coronavirus

don’t stop beleafing: brian evinou draws a bead on toronto’s team

/ puckstruck

In a purer world, a perfected and unplagued one, wherein the Montreal Canadiens didn’t upset everyone’s expectations and ruin everything, the Toronto Maple Leafs might have gone ahead and done the sensible thing and won the Stanley Cup last year, putting an end to all those decades of frustration.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t to be.

Brian Evinou kept the faith all the same.

A lifelong Leafs fan who’s also a cartoonist, animator, and teacher in Oshawa, Ontario, Evinou was putting his passion to paper before the original Year of Our Pandemic, 2020, came along, creating colourful single-panel comics paying tribute to (and sometimes cracking wise on) the Leafs and their NBA cousins, the Raptors.

He got more systematic in his creativity as Covid-19 continued to torque and reconfigure daily life and hockey seasons, too, into 2021. What began as a game-by-game narrative of Leafian lore and experience posted across Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram evolved, as it gained notice and fans, into something altogether more ambitious.

This past fall, with the help of a quick-moving Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, Evinou self-published his graphic chronicle of Toronto’s second COVID-shortened season in a handsome hardcover edition.

Smart, funny, and sharply observant in all its bright event and detail, Brian BeLeafs: 2021 Season follows John and Joe and Jack, Auston, Mitch, Morgan, and all the rest of the Leafs, as they make their way through the 62-game season that ended last May with a first-round playoff upset at the hands of Montreal.

They’re at it again, of course, the Leafs, so … maybe … this year? Evinou is doing his part, following the team where it leads, firing up his pencils and pens after each and every game.

You can — and should — find Brian Evinou’s work on both Twitter and Instagram (@BrianBeLeafs) and on Patreon (patreon.com/BrianBeLeafs). Books are available through his website at brianbeleafs.com.

Last week, I e-mailed him some questions. Those are here, along with his answers:

I’m wondering about beginnings. First up, you as a Leaf fan: when did that start? Is there a particular player or game that cemented it for you with Toronto? 

The Leafs and hockey have always been a big part of my life. My parents are Scottish immigrants and my Dad is an avid soccer player, sports guy, and collector. When he arrived in Canada, he took to watching hockey right away and got my brothers and me playing and watching, too. My first clear NHL memory is the Calgary Cup win in 1989. I think the flaming C and Lanny McDonald’s mustache were very distinct visual memories. We moved to Oshawa when I was in grade one, which soon coincided with Eric Lindros coming to the Generals. So we were going to lots of Gennies games.

My strongest early Leaf memories are of the Doug Gilmour teams. I had a paper route when I was a kid and one of my clearest memories is making my papers, inserting the advertisements, while watching Game 6 against the L.A. Kings in 1993 with my Dad and brothers. I remember crying when the Leafs lost. Tough stuff, but I was hooked.

Back then, we went to a game once a year and during those playoff runs we even went to a couple more. I remember lining up outside the Sunrise Records box office hours before it opened to get tickets to those games. We still have the ticket stubs, one of the games against the Red Wings, one against the St. Louis Blues. I guess, looking back, it was the Gilmour team that really cemented my fandom, paired with collecting hockey cards ,which was so huge around then. Fell in love. Love that hockey.

What about as an artist? How did you get going on that?

I was always the kid drawing in class. I was really into Ninja Turtles and X-Men and early on decided I would become a comic artist. In Oshawa we had great stores like Worlds Collide, but back then it was known as Unicorn Comics, where I could get anything I was after. I spent a lot of allowances there buying comics and then copying them.

In high school, becoming a comic artist started to seem very out of reach., I didn’t draw like the Image comics guys which was the main thing in comics at the time, so I kind of redirected into animation. I’ve been working in animation since 2005-ish. I’ve worked on lots of cool projects, mainly with Solis Animation. One of the notable things we did was Gord Downie’s Secret Path, which was very cool. We were invited to his performance of that album shortly before he passed in 2017. At Solis, we’ve also done music videos for Jessie Reyez and I recently did a thing there for the wrestler Danhausen.

