Colourful Metaphors

Basher and Ru ready for a win ... and still waiting

“Hey, Ter, you know how I said I was a little sad that we didn’t go to the game after all?”

“Yes …?”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

It’s a statement when the tribute before the game is better than the game itself. Not that it was a bad game; it was just a losing effort. The Flyers got on the board first, the Canucks answered, and then it was over—in seventeen seconds, to be exact, after Alex Burrows broke loose and scored twice in the third period. An empty-netter finished them off, so the final score was 4-1 in Vancouver’s favour. Now we’re 23^rd in the league, eleventh in our conference and fifth in our division. 73 points over 72 games with 10 left in the season.

$#*^%*

After Burrows’ second goal – the knife to my heart – the colour commentator remarked that the Flyers’ playoff hopes were getting slimmer. I snorted and snapped, “What playoff hopes? Did we have playoff hopes?”

Ter patiently replied, “He’s being nice.”

 

Augh. What have we come to, when the opposing broadcast crew shows us mercy?

All right, so I’m a bad loser.

The night was special because the Canucks honoured the late great Pat Quinn, who had also coached the Flyers to their 35 game win streak in 1979/80 (losing game 7 of the Cup final to the heinous misbegotten Islanders), but was mostly responsible, so they say, for making something respectable of the Vancouver franchise. St. Trevor of Linden brought in the very best of the Canucks’ alumni, and my hero was among those from other teams where Quinn left his mark. Bob Clarke was captain of the Flyers when Quinn coached in Philadelphia, and when I heard him announced, I briefly regretted the decision to skip the trip and see the game live. I had to remind myself that he would have been there anyway, just up in the visitors’ royal box, not on the ice and wearing a Flyer jersey.

Ter and I would have been there, but for the mutual decision to spare ourselves the expense of an overnight and two days’ work at a critical time of year. I gave the tickets to a colleague who lives on the mainland, and who took his son as a belated birthday present. They sent me a selfie taken during the first intermission. The birthday boy was beaming in a signed Canucks jersey—clearly a fan of the home team. That made the decision not to go even more worthwhile.

Well, 4 -1 is better than the result of the January matchup, when Vancouver visited the Flyers and won 4-0. Letting the opposition score four unanswered goals was … exactly what happened last night.

 

*&$^%#

Old Time Hockey

I saw the best hockey game I’ve seen in ages, last week. Flyer arch-rivals the Pittsburgh Penguins paid a visit to Philadelphia and all hell broke loose. Period two is normally when I do the dishes or go wash my hair; it’s the middle frame and not a lot happens because the frenzies happen either out of the gate or two minutes before the final buzzer, depending on the score. At the end of the Pens/Flyers first, the score was still tight, but the boys boiled over as soon as the second started.

Whoa-hoa-hoaaaaa-Nellie! Something like sixty-six penalty minutes were issued in the second period alone—this after a five minute major and game misconduct were issued to Zac Rinaldo in the first for charging (and, I confess, injuring) Pittsburgh’s Kris Letang. These two teams really dislike each other, so a feisty match is almost always in the cards when the Battle of Pennsylvania comes to town. Scoring star Jakub Voracek had his second career fight that night, and sat out seventeen minutes while serving consecutive penalties for it. That hurt my pool points, but it was worth it to see the kid lose his mind in the crunch.

Being a Flyer girl since the days of the Broad Street Bullies, I admit I have lamented the cooling of the team’s ferocious play. There was a time when the quietest room in the NHL was the visitors’ locker room at the Spectrum, when opposing players called in sick on game days in Philadelphia. One of the Montreal Canadiens (can’t remember which one, they were all so great) complained that the 1970s Flyers ruined the game, to which Bob Clarke recently replied—and I’m paraphrasing here: “The Canadiens had an all-star lineup; they didn’t have to play rough. We didn’t have that kind of skill, so we played to our strength.” *Shrug* It worked, for two championship years, anyway. After that, though they often made it to the finals, they lost the Stanley Cup and have yet to win their third.

The game has changed, so the players have changed. Skill and speed are paramount, and the rules are so tight now that the officials delay the game while calling a penalty for delay of game (stupid, stupid, stupid). Players have to think ahead of the play, and if they don’t, I end up doing the dishes or washing my hair during the second period.

The best games are played from the gut, like the Pittsburgh/Philly game the other night. High emotion, when the boys care more about winning than getting paid, gets the bench involved, engages the crowd, and results in a win-win no matter which team scores more goals.

That the Flyers happened to win this one in overtime was extra candy for me.

Hockey Woes of a Hockey Ho

#16, Captain Bobby Clarke
circa Ru's Hormonal Ignition

When I was growing up, Hockey Night in Canada was nothing more than the program that ran after The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. At that point, my parents were affluent enough to have acquired a second TV, a portable black and white, to solve the burgeoning viewing issues between the men and the women in the house. My father and two brothers would disappear upstairs at 8:00 on Saturday night. I’d stay in the living room with my mother, two sisters and the “big” TV. I don’t remember what we watched, but at infrequent intervals, the war cry of the male sports fan would shake the walls from upstairs: “He SCOOOORES!!”

