Geddy Behind Home Plate

The laundry basket and a glass of beer are in front of me. This is my Saturday routine. I’ve tossed the phone bill off the couch to the coffee table and the Blue Jays home opener is on the tv. There, Geddy Lee sits in the stands behind home plate, three rows up from ground level, a face in the crowd but prominent to me with his long bum-parted hair, schnozz and John Lennon sunglasses. I marvel at the fact that, rather than feeding the thousands, he’s one of the multitude, completely out of context.

I abandon watching the game, in audience of his audience within an audience.

Here is my rock god, watching a baseball game, eyeing the box for strikes and balls, talking to his neighbour, jolting to an incoming foul ball that really only sails harmlessly into a safety net. He eats a hot dog, his jaw chewing in great movements. With uncontrollable glee, I laugh when he eats an ice cream cone, dabbing his lips after each bite. He likes to sit with his left arm crossed over his lap while his right hand; his road weary, calloused hand, holds his chin and the side of his face. I phone my brother to tell him where Geddy is right now, live on television in real time. My brother isn’t interested. He hates baseball.

I wait for the producer to give the television audience a close up of Geddy, but it doesn’t happen. Even though he’s in plain view; an icon in their midsts, he remains just another face in the crowd. I want an in-stand interview. I want to hear his soft nasal tone predicting the prospect of the new season, just to solidify his context, justify his place in this crowd of baseball fans. It never comes. The entire game passes like most Blue Jays games do; uneventfully. Three hours later when the last strike is thrown, Geddy picks up his jacket, slides it over his shoulders and moves with the crowd for the exit. I don’t know who’s won or by what margin. As the end credits roll across the tv screen, I’m left with nothing to do but fold my cold, wrinkled laundry.
I know there’s another load waiting downstairs for me too. The day is late now and there’s supper to be made. I don’t want to do any more folding. So much time has passed me by.

Welcome, New Millennium

This morning, the first morning after the first morning of 2010, I made my tea as I usually do. The cats wrestled and chased each other around my feet while I quietly went about my routine. I was thinking about the spectacle of the last couple nights; the hyperbole of the holiday and how, after all the excitement, I am still here unchanged and unaffected. It was ten years ago when Y2K loomed over us. The doomsday clock tensed and everyone held their breath, only to exhale on the other side as they; we, always do annually. I was at home with my sons. I have a picture of that very moment that midnight arrived. My youngest had fallen asleep just ten minutes before, despite my earnest efforts to arouse him to the occasion and my older son was watching the countdown on television, his eyes bright and expectant for the glorious transit of millenniums. That is all I have of that moment. The lights never went out, the fabric of the universe remained intact. On the CBC, the Tragically Hip were playing, and instead of stopping the show and breaking into a rendition of Auld Lang Syne, they scored the moment by launching seamlessly into “Save The Planet”. It was business as usual. I remember as it was playing, before phonecalls from relatives to unite us in the occasion, I went outside on the front porch and noted the dark silence of the night. There, was no fanfare at all, just the whisper of the highway nearby. Everything was just as it had always been. I went back inside to sit with my boys and watch the celebrations coming in from around the world, plotting how soon I can get my older son to agree to go to bed.
A year later; January the 1st, 2001, I woke in the morning and puttered about the kitchen just as I had done just now. I noticed the rosiness of the clouds, the rising sun fighting through the horizontal atmosphere, atomized into a refracted red. Gradually, the sun rose and was shining brightly over my neighbour's roof and through naked tree branches into the kitchen window, into my eyes. I hid behind the open cupboard door to shield my eyes from the brightness. I then realized that I was witnessing the true dawning of the new millennium. It was January the first, 2001, the real beginning of the year, the century and the millennium. In our haste, the world could not wait to celebrate and did so prematurely, a year too early and nearly everyone was missing this, this new sunrise. I looked at the light as long as I could, but had to look away. I realized that this brief allowance of attention was all I could give the moment. Then the moment was gone. I fixed myself a coffee, checked the pancakes on the grill and went to see what the boys were watching on tv.

Welcome to the New Millennium.

Welcome, New Millennium.

You’re Welcome.

Spectator Sport: Love and Hate for the Game of Hockey

Like most Canadian boys, I grew up with hockey stories to tell.  It’s inevitable.  When you grow up in Canada, hockey is part of your cultural fabric;  an undeniable fact and underlying theme you return to again and again.  I was never a player.  I can tell you without shame that the times I held a hockey stick and whacked at a puck or a ball are few and far between.  But I’m a Canadian boy, and hockey gets in there somehow. It’s in there, but not as a sport, or a hobby, though.  With me, it’s pure entertainment and nostalgia.  Beyond that, I can’t be bought or sold.

