A FAN’S NOTES

The Rise and Fall of Hockey Canada

The National Hockey League launched another endless season this week. The Montreal Canadiens appear to be a team somewhere south of terrible. These two related sports stories interest me because at least they’re about the game. It’s the other kind of sports stories that revolt me, the ones in the news section of my paper.

If you’re a Canadian reading this post, you know what I’m writing about. Two alleged incidents of sexual assault by a multiple of junior players who wore Canadian colours in 2003 and 2018. Hockey Canada has settled one lawsuit using hush-hush money from a secret fund financed by misappropriated player registration fees. This suggests sanctioned gang rape or at least business as usual, boys will be boys, and there’s no need to involve the courts or the insurance company. The existence of a second such fund came to light last week. This is not petty cash; this is a calculated cost of doing business with teenage boys. Two pools of dirty money suggest there are enough anticipated sex scandals lurking in dressing rooms to rival the Catholic Church. 

Hockey Canada was established in 1968; its purpose was to assemble Canadian national teams to compete in international tournaments nobody cared about. In 1994 it merged with the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (founded 1914) thus becoming the sport’s national governing body whose remit now included growing and promoting the game at all levels for all participants.

I’ve long admired Hockey Canada’s logo. The concept, a pale player silhouette framed by contrasting colours, though unoriginal it is immediately recognizable; it pops. The organization’s corporate sponsors signed on to incorporate it into their own advertising and marketing materials. Some sort of gold by association for Tim Hortons, Canadian Tire and Scotiabank.

Hockey Canada metastasized into Canada’s premier sports organization during the nineties. The agent was television, and that term in turn may be used as a synonym or metaphor for filthy lucre. When the International Olympic Committee and International Ice Hockey Federation (of which Hockey Canada is a member and, who knows, an NHL proxy) agreed professionals could compete at the Winter Games, Hockey Canada took a star turn. It would choose Canada’s Nagano ‘98 squad, cherry picking from the NHL’s best Canadian players. This was not the Spengler Cup, baby! Canadian hockey fans would watch a national team assembled via some sick fantasy draft by Hockey Canada. This was power, this was prestige; this was dazzle, grape Kool-Aid to corporate sponsors, and eyeballs to advertisers.

The way Canadians experienced television began to shift around this time of exciting Olympic hockey news. Cable channels had proliferated, many of them focused on sports. Leagues looking to sell broadcast rights had more potential partners at the bidding table. The television signal was transitioning from analogue to digital. Advertisers quickly realized the only “live” TV available in the spectrum was either news or sports. The IIHF world junior championship, a Hockey Canada property, became a hot commodity for a sports channel with restricted or non-existent NHL broadcast rights. Every ensuing holiday season pimply Team Canada was as scrutinized and venerated as the Second Coming of the ’72 Summit Series or ’76 Canada Cup teams of seasoned professionals; the absolute career apex for most of the kids who made the roster cut. One of the perks would be a coddled, frat house sense of entitlement. And Bauer and Nike swag.

Last week Hockey Canada’s interim board chair Andrea Skinner (she has since resigned as did subsequently Hockey Canada’s entire Board of Directors) complained to a parliamentary hearing that her organization was cast as a “scrapegoat,” a witch hunt poster boy for a larger, endemic problem pervading society. There is some truth in her petulance. Various Canadian sports authorities and institutions are mired in allegations of sexual misconduct. But really, she spoke to Hockey Canada’s deafness to its entire mission, its raison d’etre. What if the dollars in those rainy day rape funds had been directed into the women’s and sledge hockey programs?

Hockey is to Canada like apple pie and baseball are to the United States, evocative of less complicated times. And though they never really existed, when we speak of them we’re implying higher behavioural standards, proper ethics, manners, morals and values. Life can be coached. Evolving boy-men segregated from normal development by elite hockey programs would benefit from a seminar or two or 20.

That Hockey Canada elected to cover up alleged sex crimes, pay out hush money and then create a second slush fund for tamping down future sex crimes beggars belief. This isn’t just cynical rot at the top of Canada’s hockey governing body, but putrid gangrene. Because nothing, not even pus, drips or oozes uphill, there was only one way for the infection to spread.

