Devils al dente: artist Scott Modryzynski’s take on the New Jersey logo, from his magnificent effort to (his word) foodify the NHL. For more, visit Foo-gos.com at http://foo-gos.com/gallery/nhl/.

Comments Off

Posted on June 1, 2012

lumley’s number one

Posted on May 30, 2012 | Comments Off

Harry Lumley, already fluey, chases hard after this fella because there’s no-one else. And when fluey Harry Lumley falls — because, of course, he’s in his goalie gear — we have to laugh.

I make it sound like I was there, which I wasn’t. This is a charity game, in January of 1950, the first-place Detroit Red Wings are taking on a team of International League all-stars to raise money for the lesser league’s fund for injured players, which is kind of ironic, as we all makes sure to say at the time. A comedy game the papers call it. Old Apple Cheeks, as we call Lumley, AC for short, old AC will sometimes take a regular stick and move up out of his net for face-offs down at the far end, which he does in this case we’re talking about here, he’s up when the puck gets by him, and so he has chase because the net is empty. Go AC, we call, ha, ha, watch out  — oh, no, Harry.

Sorry. That’s awful. Let me be clear: I wasn’t there. Nowhere close. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Apple Cheeks is true enough; they did call him that. And the charity game, and the chase. Here’s what Lumley recalled:

Well, the puck got past me and I ended up trying to chase this fella who was about to shoot into the open net. I tripped and fell and sprained my ankle. It was a bad sprain, too!

Actually, he got up and played on. Later in the game he was off again down the ice, trying to score. He was in on the All-Stars’ net, about to shoot when he, fffump, fell down. The trainers helped him to the dressing room. From there he went to Detroit’s Harper Hospital. The x-rays showed no fracture, just the sprain. Continue reading →

Comments Off

Posted in photos

Tagged , , , ,

Comments Off

Posted on May 25, 2012

No-one lives by Toronto’s bylaw banning street hockey because to do so would be wrong, not to mention unCanadian. If we want to grab our Kohos and head out beyond the curb with Sean and Eric and Emily from across the street — they have their own nets — then that of course is what we’ll do.

Not that we have done it, for a while now. Have Sean and Eric and Emily? It’s been a while since we saw them, let alone their nets. Still. We could, and would, if we felt like it, out we’d go without fear of bylaw officers or surly neighbours or weather of snow or dark of night, until our moms called us in for supper. Fear of cars, obviously, we would have: they do come tearing around the corner pretty fast, just the thought of which can panic us enough that we forget to yell “Car!”

But. Anyway. The bylaw. A Toronto city councillor, Josh Matlow, was seeking to free us all and wipe it away just because it’s wrong & etc. Until city staff told him, no, that wouldn’t work because what about the liability? So then the Councillor was pushing a staff plan by which residents could apply for an exemption to the bylaw if their street could meet certain conditions. Other than the ridiculous amount of leg- and paperwork required and widespread public and political derision for the whole plan, it seemed like a pretty good idea.

Today, though, Councillor Matlow admitted defeat, abandoning the whole ban ban. Which means we’re back to where we were, with our Kohos that we might well grab at any moment, as long as Sean, Eric, Emily and their nets are up for it.

Comments Off

Posted on May 24, 2012

Poltical puck: John Collins’ “Hockey Night in Canada” from Montreal’s Gazette, circa 1966. (McCord Museum)

Title by title the fall’s shelf of new hockey books is filling up — with one big gap dead at the centre: we’re still waiting for details of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s long-anticipated volume of hockey history.

I was going to say slim there, a slim volume, because that’s what I imagine, without really knowing one way or the other — it could be as mighty a tome as an omnibus budget. The nothing we know hasn’t stopped any of the chatter about what is, no doubt, the most thoroughly dissected book ever to have delved into the early operations of the pre-National Hockey Association Toronto Professionals.

Publishers were bidding on the book back in February, and one of the prospective houses got what it was after on or about March 1: this we know. Otherwise, what we still haven’t heard includes who won, how much they paid, title, page-count, price, what’s the publication date, lots of editing required or just a little? The silence has been spookily reminiscent of a time long, long ago before Twitter knew everything before anyone bothered to know they were interested.

And it goes on: this week I went to the agent handling the deal for the PM, the venerable Michael Levine, for an update, which was this one: “Sorry — no official word yet.”   Continue reading →

Comments Off

Posted on May 24, 2012

They’re still autopsying the Flyers’ exit from the playoffs in Philadelphia, an operation that will go on all summer. A quick survey of the hockey press tells the story, so far, of why they bowed to the New Jersey Devils. It involves (punctuation mine):

• the Devils’ relentless forecheck!
• the Flyers’ lack of offensive depth!
• the Devils clogged up the middle!
• the historical propensity of Flyers’ goalies to lose it during the playoffs!
• the Flyers big-time scorers couldn’t get free for quality shots!
• the Devils were old!
• coach Peter Laviolette’s adjustments weren’t sufficient!
• not enough Chris Pronger!

The Devils were old? The oldest team in the league, actually, which was (according to The Globe and Mail’s James Mirtle) “one reason why they seemed so organize and unflappable throughout the series.”

Okay, good. That’s a start. But what about:

• not enough hate!

Well, obviously. After the vitriol of their first-round wrestle with the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Flyers just couldn’t summon up the spite to propel them past the Devils.

Which, of course, allowed the Devils to save up their reserves of acrimony for the ongoing semi-final against the New York Rangers. Oh, how they hate one another, these two teams. We know this because — well, for one thing, Devils’ goalie Martin Brodeur says so in the autobiography, Beyond the Crease (2006), Damien Cox helped him write. “I hate the Rangers,” he reported there and Lou [Lamoriello] hates them to death.”