My parents loved watching hockey. It was a given that we would watch that, just as much as we would watch Hee Haw or Ein Prosit.  Some of my earliest memories are of my sitting in front of that old black and white tv set, watching the Maple Leafs play.  These were the late 1960’s, the days fresh off their last Stanley Cup win.  These were the days when another Cup win seemed like a foregone conclusion; if not this year then next, as we, as Leaf fans had a sense of entitlement, like a special place of favour amongst hockey fans.  At that young age, I would often fall asleep to the sounds of the game in the background.  Indeed,some of my deepest auditory memories are hearing Dick Irwin’s nasal voice quacking names like Keon, Pronovost and Bower.  Those names were part of the lexicon of my early childhood.  I hear those names and I am teleported to that scratchy chair in the living room, where I sat with my favourite toys surrounding me on the cushion , like I used to do in the flashing cathode of that black and white tv set.  There were magical names coming out of the play by play, like the names of saints that had resonance with pride and heritage.  I would hear them in my youthful drowse, so close to bedtime, as I curled up in my entourage of toys, starting to doze.  My mother would tell me it was time to go to bed, and would lead me by the hand as I would stagger along down the hallway, then curl again up under my blankets, my bedroom door left open at my request, so I could hear the sounds in the living room, knowing my mother was there, watching the game while she did her needlepoint.  It was the safest feeling in the world; knowing my mother was there, watching the game.

Because my father’s bowling night was Saturday, I often thought that he had really left to play for the Leafs, kind of the way Bruce Wayne left his stately manor to become Batman at night.  I don’t know how I came to this conclusion; whether it’s an assumption I made on my own or someone had been messing with my head.  Either way, I had accepted it as a half baked fact, simply because it was all a part of a boy’s insistence that his father was a hero, whether donning a cape and a cowl beating up psychotic ne’er-do-wells or skates and a stick throwing the competition around like so many bales of hay.  This delusion had me watching whenever I knew Hockey Night in Canada was on, sitting and waiting to see if my father would jump those boards onto the ice, though it was difficult to see on that snowy black and white image fed to us through the rabbit ear antennae that topped the set.  That was technology back then.

That Stanley Cup win never did happen, or at least it hasn’t happened since, but there was more than that to sustain the game in my impressionable young mind.  And it didn’t even come from any kind of media conduit.  I got my NHL experience first hand.  Even in the seventies, the average player for the NHL had to have a summer job to get him through between seasons.  Enter Marv Edwards; backup goalie for the Maple Leafs, and fuel truck driver that used to deliver gasoline to our farm in the summers of the early seventies.  Marv was a friendly garrulous fella who used to talk about the great times he had with the stars of the rink.  His favourite source of inspiration was Eddie Shack, the storied defenseman of the Leafs whose recklessness on the ice made him a constant source of entertainment.  His nickname actually was The Entertainer, as logic would have it.  Eddie even had a song about him playing on the radio; “Clear The Track, Here Comes Shack”  by Doug Rankin and The Secrets.  I don’t really remember the stories Marv told, but I do remember him bringing me an autographed picture of Shack, as he had promised.  Having that autograph brought me back to the tv some more, trying to get as much as I could of the Sudbury wildman.  I even had his lunchpail, “Clear the Track” emblazoned on it, with Shack running down a train at full bore. He was amazing to watch, skating so recklessly that it looked like he was going to fall over, carrying his stick along with the puck in tow almost as if it was an afterthought.  He always had the biggest smile on his face, as if there was nothing he would rather do in life. And when he fought, it was dropglove, bareknuckle, no holes barred. His fights often continued off ice after the game.  When he scored, there was cocky showboating and posturing that took on the air of a wrestling interview.  He made hockey fun to watch.  He drew the eye in that crowd of goons that all skated around after that little rubber disk.  He was special.

Hockey was in full fever back then.  It was the era when you could expect a bench clearing brawl when the Leafs would play the Flyers, like clockwork. The Summit Series in 1972 gave full testimony of that fever too.  I was in school and classes were postponed so we could watch the game.  It was like a party; pop, chips and the first cheesecake I ever had. Is it a shame that all I remember from that party is the food?  I only heard about that wild stab later, when history would return to that moment, and return to it often.


