Category: Sports

Our vacation in New Orleans or: how I came to want to free Sean Payton

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

Well, that was one of our all-time favourite trips. Here’s the play-by-play:

Friday

I’d been dreading our American Airlines flight. The last time I took American (>10 years ago) I told myself I’d never fly with them again, but we didn’t have a choice this time. But it really wasn’t too bad at all…our flight left on time and got us to Dallas in plenty of time to eat a pretzel and tacos, lounge on some recliner-ish airport chairs, and make our connection to New Orleans.

Our hotel, the Avenue Plaza Resort in the Garden District, ended up being bigger than we thought too, and not quite as ugly as the website’s pictures suggested. So the low-expectations part of our trip had both turned out pretty well. So far so good!

It was already pretty late, so our plans that night were simply to try out the Avenue Pub just down St. Charles Avenue. How lucky that our hotel was five blocks from one of the best beer places in North America. CBJ+M — our traveling companions — staked out a little table upstairs, and we drank our fill of excellent beer, ate dump truck fries (waffle fries with pulled pork and cheese) and red-beans-and-rice wontons, admired the cool art and saw our first of many “Free Sean Payton” shirts. If you don’t know who Sean Payton is, this will help.

And then, boom…we crashed.

Saturday

Late to bed, late to rise. We gathered in the morning to test out the Trolley Stop Café, just a few steps from the hotel. It was already busy, and got busier before we left. The place was fairly famous on Tripadvisor for having big portions of yummy, cheap food. And Tripadvisor was not wrong. I had bacon and french toast and country sausage and eggs and grits (for the first time ever) for $6.75. Seriously. We all stuffed ourselves and were well-entertained by our server.

We jumped on the St. Charles Streetcar (don’t call it a trolley, no matter what the cafés tell you) and headed for the Central Business District, and walked from there into the French Quarter. At this point I should point out that Saturday ended up being a near-record high temperature for that time of year in New Orleans. Sunday and (part of) Monday were the same. And I should also point out that all I’d packed were jeans and dark tshirts. So walking around was getting a little toasty. Anyway. We deliberately avoided Bourbon Street; Nellie had never seen it, and we wanted her to experience it in its full glory that night. We did see a bit of Royal Street, Chartres (which is not pronounced how someone might think if they’ve been to Chartres, France…which I have…so I mispronounced it all weekend), Decatur and more. We saw ESPN setting up their analyst studio and walked along Jackson Square before splitting up. Nellie and I walked along the river, cooled down with a pint at the Crescent City Brewhouse and then walked along Royal and Chartres some more and checked out a cool little shop called Idea Factory. If we’d had a little more time we would have checked out Faulkner House Books as well. Both were recommendations from the Rather guide to New Orleans. Seriously, if you’re visiting a city for the first time and want to find interesting places, buy one of these books.

We met back up with CBJ+M for a late lunch at the Napoleon House, a building which, so the story goes, was to be a home for Napoleon if a plot to extricate him to New Orleans had gone off, and has been a bar since prohibition — by the looks of things the decor hasn’t changed much since the 30s. But the food (jambalaya for me, po’boys for everyone else) and drinks (Pimms cups, mainly) were tasty. We sat on the leafy back patio next to the koi pond and thanked the maker for the giant fan blowing directly at us.

At this point it was time to get to our real reason for being in New Orleans: the NCAA finals. Or, more accurately, the semi-finals on that evening. All day we’d seen fans walking around in Kentucky, Louisville, Ohio State and Kansas shirts; on the walk to the Superdome they became the norm and I, wearing a black Crywolf shirt, stood out. It obvious from the mass of humanity headed for the games that the stadium was huge, but I still kind of wasn’t ready for it. I sat down in my seat (after a long, steep climb) and took it all in.

Huge, right? 70,000 people were in those seats by the time the game started. Anyway, the games were fantastic: Kentucky/Louisville is a rivalry that’s hard to explain unless you’ve sat in the middle of it for two hours, while the huge Kansas comeback win over Ohio State was a classic game. At the end of each game, disappointed fans from the losing teams hurled commemorative seat cushions onto the crowd in the lower levels…luckily they hadn’t given out commemorative letter openers, or commemorative D-cell batteries. In retrospect we should have used our seat cushions to smack either the astronomically shrill Kentucky fan behind us (my ears are still ringing a week later) or the drunk Louisville chick in front of CBJ, who insisted on standing for the last seven minutes of the — very tense — game. On the plus side, we sat right behind a guy wearing, of all things, an Expos hat.