Remember, kids, hockey builds character! Play fair, play smart and obey the rules!         

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of Shakespearean tragedy  since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Goin’ Home

Time is eternal when you look back on it, yesterday, and all that. It exists in the present as it must; unfurling continuously. The future is theoretical. There’s a good probability that it, or something like it, could happen. So, that infuriatingly trite platitude “It’s the journey and not the destination” is true although it cannot be applied to sort of, kind of post-pandemic air travel.

“Bonjour! Hi! Bienvenue a Montreal!” I’m flying way back home this week. The occasion is the forty-fifth anniversary of my high school graduation. My suitcase is open on the blanket chest at the foot of the bed. The wayfaring documents are stacking up on the dining room table. I’ve since lived a little more than the latter half of my life to date away from my hometown. But there are still a lot of yesterdays cached in that place. On the drive into the city from the airport I always see an invisible, rusting modal freight container hidden in the weeds beneath the urban ruins of the old Turcot spaghetti traffic interchange which teetered on piers above a former CNR yard; there’s a big box of me down there somewhere hard by the repurposed Imperial Tobacco cigarette factory, I swear.

Twentieth century boy: I sometimes wonder why I feel such affection for the most squirmingly uncomfortable five years of my life. Confidentially, high school was difficult. The bloc of Catholic boys was diverse in a small school way: brains, jocks, stoners, nerds and politicos. Only a spider, let alone a self-loathing ordinary average guy, could keep a foot in each camp. I did make friends and if we’re not as intimate as we once were, we’ve at least kept in touch. It follows too that I made enemies and if their personalities remotely resemble my own, they’re still nursing grudges.

High school flagged my academic shortcomings early on, math and science. Oh, the grace of a report card “51” in chemistry. My “47” in geometry required summer school; I was obtuse, the square of the hypothermia was beyond me. My algebra teacher was also my football coach: “Geoff, you’re able to memorize the playbook (Veer Series, wing formation, audibles, more backfield motion than the I-formation), so why not the terms of this formula? If you can learn just one thing this year…” Thank you for the passing grade, Coach.

Unbeknownst to me, the rigours of the Jesuit education provided by Loyola High School instilled in me the capacity for critical thinking. This was done by stealth. Little did I know that this faculty would colour my engagement with the world as a post-secondary student, worker, writer, consumer and citizen. My secondary schooling was a secret gift with no expiry date.

To paraphrase a lyric fragment sung by the immortal Eddie Money, I want to go back though I’m feeling so much older. Loyola’s alumni weekend kicks off this Friday afternoon with a football game against St. Thomas. I’m tempted to attend. We always used to beat those guys. Loyola’s teams are nicknamed the Warriors; I suspect the Indian head logo has long been consigned to the dustbin. I assume the uniforms have changed and the equipment is much safer. “Geoff! Where are you!?” “Umm, on the football field?” “Geoff! What day is it!?” “Umm, game day?” “He’s fine.”

My old school was always a piece of a larger enterprise. Though the building, modern mock Gothic, is new and not the one whose halls I haunted, it still resides on the campus of the former Loyola College which has long since been incorporated into Concordia University – another Alma Mater of mine. I’ve logged tons of time in Montreal’s wild West End through the years, but not recently. I should take a stroll around the neighbourhood.

Mister Hot Dog was on Sherbrooke Street at the east corner of the campus. It was an odd shape at an odd intersection, not quite a corner – if only I could remember my geometry. It was a counter operation, stand and inhale. Everybody knew that the fat, sweaty guy with the brush cut who ran the place really, really appreciated his lunch clientele, fresh-faced high school boys. West of the campus, still on Sherbrooke but beyond West Broadway was The Golden Moon. It was one of those family-run restaurants (Greeks, always Greeks) that used to be everywhere and are nowhere now. Till at the front behind a counter displaying cheesecakes, kitchen and toilets at the rear. In between, rows of booths, some seating two, some seating four. Each booth had its own jukebox; April Wine was popular, “Fast Train” and “Bad Side of the Moon.” Loyola boys would congregate to chain smoke and swill cups of coffee or fountain Cokes. It was a more democratic environment than the structured hierarchy inside the school because different years were compelled to mingle in a space more congenial to conversation, and one more welcoming than the inside crush of rush hour mass transit.

