 years… little did I know that becoming a Half Season Ticket Holder was the biggest mistake I could ever make as a fan of the Kings.
Since that fateful first season in 2002, the Kings have not made the playoffs. 7 glorious years that ended each time in early April. (Well 6 seasons plus the lockout.) We’ve survived Andy Murray, John Torchetti and Marc Crawford. We got to see the great LAPD line, Ziggy Palffy, Adam Deadmarsh and Jason Allison, but unfortunately, due to injuries, they were never playing at the same time. Across various years, our playoff hopes had been held in the gloved hands of such trade deadline pickups as Dmitry Yushkevich, Anson Carter and Mark Parrish. Make that the stone-hard gloved hands of Carter and Parrish. Don’t even get me started on the goalies we’ve seen. Oh, alright:
Cristobal Huet
Roman Cechmanek
Mathieu Chouinard
Milan Hnilicka
Mathieu Garon
Adam Hauser
Jason LaBarbera
Barry Brust
Sean Burke
Dan Cloutier
Yutaka Fukufuji
Jean-Sebastien Aubin
Erik Ersberg
Jonathan Quick
Little did I know, when I would write my first Bloguin post that the Los Angeles Kings would be the #1 team in the Western Conference. These recent winning ways make it hard for me a blogger on this site. You see, I’m not so much here to provide in-depth analysis of the Kings forechecking or give detailed information on Jarett Stoll’s faceoff percentage. The Royal Half has lived and died by the simple facts that for a long while… the Kings just sucked. And I was here to make fun of them.
If you like the hockey equivalent of dick jokes or enjoy humorous screen-grabs of NHL players and broadcasters with funny captions… man, you are going to like The Royal Half. I’m not really ChrisKontos. The real Chris Kontos was a player for the Kings during their 89 playoff run that set the NHL on fire. You can learn more about his historic playoff series here. As for The Royal Half, it’s pretty much just a 2 man operation. Each game I go to with my Half Season Ticket Holder Buddy. We sit in our section and critique everything around us, from the play on the ice… to the Mascot throwing out tshirts. Here is an artist rendering of what we look like at home games.
I’m on the left.
Come in, look around for a while. I’m still getting the hang of the new platform as it’s a big step up from my old home at Blogspot. There might be a few posts in the archives that are missing videos, as I’m still trying to figure out how that all works. But leave a note in the comments, tell me what you like… and what you don’t like. And most important. Go Kings Go!
