A FAN’S NOTES

Coach’s Corner Consigned to Glue Factory; Don Cherry Hoarse

I love Don Cherry. I love Don Cherry because of his one immortal moment of epic ineptness in 1979 when he mismanaged his Boston Bruins bench as time wound down in a crucial sudden-death hockey game against the Montreal Canadiens. Too many men on the ice. The Canadiens tied it during their resulting power play and went on to win that seventh and final game of the series in extra time. God bless you, Don Cherry.

Cherry is a pro hockey lifer from a different era: wool sweaters, felt pads and no helmets.  He played the game when the National Hockey League had just six teams; Cherry was skilled enough to play just one game in the NHL. His career winning percentage as a coach is mediocre and probably somewhat enhanced by the boon of Bobby Orr lacing up in his dressing room at its start. Orr’s career was winding down and he was skating on one leg but Bobby Orr was that good, otherworldly.

Canada is a winter country; hockey matters. When I was growing up there were three television channels available across the country. Two of them broadcast hockey on Saturday nights. Quebeckers watched the Canadiens on Radio-Canada and the rest of Canada watched the Toronto Maple Leafs on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC).

Cherry, a failure to date in both his capacities in the sport seemed like a good fit for HNIC. As a former Bruins coach he was something of a bad guy; as a native of Ontario, “a Kingston boy,” he was an unabashed Leafs homer in Canada’s largest television market. After HNIC threw the animated Peter Puck over the boards into the snowbank, the show presented Canadians with another cartoon, a sharply dressed, unfiltered, concussed old school buffoon. And really, nobody expected the CBC to elevate cerebral presenters such as Barbara Frum and Rex Murphy to the gondola at Maple Leaf Gardens.

And we laughed. Don Cherry was vaudeville. His Coach’s Corner segments featured an earnest and expressive straight man feeding him cues. This was satire with spittle hoarsely spraying instead of seltzer-water. This was the Royal Canadian Air Farce comedy troupe digging even deeper to be more idiotic than their HNIC lampooning “Big Bobby Clobber” sketches. This was genius, subversive, Canada’s Saturday Night Live. Cherry hated anybody who didn’t wear Toronto’s blue or Boston’s black. He hated Russians, Finns, Swedes and French Canadians but within a hockey context or so we thought; they weren’t “good Saskatchewan boys” like Gordie Howe.

But it wasn’t a joke. This was professional wrestling commentary for Sun newspaper mouth-readers. This clown was for real. Cherry didn’t embrace hockey’s “quicksilver ballet” aspect so much as its potential for high speed violence. He made a modest fortune selling Don Cherry-branded video cassettes of hockey fights. Canadian hockey fans eventually realized their insane, beer-swilling uncle had exchanged his usual table in the neighbourhood tavern for a national platform.

Cherry could have and maybe should have been fired for any number of inappropriate remarks since he first graced the airwaves in 1980. Hockey matters here in Canada, but the game is mere entertainment, a distraction. While no sports network executive in their right mind would want a bland and gray colour commentator with whom all viewers agree, Cherry’s “everyman” shtick was always grating. Through four decades it grew tired and then stale before finally devolving into the sub-moronic nadir we ignored until last Saturday night.

I can only surmise that Cherry over time deluded himself into believing he was HNIC’s main attraction and was therefore as important, and perhaps even bigger, than the game itself. Abrasive and inarticulate, Cherry suits the gaudy coat of the ignorant modern populist patriot. He can dumb down Charles Dickens for the lowest common denominator: You people may not know it but hard times were the best of times and nothing tops an economic depression or world war to inspire a homogenous community to pull together.

The arena lights had dimmed. Outside on rue Ste-Catherine jubilant Montreal Canadiens fans celebrated a miraculous, nerve-wracking, come-from-behind victory. The visiting Bruins had blown it. FUBAR! The spring of 1979 had arrived in the city but even better, the hockey team was moving on down the road toward its fourth consecutive Stanley Cup championship. Boston would fire its coach.

Goodnight, Don Cherry. At least one of your great many colossal gaffes will never be forgotten here at meGeoff. I love you. Goodbye. Godspeed.    

