One Grumpy Old Man's Opinion

October 1 was the opening night, or Opening Night, depending on your level of passion as a hockey fan. I was pumped as only a die-hard Habs fan can be (how can you not have Jean Beliveau as your all-time idol ?) but I would have liked to have seen the Chicago Black Hawks opening ceremonies as they hoisted their Stanley Cup banner.
As mentioned previously in this space, Black Hawk Bryan Bickell lived with our family for three years when he played for the Ottawa 67s. We were delighted to attend his wedding this past August at Fourth Avenue Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church where he finally tied the knot with Amanda Caskanette, his long-time and only -ever girlfriend. Which is saying a lot for a hockey player, if you can believe the stories. Bryan recounted a tale during his groom’s speech at the National Convention Centre which we thoroughly enjoyed, especially after taking advantage of the open bar for a couple of hours.
Bryan had never been Brian (Killer) Kilrea’s favourite player, to say the least. Personally, I always enjoyed the kindly old coach’s irreverent humour, brutal honesty and scathing critiques, but then I never had the privilege of sitting in the dressing room and being the target and the reason for the merriment. So Bryan, because of Killer’s (perceived) view of his lackadaisical play, and too much time spent with Amanda and not enough miles logged on the exercise bicycle, was always skating on thin ice in and around the coach’s doghouse.
One night Bryan snuck Amanda back into his bedroom on our second floor. This was easy enough as it was a weeknight, a school night, and so there were no Glebe parties to attend, providing for an earlier -than-usual bedtime. The plan had been for the two to exit before anyone was up, leaving no trace of their crime and no reason to undergo another coach’s rant about commitment and morals. To their dismay their plan was scuttled when they heard the sounds of Sports Centre coming from the livingroom at the bottom of the stairs. Our sons Liam and Adam had not yet developed their bad habits of sleeping -in until gently awakened with a cup of cold water dumped on their heads.
Bryan made his way slowly down the stairs, Amanda buried deep at the bottom of a spare hockey bag that Bryan had just managed to find in a dresser drawer and slung over his shoulder. Liam looked up from the t.v. replays, surprised to see Bryan up at this early hour.
“What are you doing with your hockey bag ?” he inquired. “You never bring it home.”
Bryan swung the bag to a more comfortable position on his shoulder, banging Amanda’s head on the the stair railing. “Take it easy, she whispered.
“Well, uh, I brought home some extra equipment your dad might like to try,” he explained. The bag swung in the opposite direction, smashing Amanda into the wall. “Shit, that hurts,” Bryan heard this time; Amanda hissing into his ear as only a future bride can do.
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that; Dad has his own equipment,” our other son Adam said between slurping his Cheerios. Bryan was too tired to answer by this time. He’d made it to the front door, his secret still safe, and the only price he had to pay was another week on the injured list because he aggravated an already-separated shoulder.
Good preparation for the six game war he carried on with Zedeno Chara in last spring’s Stanley Cup final. The Perras family takes full credit for Bryan emerging victorious with the Cup.

Even from the warmth of my kitchen table, looking out the window on another day of blowing snow and a driveway that needs to be shovelled (again) I am reminded that it is still January. Five years ago this month my older brother Michael died.
He was a diabetic and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. And it is ironic that I was at a hockey game watching my oldest son playing in the Gatineau Midget Tournament when I received the bad news. “Still partaking in jock-like activities, are we?” he would have said. Seriously, he really talked like that.
In fact, he was the only one in the family who wasn’t a jock, and he prided himself on it. The rest of us would imitate how he would throw a baseball, and then fall on the ground laughing. It was great fun. In rebuttal he liked to recite his view of jock-talk: slow, mono-syllabic and full of profanity. Then he would laugh and I would punch him in the mouth.
He was the first of three family members to die in the space of slightly more than a year, and I am still probably suffering the after-effects. “I think you need counselling AND medication,” my wife will often tell me after one of my moody comments.
Michael’s eulogy was my test-case in the writing of such things. I finished it in the car on the way to his funeral and then read it out loud to my wife and kids, pleased as punch with my version of what I saw as the often-misguided life of a teasing older brother. Their assessment of my eloquence was both instantaneous and outraged. “You can’t write that,” they sputtered in indignation. “You only write about the good things.”
“Yeah, but…”, I sat back in my seat and pondered the thought. Eulogies had often seemed false to me. Every version that I had read had painted a picture of a latter-day saint, close to Leonardo da Vinci in their accomplishments and to Mother Teresa in their good works. And then I looked out at our real world. Oh, that’s why it’s in the shape it’s in. All the unselfish, over-achieving souls have died off, leaving only grasping, greedy morons to screw everything up. The truth is that my brother was an authentic original, a true character who left an impression on everyone he met.
He was the smartest of us four kids, a trait of which he never tired of reminding us. He was sociable and eccentric. In the early days of suburban Montreal, when the original residents of the village of Beaurepaire would have to wander down to the post office to pick up their mail, my then three year old brother would often make the trek with my father and engage the locals in conversation.
“I see you’re smoking your pipe tonight,” he would greet an older gentleman who would be smoking his pipe every night. “Do you know that might cause tongue cancer?”
No. Really. From the time he was old enough to absorb and then read he became a walking encyclopedia, especially about things medical. And he loved to flaunt his knowledge. He used to drive my down-to-earth and sensible mother bananas. “You better never take up drinking, Michael, because you talk enough already,” she would proclaim in exasperation at his latest episode of unsolicitated advice, as he called it.
Even as young children we display character traits that die hard. Michael starting self-medicating before that term had even been invented. My father would look for his bottle of Eno to soothe an often-irritable stomach, only to find that his eldest twelve year old son had downed it in one sitting because he liked the bubbly concoction. “You’re a weirdo,” I would tell him. “That’s not normal.”
However, he did become invaluable in treating the scrapes, bumps and bruises that were an inevitable result of an active baby-boom family in the sixties. Michael wanted to become a doctor, but an aversion to old-fashioned study prevented his acceptance to medical school. Once again my practical, hard-working mother stepped in with some sensible advice. Given his love of all things medical, the job of an orderly in a hospital might be a satisfying alternative. “Mom wants me to spend my life pushing around the piss cart,” he raged at what he considered the insult. He settled for an engineering degree from McGill and then a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Toronto. He made a lot of money, moved from Montreal to Toronto to Winnipeg, then to London, England and Paris, France with his wife and later on, three children, but he always seemed misplaced in his line of work. He should have become a doctor and to replace his desired role of writing prescriptions he took up his old habit of self-medication. He moved from twenty cups of coffee a day, to twenty Diet Cokes, to I-don’t-know-how-much vodka. He was also a Type -2 diabetic, the by-product of a lifetime weight problem.
I’m no brain surgeon or medical doctor, but even I know diabetes and alcohol are dangerous playmates. It didn’t surprise me when we got the call from my father, slightly more than a year before his own death.
But even now, as I write this second requiem, I can’t help but smile at his foibles, our battles and an imperfect life lived. We shared a lot of laughs, and even now when I say something humorous, using three big words where one short one will do, someone in my family will say, “Michael said that, didn’t he?”
And his memory always leaves a smile on my face.