I got back into comics in a big way when a friend suggested I check out Scott Pilgrim, a great Canadian comic, by Bryan Lee O’Malley. The story was amazing and the art was closer to what I could do. I jumped into indie comics in a major way and soon I was making my own mini-comics. I started self-publishing my own comics around 2008 to about 2015. I did seven mini comics, one graphic novel-length webcomic, co-edited two anthologies and even coloured a Ninja Turtles cover. Today, I’m still working in animation and I teach at Durham College in Oshawa.

You Know Jack? Toronto’s April 10 game, home to Ottawa, saw Auston Matthews score a hattrick as goaltender Jack Campbell set an NHL record by recording his 11th straight win to start a season.

And how did this project start? What was the spark for Leafs comics and, now, the book?

I had my first son in 2015 and all of a sudden it was hard to make long-form comics. At work I’d listen to a lot of sports radio and podcasts and come up with little jokes I wanted to get out there. I am very active on social media, but my tweet-crafting is not as refined as Acting the Fulemin. I wanted to get more involved in my own way.

My first comic was a joke about the Dreger Cafe. Darren Dreger would do these interviews at the World Championships for TSN at these nice cafes. He did one with Mike Babcock where Dreger grilled him about how the Leafs were going to use what would ultimately be the Auston Matthews pick. I had Babs denying that they had made up their mind, all while wearing Zurich Lions gear and an Auston 2016 shirt.

I got a good response from friends on that comic, but being a new dad was pretty all-consuming and I didn’t get around to doing more comics until around the Raps championship run in 2019 and the Mitch Marner contract negotiations.

Once the pandemic hit, my sons were older and I had a bit more time and energy on my hands. I started doing actual game comics during the bubble series [in August of 2020] against Columbus. I continued that into the Raps playoff series against the Celtics that years. Those comics all did really well, which is when I started to think about doing a full season. When the NHL announced the pandemic season would be shorter, 56 games, I was more confident I could pull off a full season. Once I got going, I started to build momentum and just kept going. Next thing I knew we were in the playoffs.

It definitely helps that the team is good. It is easy to do a comic after a win. You feel good and are in a positive headspace. Of the losses, bad ones are sometimes easy to create content for. I think the west coast losses are the toughest to actually come up with a good comic for, since it is so late; I do the comics right after the game ends.

What’s your process for a particular game and the illustration you end up doing for it? Do you often know what it’s going to be before the game ends? How long then to do the work, generally? What about materials?

The process has always been the same: watch the game and react to what I’m seeing. Sometimes, Matthews scores a hatty, or hits 40 goals, it becomes very clear what the comic has to be. Some moments are too important not to be the focus. Other times visuals hit so hard in my head, I go for it even if it is not really the most dominant narrative in the game. The Justin Holl/Andrew W.K. one is an example of that. The visual of Holl with a bloody nose was memorable but not the biggest moment of the game. That comic was a big hit for me — still is. Other games have neither a big individual moment nor a big visual moment. With those, it can be harder to come up with a concept.

Face First: Home to Vancouver on May 1, Toronto’s 5-1 win saw defenceman Justin Holl set up a goal and take a puck to the nose.

On average the comics take about three hours to create. I start around 9:30 p.m. Usually I have a decent concept before I get to the thumbnails, but other times I can’t come up with anything and it takes a little longer. In those cases, I listen to the post-game media and thumbnail dumb ideas until something strikes me as pretty good. With the Arizona one I did a Nightmare on Elm Street homage, but that idea came way later. I actually had a whole different comic drawn out but I wasn’t happy with it. What got me to the eventual comic was the rookie goaltender playing like a monster. I had just watched the ‘Movies that made us’ episode about Nightmare so it was fresh in my mind. That comic was an outlier, process-wise. Usually once the game wraps, they take about three hours and I’m in bed by 1 am.