All the other boys in my class played hockey.  they all talked about the game with each other and there seemed to be a kind of fraternity between them that I never seemed to be part of, never being interested in it either.  I hated those guys.  They were bullies and goons and had this cock-surety that I could never attain to.  I was just a spectator.  I just liked to watch it on Saturday nights.  You always hoped the Leafs would win,and when they did, you had your own sense of accomplishment, feeling satisfied when you went to bed.  If they lost, well you just ignored it and filed it under garbage.

As I got a little older, Darryl Sittler became my favourite player, probably because he was captain.  He was, and still is, a handsome man, with a face like it had been chiselled in stone, with a strong set jaw, squinting eyes that usually intensify when an eyebrow raises, studious and calculating, all framed in long blonde hair, waved perfectly.  He was a fluid skater in my memory.  I used to love watching him glide across the ice, how he carried the puck with almost  magnetic force, weaving around players, and sometimes through them.  Defensemen were not obstacles to him.  He was wide shouldered and thickly built, and to see him check another player was like watching a locomotive hit a truck. He wore number 27, and I sought out that number on that snowing cathode screen whenever the Leafs played.  When he did take the ice, it was like Superman emerging from the phonebooth, or Batman from the cave.  It really did.  Heroics were about to happen.  27 was going to come up a lot later on in life.  Cheryl Ladd was 27 when he became my first celebrity crush.  A lot of really important rock stars died at the age of 27.  My locker in Grade 11 was number 27.  I was 27 when the Leafs would reemerge as a powerhouse in the league once again.  My wife was 27 when I first met her.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Frank Mahovolich wore number 27.  Gilles Villeneuve drove car #27.  You get the idea.  I was watching when he scored those 10 points in one game, one after another after another.  It was magical; something like watching the Ascension; that affirmation that my main man was truly of greatness.

Unfortunately, the 70’s and early 80’s was also the era of Harold Ballard; ugly, hairslicking, miserly, fund misappropriating owner of the Leafs back then.  The man who publicly questioned why he should hire any talent when he sells Maple Leaf Gardens out night after night.  Everything was the sell out to him.  Despicable man.  The most mind-boggling thing was that people continued to buy tickets and merchandise, dumping millions into an inferior product.   The Leafs traded away players like a blind man in the marketplace, perserving the bottom line and keeping their overhead low.  When, in 1982, they traded Darryl Sittler away to the Philadelphia Flyers, it was the ultimate betrayal.  It came out later that Sittler had been pushing for a trade, no longer wanting to be part of the moneymaking machine, wanting to play some honest hockey with eyes on a win rather than a buck.  Disheartened, I could see the trainwreck that was the Leafs in the 80’s.  It was a topic on talk radio and anywhere you could strike up a conversation, how much the Leafs sucked.  Fans started showing up at games with paper bags over their heads.  But it made me think- why show up at all if you are that ashamed of your team?  Why be a fan at all??

At that point, hockey in general sucked, in my opinion.  The league was expanding ever further, into cities that had never seen snow.  The talent pool was so diluted, so wide and reaching so deep into the barrel that it was mediocre at best.  Guys that never would have even gotten on a farm team in the Original Six were now being drafted.  It was like pouring a shot of beer into a glass of water and expecting a buzz.  The league imposed rules to slow down the game, allowing more obstruction to happen.  No longer were there those end to end rushes that excited me so much.  They clamped down on fighting, they imposed the wearing of helmets and increased padding and protective gear as if players were infants on their first ride home after being birthed at the hospital.  Then again, they were commodities, needing to be protected to keep the cash flowing. Scoring went down. Watching an NHL hockey game became like watching an amateur tennis match.  Unwatchable.  Its spirit was broken and gone.

Rather than continue with the frustration, I moved on to different things.  I was a teenager at that point.  I got into girls.  I got into Sci Fi.  I got into Rock and Roll.  My quest was for my first lay, the best high.  Hockey ceased to be important, simply because it wasn’t.  Though no girl was ever interested in me, the eye candy was gratuitous enough. No matter how many times I watched The Empire Strikes Back, it never failed to dazzle me.   Geddy Lee never let me down. 

