The emotional trauma I suffered when Zero Chara, a good man who is active in the community blah blah blah, botched his homicide attempt on Max, when Milan Lucic attempted, repeatedly, to geld Alexei Emelin, when Andrew Ference gave me the finger, it’s all self-inflicted. I think I’m battling with my team, for justice and the Canadien way, against the Axis of Evil, and then find out Brendan Gallagher is training with Milan Lucic and gently teasing him over the summer, post handshake-meltdown. As if nothing happened.
And now Gally is having a grand ole time with Brad Marchand in St-Petersburg, the Venice on the Volga.
I went through much the same with the Chargers, who always played a fan-friendly wide-open style, compared to the thuggish, cheating Raiders. For decades I knew I was right, and justifiably hated those losers in black, and their stupid fans, all so badass because they apishly wear black, black like their souls.
Yet last year Dean Spanos, the unprincipled racketeer whose father frauded and stoled his way to a station in life when he could acquire my team as a plaything for his imbecilic progeny, announced a ‘partnership’ with those same Raiders to build and share a stadium in L.A., complete with an eternal flame for Al Davis, and in so doing dispossess his hometown fans. For no better reason than to earn even higher profits than the already guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in profit that every NFL owner is already guaranteed.
Why have I been cheering so hard? Why was I glued to my television? Why did I make trips and buy tickets? Why do I anticipate each new season so intently, why do I agonize over every loss? If it’s all the same to the jerk who owns the team, and willingly tears back the curtain if it means ten more millions to pile on the stack of millions he already has?
There was that promotion last season when Zdeno Chara was in Montréal and Canadiens fans could have a free burger if they hugged the Bruin, something like that, it was a surprise reveal, and I know that if it had been me, I wouldn’t have ‘Aw shucks”ed it. I might have announced to him that I was coming at him, that he needed to defend himself, but I definitely would have attacked him, done my duty, since Gary Bettman and the SPVM didn’t do theirs. I would have loaded up my mighty righty, and as he prepared to fend off my roundhouse, would have kicked-stepped hard on his knee, to hear it crunch-pop, and hobble the loathsome beast, fell it like a Douglas Fir. As a brutish roar erupted from his foul gizzard, I would have zigged, he would have bought it, at which point I would have zagged and imprinted my steel-capped toes on his granitic forehead. Repeatedly and with escalating fury.
That’s the way it goes down when I visualize it, but in real life, he probably would have taken me, most likely. He’s a bit younger, and while we’re about the same weight, his is distributed a little differently, all things considered, that extra lankiness of his is hard to counter, that extra reach. So I might have lost the fight that I started, possibly, but kind of like Happy Gilmore, who loses a fight so bad he lands in the hospital, I could have comforted myself that he may have got in a few lucky shots, and still feel I won the fight.
But I definitely would have goed him. The moment his monstrous snout emerged from hiding, where it belonged. I wouldn’t have had to decide on it, it would have been instinct. While Gally is bromancing the schnoz.
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