The materials I use are Col-erase pencils, Pentel Brush pen for the inks, Copic markers for the colours and Microns for the lettering. I use these Strathmore sketchbooks for the comics. I work small for the comics; they are about five inches squared.

Is it still fun? What are some of your favourite illustrations and why?

It is still fun. I still get a lot out of the process of drawing. Figuring out a drawing is like a fun problem-solving exercise. Much more thinking is required. I generally listen to music during that step. The drawing can be occasionally frustrating, lots of erasing, but it is rewarding once complete. The inking and coloring phase I can do almost thoughtlessly. I can have movies playing, or podcasts, or the post-game interviews on at that point and still produce at a good pace.

I love the Leafs. Marrying comics and the Leafs into this fun project feels very natural for me and my interests. I am very happy I stumbled into it. Getting a beautiful book out of the process has been an amazing reward.

I’m a bit of a weirdo in regard to my favourite illustrations … I kind of hate my own work. Hate might be strong, but I see the mistakes. The older ones I like more now because I’m not so close to them. I did one when [William] Nylander started wearing 88. The Toronto media was making a big deal out of it as if it was somehow disrespectful to the Big E. I made a joke about Lindros keeping a list of all the guys wearing 88, but finally cracking because this “soft” Swede would wear his number. Lindros is dressed like Rambo in the comic and proclaims that he is going to reassemble the Legion of Doom line to go after Willie. I thought that one was fun. I’m a Nylanderthal and found the hate Willie got to be very short-sighted, so I’m loving his success this year. I was always there for him. People were very irrational about his warts as a young player, in my mind. And in that comic I got to draw Lindros who, as a kid growing up in Oshawa, I loved unconditionally. So I like that one.

Number of the E: Eric Lindros takes imagined umbrage at William Nylander inheriting number 88.

What has the response been like from fans? Have you had any reactions from the Leafs?

It’s been amazing. Reddit in particular was an early adopter and very supportive. There are running gags in the comments, there are relationships you develop with commenters. It’s been awesome. Twitter has been fun. I know Twitter is a cesspool, but I’m addicted and try to avoid the trolls. Instagram has been great too. Even with the positive response I was still not suspecting the success of the Kickstarter campaign. I was blown away. The book was fully funded in less than two hours. I couldn’t believe it. I’m very thankful to everyone who backed the project. It’s been a great response for sure.

I also get responses from opposing team fans who leave comments, maybe not agreeing with my point of view — that’s a lot of fun, too. One guy compared me to Steve Simmons! I was very flattered to elicit that level of response from a rival fan.

Through the comic, I have had a couple conversations with Leaf players, which has been so cool. I was on a walk with my son when I got my first message from a player and I was over the moon. It is wild to know some of the players are seeing the comics. I occasionally get a like from a player here or there and that always feels awesome. Retired guys, too, which is great. Gilmour, Nik Antropov, Wendel Clark, and Joe Bowen have all publicly liked stuff and, in some cases, shared comics, which is very cool.

Are you planning more books, for this season and maybe beyond?

Absolutely. The plan is to do another Kickstarter campaign as we get towards the end of the season which will, hopefully, fund this season’s book. I put a lot of work into making last season’s edition a good product. I’m very proud of how it turned out, but I had some ideas that came too late to make it into the first book. So there will be some new tricks included for this new book. I’m very much a print fan. The comics are very different online than they are in print. Even pairing the comics with my synopsis and the stats of a given game gives a different experience than just approaching the comic when it goes up online on reddit or Twitter.

It is funny how things go. I never expected any kind of success with the comic, so to stumble into this and to have it revolve around my favourite hockey team makes sense to me as it is a gap I always saw in the comic market. I know as a consumer I have always loved sports comics and I think the world is ready for an awesome long-form hockey comic. I ended up going for a single panel presentation and it has hit a chord but I think there is an opportunity there for someone to do an amazing long-form hockey comic with dynamic action, like what Slam Dunk did for basketball comics.