Flash forward to February 1974. The family had relocated to BC, save the firstborn son who stayed in Ontario to pursue his own path. My second brother (“the Handsome One”) was about to be married and my father was about to lose his hockey-watching buddy. Mum took my sisters and me aside to suggest that Dad might appreciate it if his daughters developed some interest in the Great Canadian Game. It didn’t have to be an obsessive interest, but enough that one of us could sit with him for a while and know something of what was happening on screen.

In typical Ru fashion, I took it to heart.

One day I wandered into the living room where Dad was watching his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs. I plunked myself onto the sofa and asked who they were playing. It turned out to be the Philadelphia Flyers.

Talk about a destiny point.

I decided—because I always enjoy contradicting my father—to stay the course and root for the opposition to his team. Harmless fun, right? Only I was almost 14 years old and got a glimpse of the Flyers’ captain. Whoa-ho-hoaaa, Nellie! Flowing blond curls and an angel face. He was missing his front teeth and had a potty mouth to boot, but apparently I’m good with that for I fell immediately in love.

From that moment, I was a blood-and-bone Flyer fan.

They won back-to-back Cups during my first two years and haven’t seen one since, though they got pretty darned close a few years ago. Captain Bobby Clarke has graduated from legendary warrior hero to management scum, but I still wear a jersey with his name and number on the back. For years, Dad and I spent every Saturday and Wednesday night in the den downstairs, watching hockey no matter who was playing. We saw the Edmonton Oilers in their gangly, coltish youth (Paul Coffey was a serious threat to Clarkie for a time) and I tried to change my allegiance to a Canadian team so full of energy and promise. I did well, thanks to #7, but when the Flyers came to town, I accidentally cheered when they scored on the Oilers. That was a sign.

I bleed black and orange.

I lost touch for a while. Young adulthood has different priorities, but I was always aware of the Flyers. Dad kept me apprised, with the regulation plethora of sarcastic sidebar comments attributed to embittered Leaf fans, but I didn’t watch a game for almost a decade. I missed the Oilers’ Stanley Cup dynasty and the retiring of Clarke’s number in Philadelphia.

Then one day while flipping channels in 1995, I landed on a TOR/PHI game and called my father to razz him. I don’t recall who won that game, but my passion for the sport was rekindled with a flamethrower, and since then, if there’s a game on, I’ll watch it.

Playoffs are the worst. I get so stressed out that I’m practically fetal by the end of a game, and the deeper my team gets is directly related to how shredded my nerves are. The Philly/Boston series three years ago nearly killed me. The Flyers were down 3-0 in the best of seven and had given up three goals in Game 4. By some miracle (due no doubt to my savaging of the Universe between periods), they clawed their way back to win the game, the series and the eastern conference final, but the effort drained them and they couldn’t beat Chicago for the Cup. &*^%$

Their series against Pittsburgh last year was a literal riot, rife with goals and penalty minutes. It was truly wild fun, and they won that round, but blew it to New Jersey in the conference semi-final. ^$#%*

They haven’t been the same since Mike Richards was traded to LA. And now that captain Chris Pronger looks like he’s done for good, there’s nothing holding them together. This half-baked season was a nightmare that couldn’t have been saved if they’d had another 34 games. They have some truly talented forwards—I consistently lose Claude Giroux to someone else in the office hockey pool, &^$%#—but there’s not much on the blue line and whatever the heck Bryzgalov thinks is in his job description, it isn’t stopping the puck. Sigh.

The regular season isn’t over until Tuesday, but the Flyers were officially finished last week. So were the Oilers, so the 2013/14 Stanley Cup playoffs will be easier on my nerves (sort of), and on Ter’s. She spends a lot of time talking me off the ledge at this time of year despite being a passionate fan herself. Edmonton born, she’s all about the Oilers and sick at their 7 year non-playoff drought, but no one beats me for drama. I’ve got a hate-on for most of the eastern conference teams and don’t care for many in the west, either; not the ones who got to the playoffs this year, anyway. National pride carries some weight: when my first choice goes out, I will cheer a Canadian team to the final … I sure wish Winnipeg had made it.

Sigh.

We’ll see what my heart does in the first round. I really hate to do this, but in the long run, I may have to become a temporary V-V-V … Nope, can’t do it. Can’t become enough of a Canuck fan to hope they win the Cup. I really like Ryan Kesler, though. I’d be okay if he won it – and the way the rest of the team has played, if they do repeat the final with a better outcome, it will be by riding on his back.

He was once owned by Philadelphia. What the heck were they thinking?

Sigh.