| 12 January 2010
Mr. and Mrs. Polak, of Ostrava, Czech Republic, must have been overjoyed on that day in April 1986 when their son, already two feet tall and 28 pounds (and sporting a five o'clock peach fuzz), finally ejected from his mother's birth canal. So overjoyed, or perhaps befogged by knockoff Eastern Bloc painkillers, they apparently envisioned a future wherein their son would somehow grow up to be an offensively minded skater for the Polish national team.
Unfortunately, Roman Polak is not a roaming Polock. He's a brawny stay-at-home defenseman for the St. Louis Blues and the Czech Olympic Team.
How brawny, you ask? He's a shade over six feet, and listed conservatively at 227 pounds. (I was going to say he's built like a tank, but Czechs are apparently a bit touchy about tank references.)
How home does he stay, you ask? In 138 NHL games, he has 3 goals and 21 assists. He stays at home like a fat guy with braces and a poor complexion.
Despite his bulk, he is a decent skater--not a pylon by any means. With the Blues, he has been paired for the last season and a half almost exclusively with Barret Jackman, who qualifies as a hockey anomaly of sorts--a defensive defenseman who won a Calder Trophy based largely on a nasty attitude.
Polak has adopted that nasty attitude from his partner, and grafted it onto a set of cankles that reportedly turned Hillary Clinton green with envy when the Czech ambassador had the temerity to bring them up at a recent meeting in Washington. "His ankles are as big as my calves," Jackman confirmed in a recent report.
Another underrated feature of Polak's game is his bushy eyebrows. Like banded wooly caterpillars, they are extremely sensitive to atmospheric conditions, and Roman can tell immediately upon entering an arena what the ice conditions will be like late in the game. This is of immeasurable benefit to his Blues teammates, who can thus anticipate whether they will have a puck bounce over their stick at the point, or get an edge caught in a rut in the ice to give up a back-breaking third period goal. "You saw the speed, you saw the power, you saw the ability to defend," said Blues head coach Davis Payne, who also coached Polak in the AHL. "But I didn't see those eyebrows developing into an NHL-level asset."
LeNoceur makes hockey jokes at Melt Your Face Off in addition to making Olympic hockey jokes for the Bloguin's Olympic Hockey Blog.
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