As for next season, I think I will do it, but who knows what life will bring. I’m definitely committed to this season. I love making the comics and I’m not going to stop watching the games, so I think there is a good chance you might be stuck with me.

The Leafs are looking good this year. What’s your feeling about their prospects? Is this the — dare I say it — year?

I think the Leafs are an awesome team. I think this is the best squad of players they’ve had in my lifetime. But what does that mean? I think they are one of a handful of teams who have a realistic shot at winning the Cup this year. Whoever wins will end up having two things, health and luck. The Leafs had neither last year, and look what happened.

I think the randomness of hockey is undersold quite a bit. Kind of blows my mind how people can watch an amazing rivalry where the difference is one goal in a 4-3 series and then people make sweeping judgments on the loser and winner that are vastly different. Any dumb bounce can change those judgments. I believe the Leafs luck has to turn eventually. But hockey really is so random, so I have no idea. I think the Leafs are right there. Maybe this is the year they get a couple dumb bounces. It has to happen eventually. I hope it’s this year. I like this team a lot.

Brian BeLeafs: 2021 Season
Written and Illustrated by Brian Evinou
(Self-published, 168 pp., C$29 hc)

This interview has been edited.

Captain Courageous: Toronto’s short-lived playoff run began in 2021 with a May 20 loss to Montreal in which captain John Tavares was stretchered off the ice after a collision with Canadiens’ Corey Perry. “On his way off the ice,” Evinou writes, “Tavares lifted a thumbs-up to everyone watching from home. His thumbs-up seemed strong.”

a husky healthy lot: a vaccination mandate for the nhl — in 1920 

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Benny And The Vax: An arm swollen to twice its regular size didn’t keep Ottawa goaltender Clint Benedict from the ice in 1920.

Winter was on the way, but cases were on the rise, too, and as concerns over the spread of disease mounted, players in the National Hockey League did what they had to do and took a needle to make sure that the hockey season could proceed.

If the scenario sounds as familiar and up-to-the-moment as today’s (online) edition of your daily newspaper, the case at hand comes to us as 100-year-old history. Twenty months into our 21st-century pandemic, in a week in which the NHL’s modern-day Ottawa Senators have seen their schedule suspended under a weight of Covid-19 protocols, we’re casting back here to the fall of 1919 here.

Back then, in the wake of a world war, another devastating pandemic still wasn’t finished its dreadful work, but this isn’t a Spanish flu story. Seven months after that virulent virus shut down the Stanley Cup finals in Seattle, sickening most of the Montreal Canadiens’ line-up and killing defenceman Joe Hall, it was smallpox that was on the loose across Ontario.

 News of a “mild” epidemic in Toronto made news in Ottawa at the beginning of November. “Fifteen cases are in the smallpox hospital,” the Journal advised, “but no deaths have been reported. All teaching institutions, included colleges, are ordered vaccinated. The City Council is to be asked to issue a proclamation ordering everybody to be vaccinated.”

By mid-month, the case count in the provincial capital was at 361, with 1,000 people in the city under quarantine. (Across the rest of Ontario, 541 cases were reported.) But Dr. Charles Hastings, the city’s medical officer of health, estimated that the actual number of infected Torontonians to be between 2,000 and 3,000. The smallpox vaccine was the first to have been developed against a contagious disease, going back to the end of the 18th century, and in Toronto that fall, the effort to vaccinate city’s population was working well, Dr. Hastings felt: in a city of some 520,000, as many as 100,000 had been inoculated by mid-November, “including a large proportion of schoolchildren.” Still, urgency was required: he sought compulsory vaccinations for all Torontonians.

