The Detroit Red Wings may be feeling a twinge of embarrassment after their home-opening loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs tonight, in which the Stanley Cup champions passed the puck like a remedial-level pee-wee team.
That is, until Def Leppard's Joe Elliott redefined the concept of embarrassment during one of their NHL Face-Off Rocks segments at the Fox Theater in Detroit. This is what you get for booking a band from England: Drive on the wrong side of the road, place the holiest of holy hockey grails on a pedestal upside down.
Epic, epic fail. Even Draper's kid had the good sense to poop in the thing right-side up.
This was the proverbial slow-motion car crash; like on "The Price is Right," when a contestant is about to put the $199 price tag on the tube of toothpaste and the crowd simultaneously shrieks "NO! NO!"
You saw him turn the Stanley Cup the wrong way, and you just wanted to reach through the television and flip it back before he put it down. If only someone on stage had helped him. Why couldn't the drummer have lent a ... bit of moral support?
Aw, shucks, we all make mistakes. We can't stay disappointed in a band that gave the world the arena rock magnificence of "Hysteria." Heck, the scene above wasn't even the most disturbing thing we saw on Versus tonight. This was:
NO! NO! This was the first time we had seen Brian Engblom this season, and the rumors were true: He cut and/or tamed the mullet! Say it ain't so, Swedish Muppet! This is like when your stoner friend gets a job at the bank and starts wearing short-sleeved dress shirts. Engblom chopping the mop is a harbinger of the death of hockey hair; thank god Nordy decided to keep business in the front and a party in the back.