Men’s hockey dressing rooms are the last havens left in this country battling the scourge of political correctness. I’m talking Old Timers now, because that’s what I am. I can’t say that I still feel like I’m twenty five years old because that’s a long time ago. And I sure as hell don’t look like I’m twenty five. There’s a constant reminder of that every time I look in the mirror. Ouch.
But hockey brings out frank, refreshing and honest conversation among people and it’s not just among Canadians. Ask Brian Burke. And I can even vouch for what goes on in the shinny confines of a non-traditional hockey country such as France. We were over there in 1995-96 on a teaching exchange and I managed to wangle myself onto a team in the French National League as the only Canadian permitted. I was thirty nine years old, well beyond my salad days. I remember a couple of incidents which reminded me that my chronological counter had surpassed my teammates. We were playing in Nice, which had a beautiful building surrounded by glass walls on the top level, where the rink was situated. It provided a beautiful view of the lights and the skyline of Nice, an interesting diversion, especially if the game was not going too well. Before suiting up for the night’s match a large crowd jammed into the elevator, including some of the opposition players and their girlfriends. One of the fairer sex, glancing about the enclosed space, caught my eye. Immediately she learned over and in a stage whisper she made her observation to her boyfriend. “My God, they’re an old team !” I was even wearing a hat at the time.
And it’s not just the opposition which relishes the non-politically correct pastime of expressing brutally frank opinions. I was at least ten years older than the next oldest player on the team, also a Canadian but one who was the possessor of a French passport. Most of the others were in their early twenties. I’d run out of tape while adjusting my shin pads and innocently asked Fabien, sitting right beside me, if I could borrow a small amount. Fabien was eighteen years old. He looked over and hesitated, perhaps feeling that hockey tape, expensive in France, would be wasted on a thirty nine year old who might drop dead of a heart attack on his next shift. He demurred, dropping the tape quickly into his bag as if concealing the fact that it had ever existed.
The shifty manoeuvre was not lost on Christophe, a twenty six year old defenseman sitting across the room. “Pauvre Perras,” he sympathized. Frenchmen always address each other using the last name. “These young guys today have no respect for their elders. Give the old boy some tape, Fabien. He’s just about an historical monument.”
And today, back in my homeland, feelings in the dressing room have no better chances of being spared. I hardly know the last names of most of the guys on the four different teams on which I play. Don’t know what their job is, how many kids they have or whether they’re married or not. It doesn’t matter. No one is allowed to talk on at any length about their kids’ accomplishments, their own ailments, or even about how they scored their last goal. Such indulgence would only be met with a torrent of verbal abuse. What a glorious refreshing escape from office politics or cocktail party chatter. Even the team names are often self-deprecating. In our Rusty Blades league we happen to have both Roger Smith, the ex-CTV news correspondent and Jim Munson, a member of the much-pilloried Senate. Very good friends from their days of both being television correspondents in London and Beijing, they are known to still stay in very close contact. Soon after one game, sitting in a local watering hole, Roger had mentioned that he was waiting on a phone call from his daughter who would soon be returning to Ottawa after a semester at McGill University. Sitting on the other side of me was Gary, who called himself the Rocket, because he was anything but. Gary didn’t know a thing about Roger’s impending call. When the cellphone went off Gary leaned over and whispered, “It’s probably Munson.” Roger answered his call.
“Hello darling,” he said, speaking loudly enough so that Gary the so-called Rocket could overhear.
A fiendish grin spread across Gary’s weathered face. “It’s Munson”, he chortled loudly, signalling the waitress to bring another beer.