The third episode of Hockey Wives is basically a grab bag of storyline snippets and it’s neither as humanely grounded as the second episode nor as glitzy as the premiere. The show seems to have settled into a more quotidian documentary approach, and while we may be hitting a wall in terms of realizing that most people’s real lives—even those of hockey wives—are pretty boring, there were some intriguing revelations in this episode:
Tiffany and George Parros deserve better friends
Tiffany tells a friend that after George was knocked out during a fight at the beginning of the 2013-14 season, “Parrosing” turned into a meme—basically planking, but infinitely more obnoxious and bloodthirsty.
“One of our very good friends sent us a picture doing it the very next day,” she spits. “You are disgusting. I thought my husband was permanently injured and you’re sending me that the very next day.”
Then she talks about their loss of identity and status since her husband was more or less forced into retirement. Everyone used to introduce him as “George, who plays for Montreal,” she says, but now people don’t know quite where to file him in their social hierarchy. “Our dinner invitations have gone away,” she says. Small wonder Tiffany is anxious to leave L.A. behind and start fresh. Except that the new place they’ve chosen has its own problems.
High-end Las Vegas real estate is as gaudy as it is depressing
The Parros’s lease in L.A. is up in three weeks, and they’ve decided to decamp for Las Vegas because luxe housing rentals are cheap and Tiffany is concerned they haven’t sorted out a replacement for her husband’s NHL paycheques. This seems like an oddly random choice, even with the pragmatic justifications.
In Manhattan Beach, where they currently live, Tiffany says a 2,800-square-foot house near the water can go for $15,000 a month, while in Vegas, you can get a 4,000-square-foot palace for $3,500. Yes, but then you have Las Vegas outside your front door. Frankly, I would rather live within the entrails of Marjory the Trash Heap.
Tiffany goes to see a succession of very large, bleak and garish houses, several of which give off a probably-murdery vibe.
“The whole idea of us moving to Vegas is that we didn’t have to change our quality of life,” she complains to her agent. “We move here, we save money and we get to still maintain a nice lifestyle.”
The last house of the day is a 4,500-square-foot monstrosity with a weird glass-walled room overlooking the staircase and upper hallway. “This is where the strippers change,” Tiffany announces. The final maybe-murder-mansion gets crossed off the list, and her family still doesn’t have a new home.
Noureen DeWulf will force you to realize ugly facts about yourself
Ryan Miller’s wife speaks a lot about anxiety over balancing impending motherhood, her career and not losing the essence of who she is, which is a completely legit and huge thing to wrap your head around when you’re about to be responsible for a small human.
But then she declares grandly, “My career is always there in my mind, how hard I’ve worked for my craft.” Which caused my brain to snort, “Come on. Your craft? You’re on Charlie Sheen’s replacement sitcom,” and then I had to confront my own elitist judgment of other people’s livelihoods and artistic values. So thanks for that.
Nicole Brown perhaps overestimates crime risk, but will handle it
Dustin Brown’s formidable wife meets up with a couple of other hockey wives for a private self-defence training session. I feel like this is a thing you see women do all the time on TV, but never in real life.
One of the other wives comments that it’s easy to look online and figure out when “the guys” are on the road and the wives are home alone and vulnerable, but this sounds like a fairly Byzantine way to go about a life of crime. Then Nicole says she’s heard there are a lot of “follow-home crimes” in Manhattan Beach, where people, say, take out the trash and a bad guy storms into the house behind them.
This seems somewhat unlikely in a protected and well-off community, but I’m not here to judge anyone’s perception of risk (OK, yeah I am: the crime rate in Manhattan Beach is about half the U.S. average, with zero murders, 34 robberies and 25 aggravated assaults in 2013, the most recent year for which I could find statistics, because I am a nerd who enjoys this crap).
Anyway, whatever the situation, Nicole—a former college scholarship hockey player—is well equipped to handle it. The self-defence instructor demonstrates grabbing her from behind and she goes bananas in a very satisfying way, pounding on his mid-section rapidly with her fists.
“This could save my life one day,” she says. “This could save my minivan.”
The Brown children really do not like pants
This episode features, by my count, our second and third occurrence of Pantsless Small Boys in the Brown household. One ends up suddenly stripped down amid a raging sugar high after Trick-or-Treating, and the other perches nobly on a bench in a hockey arena in his underpants, before he changes into his soccer uniform.
“I chose to have four kids. But sometimes it’s a nightmare,” says Nicole. She uses the word “nightmare” several times in this episode.
Some hockey wives are just terrible, terrible people
Emilie Blum continues to be the most sweet-natured and appealing of the women on the show. Her husband, defenceman Jonathon Blum, is trying to make his case with the Minnesota Wild, but in this episode he’s sent down to the AHL yet again.
The move is sudden: the couple has to get up at 4 a.m. and set out on a long drive to Iowa so he can make 10 a.m. practice. The drive features one of the best visuals in this episode: Jonathon behind the wheel with one of the couple’s Chiweenies (Chihuahua + dachshund, also called “Mexican hot dogs,” which I feel is iffy in terms of cultural sensitivity, but I can’t quite explain why) perched on his lap and the other draped jauntily over his shoulder.
Later, Emilie drives to the game with the wives of two of her husband’s teammates.
“Obviously, it would be so much better if Jon was playing for the NHL, but in the AHL, I feel so much more comfortable with the other girlfriends,” she says. “In the NHL, one of the other wives had made a comment about my purse, and I came home and cried because I felt really uncomfortable and a little bit intimidated.”
So apparently horrendous sorority types exist among hockey wives in the wild. Emilie, if you tell us who that woman was, I will organize a flash mob that will judge the hell out of whatever purse she’s carrying, until she goes home crying. And then we will high-five and drink wine with you.
The Iowa Wild lose 5-1 and Emilie looks dejected in the stands, then rearranges her face into a supportive smile when she meets up with her husband.
“Another loss,” Jonathon mutters. Emilie responds brightly, “You guys are looking better, though!” In voiceover, she says, “Sometimes it’s really hard to be that rock that Jon leans on. I have to tell him everything is going to be OK, when I don’t know myself if things are going to be OK.”
The show lags several months behind real time, so it’s easy to find how things worked out, if you’re into spoilers: Jonathon Blum’s HockeyDB page features an asterisk next to the 2014-15 Minnesota Wild: “No longer on active roster.”