Plus ça change: Anti-(smallpox)-vaxxers demonstrate in front of Toronto’s City Hall in 1920. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 2517)

The fact that Mayor Tommy Church and a majority of city councillors didn’t agree meant this was anything but a straightforward matter. Mayor Church declared his belief in vaccines; he just didn’t think the people of his city should be compelled to get them. Ontario’s Board of Health sent a letter requesting that the city issue a mandate; Council declined to issue one. Dr. John McCullough was the province’s top doctor: he reminded the Mayor and his stubborn councillors that any of them (as the Globe noted) “to whom responsibility for failure to issue this proclamation may attach will be liable to a penalty under the Vaccination Act.” There was talk of fines, of indictments under a grand jury, of jail sentences.

As Christmas approached — and cases increased — the struggle between the politicians and the doctors intensified. While the politicians refused to give ground, the local Board of Health saw to it that unvaccinated children were barred from city schools: on December 4, more than 1,000 were sent home. But it was politicians who manned the Toronto Board and by early January dissenting councillors had the upper hand, such that the city’s BOH not only refused to cooperate with the Ontario Board in its effort to enforce general vaccination, but suspended its earlier exclusion of unvaccinated schoolchildren.

The Ontario Board kept up its pressure on Toronto’s council, warning of lawsuits that would surely follow as a result of the city’s neglect and noting that smallpox outbreaks in the rest of the province were all traceable to Toronto. By early January, the Globe was reporting the epidemic’s first two Toronto deaths, a baby girl of 17 months and a man of 66.

Ontario’s neighbours were watching, and worrying. In November, the United States Public Health Service announced that all travellers crossing from the province into Michigan at Detroit would need to show proof of vaccination to enter; similar rules applied at Buffalo and other New York ports of entry. On December 20, Manitoba imposed a similar restriction. By January, Quebec was ready to follow suit, imposing “one of the most severe and sweeping health protection measures in years,” and extending an order already in place in Montreal requiring all visitors from Ontario be vaccinated was extended to include the entire province. “Quebec,” declared Dr. Hector Palardy, district health officer for Montreal, “has no smallpox whatever, and does not want any.”

It’s here that we circle back to the ice. Papers across the country carried the news as the old year shifted into a new one:

Needle News: Word of NHL vaccinations went on the wires across Canada in early 1920.

By then, the NHL’s third season had been underway for a week. It was a four-team loop that year, with Quebec having joined in with Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. The Senators would end up winning the league championship and the Stanley Cup by the time it was all over. With a line-up that included Clint Benedict, Eddie Gerard, Punch Broadbent, and Frank Nighbor, they were already working with a formula that would bring home two more Cups over the course of the next three seasons.

“None of the boys reported sore arms,” the Ottawa Citizen reported in the wake of Dr. Graham’s needling, “but they are liable to develop in a day or two and may handicap the club considerably in the championship race.”

Still: “As a husky healthy lot, Dr. Graham does not believe that any of the men will be disabled.”

Frank Nighbor wasn’t so sure. Along with teammates Broadbent, Jack MacKell, and Morley Bruce, he’d been previously vaccinated against smallpox while on military service during the war. Lacking certificates to prove it, all four had submitted to repeats from Dr. Graham. Nighbor hadn’t forgotten the first time: “he says he was a very sick boy when the Flying Corps surgeon jabbed him at Toronto.”

Frank Nighbor

Several of Nighbor’s teammates did suffer in the days that followed. On January 3, before they hit the road for Quebec, the Senators traveled to Toronto to take on the St. Patricks. It was a rough game, with the home team prevailing, 4-3. Ottawa defenceman Sprague Cleghorn did score his team’s second goal, but the Citizen asked for some sympathy on his behalf: “Cleghorn went into the game so sick that he could hardly stand.” A week after Dr. Graham’s visit to the dressing room, he was still suffering. “His left arm was swollen,” the Citizen explained, “and he complained of pains and dizziness in his head. Yet Cleghorn insisted on playing.”