South of the “Moon,” down a gentle incline and across the commuter tracks was Ye Olde Pub. It was a workingman’s bar whose trade resided across the street at the Sealtest factory, that dairy with the hunting lodge exterior wall of gigantic, grinning cow heads. Drinkers of any age were welcome at Ye Olde, and the rumour was a certainty: the Vice Squad could raid the joint at any time. This fearful knowledge only enhanced the buzz of guzzling three Molson Exports before attending a dance with the girls from our sister Catholic private schools. In truth, there wasn’t enough beer in the whole damn West End to detach me from the whitewashed cinderblock wall of Loyola’s primitive cafeteria. Boys this side, girls over there on the other, and didn’t the time seem to flash by between “Ballroom Blitz” and “Stairway to Heaven.”

Forty-five years. I’m acutely aware of how I misused them and used them up, but sometimes I still can’t believe they’re gone. I cannot anticipate another forty-five years of existence. Hell, my class’s fiftieth anniversary will fall in 2027. Who knows? Those next five years may prove trickier than I’d prefer. And so Friday night at Loyola I’ll be wandering around wearing a name tag and swigging from a cup of beer, a little lost in the new building, a bit wayward, and wondering just why it is exactly that I’m so happy to be back there again.        

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of mystified nostalgia since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Gimme Some Peace

During my teenage years, that curiously stunted era of developing into some sort of being vaguely resembling an adult, all my mother ever said to me was, “TURN IT DOWN!” I resolved that I’d never devolve into a psychotic crank like Mom. Just who in their right mind would prefer Julio Inglesias and Engelbert Humperdinck over Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer? Contemporary living has been a stern tutor, teaching the tyranny of noise - however one may define cacophony. My stereo and Mom’s yelling aside, the seventies, in retrospect, were a much quieter time.

Generally, the ceaseless urban roar is an artificial construct. My neighbourhood, like most, is transitioning; the din is dense. The City of Edmonton actively encourages population density in order to increase its tax base. Basic, essential services are expensive. For example, the City did not spray for mosquitoes last spring. That pesty saving to the municipal budget ranged from a quarter- to a half-million dollars. My ward’s alderman bet his seat on bats and dragonflies. Additional federal and provincial funds literally just drip down into this developers’ paradise, more of a trickle would be welcome. Single homes are demolished so two may take their place. The grinding engines of heavy trucks and heavy machinery are constant. The paradox of progress is more motors and municipal expense as ageing infrastructure is upgraded to accommodate increased volume (pardon the pun).

A casual chat with the neighbourhood community league president the other Saturday was especially disheartening. He figured the noise of transition was sustainable for another decade, at least. I thought, “Great, fanfare enough to see me out.” Variations on these strident, gratingly harsh sounds are everywhere now too, aren’t they? Alarming news, angry punditry, mad social commentary, politicians talking up to the lowest common denominator, a myopic world screaming to be heard; my God, what some people shout about when they use their cells as walkie-talkies - hire a lawyer, sell the stock or get a prescription, I don’t care to know one way or the other, just stuff a sock in it (and your anxious little dog too).

Edmonton had been hit a violent storm one evening about a week's previous. The type I’d expect in July or August, heat generated and frightening. The window blinds were up and so the various rooms of the Crooked 9 flashed electric blue, the colour of vacuum tube television screens. Thunder cracked like dominoes tiles on an oak table. Double-down slams! Nature’s noise was real and welcome, a refreshingly glorious star cameo.

The shrill background whine to modern life is omnipresent. The noise, beyond the freeways’ roar and emergency sirens, is visual too. Cities are not assembled Lego kits, out of the box and done. Ta-da! Rome was not built in two millennia. My town has proved particularly adept at botching its footprint on both sides of the North Saskatchewan River. Commercial architecture is boring and repetitive, newer low-rise buildings look cheap. Boulevards and planters are weedy and infrequently manicured because maintenance costs money. Bridge refurbishments and light rail line extensions are better really, really late then never and so the city’s primary colour is a sort of Halloween orange: traffic cones and pylons, striping on barriers and safety vests, detour and reduced speed limit signs. Pyramids of fill, gravel, sand, clog narrow streets. And there is litter, there is always litter; a recent informal survey indicates that disposable masks rival some of Canada’s most beloved corporate brands underfoot. Can I buy one thing, just one thing, without a logo on it?