Seat cushions or no, our asses were sore after sitting for 6+ hours, so were happy to stand up and walk out of the stadium. We re-joined the mass of humanity and made for the French Quarter. Nellie was very excited to see Bourbon Street; about seconds into our trip down Bourbon Street she was very excited to leave. Seriously, it’s one of the most awful places on earth unless you’re a) an olympic-calibre drunk, b) a bead manufacturer or c) a street preacher.

We fled down Bienville to the corner of Decatur, where we found Industry Bar & Kitchen. It was an oasis in the ridiculous clubland that is the Quarter at night: a calm bar with great beer selection, early 90s alternative music on the speakers (okay, that might be more exciting for me than for others), and pizzas made and sold in the far corner. We stood at a table, drank our craft beers (NOLA Hopitoulas and Delirium Nocturnum for me, if I remember right), watched the hilarity of the quarter unfold outside the bar, and enjoyed the scene of the bartender building a tower plastic of cups on the head of a guy who’d passed out at the bar.

Tossing our beers in go-cups (you can walk around with open liquor, as long as it’s not glass, but even that doesn’t seem to be enforced) we walked over to Canal to catch the streetcar home. When that failed we tried to catch a cab. That wasn’t easy either, but we finally managed to snag one and bombed home.

Sunday

Something we noticed after seeing the omnipresent New Orleans beads strung from every wire and railing on Bourbon Street was that they’re actually strung all over the city…any trees or horizontal edge along a Mardi Gras parade route is strewn with beads.

We didn’t have another giant Trolley Stop breakfast in us, so we grabbed a bite at the nice little Avenue Cafe next door. The food was good, and the wifi password was ‘bestcoffeeever’. I didn’t try the coffee myself, but…cute. Full, we jumped on the streetcar; three of us jumped off at Lee Circle and walked down Andrew Higgins Drive to the National WWII museum. You may recognize Higgins’ name — he was the man who designed the landing craft used during the Normandy landing and throughout WWII. The museum itself was very good: informative, well presented, with a good flow through the sequence of events that led to war, to America’s involvement in Europe and the Pacific, and to the conclusion of each. The end of the Pacific section, with pretty music playing over looping footage of Enola Gay loading and dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was particularly moving for me. I wish we’d stopped our visit there instead of heading next for Beyond All Boundaries, a 48-minute “4D” film produced by Tom Hanks. It was an interesting concept, what with the fake snow dropped on the audience during the Bastogne scenes, or the guard tower rising from the floor during the prison camp sequence, or the blinding flash of light and rumbling chairs representing the atomic bomb detonation, but…it was also pretty cheesy. Far more jingoistic, too, than the museum proper had been. Museums are meant to educate, not celebrate; the museum did the former, but Beyond All Boundaries felt very much like the latter.

By this point we were getting hungry, so we continued south from the museum to the corner of Tchoupitoulas where we found Cochon. Or rather, Cochon Butcher, the smaller and takeout-ier sister to Cochon, which was closed. The place was rammed with locals, always a good sign. The ladies stuck to salads, while CBJ and I each got a BBQ pulled pork sandwich (so! good!) with potato salad and a beer. I’ve had a lot of pulled pork sammies in my life, but that might have been my favourite…the quality of the meat was so good they didn’t even have to soak it in sauce, they just stuck some cole slaw in it. And the soft egg bun and the OOOOOOOOOOOKAY I’m drooling. Time to stop reminiscing.