Ahead of Ottawa’s next game, at home to Montreal, the Citizen later revealed, a couple of Senators were ailing: while Punch Broadbent had a case of pleurisy, goaltender Clint Benedict’s “vaccinated arm was swollen was swollen twice its normal size.” Both insisted on playing in what turned out as a 4-3 Senators win; Broadbent scored a hattrick and added an assist.

It’s not clear whether or not Ottawa’s players were still feeling any side effects by the time they finally got to Quebec in mid-January. We do know that the road trip east yielded a split: after beating Quebec 2-1, they lost to Montreal by a score of 3-2.

NHL notes from January of 1920.

When Toronto’s players got their vaccinations in early January, the news was that “several of the players were laid up with sore arms.” As for players from Montreal and Quebec — I’ve seen no mention in contemporary accounts of them getting their needles, though I assume that if they were travelling to Toronto and back home again, Quebec’s mandate must have caused them to be vaccinated, too.

Ontario’s Board of Health gave up its fight for a city-wide Toronto mandate in early January of 1920 after the Supreme Court of Ontario ruled that the board didn’t have the power to tell the city what to do. “The Provincial Board of Health has done its utmost to protect Ontario and others from the peril of smallpox,” Dr. McCullough said. “Owing to the opposition of the Toronto City Council, we have not been completely successful.”

Case numbers did begin to drop, even if Dr. McCullough didn’t soften his tone as the weeks went on. Addressing Windsor’s Chamber of Commerce at the end of January, 1920, he charged that “the city of Toronto has been guilty of spreading smallpox all over the province of Ontario and would have spread it all over the continent had not the Americans taken steps to prevent it.”

He was referring, of course, to U.S. border restrictions, but let’s not diminish Quebec’s efforts. After that province lifted its restrictions on Ontario travellers in early March, health officials went to the trouble of releasing a bevy of impressive analytics. In the two months of monitoring railway traffic from Ontario, Quebec inspectors had boarded 1,501 trains carrying 89,275 passengers. Of these, 69,933 were found to have vaccination certificates (“which were examined and stamped,” the Montreal Gazette divulged) while a further 12,549 rolled up sleeves to show vaccination marks (“which were verified”). Another 6,639 passengers who had neither certificates nor vaccination marks submitted to vaccinations on the spot.

And those who refused a frontier shot? There were 154 of them. “The inspectors were adamant,” the Gazette noted; “that number was turned back and prevented from crossing into this province.”

Playing Hurt: Punch Broadbent scored a January hattrick for his Ottawa Senators in 1920, pleurisy notwithstanding.

 

 

ice age

/ puckstruck

After two Covid-skewed seasons, the NHL gets back to something like regular programming tonight with the launch of a new winter campaign. It’s 104 years since the NHL first put to ice, in December of 1917, with four teams, all of them in eastern Canada, of which only three were around at the end of the 22-game regular season. Pandemics notwithstanding, it’s a whole new world now, with the newfound Seattle Kraken bringing the NHL’s membership up to 32 teams. They’ll each play 82 games — probably? maybe? — for a total of 1,312 before the playoffs get going next May. All being well, the league will pause in February for the best of its players to go to Beijing to play for Olympic gold.

Pictured here: an illustration from a Boston Bruins program from 1938-39. This year’s edition of the Brus start up on Saturday, October 16, when they host the Dallas Stars at TDGarden. Not to promise anything, or to jinx it, but in ’39 coach Art Ross ended up steering the Bruins to a Stanley Cup championship.

sometimes strikes twice

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Tampa Mayor Jane Castor got her wish. On Sunday, with the local NHL juggernaut known as the Lightning poised to sweep past the Montreal Canadiens to win a second consecutive Stanley Cup, the mayor hoped for hiccup. “What we would like,” told a news conference, “is for the Lightning to take it a little bit easy to give the Canadiens just the smallest break, allow them to win one at home, and then bring it back to the Amalie Arena for the final and the winning of the Stanley Cup.”And so it went, of course: after bowing to Montreal in overtime on Monday, the Lightning did bring it all back home, prevailing 1-0, in Game 5 on home ice to join the Pittsburgh Penguins of 2016-17 as just the second team in the last 15 years to repeat as champions. 