More proof? In March, the last time the teams met during the regular season, three fights broke out in the first three seconds of the game. That would seem to suggest a certain pre-existing animosity.

And yet, in these playoffs, it wasn’t until Monday’s fourth game that the two teams really began to show their teeth. Most of the Hockey Night in Canada crew seemed to agree on that. “These are two teams who don’t like each other,” Glenn Healy felt the need to remind us, midway through. In case we’d missed it (we had), he was only too pleased to catalogue the nastiness, the little spears, the punches to the heads. And that was before the Rangers’ Mike Rupp swatted at Brodeur, prompting coaches Peter DeBoer and John Tortorella to make like they wanted to tear one another’s throats out.

None of which is really news. It doesn’t surprise anyone who keeps up with the game, much less trigger anything resembling regret or censure. Where else do you see the word hate used so casually, without question or qualification? Maybe you thought it was speed or excitement, in the NHL, that’s the product. It’s what the league’s current Director of Hockey Operations was talking about in 2007 in an interview with The Toronto Star’s Randy Starkman. “We sell hate,” Colin Campbell said. “Our game sells hate. You guys, the media, sell hate.”

Comments Off

Posted on May 23, 2012

Just add Hull: Chicago’s Instant Left Winger Kit, circa the 1960s.

Comments Off

Posted on May 12, 2012

Ray Lussier’s famous 1970 photo of Noel Picard’s disapproval.

“It remains the sport’s defining image,” Craig MacInnis says in his book, Remembering Bobby Orr (1999), and more, too:

It is the image of the sporting hero as Superman, as a winged deity taking flight while his earthbound adversaries (goalie Glenn Hall, defenceman Noel Picard) huddle in bleak resignation.

I don’t know if huddle is the word: Hall looks like a gust from a passing freight train blew him over, while Picard looks properly pissed. But yes, true enough, Ray Lussier’s photograph of Orr’s 1970 overtime goal is one of hockey’s most memorable and expressive.

Denis Brodeur’s 1972 study of Soviet disappointment.

But is it, as Roy MacGregor was saying in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, the photo that “says more about the joy of victory and the frustration of defeat than any snapshot the game has known”? No. Because what about Denis Brodeur’s indelible portrait of Paul Henderson moments after his winning goal in 1972? Or, for that matter, Frank Lennon’s? (Both photographers shot Henderson in the moment after he’d scored; Lennon’s photo is the one where Henderson’s eyes are open.)

Henderson’s joy is roughly equal to Orr’s, I’d say, even if he doesn’t get as much air. Where the 1972 images claim their advantage, to me, is in the textures of Soviet disappointment that they depict. With a few exceptions, the people in the crowd behind haven’t realized what’s happened yet, not in the way the players on the ice have. Despair is dawning through the disbelief out there while, in the Brodeur version if not the Lennon, Tretiak glares angrily in Henderson’s direction. It’s hard to imagine a bitterer win or, for that matter, a sweeter loss.

Comments Off

Posted on May 11, 2012

Whee! Sculptor Harry Weber’s Bobby Orr flies bronzely through the Boston air in front of the TD Garden.

Boston Bruins’ fans won’t soon forget the most famous goal to have been scored in the old Garden, but just in case there’s an 800-pound statue out in front of the new TD Garden to remind them how Bobby Orr soared after he’d put the puck in the net on this day in 1970 to beat the St. Louis Blues and win the Bruins their first Stanley Cup since 1941.

“I don’t know what I did,” Orr said after the game. “I saw it go in the net as I was flying in the air. Then I hit the ice and before I could get up the guys were on top of me.”

It was all according to plan, apparently. Captain Johnny Bucyk had tied up the score at threes in the third period, sending the game to overtime. Bruins’ coach Harry Sinden: “After the third period, I told the fellows, ‘Look, let’s not do too much thinking.’”

“The Stanley Cup — whee!” Orr shouted after the game, and I quote.

Next day, The New York Times described how the crepe paper showered down, and

because of the heat the colors ran, tinting the ice orange, yellow and blue. Children dashed past unconcerned special police and mobbed the Bruins.

The Canadian Press offered this:

Bobby Orr, the 22-year-old wonder defenceman who scored the winning goal in overtime, stood grinning under television lights as his father fought through the crowd toward him.

Doug Orr, who came down from his Parry Sound, Ont., home with Mrs. Orr, left his wife outside the dressing room.

“This is the best day of my life,” he said.

Comments Off

Posted on May 10, 2012

the cons of prose

Posted on May 9, 2012 | Comments Off

Jaromir Jagr isn’t the first right winger to be filing copy for newspapers even as he’s playing NHL hockey. Charlie Conacher was a Globe and Mail columnist in the 1930s, and outspoken one at that. In the mid-1950s Boom-Boom Geoffrion had a writing gig at Parlons Sport around the same time that his fellow scribe and teammate Rocket Richard was using his column at Samedi-Dimanche as a platform from which (among other things) to blast away at NHL president Clarence Campbell.

And if you followed the syndicated column that Gordie Howe wrote in the 1960s you’d know that the reason the ice improved in the old Boston Garden around 1964 was because (in Gordie’s opinion) they’d reduced the number of trains through the North Station a level below. “They had little ripples in the ice from the vibrations caused by the trains,” Howe wrote. “The shaking also brought down dust filaments.”

Among left wingers, Montreal’s Aurele Joliat wrote a column for La Patrie in the 1930s, which appeared, sometimes, on the same page as that of a column by his friend and centreman Howie Morenz. Wayne Gretzky wrote for The National Post, of course, in the 1990s — although that was after he’d retired from the ice. I’m not sure that wrote is the right word, either: he helped Roy MacGregor write a column, is maybe what we’ll say. Continue reading →

Comments Off

Posted in warnings

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,