Official Site of Darcy Hordichuk

I know nicknames are a much talked about subject amongst fans but the one that’s stuck with me for the last little while has been Hordy. I just recently heard HordichukNorris, which is definitely creative but a little long, if anything. I think the guys are pretty good about not giving me a funny nickname because they know I’ll come after them. Some of the guys here have started calling me Hordini because I’ll do a magic trick once in a while and the guys like to call me that. Other than that, as far as nicknames for me, that’s all I’ve got.

But you’re probably wondering about the Hordini thing. Magic isn’t exactly something you just “pick up” or learn in school. Here’s the story behind it: when I was younger, my friend used to do some magic tricks and I always thought it was really neat but he never revealed how the trick was done but of course, I wanted to know.

So when I was in the minor leagues going out on road trips, I would go and find videos and practice some magic tricks while we were on the road trips. I got good at some tricks and it’s fun. I’m still a work in progress, that’s for sure.

The one I like to use the most isn’t really a typical trick that you would think, it’s called NLP, which stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming, where you can kind of read people’s minds. That’s the one I’ve picked up from somebody in Dallas, who was a magician.

Here’s what I do: I’ll ask someone to think of a person, someone so famous that when they walk into a room, everyone in the room knows this person, male or female, white or black, dead or alive. I’d say words that would help me figure out who this person is and the way I would figure it out is by reading the person I’m talking to.

So I would look in their eyes, if they twitch to the left, it’s a female and if they twitch to the right it’s a male. Sometimes I’ll say if the person’s dead or alive and they’ll nod their head so they’re giving it away with their body language. There are certain things you can tell with body language and how old you are. Sometimes I’ll use subliminal messages depending on what I say, like if I say someone coming down a black carpet as opposed to just a carpet that will influence what people choose. You plant different things into people’s minds and it often makes a difference in who they choose.

There are certain traits amongst different people and the way people carry themselves, and their tendencies are clues that signal to me who they’re thinking.

For example, when you’re driving and you get pulled over and people’s reactions are natural because their bodies are trained that way, so they get fidgety or really nervous, it’s kind of the same thing. When I try to figure out if they’re lying or not, they’ll look up and when they lie, they’ll look towards one side and you just know.

A lot of people tend to lie when they’re face to face so if I asked you if you’ve ever stolen a chocolate bar, you would of course, answer no. If I had a piece of paper and I were to write down from 0-10, on this piece of paper – 10 is yes and 0 you’ve never stolen. They’ll more than likely (almost always) change their answer because now they’ve got a wider range or net to cast their answer and they’ll give an answer that’s not completely a 0 but somewhere in the middle. Now I’ve got on paper that they’ve lied and because people can’t lie on paper, I end up knowing that you’re guilty.

I like to try to break down people and find out their tendencies and you can kind of throw people off by reading their minds a little bit and doing little tricks like that with NLP. It’s really neat what you can find out and what you can do with it.

This is why I’m pretty much dominating at poker this year on the plane. You can just read people and you know when they’re lying – I mean that’s really what poker players do, right? They’re really good at reading body language and people’s eyes (some of them wear sunglasses) and that’s how they’re good, it’s not all about the cards, all the time.

I don’t want to brag but right now, I’d say that I’m the uncontested frontrunner in poker this year. Roberto Luongo’s supposed to be the best poker player on the team and in 12 hands that we played, I won 12 straight. You can verify this with a few of the other guys but I’m sure they all know because I was cheering all the way through the plane. He said I got lucky but when you go 12 for 12, there’s got to be a little bit of talent there.

If I were to say the early rankings, I’d probably say I was first with Daniel/Hank (I can’t tell the difference when one wins and one doesn’t so I just put them together) in second and… I’ll give Roberto third.

I’ve heard rumblings that Kevin Bieksa’s one of the heavy favourites from last year but that was last year and you’ve got guys like myself, Pavol Demitra, and even Kyle Wellwood added to the team, he’s now bumped down to the “B” table. I mean Kevin’s good to a certain extent, when you’re at the “B” table – it’s like when you’re playing hockey and you’re the best skater in your town, how do you rate against the rest of the city or the city next to you? Right now, Kevin’s the guy in the hometown, where he’s in his little bubble, but once he’s ready to step out to the big city and come to the “A” table (where I play), he’ll see some tougher competition.

We’ll see how it goes for the rest of the year but I may step away from the table soon and let some of the other guys move up but we’ll see. But like I said, it’s still only November, we’ve got plenty more of the season left to go.

Darren McCarty of the Detroit Red Wings gets beat down by Darcy during the Canucks game on Monday. 11.24.08.

After “can you beat up [fill in the blank]?”, the second most popular question I get asked is about my website.

I’ve heard that Mike Weaver, who was on the team last year, also had a website but he studied that kind of thing and he actually built it all, I’m not quite as tech savvy as him but luckily I have some really great people helping me out.

It all started in Orlando when I played for the Solar Bears of the IHL during their last year (and where we won the Turner Cup aka the League championship). With all the buzz going on at the time, there was a following from some of my junior teams and one of the girls at the Solar Bears was always giving me updates from the fan club about fans asking about me. I think she did some work with Solar Bears website also so she brought up the idea to create a website and they bought the domain and set it all up.

Because I’ve been traded a couple of times, it was hard to coordinate schedule and get everything together with the girl who set it up and since then, a couple of different people have been running the site. Right now we’ve got another guy helping us out – it’s someone I met through friends. He’s done some other athletes’ websites and I liked what he did so he’s just been running with it so far and I’m pretty happy with it.

Now don’t get me wrong, while I don’t do the technical crazy coding stuff with the site, I try to stay as involved in it as much as I can. I used to have a blog on there where I could answer fan questions and update them on what’s going on but with my schedule lately, it’s been more difficult. It’s good to pick it up again and blogging for Canucks.com – I’ve heard I’ve got big shoes to fill with some of the other bloggers that have written for this site.

I think doing something like this is good to do for fans because they always like to know more about players and life outside the rink so I’m happy to do this. I know as a kid growing up, I always wanted to know what dressing rooms looked like, some people like their hockey cards, I wanted to know about the dressing rooms – everyone has their thing, right?

And even now, after seven years in the NHL, dressing rooms still amaze me. Vancouver’s got it pretty good here as it stands right now but we’re even getting renovations, which means it’s going to be even better. We definitely get spoiled here with the hot tub, steam room, and now, a plasma TV in the lounge. It might mean we’re maybe not spending as much time at home because we have it here at the rink. It’s good for us to lounge around but I’m sure our wives want us home sooner than later. This is definitely a top-notch room compared to most other dressing rooms.

If you want top-notch and different, as far as media goes, Vancouver also ranks high in that one. I mean you walk into the room after practice and there’s always swarms of media around. The only time I get a taste of this media is when I play Toronto or Vancouver or even Calgary but one thing about the media here is that they know a lot about the team and they love the game. But that’s great because that’s what the fans want is to be informed and all of the media have been great to me so far and I’ve talked to most of the guys so far and they’ve been nice.

And just to end off, my wife and I will be expecting a little baby boy!

Darcy Hordichuk vs George Parros from the Vancouver Canucks at Anaheim Ducks game on Oct 31, 2008.