Pictured above, that’s Mayor Castor the first time around, nine-and-a-half months ago, after the Lightning did their winning in an Edmonton bubble. She was on hand at Tampa International Airport to greet the team as it arrived home in early October of 2020, and to receive the Cup from captain Steven Stamkos (left) for an obligatory hoist. “People say it’s 35 pounds,” an ebullient Mayor Castor told me in an interview a few days later, “I’d say it’s heavier than that.” 

“Born and raised in Tampa, 60 years old,” she said, by way of presenting her hockey bona fides. “I’ve never been on ice skates in my life, and I’m a rabid Tampa Bay Lightning fan.”

(Image courtesy Mayor Jane Castor)

masking up, 1979 edition: what would ted lindsay do?

/ puckstruck

Ted Lindsay was 53 in 1979, with his left-winging NHL heyday firmly behind him: 14 years after he’d last turned out in a competitive game for the Detroit Red Wings, he was on the job as the team’s GM. He did still get in on a regular Monday-night pick-up game at the Detroit Olympia, alongside a motley non-Hall-of-Fame crew of friends, sportswriters, and Zamboni drivers. “Jeez,” said one of those scrimmagers as he watched Lindsay do his middle-aged thing one night in April of ’79. “He must have been unbelievable when he was 24.”

The mask? No, there was no pandemic on the loose in Michigan that spring. The tuque, Lindsay explained to an interested onlooker, was for style, while the mask was to help warm the rink air as it went into his lungs. “It’s the same skiing,” Lindsay said. “The cold air is rough on me.”

back to the garden

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Putting On A Show: For the first time since March 7, 2020, there will be fans on hand in Boston’s TD Garden tonight, some 2,300 of them, as the Bruins take on the New York Islanders. Herewith, some views from the beforetimes, collected on February 12, 2020, when I saw the Bruins beat the visiting Montreal Canadiens by a score of 4-1 on the strength of a David Pastrnak hattrick.

delay of game

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It was just a regular night on the NHL’s late-season calendar, that Wednesday, March 11, a year ago, with five games on the schedule and a yield of regular outcomes: the Ottawa Senators lost, Connor McDavid scored a goal. But that, of course, was all for the league’s 2019-20 regular season as well, um, life as we knew it in North America. Maybe you recall: the next day was when COVID-19 stopped everything, other than the fear, uncertainty, suffering, and death. The year we’ve had since? Well, you know. As Nick Paumgarten, staff writer at The New Yorker, where he sometimes bends his paragraphs to hockey themes, notes in this week’s magazine, “If you were lucky, you were merely bored.” Herewith, a couple of Toronto front pages from a year ago, including (above) the Star’s only-in-Canada end-of-February virus-complimenting  front page.

Wear a mask.

Get vaccinated.

To better, brighter days, and anniversaries, ahead.

what to wear

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Trending Twitterwise this morning (with a little help from his friends), Ken Dryden’s  reminder, here below, to (keep on remembering to make sure you) wear a mask — even if it’s over your other, famous mask.  Above, showing how not to do it, Dryden pauses at practice at the Montreal Forum in the early 1970s.

 

(Top image: Antoine Desilets, Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec)

department of throwing stuff: without your help, we would find it extremely difficult to win

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Pelting Plea: in early 1935, the Stanley Cup champions appealed to their fans to discontinue the deluge.

A month into the NHL’s second COVID-modified season: how’s that going? As of last night, 175 games of 210 scheduled games had been played, 35 postponed. Around the league, 108 players on 26 teams have spent time on the COVID protocol list, not all of whom have tested positive, with 52 players from 10 teams now cloistered, along with a couple of linesmen. Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and St. Louis are the teams that have, so far, avoided listing any players.