The next step in the day’s plan was to walk back over toward the Quarter, and so we took a long shortcut (longcut?) through the Riverwalk, a cheesy indoor mall designed for cruise ship passengers but whatever…it was air-conditioned. Once we spilled out onto Canal we parted ways again, with CBJ+M heading off in search of some shirts and Nellie and I just wandering to the east. We checked out Bourbon Street again, just to see it in the daylight…yup, still awful. We tried some alternate streets, still heading east, and eventually reached the Marigny neighbourhood. We were close enough to Frenchmen Street to stop by another Beeradvocate-recommended bar: D.B.A.. They were temporarily closed for filming (fair enough, it was 4:00 on a Sunday afternoon) so we checked out the upcoming lineups at neighbouring bars (Kermit Ruffins? John Boutté? Clearly Frenchmen Street was a good place to hear live music; alas, not for us that night) and rested our tired feet in Washington Square before returning. And D.B.A.? Such a cool place. Obviously great beer selection, but good vibe with locals (the guy sitting next to me at the bar was named “Barnaby”, because it was New Orleans and of course he was), and swing-dancing class happening in the next room, and a pregnant bartender, and a sign that said “No Miller, Coors or Bud Lite. Get over it!”, and ‘drinkgoodstuff’ for a wifi password. Again…cute!

We were supposed to be meeting up with CBJ+M again soon, back at the Avenue Pub near our hotel, so Nellie put her remaining beer in a go-cup and we went outside to find a cab. As luck would have it one drove by the second we stepped outside. I ran to climb in, while Nellie — conditioned by years of banned public drinking — chugged her remaining beer and ran to the cab. The cabbie calmly informed us that it was perfectly okay to bring a go-cup into the cab, and Nellie cursed her cautious drinking habits (ha!) as we drove west. Through a funny string of conversation (in which Nellie learned where Kansas is) we ended up chatting with our cabbie quite a bit, who advised us on the best time of year to visit New Orleans (about 2 weeks after Easter, says he) and the ridiculous inconsistency of New Orleans street name pronunciation. He dropped us at the Avenue where we staked out a brilliant spot on the balcony and drank cold beer (my ginger-infused Japanese weissbeer was particularly good) in the heat of the late afternoon, waited for CBJ+M to arrive and tried to figure out a way to stay in that very spot forever.

We got cleaned and spiffied a bit before dinner at Coquette, a wine bar in the Garden District. What a find. We started with drinks (a phenomenal bacon-infused bourbon for me, a champagne/gin/lemon French 75 for Nellie) before getting on with the incredible food. My starter was pickled baby beets with burrata and duck ham (which is exactly as kickass as it sounds) and my main was duck breast with fennel & peas. Nellie, meanwhile, had fried gulf oysters paired with a glass of Chardonnay followed by cochon de lait (aka sucking pig), which my forkful or two (or six) told me was outstanding. I honestly can’t remember what CBJ+M got, except that CBJ got a cocktail called the Mutiny (blackstrap rum, spiced rum, lime, Angostura bitters, hot sauce) which was damned tasty. Our mains were paired with a 2008 Emeritus Pinot Noir from the Russian River. Then came an entirely unnecessary dessert of milk chocolate mousse with salted caramel and peanut butter sorbet. Nellie, preferring to drink her desserts, had a glass of Bordeaux instead. It was an incredible meal, one of the best we’ve had in ages, and it cost less than half of what we would have paid in Toronto. Which somehow made it taste even better.

Monday

We started packing Monday morning, knowing we’d have to get up at 3:45AM the next day (boo! hiss!) and not having much time that evening. But by late morning we were on the St. Charles streetcar one more time, this time jammed in like sardines, heading over to Canal. I stopped at one of the dozens of pop-up stores selling team tshirts and made a rare find: a) a Kentucky tshirt (there were only a few left anywhere) which b) wasn’t the same as the generic shirts being sold all over the city and c) fit me and d) was super-thin (which came in handy on a hot day like that). Score! We grabbed a little lunch and cooled off at Crescent City, then walked east along Decatur and west along Royal, stopping in the odd store and art gallery along the way.

Once we’d had enough shopping we decided to finally check out Bracket Town, part of the NCAA celebrations. We walked over to Poydras Street, then walked all the way back through the Riverwalk thingy, and then the whole length of the convention center (which is, like, half a mile long, goddammit) to Bracket Town. We thought there’d be some stuff in there that we’d enjoy. We were wrong. We regrouped after about 10 minutes, long enough for Nellie and I to toss down a couple of free Coke Zero samples, and then decided to go back to the adult part of town. But, uh, in a cab. We got dropped off at Café du Monde, ate some delicious & messy beignets as all good visitors to New Orleans must, and watched with concern as some storm clouds rose on the horizon.

