HUMOR: Hockey, Eh?
Will a new bridge between Canada and the U.S. cause China to dissolve the Canadian NHL hockey teams, as the president suggests? Drew investigates.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
The best hockey player I met in my young life was Scott Allen. He lived down the street.
Scott took the necessary step of buying ice hockey skates as a teenager and proceeded to devote himself every winter to the craft by going to Carsonia Lake and practicing whenever the lake would freeze. Most of us in the neighborhood didn’t own skates and only had Mylec street hockey sticks at our disposal, but as Scott wore out pairs of skates, he would sell them to the rest of us who, ultimately, learned to skate and bought ice hockey sticks so we could play a very modest game of hockey whenever the ice was thick enough to support six-to-eight of us in a small area.
One day Scott showed up at the lake and told us that from this point forward we were to call him “The Myth.” He figured if he was going to play in the NHL, it would help if he had a nickname. We told him that it was a perfect nickname because any chance of him playing in the NHL was a “myth,” so he proceeded to pull our jerseys over our heads and knock us down to the ice.
This action did not require actual punching or fighting because we were such bad skaters that any exerted force would knock us off balance and send us sprawling to the ice. We all learned how to fall forward on the day that The Myth was born.
Unfortunately, Scott never made it to the NHL, but it was not for lack of trying, self-discipline, or self-imposed nickname. Scott was an exacting master, and whenever he would miss a slapshot he generally shattered his stick on the ice. If he felt he had done something stupid, he would take off his glove and punch himself in the face. (He actually concussed himself once.) And his self-flagellation was not limited to hockey. He also bowled in a Saturday morning league and would often punch his bowling ball if it failed to knock down all the pins as he intended. The bowling ball proved stouter than his chin.
I thought of The Myth recently when President Trump released a torrent of social media hate toward Canada about the opening of a new bridge between the two countries. The construction of the Gordie Howe International Bridge is nearly complete and will provide an easy route between Canada and Detroit except Trump is apparently refusing to let the bridge open because it will benefit … China.
Gordie Howe was a Canadian hockey player who many consider to be the greatest of all time. He played 24 seasons for the Detroit Red Wings, so naming a bridge from Canada to Detroit after him makes more sense than naming it after other Canadian-born professional athletes who spent 24 seasons in Detroit for the simple reason that there aren’t any. I don’t believe Trump’s issue with the bridge has anything to do with Gordie Howe (unless he wants the bridge named after himself), and his social media rant did not mention Howe by name but rather warned Canada that their new budding friendship with China would inevitably result in China dissolving the seven Canadian NHL teams.
I believe that the global perception of Canadians is generally that they are a warm and welcoming people who love beer and hockey. I base much of this impression on the 1983 movie Strange Brew which I concede might not be accurate even if it did star Max van Sydow as a convincing Brewmeister Smith.
I lost track of The Myth after I went off to college since he never showed up on the ESPN scroll on the TV in my dorm’s lobby. Scott also did not have ties to Canada or Canadian hockey teams, so he would not have been helpful in providing an informed opinion on the possibility of China taking over Canadian professional hockey.
Fortunately, Jon Nichols grew up in Buffalo which is about 20 miles from the Canadian border and is the only friend I could think of who grew up within close proximity to our neighbor from the Great White North and also played hockey.
“Like most kids in my hometown, I started playing hockey at age 5,” he said by email. “When I got into more serious competitive levels of play in my pre-teen and teen years, it meant going over the border to play Canadian teams, mostly from the Toronto area.”
“Playing against corn-fed, Canadian boys who came out of the womb with skates on builds a lot of character. You learn a lot about yourself losing 15-1 and 12-3 to twelve-year-old boys with full beards and pent-up frustration about having to be such nice people off the ice all the time. The thing that you learn most is that this might not be an American sport.”
“If you ever want your kid to know at a young age that going pro is not in their future, send them up against any team from Mississauga or London, Ontario. Perhaps it will convince your child that medical school or becoming an astronaut is a much more realistic, attainable plan than playing in the NHL.”
This sage wisdom apparently was not heeded by Jon’s son, a recent graduate of Colonial Forge High School, who is not currently in med school or interning with NASA as he attempts to live out the distinctly non-American ice hockey dream his father tried to warn him about.
Nichols is also not worried about the mounting political tension between the United States and Canada as it relates to the NHL and the sport he still loves.
“As global politics seep into Canada’s pastime, this issue is of particular importance to me,” he said. “I support strong tariffs against Canadian hockey. We need to make it harder for them to get skates and sticks and perhaps even pucks. The playing field, or ice as it were, needs to be leveled. It is time that talented and very large Canadians boys stop taking hockey opportunities away from us average-at-best Americans boys.”
“Will a trade agreement between Canada and China affect the quality of Canadian hockey, just as the President promises? Gosh, I hope so. They’ve had an unfair advantage since the game was invented, and I for one am tired of people pushed around by the likes of people named McDavid, MacKinnon, Makar, and whatever elite players with M last names they throw over the boards to skate circles around us.”
There was one elite M player that Jon Nichols and history failed to recognize. Like most people who did not grow up in Pennside, Pennsylvania, Jon never heard of the name we used to only mention in hushed tones. Just like the butterfly that flaps its wings in the Marshall Islands and starts a tsunami in Japan weeks later, if Donald Trump had been president in the 1980s and had imposed harsh tariffs on Canada there might have been more NHL opportunities for Central Pennsylvania-based hockey players. The world might have known the legend that was The Myth, and Scott Allen would not have been a paperboy into his mid-20s.
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