This one is a bit different from our usual posts — a personal story from the founder of The Hockey Gods, rather than a researched history piece. We wanted to share it anyway, because it's the actual origin story behind this site, two and a half decades before any of the rest of it existed.
I could only chuckle to myself as I picked up my media badge and information packet at USA Hockey headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. After all, The Hockey Gods web site was still a work in progress at the time — just another "under construction" registered URL. All it took to get credentialed was filling out a form on the USA Hockey web site and faxing it in. I figured there was no way I'd actually be approved. With even a superficial amount of investigation into my media application, my cover would and should have been blown. Yet here I was, walking in as an accredited media correspondent at a US Men's Ice Hockey orientation camp in September 2001, just months before the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, with Herb Brooks himself in the building.
I hadn't exactly earned my way in through the front door of hockey journalism. What I'd actually spent the previous year or so on was something stranger: teaching a computer to answer hockey questions. Starting around 2000, I built the original "Ask the Hockey Gods" using an Oracle database and Perl scripts, feeding it a growing list of questions I expected people to ask, then using regular expressions to match whatever someone typed against that list. Find a match, give the real answer. No match, fall back to something vaguer — the hockey equivalent of a Magic 8-Ball. Who, what, where, how, and why could cover almost anything if you were clever about the fallback answers. It wasn't artificial intelligence in any way a computer scientist would recognize, but it was, in its own scrappy way, an attempt at the same basic idea decades early: build something that could hold up its end of a hockey conversation. That was the whole website. And somehow, that website's "media correspondent" was now standing in a USA Hockey camp.
Once I was actually inside, whatever cover story I'd braced myself to defend never mattered, because nobody asked. I had a badge. I had access. I had absolutely no idea what to do with either one. I wasn't a journalist. I had no list of questions prepared, no editor waiting on a story, no real sense of what I was even supposed to be gathering. What I was, more than anything, was a hockey fan who'd just been handed the keys to the candy store. I spent the camp soaking it in — watching pro players up close, getting autographs, taking in whatever I could. I still have a photo from the press conference with Herb Brooks himself — just months before that Salt Lake City silver medal, and about two years before his death in a car accident in 2003 cut his story short. Nobody knew any of that was coming, of course. At the time it was just a legendary coach being unexpectedly generous with his time toward someone wearing a media badge he almost certainly hadn't earned.
One moment from that camp stands out more than any other. Partway through an ice session, Brooks himself came out and ran an impromptu whiteboard talk, diagramming out whatever he wanted the team to see. I've still got photos and video of it today — though "video of Herb Brooks" is a bit generous, since what's actually in frame is his arm and hand, marker in motion, working through the X's and O's on the board. It's not much to look at on its own, but it's a real piece of him coaching in the room, and I've never shown it to anyone.
The other moment that's stuck with me involved John LeClair, who'd go on to lead the entire U.S. team in scoring at those Olympics a few months later. A fresh shipment of sticks had come in for him at the camp, the old-style wooden ones, and he had his own private ritual for approving them. He'd take them one at a time, flex each on the ice to test it, and if a stick didn't pass inspection, he'd press down hard on the toe of the blade until it snapped clean off, then toss the whole thing without a second thought. I still have two of the sticks he rejected, blades broken clean off, exactly as he left them.
Around that same era, The Hockey Gods wasn't just a website I was quietly building in the background — it was also the name of my adult beer league hockey team, playing out of the Ice Centre at the Promenade in Westminster, Colorado. I was captain, and the team wore jerseys with the same "TheHockeyGods.com" branding as the site itself, right there on the front. We won a couple of league championships along the way, and I still have the jerseys and the trophies to prove it. It's a small thing, but it's stuck with me: for a while there, the same odd little name was on a website, on a media badge that shouldn't have worked, and on the back of a beer league jersey, all at once.
I came home with plenty of autographs and almost no news. A real reporter probably would have been frustrated. I mostly just felt lucky. I'd bluffed my way into a small piece of hockey history because I'd built a database of hockey questions and answers in my spare time, and somebody at USA Hockey decided that was reason enough to let me in the door.
It would be years before "artificial intelligence" became a phrase every hockey website could casually put in a press release, and decades before this site would get to rebuild "Ask the Hockey Gods" with something that actually deserves the name. But the instinct behind it never really changed. I wanted a way for hockey fans to ask a question and get a real answer back, and I was willing to fake my way into a media badge just to see what that might look like from the inside. The technology finally caught up to the idea.