Knowing we’d eventually have to walk toward the Superdome, and having confirmed that the weather forecast called for severe thunderstorms soon, we began walking back toward Canal. We stopped at our old friend Industry just in time; ten minutes after we arrived the rain started, and then it really started. Then came the lightning and thunder, some of which was so loud and so sharp it sounded like a gunshot. Seriously, the bartender came out of the back room when he heard it, ducked low to avoid flying bullets. We stayed out of the rain, drinking and eating pizza until most of it had let up. Still, it was time to go and the rain hadn’t stopped completely, so we knew were going to get wet. We ran to the Canal streetcar which took us most of the way there, but we still had to run the five blocks to the Superdome and…well, yeah. Wet.

The staff ushered us in through the underground parking ramps, high-fiving us as we ran in. You can imagine the humidity in a concrete parking structure during a thunderstorm in New Orleans, so it was pretty sporty in there. But hey, it was dry. We got to our seats in decent time, took in the pre-game excitement, and watched Kentucky storm out to an enormous lead over Kansas. Kansas made it close down the stretch, but Kentucky held on and took the championship. We watched with 70,000+ other people as fireworks exploded and confetti fell, as the team was interviewed and cut down the net, and (more or less) as they played “One Shining Moment” with the video montage. Pretty. Damn. Cool.

The walk home was nearly as wet as the walk there, so when the opportunity came to jump in a cab we took it. It was all-out piracy in the city by then; mysteriously, every cab meter in the city was malfunctioning and they could charge whatever they wanted. Whatever; we were home, and drier than we otherwise would have been. We packed our remaining stuff (including some very wet clothing, unfortunately), watched the ESPN highlights and commentary and tried, post-game high notwithstanding, to go to sleep for a few hours.

Tuesday

Our alarm went off at approximately stupid o’clock AM and we dragged ourselves into action. We’d pre-arranged a cab…or at least we thought we had. We actually ended up squeezing into an SUV with six other people, all bound for the airport. Turns out a lot of the cabs were making so much money into the wee hours of the previous night that no one was reporting for duty on Tuesday morning. Anyway, we thought leaving for the airport at 4:30 for a 6:00 flight would give us enough time, but as it was we just barely made it. My Nexus/Global Entry pass got us into the expedited security line, and from there we walked up to the gate with maybe five minutes to spare. If we’d been stuck in the (enormous!) standard security line we’d have missed our flight. Our flight to Miami was uneventful, apart from being full of Kentucky fans who look like they’d not bothered to go to sleep the night before. Also: wi-fi! I paid for access on both legs, MSY -> MIA and MIA -> YYZ, and will happily do it again if I ever get the chance.

We had originally been scheduled to return via Dallas; when American changed our flight to a 6AM departure via Miami we were pretty pissed but left with no alternative. However, we were pretty thankful when we arrived home and saw that all flights out of DFW — including CBJ+M’s flight, the one we were originally meant to be on — were canceled due to tornadoes in the area. So suddenly an early flight time didn’t seem like such a big deal.

.:.

We’ve been thinking about and planning this trip since last August when CBJ+M found out they’d won the Final Four tickets. Now that it’s over, we’re already thinking about when we’ll go back to New Orleans. We want to enjoy the city when it’s not full of tens of thousands of basketball fans. The food, the drink, the architecture, the friendliness of the people, the history…it all adds up to give the city so much character, and we want more of it. New Orleans, we’ll see you again soon.

Oh, and…Free Sean Payton!

Embroiderer > King

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Back in high school, my friend’s kid brother — who was a pretty good goalie for his age — got to attend a training camp with Patrick Roy. I don’t think Roy was there much, but said kid brother reported back that one of the instructors, an already-drafted QMJHL goalie named Martin Brodeur, was going to be even better than Roy.

Naturally I was dubious. For Canadiens fans (which I was, as were this friend and his kid brother) Roy was practically royalty.  We’d watched him talk to his goalposts on his way to a surprise cup in 1986 as a rookie. He’d won three Vezina trophies in four years. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d soon watch him win another cup in 1993, another upset for which he’d win his second playoff MVP award. Of course, I watched him leave Montreal in a blaze of ego, and then suffered through watching him win two cups (and another Conn Smythe trophy) with the Colorado Avalanche while my Canadiens foundered. He elevated a team with loads of talent which just couldn’t get over the hump, and delivered two cups to Colorado. When he won his fourth cup I considered him the greatest of all time.