While I was gone, I missed a few things.  I missed Gretzky for the most part, in his heyday with the Oilers.  I missed Lanny Macdonald finally winning the Cup.  One thing I’m glad I missed was the inauguration of The Mighty Ducks as a team in the NHL.  Who names their team after waterfowl?  Oh yeah… DISNEY.  I also missed the disheartening Miracle on Ice, which further seemed to incense the American sense of entitlement even in the game we called ours (which, again is another silly sense of entitlement of its own). That miracle spawned its own Disney-like flag waving movie.  Hockey was Hollywood.  I missed all of that, happily chasing teenage endeavours, not always with success, but that was my drive at the time.  As time went on, I met someone, got married, had two baby boys, bought a house.  I was growing up all of a sudden.

Because I had sons, I started to gravitate to masculine things.  I got into baseball.  This was during the rise of the Toronto Blue Jays, and the season during which they won their first of two World Series in a row.  It was fun to watch, and I found I could sit with one leg crossed over my knee, and cradle my wee babe in that crevice, watch the whole game in peace, and still be a doting new father.  One of my eldest son’s first pictures was of him in a little baseball uniform, cap and all, with a baby-sized bat at his shoulder and a team autographed ball in a little glove at his side. When they won, it seemed like something awoke in me.  Having a son at this time seemed to bring me back to something.

It was the 90’s.  Things were changing.  Communism had failed in Europe.  The Berlin Wall came down.  Dictators were dropping like flies.There were things happening with the Maple Leafs as well. First off, Harold Ballard died.  He held on to the Leafs until the bitter end.  His passing was something akin to the slaying of Ceausescu in Romania around the same time.  The dictator died and all of a sudden the sun came out and democracy reigned.  Steve Stavro took over as chairman of the organization and started to spend money on hockey operations.  He hired Cliff Fletcher as general manager from the Calgary Flames in 1991, then Pat Burns as coach at the beginning of the 92-93 season, then by January, had Fletcher orchestrate the biggest trade in NHL history, for forward Doug Gilmour aka The Killer and 10 other players.  Suddenly the new blood started to circulate.  The effect was almost immediate.  The team started to win and chug their way up the standings, which hadn’t happened in decades.  With Wendel Clark, Dave Andreychuk  and a host of other strong, mature players, the Leafs began to look, and more importantly, play like a real team, not just a cash cow.  I tried to ignore it, but my brother, with a renewed love for the team of his own, started telling me I should start paying attention.  He would come over and insist on watching the game.  So as father, son, brother and uncle, we all sat on the couch and started to watch.  It wasn’t the same as I remembered.  I didn’t get the same muzzy sense of nostalgia as I always used to.  This was new.  First off, the game I was watching was in colour.  And you could see the puck on the ice clearly.  The uniforms were different.  Their heads were masked in those mandatory helmets, though you could see the numbers to identify them.  I came to search for 93, 17 and 14.  The names ringing out with clarity were not the ones that I remember, but they held a hagiographical assurance of their own, like things were in good hands. When, in 1993 Doug Gilmour broke the club record for most points in one season, just on the cusp of their playoff run, he received the bronze stick from the former record holder, my man Darryl Sittler.  Dougie then took the mike for his speech, and said fatefully to the crowd in attendance:

“For you guys, the fans, we’re going to do something for you guys yet.”

Those words meant so much.  After years of letdown and frustration, finally someone was telling us that they were going to do something.  There was a commitment, there was an affirmation of loyalty.  I sat there in awe.  Doug Gilmour became my new favourite.  I was back with the Leafs and I jumped in hard.  Bought Maple Leafs merchandise.  Followed the standings in the paper. I studied the other teams and discovered the new pool of talent that was out there. I discovered Lemieux, Jagr, Messier and yes, even Gretzky.  Who could deny The Great One?  These, with my Leafs became the new saints.  You could feel the energy.  My newly-bought jersey drew conversations with strangers.  The Leafs were poised to enter the playoffs, but the road through was not going to be an easy one.  They would first meet the powerhouse Detroit Red Wings, taking them through a gruelling 7 game war.  What came next was St. Louis was the league topping St. Louis Blues, who had troubled the Leafs at every meeting through the regular season.  This, again was another 7 game Ironman marathon, though the last game ended definitively with a crushing 6-0 victory for the Leafs.  Indeed, they were coming through on their promise.  Then came the Los Angeles Kings.  Not a particularly deep team, but they did have Wayne Gretzky, and his linemate Luc Robitaille, with enforcer Marty McSorley.

