The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
"If you can't beat them in the alley, you can't beat them on the ice." Ð Conn Smythe The original owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs established the mantra for the National Hockey League decades ago and Todd BertuzziÐnot to mention Steve MooreÐare heirs to that famous slogan. This scribbler has two sons. Both went through the usual midget and bantam systems in Vancouver, the wonderful life-giving experiences that involve bleary-eyed fathers driving to frigid rinks at 6 a.m. on Sunday mornings, a ritual repeated all across this hockey-crazy country. It was an educational time, since this father was the score-keeper at the games, and the time-keeper beside me was a father by name of John Cleghorn who did rather wellÐunlike the scribblerÐin later life, becoming the chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada. With screaming, furious parents behind us hurling curses at the young volunteer referees on the ice, it was nigh-impossible to keep their spittle off the score sheet. One of our jobs was after the game to lock the dressing room doorÐfrom the insideÐof the home team until maddened parents of the visiting squad ceased pounding to get in and get at the refsÐthe little tads terrified they might get in. Only when these mentally-challenged loving mothers and fathers grew exhausted and got into their cars to go home could we unlock the doors again. Thanks a lot, Conn. One game, my older son, by now about 12, was an awkward but willing learner. A much larger youngster (a future Bertuzzi) sped across the ice and with a cross-check from behind drove him right over the boards into the penalty box two feet from where I sat. I thought his back was broken. It wasn't, but his spirit was, and he lost interest in the game. My younger son, gifted with the effortless skating style of the Pocket Rocket, still plays in a 'beer league' every week, with the same group of buddies who have been on the ice together since they left university 15 years ago. He's the captain and the league allows no bodychecking and of course no fights. They love it and will be doing it forever. Beat them in the alley? Had the opportunity myself. The scribbler was a young sportswriter, for his sins, with the Vancouver Sun and one night was covering the Vancouver Canucks from high in the press box which could be reached only by a ladder. I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to find the blazing eyes of Coley Hall, the millionaire owner of the Canucks. He apparently had not been amused by some previous comment under my byline and had climbed all the way up the ladder and asked me "to come outside" with him. Coley Hall (who died just last year) weighed some 200 pounds and was famous for his fisticuffs in night clubs around town. I declined the offer, which is the reason I am alive today. But that's hockey. Hockey is taking a 15-year-old Bobby Orr out of his home and away from his parents to ship him far away to another team that has drafted him because of his brilliance. He has since confessed that he cried himself to sleep every night because he was so lonely. That's hockey, the only game beside British soccer that purposely cuts the talented off from a formal education. See 'Selling' P.# Con't from P.# Hockey is Don Cherry, who makes a fortune selling videos of the best fights. And hockey is the sports pages of the newspapers that display their colour photos of a slugfest with each game. Dan Parker, a New York sports columnist, wrote 50 years ago, "Hockey is a wonderful game. It has to be, to survive the jerks who run it." X x x AND ANOTHER THING One finds the most amazing things in obscure court cases. In Ontario Superior Court one Michael Geluch is suing the Rosedale Golf Club $475,000 for wrongful dismissal from his position as general manager. He has testified that George Cohon, head of McDonald's Canada, was blackballed from joining the club because he was a Jew. When was thisÐIn the 1940s? When we knew things like that went on? The 1950s? When we thought that had died out? No, 1996! All Toronto society knows that far off in another century the most posh neighbourhood in Toronto, Rosedale, barred rich Jews, who then set up their own enclave, posh Forest Hill. But 1996 and it's still going on? No wonder they call it Toronto the Good.