But even then I know he might have a challenger. Brodeur won the Calder trophy as top rookie in 1994, and won the cup the next year. Brodeur was never as dramatic as Roy…no fiery exits from New Jersey, no winking at a forward he’d just robbed…just 18 seasons of all-star play. Four Vezinas (one more than Roy), two Stanley Cups, and the all-time records for wins, shutouts, and single-season wins.

I had posters of Roy on my wall. I had his jersey, and wore it to school the day after they won the cup in 93. I think I still have his rookie card somewhere. But when the CBC asked yesterday, “Is Martin Brodeur a better goaltender than Patrick Roy?” I had to say yes.

One never wants to decide between his hero and the man who knocks them off the perch, even on a topic as silly as hockey. But, unpalatable as that was, I realized how lucky I’ve been to watch (and see live, in Brodeur’s case) the two best goalies in the history of hockey play at the same time.

Le low

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

Well, that’s my bracket busted then.

My day started out just fine…great weather and a canceled afternoon-long meeting led me to hit the Real Sports Bar early. I emailed my team back at the office, telling them all to go home, and staked out a spot for CBJ+M (and, eventually, Nellie). We landed decent spots with a good view of the 2-acre TV. The fuzzy picture below just doesn’t do it justice. Just for scale, the smaller screens to the right and left are actually composite screens made of four 42″ plasmas each.

Real Sports Bar in Toronto

The food was decent for a sports bar, if rather overpriced (much like their neighbour, E11even). The beer list was entirely pedestrian, and it got a little douchebaggy later in the evening (douchebags are easy to spot, by the way: they drink Bud Light from those cobalt blue bottles), but there’s no question that it’s a great place to watch sports. There are screens everywhere, including over each urinal in the privy. We had a free round sent over by some friends at another table, and reciprocated with tequila shots; thankfully the niceness arms race stopped there. We were also about to place an order for medium chicken wings when our server showed up, asking if we would like a free order of medium chicken wings which had accidentally been ordered for someone else. Either we were very lucky, or we were momentarily able to make things appear at our table just by thinking about them. I tried thinking about Mila Kunis carrying a bottle of 1982 Chateau Margaux but it didn’t work. Still, we were having pretty good luck and enjoying ourselves a great deal.

But then things went from bad (Ohio beating Michigan) to worse (my Duke Blue Devils losing to #15 seed Lehigh). The nuclear-level problem was Missouri losing to Norfolk State; I had Mizzou going to the final four. Granted, so did a lot of other people in my pool, but my day overall — 5 and 11, after going 13 and 3 the day before — shot me to the bottom quarter of the standings.

Nellie, on the other hand, is near the top. She always does better in the pool than I do; I should just stop entering and save myself the $20 each year.

How to fix the Montreal Canadiens, 2012 edition

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

As I type this I’m watching the Montreal Canadiens play their 13th-last game of this dreadful season — they currently sit last in the Eastern conference and 28th out of 30 in the NHL. They have no hope of making the playoffs. They ditched some trade bait at the deadline and have picked up some decent prospects and picks (five picks in the first two rounds in the upcoming draft) so that’s cause for optimism. Still, more changes are made if they’re going to make the playoffs. Not that the Habs management is calling me up for advice, but here’s what I (and, I think, anyone who’s thought about it for twenty seconds) would do:

