Game 7. A play in one line.
(Interior, because everything is interior, man).
Couch man: I do love me a game 7 (over the gentle hum of a beer fridge).
The End
…
It’s that time on Saturday morning, the boys have stuck their milk crates down in front of the LCBO of Parkdale, Toronto’s languid revolution of the proletariat. It’s convenient for them, setting up outside the provincially controlled liquor outlet, purportedly the biggest buyer of booze anywhere on Earth and by drunken extension, probably the universe (I don’t know what they’re up to on Kepler 22b). I can shop my unhealthy predilections, pay a huge fucking sin tax and feel bad and good enough about the whole transaction to throw some change at these guys perched on their milk crates so they can walk the fifteen meters to the beer fridge at the back where there is still something called Old Milwaukee that sells for like $2 a tall boy and makes you feel absolutely great while sitting on a milk carton outside a Crown corporation operationally predicated upon the exploitation of vice and the moral and physical ruin of a country. And why shouldn’t they sit there? Somewhere at a hockey game, rich people, and others, trapped in an overbuilt arena with a giant four-sided TV hanging from the ceiling will tap their phones on a card reader for a $17 can of -I kid you not- Molson Canadian (useful calculator: 18% tip = $3.06).
We do hockey better than anyone else (there’s a beer ad that says so) and if we get into any trouble hitting that standard, meet my friend and countryman, Bobby Clarke, he has something to say to your ankle with his stick. We play through the pain and for the rich joy of suffering and isn’t that the Buddhist way. We are a Buddhist country after all or maybe we’ll get there (there is no puck).
…
I heard they nailed the ten commandments to the blackboards in some weirder part of the United States of Hysteria, so I guess there’s still money to be secured from tithes, a gesture against retribution, a sin tax with different syntax (wow that’s gratuitous, wonder if it makes it in) to a benevolent institution predicated upon the exploitation of vice. The church and children; what could go wrong? Forgive them Father.
…
Someone told me it was Father’s Day the other day. I already lost both my dad and the excellent stepdad who treated me like family, so the day kinda went by, unnoticed. I could have burned incense in front of a game on TV, I guess.
I witnessed my first professional hockey game when I was seven (this age has no basis in factual record, providence or evidence, but if I put it on the Internet it becomes true, which is powerful like Zdeno Chára distributing concussions on ice, except these concussions come from the misunderstanding our dumb submarines make when their connected eyeballs look at a screen with flashing pretty things).
It was in the Montreal Forum, a church of hockey, on the corner of Atwater and Ste-Catherine, and the Canadiens were playing the Philadelphia Flyers with their toothless, ruthless Canadian homeboy Bobby Clarke and I was sitting next to my dad, who probably got the tickets through work from someone looking for better treatment at their proverbial water plant (say Hey, Calgary). Midway through the first period, Steve Shutt found Jacques Lemaire right where he wanted him, who further obliged by scoring the first goal of the game. The Montreal Forum, until then a restless murmur of middle-aged men in sweaty shirts, exploded. It was like nothing I had seen in my short life. My Dad leapt to his feet and bellowed one of his patented Hey! Hey! in celebration, so I jumped up and did exactly the same thing because this is what you do. I’ve been doing it the rest of my life, with less frequent occasions offered in Gary’s League for Corporate Indifferents.
…
A Game 7 is the second time in a playoff series that all things are equal. The first is Game 1. If the play gets to the seventh act (Shakespeare was a lazy bum on a milk crate) things have gone as far as they can go without breaking the furniture. Scratch that, all the furniture is now broken and now we’re playing for the house with the broken furniture. Game 7 of the actual Finals is tabula rasa. It is the place where nothing has happened, and nothing will happen after. It is a state of grace, inhabited by human bumper cars. It’s pretty excellent.
It’s not about the league, with teams in Florida, where hockey is just another thing to pass time while you don’t teach the history of slavery.
