It’s summer…
hottest day of the year so far here in Vancouver… my poor flowers are wilting, the cat is snoozing flat out in the shade… I'm eating strawberries and ice cream... can we please stop talking about hockey now? I mean it. I’m sick of bloody hockey! For months it’s been hockey hockey, hockey hockey, hockey hockey hockey hockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockey hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey hockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockey… gasp… hockey…hockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockeyhockey! And when your tired of hockey there’s more bloody hockey! On the CBC TV sometimes it’s hockey every day, the month of June is almost entirely devoted to hockey, hockey games, hockey on the news, Hockeyville Canada and soon to come, Hockey, a peoples history. It’s inescapable, especially for people like me who are not tapped into the glorys of the 500 channel universe! I made a choice, I had to decide if I wanted money for cable TV or books and I choose books! I get six channels, one in French and another multi-cultural, Global (or Fox Canada as I call it) is a joke, The A Channel is admittedly weirdly eccentric and CTV… well… so it is on the CBC I depend for most of my TV entertainment and hockey robs me of news, documentaries and screws up Coronation Str so badly (I’m not getting up at 7:30 AM on a Sunday) that I’m way behind. Their one good show about hockey, the mockumentary "The Tournement", was canceled. Some of you by now must be questioning my patriotism, if not my manhood. When I’ve confessed a disinterest in hockey to strangers they assume I’m an American; how could you be a Canadian and not love hockey? Well, I don’t, I’ve tried watching hockey recently and just don’t get it. A ceaseless mad scramble for the puck (and i can see the puck, I'm that Canadian)occasionally highlighted by brawls between overpaid thugs. I don’t get what a band of mercenary players who might well be traded next season has to do with my hometown and it’s self-respect. Perhaps it has to do with growing up with a brother who’s mental health depended entirely on his team winning. If they won, he was angry they didn’t win more desisively, if they lost he would rage in a fury that shook the whole household. Plus he would always cheer on teams that were anyone but his hometown of Vancouver, when the NHL team in Winnipeg (our birthplace) folded he stopped watching NHL games altogether as a protest. To this day he refuses to watch NHL games. Hockey is about selling beer and drunken rowdy fans breaking stuff, after some of the playoff games in Edmonton the police arrested hundreds. I suspect that if the Oilers had actually won the Stanley Cup Edmonton would be a pile of smoking ruins right now. I do realise that this is the CBC’s only chance to make some money before the next budget cuts from Ottawa, so I do not begrudge them some revinue generating hockey coverage. But it’s nearly July, it has to end! You’ve had the season, you’ve had the playoff’s, the NHL awards, enough Don Cherry to choke a horse but now I switch on the news and what do I see? Hockey trades. Vancouver’s hero, Todd Bertuzzi, that towering example of fair play and sportsmanship, is being traded to some other team where he will become somebody else’s hero. And I’m supposed to care? Be fair, hockey fans, give the rest of us a break! It’s only, what, two months until the beginning of the next season, then we can do this all over again. Be reasonable! And would it kill the CBC to put on more curling coverage?