  • Trade (or, worst case, buy out) Scott Gomez. His 0.297 points per game for $7.5 million just doesn’t work. You can’t play him ahead of Desharnais or Plekanec, and you’d be holding back Eller’s development (not to mention Louis Leblanc’s) if he’s not the #3 centre. Unless Gomez wants to take a pay cut and become a defensive specialist (hee!) on the fourth line he needs to go.
  • Try to get something — anything — for Kaberle, Campoli and Nokelainen. At the very least let Campoli leave town.
  • Move Rene Bourque to the 3rd line. Bourque, Eller and Travis Moen (if they can keep him around) would be a very good, very physical 3rd line.
  • Use some cap room to sign a second-line winger to play with Tomas Plekanec and Brian Gionta. A scoring winger with some size would give the Canadiens a second scoring threat to compliment the Pacioretty-Desharnais-Cole top line. Add the afore-mentioned third line and an intimidating fourth line featuring Ryan White and Brad Staubitz (if he re-signs) and your forward lines are actually in pretty decent shape, I think.
  • With P.K. Subban, Andrei Markov, Josh Gorges and Alexei Emelin the core of the defense is solid, if a little fragile. Assuming Kaberle and Campoli leave town, Montreal would need a veteran 5th D-man to bring along prospects like Raphael Diaz and Jarred Tinordi. Yannick Weber seems to be a spare part under coach Randy Cunneyworth, but having a guy who can play D or forward is helpful.
  • No help needed in net: Carey Price is it.

I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of nuance, but at least if Mr. Gauthier calls me in the off-season I’ll have some conversation-starters ready.

"How we treat our warriors when the battle is over"

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One of the films I really wanted to see at TIFF this year was The Last Gladiators (imdb | tiff), a documentary about hockey fighters. But it wasn’t high on Nellie’s list, and when you only see five films in the festival you pick ones that you’re both hot for. I wanted to see it because it was about hockey and because it was directed by Alex Gibney and because the main subject was Chris “Knuckles” Nilan. But mostly I wanted to see it I feel like it could be a document of a turning point that we can’t quite distinguish yet because we’re in the middle of it.

Just before the film festival began Wade Belak, until recently a Toronto Maple Leaf known mainly for his fighting, committed suicide. In August Rick Rypien, another fighter, also committed suicide. In May former New York Rangers enforcer Derek Boogard died of an overdose of alcohol and painkillers. This was the backdrop for this documentary, most or all of which wouldn’t have been there when Gibney started filming.

But the fact that I would describe these guys as “fighter” or “enforcer” distinguishes them from the likes of Nilan. Nilan could play. Three times he scored 15+ goals in a season. In six of his seasons he was a plus player. Over his career he earned about a point every 3 games. Boogard and Belak, by comparison, earned a point every 17 games or so, though they were defensemen; Rypien, a forward, earned a point about every 7.5 games. Those three were the type of player commonly referred to as “goons”. So was Nilan, no mistake, but Nilan could play. Likewise, Bob Probert — probably the most feared fighter in the league during the late80s and early 90s — twice scored 20+ goals in a season and averaged a point every 2.4 games. Probert, by the way, struggled for years with drugs and alcohol and died at the age of 45. Even the talented among this contingent weren’t immune from whatever demons haunted them.

There are more stats and anecdotes pointing to the fact that fighters were, and are, a tormented bunch on the whole. That alone should be an emotional jolt sufficient to give the Don Cherrys of the world pause, and wonder whether the price fighters pay is justified. God knows, the logical line of reasoning hasn’t worked.

For the first few years after the NHL expanded from 21 teams to 30 it was fashionable to slag expansion for diluting the talent pool in the NHL. By and large it did at first, but as Europe opened up and talent development in the US accelerated, the talent filled the roster spots. But no talent pool exists to feed the requirement for goons, and so the makeup of teams changed. Before expansion, when the likes of Nilan and Probert played, it was much harder to be a “single-purpose” goon…that is, someone on the team solely to fight. Nilan’s job was to protect talented Montreal players; Probert’s job was to protect Steve Yzerman. Dave Semenko’s job in Edmonton was to protect Wayne Gretzky, just as Marty McSorley’s was in LA, but both men could play. The 21-team market was small enough to filter out the pure goons; you only made an NHL team as a fighter if you could also score or play defense. As so many new teams now felt they needed enforcers, they filled their rosters with what remained: pure fighters. It may seem a subtle difference, but it’s an important one:  if you were a player who happened to fight, like McSorley or Probert, and the game called for playing, you played. You skated, you shot, you backchecked, you cleared the front of your net, and you won. You played hockey. If a fight was needed — a concept that had been around for decades, but became glaringly apparent with the goonish tactics of the Flyers and Bruins in the 70s — then you fought. Today, there are several players — on each opposing team — whose sole purpose in the league is to fight. Their skills aren’t enough to call them up from the minors, or even draft them, if they didn’t fight. This, in the common pro-fighting parlance, is “knowing your role”. And this is what’s killing the game.

