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Seeley Booth, starting goaltender?
Uh, yeah, I have now become that person who scrutinizes screencaps from multiple episodes to see what's on the wall behind the character and uses those props to draw elaborate conclusions about him. What can I say? It's Seeley Booth and hockey, people. I'm only human.
As Dr. Goodman told us in "Two Bodies in the Lab," the objects a man places behind where he sits are a display meant to demonstrate his accomplishments, his power. Let's look at what's on the wall behind Booth's desk (starting from Brennan's right shoulder in the photo):
From the left to the right, it looks like a diploma or citation of some sort, with an award above that, and then this symmetrical arrangement directly behind the desk: the blue picture in the middle, with framed medals to the upper right and upper left, and pictures of classic cars to the lower right and lower left.
Another look at the arrangement, which shows the car photo on the lower right and a better view of the medals on the upper right.
Now it's obvious how important his medals are to Booth; he still loves the Army and he earned those at the risk of his life in the service of his country. And we know he loves classic cars and works on them as a hobby, so it's not hard to imagine that the cars given pride of place here are ones he restored himself.
That just leaves the blue picture, which is given the center place in the arrangement and is positioned so that it's directly behind Booth's head when he sits at the desk:
For the less hockey-oriented among us: that's an aerial shot looking down at the ice above a hockey goal. The lower semi-circular area, colored light blue and bordered in red, is called the crease; it's the area where the goalie stands. In North America, the crease only has that shape in amateur leagues--the pro leagues use something more rectangular. The upper curved shape, off-white or brownish, is the net.
My guess is, from where the picture is placed and the company it's keeping, that the only reason Booth would have to place it there is that he played hockey as a younger man--probably up through college.
(And, here's where we begin the rank speculation and all the squints roll their eyes and wander off.)
A picture of the crease, emphasizing the crease as a place on the ice rather than the goal as a target toward which one moves, is kind of an unusual way to represent hockey. The obvious explanation is that Booth played goal, which would have made the crease the place he spent all his time on ice. On a slightly bigger stretch, he could have been one of the two types of skaters who spends all his time in or near the crease: a screening forward or a stay-at-home defenseman.
A screening forward makes it his job to get as close as he can to the opposing goalie, blocking his view of shots coming toward the net and hoping to redirect shots from close by, too late for the goalie to stop them. A stay-at-home defenseman, meanwhile, stays near his own goalie, battles screening forwards, and is very little concerned about scoring goals; he's mostly focused on protecting his territory.
In fairly common slang, it can be said of either type of player that the crease and the area immediately surrounding it are his "office."
Entirely subjectively--based sheerly on personality--Booth reads to me as a stay-at-home defenseman more than a goalie. Goalies are the most solitary members of the team in hockey, taking ultimate responsibility for every goal scored against them and, therefore, for every loss. Also goalies just... just tend to be weird. In a very endearing way! But a way that does not scan with Booth for me. I can't really explain it in words, but there is a goalie personality and I don't think Booth has it. Also, as much as I would like to imagine the contrary, I don't think Booth can do the splits.
Defensemen, on the other hand, are in the thick of the team effort--and a stay-at-home defenseman can bridge the gap between the isolation of the goalie, who he personally looks to protect, and the closeness of the rest of the team. Defensemen of Booth's size and build tend to also be enforcers in North American hockey--responsible for getting into stand-up fistfights on the ice to deter opponents from picking on smaller members of the team; we know Booth can hold his own in a fight.
Now, even more speculatively:
I think it's established that Booth grew up in Philadelphia (in "The Woman in Limbo," he says that his father was a barber there after Vietnam), and I'd guess that Booth was born c.1969 at the latest, to have already been a sniper in the Persian Gulf (as Kenton says he was in "Two Bodies in the Lab"). In Philadelphia in the 70s, the pro hockey team, the Flyers, enjoyed enormous success. They won the Stanley Cup championship in 1974 and 1975, when Booth would have been about five years old--just the age to start playing hockey and attain a competitive level of skill. From 1973, the Flyers had been nicknamed the Broad Street Bullies, known throughout the league as a team who was rough nearly to the point of thuggery, and loved to fight. This could certainly have inspired young Seeley to grow up into a tough, fighting defenseman.
And then, at a guess, he finished college and decided to do something other than play a game for a living for the rest of his life (or maybe he just wasn't a breakout star; that'd be almost inevitable for a goalie and nearly as likely for a defenseman, both positions that tend to need years of full-time play to hit their peak), and, either way, decided to join the Army, where he learned more All-American interests (cars, football, gambling), leaving nothing of hockey but the picture behind his desk and that wicked right hook.
