I was greatly disappointed with your article on this area’s newest professional hockey team, the East Coast Hockey League Chesapeake Icebreakers (“Thug Life,” 12/12). Sean Daly has nothing to offer the reader but arrogant, sneering observations about the league, the players, the fans, the venue, the owner, the coach, the locker room, and even the Zamboni driver. He makes snide comments about people singing the national anthem. He snickers about what he decides must be blue-collar fans, their attire, and their vehicles. He slams the athletes and their aspirations, reporting that they are stuck in hockey limbo and have no options in life but playing in the minor leagues. Daly’s professional options must be quite impressive indeed to find his articles in Washington’s Free Weekly, wedged in between advertisements for various erotic boutiques and dating services.

If the reader is able to wade through the whole article, he is left wondering exactly what Daly expected to find at a minor-league sporting event, particularly a hockey game. He finds the play lacking the “often balletic grace and creative playmaking” found in the NHL—well, if the players possessed that level of skill, they’d be in the NHL, wouldn’t they? He apparently finds the fighting offensive. One can only suppose that he finds the NHL fights balletically graceful and creative, too. He comments that the locker room is “really just a big room with benches.” One must conclude that Daly has never before been in a locker room, since that’s a fairly accurate description of any locker room—including those in the NHL.

What comes through most clearly in Daly’s article is his own bitterness, perhaps at being stuck in journalism limbo. He has responded with disdain and scorn to the passion and optimism expressed by these young hockey players, who are pursuing their dream game by game. Daly must be bewildered by this approach to life.

Personally, I was bewildered by Daly’s vehemently vituperative report on the Icebreakers. To quote my 11-year-old son, “Who wrote this trash?”

And no, I don’t own a pickup truck.

St. Charles, Md.