The result of what I describe above is staged fights. Everyone knows that the second enforcers from both teams are on the ice, they’ll fight. That’s what they’re there for. It’s all that they’re there for. They’re not sticking up for themselves, or retaliating* for a dirty play against their star teammate. They’re fighting because, if they don’t, they’re out of a job. This self-sustaining economy has infected the league, and it makes the game so goddamned boring and predictable. You see these set pieces coming ten minutes away, and they just don’t mean anything. The fighting doesn’t help the game — far from it, it generally slows down what is otherwise the fastest pro sport on the planet — and it’s usually anti-climactic. The fact that during the playoffs you almost never see fighting suggests it isn’t in any way necessary…it’s just a sideshow during the season, a bad habit that people can’t seem to shake. It’s junk food. It’s reality TV. It’s dutch elm disease, rotting away at something beautiful.

I could have probably spared you this bloody great rant and just pointed you to Jack Todd’s much better argument in the Montreal Gazette a few weeks ago, but it warrants repeating: ban fighting. As Todd says, it’s “cruel, backward and unnecessary.” It’s also really fucking boring.

* I don’t endorse this bullshit either. Part of the reason why league discipline has been such a joke over the years is because it’s assumed that any dirty play will result in the victim’s teammate “straightening the guy out”. I’m hopeful that recent clear and substantial discipline meted out by Brendan Shanahan will improve things.

Say it ain't so, Joe

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

Last Wednesday I flew to Atlanta for a conference. I sailed through customs and security at Pearson and thought I was en route to the most effortless flight of all time, but then the Air Canada workers strike bit back…the ground crew forgot to file some paperwork to get us across the border, so we sat on the tarmac for an extra half an hour. That delay allowed a huge thunderstorm to roll into Atlanta ahead of us, and that storm shut down the airport, so we circled for almost an hour. By the time we got on the ground we were two hours late. It then took me (I’m not kidding here) twenty minutes to get out of the airport; no one warned me that the terminal is so long you have to take a train from one end to the other. Anyway. I checked in to the Westin Peachtree (avoid if you’re in Atlanta — it has great views, but is old and shabby once you get past the lobby), headed to the bar and watched the end of the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals. I never actually left the hotel for the next 24 hours, heading straight to the airport for my return flight…pity, I’d found a few decent-looking beer places in the city and was hoping to try one or two of them on for size.

.:.

Back to that game 7 for a minute. In the official order of my preference for who wins the cup, it goes Montreal first (obviously), then any of 26 other teams, then Philly, then Boston, then Toronto. So it really does pain me to say that Boston deserved to win the series. They played like the better hockey team, even if they weren’t. It also pains me that the likes of Zdeno Chara and Brad Marchand get to hold a cup, but that pain is somewhat offset by my happiness for Tim Thomas winning his first cup, and for Mark Recchi ending his career with yet another championship. As I watched the final game end and the Bruins start to celebrate, I thought that what would sting the most was that Montreal came so damnably close to knocking the Bruins out in the first round — losing only in overtime of game seven. But, of course, what would sting the most the next morning was the insanity of the rioting in downtown Vancouver, an embarrassment felt by the whole country. Surely, with Canadian teams having lost in the finals five straight times since 1994, you’d think we would be used to it now.

.:.

After the traveling and frantic catch-up at work, I was hoping for a quiet weekend of doing as little as possible. That almost happened. Friday we just had a simple dinner out and drank some wine. Saturday we did some errands and generally enjoyed the gorgeous weather and then I actually had a nap. Seriously, a nap. I never have naps. I usually can’t sleep during the day no matter how hard I try. But yesterday, since I was on twelve hours sleep over the previous three nights, I curled up on the bed and went to sleep for a couple of hours. Until an emergency came up.

We found out Smokeless Joe, one of our favourite beer joints, would be closing in two weeks. And that night was the last time our friend Kaylea would be working there.

A dire situation indeed.