The story is the players, the (very well compensated) workers on the ice, for whom this moment has been a legit dream ever since it turned out they could stand up on skates without really trying while the rest of us crashed on our asses and thought about the television inside. There is in this series a guy who walks on ice, the latest in a non-hereditary lineage of Canadian hockey royalty and his name is Connor McDavid and if there is anything more Canadian than his name and his aw shucks deferential interview method it’s sleeping somewhere under last night’s pile of empties. He is formally known as McJesus, and McJesus fucking christ he is a magician, or rather a magnetic north to hockey pucks, which are fatefully attracted to his stick and only released from his mighty possession once all laws of physics have been contravened and the operational dynamics on the playing surface are sufficiently aligned to warrant their distribution (pass) or explosion (shot) from their supplication. The Book of Connor is being written under names that will be randomly abridged here to Richard, Lafleur, the Gretzky/Lemieux hydra, Crosby, and now McDavid. It’s not a real list, it’s just a way to bask in the maple glow of one of the best things about being part of this hilariously misconstructed country.
After all the bullshit ads and talking heads, and the horrible entreaties to gamble whatever’s left after the carbon tax or whatever (this is about Alberta after all), after the pointless singing of the national anthems (at least there’s two this year) and the handwringing over rumoured injuries (it’s only a fracture!) finally at some point after the thirtieth car ad since this stupid program started, a referee glides to centre ice and positions himself between two overbuilt human specimens and mercifully, finally, drops the fucking puck. And then it’s on.
Game 7, seen through the eyes of the actors, or the workers, or the players (best word, that’s why they use it) is human effort, unvarnished. At last, there is no tomorrow. If you’re gonna do it, do it now. It’s said they grip the sticks a little tighter. I’ll let that metaphor work its sexual magic. The impossibly imagined has become realized, and under the emergent pressure, grace is found in the guys working just as hard, wearing the same stupid sweater. This is a team sport, even if Connor puts the me in team. Such is the collective spirit, the goalie could knock it into his own net and there would be forgiveness (that’s not on him, we could have done better). Grace is there in the human connection of a pass at least as important as the goal. Shutt passing to Lemaire, forever. I’m starting to pass for Ron MacLean (Dad joke).
…
My dad loved his Habs, and my stepdad studied and coached sports. Sort of a heart and head of professional athletics in my upbringing, and sometimes when I watch, I still feel them watching with me.
HOCKEY SWEATERS
· The facile distinction between dads is made only for the purposes of this ridiculous invention and unworthy of them.
· The McJesus burger, coming to Louisiana soon. Get it with a slice of repentant cheese.
· The players are not, in fact, overpaid. They make a percentage of the insane amount the league pulls in. We have seen the ticket price, and it is us.
· Poor Calgary, no water and they have to cheer for fucking Deadmonton. Have a beer, boys. Hey, no one in this country is worried about infrastructure, I hope, we sure pay enough in taxes, amirite? Imagine if this engenders sympathy for the several indigenous reserves with lousy water. Imagine.
BODY SNATCHER
· Donald Sutherland, father figure of Canada. There are so many examples of his greatness to enthuse about, but I’ll go with this one:
o Midway through Oliver Stone’s sci-fi fantasy, JFK, we are mercifully given a respite from Oliver’s jolly camera furnace ride. It takes place at a park bench with Donald Sutherland, who places his hand gently on the shoulder of the movie and, for about seven minutes, tells it to shut the fuck up a minute, and takes charge. At the risk of facile distinction, it’s all there: The gravelly conspiratorial tone that could be a warning or a warm hug, the authority that seems just slightly wary to exercise itself, a knowing smile and a haunted look in the eyes, and, as a player who knows exactly where the puck is going to be, pure pro.
· Who lived in Florida.
· Plus, dude got it on with some real Hollywood hotness. Let’s hear it for unlikely Canadian sex symbols.
KEPLER 22-B
· Is where the weird action happens in Raised By Wolves, which you can watch to feel strange.
A FRIEND’S DAD
· Alex! If you are reading this, know we are thinking of you. Even if you are not reading this, we are thinking of you.