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SAINTS PRESERVE US

It’s the Tar Sands, Stupid

The Midas touch is classical antiquity’s most ironic myth, a gift as a curse. Sisyphus with his eternal rock and rolling stone merely exemplified the absurdity of fruitless labour. Both of these misguided kings are alive and well today in the Canadian province of Alberta which has continually mismanaged the random hydrocarbon boon provided by some compressed Jurassic ferns.

Last week the recently minted and recently elected United Conservative Party (UCP) presented its first budget to the people. The finance minister wore a new pair of cowboy boots for the occasion. Alas, his language signaled the same old and tired excuse for another cycle of austerity measures tried and true. “Boom times” would not be returning anytime soon. It was distressingly apparent that the boom mentality, sparked initially by Leduc No. 1 and later the tar sands up north, was still driving these plains and mountains.

Today Alberta is projecting herself as a bi-polar, alcoholic diva raging around her neglected ranch house, off her meds and out of vodka. As was the case with the rhetoric (or lack of it) in the national general election campaign which concluded 21 October, there’s been no visionary discussion here about growing and diversifying the economy. No, we’re waiting for the price of oil to rebound. See, according to the UCP, Alberta has “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” Trouble is our largest crude customer, the United States, is pretty much self-sufficient these days.

But there’s a magic bullet! Harry Potter’s Philosopher’s Stone and Avenger Infinity Stones all combined in one cowboy hat. If the Trans-Mountain pipeline were twinned along an existing right-of-way, Alberta bitumen could reach Pacific tidewater and new Asian markets. Trouble is those Liberal mandarins in Ottawa exercising federal jurisdiction by approving the project twice and then buying it to ensure its completion after frustrated corporate investors began to bail. Another problem, and a legitimate head-scratcher, is that eastern Canadians prefer tobuy their oil from model states such as Saudi Arabia rather than Alberta. This type of situation demands the premier, a would-be statesman, mount a charm offensive and not throw a tantrum ranting his misperception of Quebec’s special status within Confederation.

Alberta has a relatively low level of post-secondary engagement compared to the rest of the country. This trend does not augur well for a rapidly evolving and increasingly complex global economy. It is in a large part a side effect of Alberta’s exploitation of the tar sands, big money in exchange for a modest skill set. To the hive mind of the UCP it only makes sense to cut provincial grants to advanced education institutions until the price of a barrel of oil rebounds. An educated workforce, an economic future beyond bitumen, what’s with that? Some academics have sniffed that Alberta’s five Christian colleges did not have their grants tampered with but a review of the numbers suggests a school like Burman University with its 400 students is already flying too close to the ground and that any funding reduction would be fatal.

The vast majority of Canadians reside in densely populated urban areas. Canadian cities are underserved by their provincial legislatures and the federal parliament, their voices subservient to a higher echelon of largesse. Revenue Avenue downtown consists mainly of property taxes and speeding tickets. Because Alberta has a spending problem and not a revenue problem UCP government logic dictates that municipal funding be cut, and that important infrastructure and transit projects in her major cities be delayed. Sure, their need will be much more acute in a few years’ time and costs will have gone up but by then the price of oil will have risen like Christ, black gold gravy.

And there’s another cross to bear (or ignore) in the meantime. Labourers used to decent dollars don’t hang around remote abandoned work camps. They migrate to populous places seeking work. If no one’s building hospitals, repairing roads and bridges or laying rails, there’s not much to do with one’s time. Social services have been cut; this budget de-indexed the Alberta Works family benefit allowance. When the welfare, as embarrassing and shaming as it is to accept, is subsistent and the food banks’ shelves are sparse, when things appear to be breaking down from the top, there’s only a few ways left to turn and none of them are good.

The climate in Alberta hasn’t changed; the same misguided wishes keep providing the same fruitless result.         

     

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HUMAN WRECKAGE

Agent Running in the Field

My father moved from Montreal to Ottawa in 1973, maybe 1974. Dad died in 2014. The two of us did not spend a lot of time together during those four decades in between. As I’ve lived these past five years knowing he will never again be at the other end of a telephone line, I’ve realized he did his best to set me up in life and for life in his quiet, thoughtful and necessarily distant way.