We sprung into action, throwing some food down our necks and arriving to find two plum spots waiting for us at the bar. We got the scoop, and sat down with the intention of having three each. Which, of course, ended up being five each. Or possibly six, if you count the vanilla ice cream and Nickel Brook Green Apple Pilsner float that Steph made for me. We drank and laughed and listened to blues and were especially happy to see Colin and Eddie, our favourite bartenders before Kaylea began working there, show up later in the evening. We said (and hugged) our goodbyes, not knowing if or when we’d see them all again, and left the place that’s been one of Toronto’s best beer bars and our unofficial living room for the past…I don’t know, eight years?

Hopefully it’ll come back in some incarnation, but it’ll just never be the same.

Steph, Kaylea, Eddie and Colin

Encore

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Signs of spring: birds singing. Snow melting. Taxes. Maple syrup. Flowers blooming. Bruins/Habs.

Tomorrow night Montreal will face Boston in the playoffs for the fifth time in ten years. True, that’s not quite as frequent as in the years before the 1993 shift to conference vs. divisional playoffs, when they met each other in the playoffs nine straight years. But this year has a little extra zing, thanks to Zdeno Chara’s attempted decapitation of Max Pacioretty last month.

I don’t see Montreal trying to go after the Bruins physically. First, they can’t. Second, if physical retaliation were their plan they would have tried it during their final meeting of the season, in which Boston demolished them 7-0. No, the Canadiens’ only intended revenge would be to knock off the third-seeded Bruins. But I don’t see how they can do it. Boston is too big, too strong, too fast. Montreal has been without their two best defensemen, Andrei Markov and Josh Gorges, for the better part of the year. Montreal’s only star player is Carey Price, but Boston goalie Tim Thomas is also one of the best in the league on many nights.

If Price steals a few wins, Thomas gets rattled, Boston’s scorers dry up and Montreal gets a second straight heroic playoff from guys like Mike Cammalleri, Brian Gionta and P.K. Subban, then maybe they’ll pull off the upset.

If, if, if. Go Habs go.

Burnsy

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I’m fortunate to cheer for a hockey team which has won six Stanley Cups during my lifetime. That’s right, Leafs fans under the age of 43: six. Suck it. Anyway, I’m too young to remember much about the first four of those Canadiens cup wins (in consecutive years from 76 to 79) except that it was during those years that I decided Montreal was my favourite team, much to my father’s chagrin. I only vaguely recall the arrival of St. Patrick (Roy) to win the cup in 1986, as I didn’t really start paying attention to hockey until I was fourteen. It was 1989, and Montreal had made the cup finals again in Pat Burns‘ first year behind the bench.

The Canadiens lost to Calgary that year, but it set a precedent for Burns: he had a habit of making a big impact in his first year with each team he coached. He won the Jack Adams trophy that year as best coach in the NHL. Making the traitorous move to Toronto in 1992, he led an underdog team of Maple Leafs to game 7 of the conference finals, before Wayne Gretzky eventually shot Doug Gilmour in the neck, peed on his corpse and threw the puck into the Toronto net with his bare hands. Or at least that’s how Leafs fans describe it. Nonetheless, Burns won the Jack Adams again for his role in turning Toronto into a contender. He would eventually be fired, but won a third Jack Adams trophy in his first year coaching the Boston Bruins. In 2003 he led the New Jersey Devils to the Stanley Cup, his first and only cup win. A few years later he would step down because of the cancer that would eventually spell the end of him. Pat Burns died last Friday.

It was a fitting coincidence, then, that Montreal and Toronto were to face each other the following evening. Montreal — as is their custom — held a touching and tasteful ceremony of remembrance before the game. It is well the game was not set for Toronto; I shudder to think how that tribute might have gone. The Canadiens then went out and stomped all over the Leafs, winning 2-0 for Carey Price’s third shutout in six games. Price looked, as he has all season, calm and focused and confident. After the game Price revealed to reporters that his inspired play of late may have had something to do with the very man the fans celebrated last night.

“He was a special person and he did a lot of great things in this league for both teams,” Price said of the 58-year-old who had success as coach in Montreal, Toronto, Boston and New Jersey before his illness drove him to step down in 2004.

“He left me a message before the season started and I was really touched. He gave it to (assistant coach) Kirk Muller and he passed it on to me.”

Asked what Burns said, Price just said: “That will always be here with me.”

Thanks Burnsy.