This
is an article written by Don Redmond of the Villager in June of
1993. It is, I suppose the nature of cheering on a team, accepting that they’ve lost when you wanted them to win the most. One week ago, the Maple Leafs had me so high, I could have farted in a bird house. Now it’s just ‘what if?’ What if they had won? What if they beat Montreal for the Stanley Cup? What if Wayne Gretzky had never been invented? What if Doug Gilmour really was God? Not the God but a God. What if he turned Gretzky into a pillar of salt and some hunter took him away as a deer lick? What if Gretzky’s wife, Janet, doesn’t call him the Great One but does call him the ‘I’ve Had Better’ One? What if you really could see through clothes with those X-ray glasses they advertise in the back of comic books? What if I hadn’t spent 10 bucks to get a pair? What if I get to the point? The point is this. A Toronto-Montreal final would have been fantastic. It would have pitted the French against the English and split up the country like no politician could. It would have pitted father against son, brother against sister, uncle against aunt, circus animals against domestic animals, vegetarians against people that eat real food, television evangelists against people who don’t steal money of the easily duped, newspaper publishers against people who bathe, journalists against people who work for a living. It would have been so cool. It would have been better than sex with a foreign exchange student who barely speaks English and has to fly home to Sweden the next day and who copies your phone number off the kitchen phone which you’ve had for five different apartment moves and the number is out of service and you told her your name was Kevin anyways. Okay, I’m guessing maybe that’s a little better than a Montreal-Toronto Stanley Cup Final. Unless you’re the exchange student. Or someone named Kevin. But the hardest thing about the Leaf’s loss in game seven against the Kings wasn’t the loss itself – though that in itself was no wrestling match with Michelle Pfeiffer. No, the hardest thing was the company I was with. There were Leaf fans, to be sure, but I also had to watch it with Montreal fans. Think they enjoyed it? Oh yeah. As it turns out, it was Chris Oddy’s 29th birthday – again. I think this is about his fifth. So he invited a bunch of people over to watch the game. As a huge Montreal fan, he must have sensed a Leaf loss and decided the best birthday present he could give himself was the looks on our faces when they did. Among the throng was Drew Church, another Habs’ fan, who sensed the same thing and came along just to be sadistic. He’s younger than Chris but will likely turn 30 before him anyways. Chris got his birthday present which is a good thing because I didn’t buy him anything. And in about a week, I suspect the Canadiens will give him another one by winning the cup. And the scariest thing is they’ll do it with Gary Leeman and Rob Ramage on their roster – guys that weren’t good enough for the Leafs. I’m not exactly sure, but isn’t Gary Leeman’s name being on the Stanley Cup one of the first signs of the apocalypse – the end of the world? Will Gary Leeman hold the cup over his head and yell at the camera, “I’m going to Disneyland – or at the very least, I’m getting traded to the Anaheim Ducks for a fifth round draft pick, which is kind of like going to Disneyland.” Will Leeman be allowed to even touch the cup? I mean, Mark Messier took it into a strip club after Edmonton had won it one year. Does Leeman deserve to touch a cup that stands not only for hockey supremacy but has been danced around and blessed by naked ladies with five-dollar bills in their G-strings? Actually, that sounds better than a Montreal-Toronto final too. Montreal fans say ‘yes’. Their thinking is that Leeman suffered enough by being a Leaf during the Ballard and Yolanda years so he deserves something better. My thinking is that at least he was drawing Gary Leeman’s pay cheque during the Ballard and Yolanda years and I was drawing Don Redmond’s pay cheque – literally, I forged it – so I suffered a great deal more. Still, the last Leaf Loss provided me with a couple of memories worth preserving. There was Big Craig dancing around with Chris’ Montreal Canadiens towel, wiping his butt with it. Actually, Big Craig dancing is kinda funny, but no-one stuck a five-dollar bill in his G-string so he stopped. And Chris took back his towel, which is kind of like a religious artifact in that apartment. Actually, that’s it for the memories. It gets a little fuzzy after that. I really don’t want to say that I was intoxicated, I was overserved, that’s all. If I’m my own liquor control board, my workers were out on strike that night. At the beginning of the playoffs, I would’ve been happy just to know the Leafs would get past Detroit. But when they got to the semi-finals, it wasn’t enough. They had to go for the Stanley Cup. And they didn’t. I’d like to say that I’m happy with how far they got, how they showed a lot of guts and stuff like that but I’m greedy. I wanted Stanley here. In Toronto strip clubs where he belongs. And now I’ll never get to see myself on CBC-French. They interviewed me, among other patrons, during game six at Shakey’s and asked about the importance of a Montreal-Toronto final. Wisely, they came during the first intermission while most of us were still lucid. Unfortunately, I don’t really remember what I said. I guess it was the usual Toronto vs Montreal tradition mumbo-jumbo that reporters want to hear. But like most of what I say, there was zero relevance happening, I don’t really remember. But I do know one thing. I would have offended a bunch of French people if they translated what I was saying. I didn’t say anything derogatory about them, mind you. Well, unless you consider “the French are so lame, they named the poodle after them” to be derogatory. Hey, I apologize but hockey’s war. Don
Redmond |
