Road Hockey Rumble

I spotted this show, Road Hockey Rumble, on OLN today and caught the last 15 minutes of the episode. The premise: Two guys travel across Canada, landing in communities and assembling road hockey teams who will play 1 game in the town before they move onto the next. The series premiered last week in Trail, BC and today’s episode saw them in Prince George, BC. They’ll then be traveling West to East, stopping in everywhere from Lloydminster, Alberta to Summerside, PEI.

Meet two ferocious road hockey obsessed rivals, Calum and Mark, who make their way across Canada in a 13-game grudge match series of road hockey on the new original OLN series Road Hockey Rumble.

On the road they tap into the rivalries, legends and elbow-to-the-face grit of Canada’s most colourful and competitive towns. In the border town of Lloydminster, AB, it’s the Albertans vs. the Saskatchewanians. In Toronto it’s Torontonians who were born there against players from other Canadian cities who now live in Toronto, but despise it. [TSN]

The premise is sort of Kenny vs Spenny-ish. Two friends battling each other to win a competition, cheating, calling names, while the winner gets bragging rights, the loser always gets some form of humiliation. In this case, the guy on the losing team was sprayed with Supersoakers containing blue dye, that they said would last a week.

The idea of roaming around the country and sparking up street hockey games is pretty fun, and I don’t have a problem with the low-budget Canadian programming. If it was more of a documentary style, I think I’d be much more excited. I think the over-compensating cheese and raw manly humour (fit for SpikeTV) is what makes me not like this as much as I should. Although, this is only episode 2 so I’m willing to give it another chance.

The official website is up and running although some features are not-yet-functional. They already have a blog and MySpace page setup, as well a Flickr account. The show airs Wednesday nights on OLN [Episodes].

For a slightly different representation of a Canadian guy wandering around sparking up hockey games and in search of the sport in remote unlikely locations, check out Dave Bidini’s The Tropic of Hockey (book) and The Hockey Nomad (documentary based on the book) [miss604]