How Cam Fowler Inspired Me to Become a Die-Hard Hockey Fan
It was the fall of 2010. I was beginning my first semester of college, living on campus, knowing absolutely no one. I was a die-hard Angels fan for most of my life up until that point, and after three straight years of making the playoffs, my favorite baseball team would miss out on the postseason.
Being all alone in a different state with my favorite sports team in the unfamiliar position of taking October off, I decided that I needed another team to latch on to. I had begun casually following the Anaheim Ducks the year before, but was in no way invested in them as a team. Before that, I had been to one Mighty Ducks game in the early 2000s. That was the extent of my knowledge of hockey. But with the Angels out of baseball’s biggest stage, I decided to focus my attention on the beginning of the hockey season.
It didn’t take long for me to be sucked in to the fast-paced action. Guys jumping over the boards in the middle of play. Scoring chances developing rapidly out of nowhere. The overwhelming sense of anxiety when the team was on the penalty kill. And the sheer skill of the players doing things on ice that I couldn’t even do on dry ground.
There was one player in particular who caught my eye. An 18-year-old defenseman who I learned had gone straight from junior hockey to playing in the NHL, something I found out later was relatively rare, especially for non-first overall draft picks.
Cam Fowler, despite being so young, seemed to be one of the best skaters on the ice. Every stride, every turn, every cut was smooth; it was as if he was a masterfully painted portrait rather than a brutal, angular force of nature.
He also seemed to be in the middle of so many scoring chances. While other defensemen would stay back and hold the blue line, Fowler seemed to find every opportunity he could to pinch down and get the puck on net. Multiple times I watched as he used his skating ability to walk by defending forwards and get in for a dangerous chance.
Watch as Fowler doesn’t hesitate to join the rush in overtime against the Calgary Flames and acts as an additional forward to finish off a sweet backhand move driving the net to win the game.
As a new hockey fan, I only had my eyes to rely on. This was before the love of analytics, before a deep understanding of the game. Even with that deeper understanding, Cam Fowler has grown as a player since his rookie season. But as someone who was looking to find a new exciting outlet to latch onto in a new state and new living situation, being able to watch a player the same age as myself immediately establish himself as one of the Ducks top players did most of the heavy lifting to make me a fan.
Hockey and baseball are very different experiences. Baseball can have plenty of exciting moments, but it often takes a lot of build up to get there. Hockey has constant action where scoring can happen at any moment. An entire game can be filled with the kind of intensity that a lot of other sports only get a handful of times per game.
Now, a decade later, I still follow baseball religiously. But hockey has taken its place as the sport that envelopes my life the most. I had no idea 10 years ago that an 18-year-old player living in the spare room of one of the greatest defensemen of all time, Scott Niedermayer, would kickstart my love affair with a sport that would eventually come to define a large part of my personality and put me on the path to a sportswriting career.
To this day, I tend to gravitate towards players with skills similar to Cam Fowler: offensively-minded who look to move the puck up ice as fast as possible and who have excellent skating skills. These are the players who are most exciting to me, the players who make it appear as if something amazing will happen at any moment.
Every now and then, my mind goes back to that lonely college freshman sitting in his dorm, feeling that rare sensation of excitement as he watched a kid the same age as him make a name for himself in a sport that would shape so much of that student’s life in the years ahead.