The series bounced back and forth and had some spectacular memorable moments.  Gilmour, chippy as ever, was a thorn in in the side of the LA defense.  At one point, when Kings defenseman Marty McSorley purposely collided with a dirty check on Gilmour, coming very close to putting the Killer out of commission and severely handicapping the Leaf’s chances at success, Wendel Clark, team captain, swooped into action by going head to head, fist to fist with the Kings’ enforcer, leaving McSorley’s face a bloody, swollen pulp.  The Toronto Sun plastered his image on their front page the next morning, with the caption: “McSorry”.  Wendel, on the other side of the coin, endeared himself to me to no end because of this.  The Leafs battled through each game, and it looked like another long haul in a long stretch of long hauls. But the night before Game 6, the Montreal Canadiens beat the New York Islanders to make it to the Stanley Cup finals.  If the Leafs could finish the Kings off in Game 6, they would go on to play the Canadiens for the Cup.  It would be the stuff of dreams; the ultimate capper for the most amazing season the Leafs had had in decades. Trailing 4-3 in the third period of Game 6, Wendel Clark scored the equalizer with 90 seconds left in regulation time, the third in a hat trick that he had earned through the game.  The Kings faced an overtime elimination as the Leafs seemed to be mounting in power, but a badly timed penalty from Glenn Anderson added to the drama, but nothing could have prepared anyone for what would happen next.  Just as Anderson’s penalty was winding down, Gretzky, in a flagrant display of high sticking, cut Doug Gilmour just above the eye during a rush.  It was a sure penalty in favour of the Leafs, and an open door to the Stanley Cup Finals.  Gretzky would be in the box and all the Leafs would have to do is score in overtime.  There was just one problem.  The referee.  Kerry Frasier was notorious for slowing the game down with ridiculous calls, and he was making the most ridiculous call of his entire career.  He refused to call the highsticking penalty on Gretzky.  Even a call upstairs for a video review didn’t change his mind.  Gretzky remained on the ice and later scored the season ender for the Leafs.

I found myself on the living room floor, slumped off the couch, staring in frozen disbelief.  I tried to wrap my head around what had just happened.  It was over.  The dream was just that- a dream.  The reality was, it was not going to happen.  I turned to my wife, who looked like she had just proven a point with me.  I shook my head, let my shoulders drop.
“Why do I even bother?”  I said.

Things never got better for the Leafs afterwards.  They continued in the ways that had turned me off before that fateful season, traded away players, gave a lacklustre effort on the ice, went back to preserving the financial bottom line.  They traded Wendel for Mats Sundin, the Swedish wunderkind.  They made the Swede captain. Then the league collapsed into a players strike, where the real drive of the industry came to the fore; the acquisition of money.

At that point, once again, I didn’t care anymore, and have not cared since.  Truly, since the 95 season, I haven’t watched a full game once.  It really holds nothing for me anymore.  Partly because there’s no reward for being loyal to a professional team.  They will lose and disappoint you on occasion, or in the case of the Leafs, more often than not.  Management will trade away your favourite players without a care.  That same management will charge you exorbitant amounts to watch the game in their arenas, which are no longer named after historical figures or place-specific sources, but after themselves; the corporations, boldly displaying where their loyalties truly lie yet again.  The NHL is a money making scheme that was erected by millionaires and corporations to exploit a public fascination.  So cheer on your team, but who is the real winner always?  The corporations.  So there’s that.

The other reason I don’t watch anymore boils down to the fact that I’ve been trying to express since the first paragraph here.  Hockey, and sports in general, is just entertainment to me.  I don’t watch it to win in betting pools, or to be able to keep up with the same obsessions my age group and gender seem to rally around.  I would just watch it to pass the time for entertainment and diversion.  That said, if it’s not entertaining, it fails to prove its worth to me. I’m back where I was in the 80’s, where the product of hockey is inferior and insipid to me.  It doesn’t resonate with me in any way.  The 92-93 Leafs did that for a fleeting time, as any longtime Leaf fan will tell you.  To me, that era, along with the pre-expansion days of the Original Six, is what would hold my interest.  Now I can only look back on it with nostalgia.    Maybe, if the Leafs might produce an honest winning team and the same fervour and respect for the past would return, I might jump on the wagon again.  But I’m jaded at this point.  Since then, there has been yet another player strike and Maple Leaf Gardens has been abandoned for another sports complex named after a corporation.  I don’t recognize and can’t recall a single player on any team in the league.  I’ve been that out of it that long.  It would take a lot to bring me back.  It would take the equivalent of the best that’s ever come before, negating the worst of the same.  I can’t say I’m waiting.