Looking Back at Youngblood

As an ’80s kid, you only knew two hockey movies: Slap Shot, and Youngblood. But Slap Shot didn’t belong to you. It was a 1970s movie starring a 1960s actor, and while its Cinema’s Greatest Decade brand of enlightened buffoonery unarguably made it the better of the two by a Big Country Bryant Reeves mile, you don’t get to choose what films your generation gets to claim as its own. Part of the reason I’m completely baffled by hockey is that Dallas didn’t get an NHL team until 1993. The rest, I blame on Gen-X’s hockey movie being Youngblood.