Throwing It Back To The CCM X-Ray Helmet
So this is something that I might turn into a weekly segment for a little while. A quick throwback blog highlighting an old piece of hockey gear that is now defunct unless you find it at a yard sale or something. So to start it off, we’ll be talking about the CCM X-Ray today. Quite possibly the most…. unique…. bucket the game has ever seen.
The X-Ray came into existence some point around the turn of the millennium. Everybody had still lost their minds from the 90s. The world was in such a hurry to get ourselves into the future that we ended up making everything look like we were living in some cheap video game world. So with CCM rushing to bring hockey equipment into “the future”, they created the X-Ray. See-through, colored helmets that essentially became a way to automatically identify the biggest dorks on every team.
You want to know who wore the CCM X-Ray? The same kids who had their arm completely covered from wrist-to-elbow in LiveStrong-esque bands. The same kids who grew up watching Disney over Nickelodeon. I don’t have the actual facts on me right now but I’m willing to be that there’s not a single player in the NHL right now who wore a CCM X-Ray growing up. Why is that? Well because the only kids who would wear such a thing were the kids who got halfway dressed at home before going to the rink. And those kids were all benders.
But just because the CCM X-Ray was strictly for benders doesn’t mean it’s not an important piece of hockey equipment history. This helmet will live on in infamy. We will always be able to use it as a warning for future products. Just because your product is “new” and “different” doesn’t always make it good. We need to learn from our mistakes and, folks, the CCM X-Ray was a major mistake. So pour one out for the X-Ray and make sure you show this blog to everybody you know who wore this in squirts/peewees.
Feel free to send in ideas for future throwback hockey equipment posts. Obviously gonna hit the major ones like the Tri-Core and the Reebok O.