As Dr. Goodman told us in "Two Bodies in the Lab," the objects a man places behind where he sits are a display meant to demonstrate his accomplishments, his power. Let's look at what's on the wall behind Booth's desk (starting from Brennan's right shoulder in the photo):
From the left to the right, it looks like a diploma or citation of some sort, with an award above that, and then this symmetrical arrangement directly behind the desk: the blue picture in the middle, with framed medals to the upper right and upper left, and pictures of classic cars to the lower right and lower left.
Another look at the arrangement, which shows the car photo on the lower right and a better view of the medals on the upper right.
Now it's obvious how important his medals are to Booth; he still loves the Army and he earned those at the risk of his life in the service of his country. And we know he loves classic cars and works on them as a hobby, so it's not hard to imagine that the cars given pride of place here are ones he restored himself.
That just leaves the blue picture, which is given the center place in the arrangement and is positioned so that it's directly behind Booth's head when he sits at the desk:
For the less hockey-oriented among us: that's an aerial shot looking down at the ice above a hockey goal. The lower semi-circular area, colored light blue and bordered in red, is called the crease; it's the area where the goalie stands. In North America, the crease only has that shape in amateur leagues--the pro leagues use something more rectangular. The upper curved shape, off-white or brownish, is the net.
My guess is, from where the picture is placed and the company it's keeping, that the only reason Booth would have to place it there is that he played hockey as a younger man--probably up through college.
(And, here's where we begin the rank speculation and all the squints roll their eyes and wander off.)
A picture of the crease, emphasizing the crease as a place on the ice rather than the goal as a target toward which one moves, is kind of an unusual way to represent hockey. The obvious explanation is that Booth played goal, which would have made the crease the place he spent all his time on ice. On a slightly bigger stretch, he could have been one of the two types of skaters who spends all his time in or near the crease: a screening forward or a stay-at-home defenseman.
A screening forward makes it his job to get as close as he can to the opposing goalie, blocking his view of shots coming toward the net and hoping to redirect shots from close by, too late for the goalie to stop them. A stay-at-home defenseman, meanwhile, stays near his own goalie, battles screening forwards, and is very little concerned about scoring goals; he's mostly focused on protecting his territory.
In fairly common slang, it can be said of either type of player that the crease and the area immediately surrounding it are his "office."
Entirely subjectively--based sheerly on personality--Booth reads to me as a stay-at-home defenseman more than a goalie. Goalies are the most solitary members of the team in hockey, taking ultimate responsibility for every goal scored against them and, therefore, for every loss. Also goalies just... just tend to be weird. In a very endearing way! But a way that does not scan with Booth for me. I can't really explain it in words, but there is a goalie personality and I don't think Booth has it. Also, as much as I would like to imagine the contrary, I don't think Booth can do the splits.
Defensemen, on the other hand, are in the thick of the team effort--and a stay-at-home defenseman can bridge the gap between the isolation of the goalie, who he personally looks to protect, and the closeness of the rest of the team. Defensemen of Booth's size and build tend to also be enforcers in North American hockey--responsible for getting into stand-up fistfights on the ice to deter opponents from picking on smaller members of the team; we know Booth can hold his own in a fight.
Now, even more speculatively:
I think it's established that Booth grew up in Philadelphia (in "The Woman in Limbo," he says that his father was a barber there after Vietnam), and I'd guess that Booth was born c.1969 at the latest, to have already been a sniper in the Persian Gulf (as Kenton says he was in "Two Bodies in the Lab"). In Philadelphia in the 70s, the pro hockey team, the Flyers, enjoyed enormous success. They won the Stanley Cup championship in 1974 and 1975, when Booth would have been about five years old--just the age to start playing hockey and attain a competitive level of skill. From 1973, the Flyers had been nicknamed the Broad Street Bullies, known throughout the league as a team who was rough nearly to the point of thuggery, and loved to fight. This could certainly have inspired young Seeley to grow up into a tough, fighting defenseman.
And then, at a guess, he finished college and decided to do something other than play a game for a living for the rest of his life (or maybe he just wasn't a breakout star; that'd be almost inevitable for a goalie and nearly as likely for a defenseman, both positions that tend to need years of full-time play to hit their peak), and, either way, decided to join the Army, where he learned more All-American interests (cars, football, gambling), leaving nothing of hockey but the picture behind his desk and that wicked right hook.