I’m unsure when I decided that pretty much everything around me disturbed my peace. I can’t pinpoint exactly when life got louder. Audio annoyance must be a function of ageing. Mary Reilly, Mary Reilly, I have become my mother; but not, you know, in the Psycho sense, just more irritable. And poor Mom, if she only knew that the discordant chords of the Clash and the Sex Pistols would now register to her ears as sounds sweeter than birdsong.

I wish our recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II had been schizophrenic because everyone and everything would’ve had to shut the fuck up for a second blessed minute.    

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of cranky complaint since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Queen Elizabeth II, 1926 - 2022

“I’m the best thing England’s got, me and the Queen.” – Mick Jagger, circa 1977

Canada’s parliamentary democracy is based on the Westminster System. Protocol necessarily involves ritual and tradition. When the House of Commons sits, each day’s session begins with the placing of a mace on the table before the speaker of the House. The same ceremony plays out in the Senate and in provincial and territorial legislative assemblies. The stylized weapon symbolizes the authority of the British Crown while crucially conceding that its power has been ceded to the people.

I like living under a constitutional monarchy. The reigning sovereign as represented by their vice-regal surrogate, our Governor-General, is our head of state. Our prime minister heads the government. I took journalism in university. Thought maybe I’d be a newshound. I ended up a news junkie in advertising. In recent years I’ve read about democracies, some established, some nascent, unraveling. I’ve come to appreciate Canada’s creaky colonial model. That subtle layer between entities, the nature of the state versus the nature of its executive is a crucial buffer. There is decorum and stability up here north of 49, imperfect as any human construct, surely, but in Canada, it’s impossible for an “elected” head of “state” to actively sabotage the peaceful transfer of power.

The Crown is similar to a kitchen wall calendar, a little old fashioned but unfailingly reliable. For the past 70 years (eight years longer then I’ve been alive) the face of this Canadian calm carrying on was Queen Elizabeth II. I’ve devoted more thought to this archaic and dubious institution, its lasting impact, importance, meaning and place in history, then I have to the throne’s lottery winners and members of the Royal Family. They are separate yet the same. Still, I believe the late Queen recognized the blind luck of her birth and possessed the fortitude to make the best of an unwanted gift of fate.

When I picture the late Queen, it’s her classic, primary portrait, young, attractive and defaced by the Sex Pistols. I wonder if that “God Save the Queen” sleeve was another “Oh, fuck!” moment, a coughed regal giggle behind a daintily clenched fist. An icon to iconoclasts. Canadian pop artist Charles Pachter had already lampooned her in his painting “Queen on Moose.” Warhol had rendered her hipper than thou, Marilyn and Mao. After the Stones had her bravely shouting “What the hell is going on?” in “Jigsaw Puzzle” she was the subject of a lovelorn, throwaway Beatles ditty.

I took for granted that Queen Elizabeth II would outlive me. Maybe there was something in the water of the River Thames or perhaps she shared some sort of alien genetic material with Keith Richards. The Queen wasn’t just the Monarch, she was the entire monarchy, existing for centuries past, weirdly immortal.

Seventy years of human history from an elevated perch. Witness to and part-time player in change and turmoil, triumph and tragedy in the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, Europe and the rest of the world. She spent some time in the dock too, a complicit figurehead for every single crime ever committed in the name of the British Empire. Closer to home, “Buck House” or Balmoral, the hot mic wit and wisdom of her toff husband the antics of her own family, her idiotic children and grandchildren, and their insufferable partners. I wonder if Her Majesty ever contemplated writing her memoirs. I’m somewhat charmed by an irrational fantasy, my hope her working title might’ve been something like Oh, Fuck! What Now?

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of breathless Royals coverage since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format.