Time to be erring on the side of shutting it all down? Not according to the NHL. At least, there’s been no public suggestion of any hiatus in the interest of all-around health and safety. Must the show go on? Maybe not, but it will.

And maybe, soon, with more fans. The Florida Panthers, Arizona Coyotes, and Dallas Stars have already been skating in front of diminished crowds, and now there’s word that both the Columbus Blue Jackets and Tampa Bay Lightning are hoping to be getting the public-health approval that will allow them to welcome a limited number of fans into their respective buildings, maybe in March.

All of which would seem to suggest that the time is right for a detour back through hockey history to a time when fans not only filled the seats of NHL arenas, but fulfilled their right to hurl whatever they might have in hand, or pocket, or on foot, onto the ice.

The throwing of stuff by fans at hockey games is, of course, as much of the history of the sport as the ice and/or referees that stuff has so often targeted. In a book I wrote about the culture of hockey (and vice-versa), I devoted six pages to the instinct fans have to throw stuff at hockey games; the variety of stuff thrown; and the dangers inherent in that stuff being on the ice — I could easily have filled a chapter of 20 pages.

Welcome, then, to a weekend’s series of posts focussing on Chicago’s old Stadium in the 1930s and ’40s.

Chicago is by no means the only NHL city with a history of dangerous debris:  the annals of stuff flung include them all, every franchise, every rink. Black Hawks’ fans were notorious, especially those occupying the high gallery seats at the Madhouse on Madison, for inundating the ice in outrage, protest, joy, or … just because they could. The 1944 Stanley Cup Finals stand out in this regard — more about that here — but there were plenty of instances before that of games delayed by coins and shoes and playing cards raining down from on high, paper airplanes, novels, fruit, empty bottles.

The Blackhawks did their best to curtail the bombarding over the years, deploying ushers and policeman, issuing threats and pleas. The entreaty reproduced here, above, dates to January of 1935, when Chicago was defending the Stanley Cup they’d won in the spring of ’34.

The Associated Press reported on this flyer, which was distributed to fans that winter. “So bold have the customers at the Chicago Stadium been getting that it was decided to appeal to their better natures in an effort to halt the aerial onslaughts.”

Fans had been growing bolder, the AP noted, since earlier in the season when a bottle-tosser, arrested by police, had been released at the request of Stadium authorities.

“Officials of the club were inclined to believe their printed appeal was conducive to better behaviour,” the AP noted, “because there was a noticeable depreciation in the amount of debris scattered on the ice the first night it was tried.”

Cleaner Sweep: Clearing the ice at the Chicago Stadium on Tuesday, March 23, 1965. The New York Rangers beat the home team 3-2 that night, the Blackhawks’ fourth consecutive loss. “The fans’ displeasure reached the high point in the final period,” according to a UPI account, when play had to be halted for 20 minutes while attendants cleared fruit, overshoes, playing cards and waste paper off the ice.”

fred sasakamoose, 1933—2020

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On NHL Ice: Fred Sasakamoose skates for Chicago, circa 1953-54.

Sad news this hour, via Hockey Night in Canada‘s Chris Johnston, that hockey pioneer Fred Sasakamoose has died in hospital in Saskatchewan at the age of 86. His son Neil Sasakamoose shared the news this afternoon on Facebook, here.

sometime other than now

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Brighter Days: Toronto is in the Grey as of today, under the coding of the Ontario government’s COVID-19 response, which is to say locked down again for a stretch of 28 days. In hockey terms, that means you could get yourself skating on an outdoor rink, if you felt the need and could find one, but not get anything resembling a game going, especially not in front of spectators: all that’s forbidden. Once, though, once … in this case, what we’re looking at is a scene of women facing off on the frozen field beside Burwash Hall at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College. The date given is a general one, 1910-20, but since the building of Burwash Hall, a student residence, was completed in 1913, we can narrow that down a bit more. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 477)