I can write for hours and not scribble or type a single word. That sort of stasis is a peculiar sort of agony. “Sure the sentence is grammatically incorrect but its meaning is clear and it sounds better. Oh…” With advertising copy that conflicted inactivity became something of an ethical dilemma. “Is it fair to bill for pacing and smoking? I’m selling two commodities here, one of which is time. Yes, but…” The back-handed miracle of middle age, semi-retirement, is that I can now write what I want when I want and my time-killing skills have markedly improved.

Since I signed my first lease for independent shelter in first year university I’ve carted a modest yet quality library between apartments and houses, cities and provinces. When I get stuck on a page now, hung up on a comma or a semi-colon, I scan the spines that surround my work area in the Crooked 9 for inspiration. As I contemplate the reference volumes, the histories, the sports writing and some of the world’s great novels, I don’t think of their authors and their subjects, I think of my father and the foundation he patiently and stealthily laid. “Dad gave me that one, that one too and that.” Dad was born in 1924; his collection of Shakespeare’s works, published around that time, is upstairs in the living room anchoring an elegant library table.

My father was a very precise man. His McGill engineering degree was interrupted by the Second World War. Crossword puzzles could be filled in with ink provided one wasn’t too hasty, fooled by the puzzler’s cryptic clues. He instructed me to write the number eight as two circles, much neater than my left-handed Mobius strip. Printing was a more effective way to communicate than cursive because the writer had an iota of additional time to consider his words. Letters from my father were always on sheets of graph paper, one letter per square. I acquired that habit and my printing (and my late older brother’s) looks exactly like Dad’s. Later in his life when he used unlined, personalized stationery, I could tell by the squared off bottom of each letter that he used a steel ruler to keep his lines straight and his margins true.

Dad’s favourite novelist was John le Carre. My favourite living author is John le Carre. A portrait of my father in his Royal Canadian Air Force uniform rests on a bookshelf near the hardcover editions of le Carre’s complete works. Some of the books are from my father’s library, some were gifts from him and some I bought myself. The three of us are connected by invisible strands of spider silk, enough perhaps to motivate an agent running in the field.

My father never did complete his engineering degree. He went back to school after the war but quit in frustration. He mentioned that time in his life just once. “After what I’d been through what could anyone say to me?” I believe my father’s experiences overseas taught him that there was a space between right and wrong and that that space was amoral and murky. This theme runs through all of le Carre’s novels and I’m sure it resonated with a particular veteran.

My father and I will always share a natural bond. Dad introduced me to his favourite writer and I was enthralled, hook, line and sinker. I appreciate le Carre’s writing on another level too, that much more because I know how much pleasure Dad derived from his prose. Le Carre transcended his genre and transformed the spy thriller into literature. His style is as dense as his plots. The reader must become something of an intelligence analyst because moves made in a great game played in a wilderness of mirrors may not be as they appear. Details of feints and deceptions, divided loyalties, the moral ambiguities of crimes committed to serve the greater good stack up enough to fill a dossier. A leaping off point for a new reader of le Carre is not Eric Ambler or Ian Fleming but rather conflicted Catholic convert, Graham Greene.

Following the cessation of the Cold War, the former MI5 and MI6 operative turned his attention to international banking, Big Pharma, arms dealing, money laundering and terror financing. Le Carre is pushing 90 now but remains amazingly prolific. A definitive biography by Adam Sisman was published in 2015 and quickly followed by le Carre’s own memoir The Pigeon Tunnel. But his fiction has not ceased. A Legacy of Spies which harks back to 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold appeared in 2017. Agent Running in the Field was published just last week. I do not know if my father had time enough to enjoy 2013’s A Delicate Truth; I know we talked about its publication but not the story which minutely relates the folly of a plausibly deniable special forces “extraction” of a most wanted jihadist.

Dad died on 11 November. I’ve always believed that date befitting of the man I knew. It’s approaching now, as surely as winter. I miss my father and I will always miss him. But grief is a peculiar thing. Dad himself said, “I had a good run.” I accept that; I understand that the great wheel of generations will always turn. I do not grieve my loss so much as his loss because I know that my father has missed four or five books that would have delighted him. But those recent le Carres are shelved with Dad’s books beside his RCAF picture and so, there they are and here the three of us shall remain.             

     

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