Let’s talk about Carolina Cornball…Grandpa Grapes…snack time for the Winnipeg Jets…clock ticking on CFL-CFLPA talking…no living wage overseas…Trump trumps Vlad the Bad’s eight goals…the Big One in tennis…baseball a yawn-a-thon?…and other things on my mind

Monday morning coming down in 3, 2, 1…and we’ll have fun, fun, fun until daddy takes the T-Bird away…

Contrary to popular belief, if you look up the word ‘fun’ in the dictionary, you won’t find a team photo of the Carolina Hurricanes.

No, the Bunch of Jerks and their “front-running fans” didn’t invent merriment and crazy hijinks, but we’re led to believe that they’ve cornered the market on mirth, what with their Storm Surge and their admirable, albeit stalled, push in the current Stanley Cup tournament.

I mean, consider these headlines I stumbled upon during a Google surf on the weekend:

• The Guardian: “How the Carolina Hurricanes hit back on the NHL’s war on fun.”

• YouTube: “Carolina Hurricanes/The Importance of Fun.”

• For the Win/USAToday: “Rooting for the Carolina Hurricanes is rooting for fun.”

• NHL.com: “Hurricanes embrace fun, victory celebrations.”

• Boston Globe: “Are Carolina Hurricanes jerks or just having fun?”

I imagine the Boston Bruins (especially), the St. Louis Blues and the San Jose Sharks are also having themselves a royal hoot since they, along with the Hurricanes, remain standing in the National Hockey League spring runoff. It’s just that, unlike the Bunch of Jerks, none of those outfits spent the entire winter playing post-match parlor games like Duck, Duck Goose, so we don’t really know for certain that they’re having fun.

More to the point, would they even know how to be good time Charlies?

Fun, after all, is not historically an NHL thing. Except, of course, when the Washington Capitals win the Stanley Cup and Alexander Ovechkin goes swimming in a public fountain. But even Ovie and the Caps stopped short of playing Duck, Duck Goose in the fountain, perhaps owing to the fact they were too tipsy with gusts up to flat-out legless

At any rate, the NHL has never been known as a knee-slapping, belly-laughs enterprise, something an opinionist at The Guardian felt obliged to emphasize in an ode to Carolina Cornball:

“The NHL can’t really take a joke. Which is maybe all the more reason to laugh at it sometimes, like a bunch of jerks.”

Certainly the Hurricanes’ marketing department is having fun, also generating scads of American greenbacks with its Bunch of Jerks and Bunch of Front Running Jerks t-shirts. It’s a merchandising windfall and, yes, now that you mention it, Donald S. Cherry likely deserves royalties on sales, since it was the Hockey Night in Canada curmudgeon who inserted the phrase(s) into the hockey lexicon.

Here’s the thing, though: Sixteen outfits qualified for the Stanley Cup tournament. Fifteen of them did not play post-match parlor games during the regular season. We are now down to the NHL final four, and even the Hurricanes long ago abandoned the Storm Surge and its accompanying shenanigans.

So are we still having fun?

Perhaps the Canes will re-introduce Carolina Cornball now that they’re down 2-nada and heading home for the next two skirmishes in the best-of-seven Eastern Conference final vs. the Bruins. Whatever works, right?

I doubt they’ll resort to parlor games, though, because there’s a time and place for everything and Ring Around the Rosie won’t help them out of their hole. Mind you, they could try Pin the Tail On the Donkey—seeing someone stick it to Brad Marchand is always fun.

This whole Hurricanes-and-fun thing has inspired considerable pro-and-con dialogue, and my favorite line was delivered by the Charlotte Observer editorial board. Noting that it was Cherry who fanned the flames by describing the Canes as a “bunch of jerks” and Carolina fans as “front runners,” the Observer wrote: “Front-runners, if you haven’t figured it out, is Canadian for bandwagon fans. Don Cherry is Canadian for ‘get off my lawn.’” That, kids, is a classic burn. Also true.

Mad Mike McIntyre of the Drab Slab dipped his pen into the Carolina Cornball discussion, offering this: “At their practice Monday in Raleigh, players gathered at centre ice in a big circle and took turns sharing their weekend activities, which included a couple of well-deserved days away from the rink. From Storm Surges, the team’s cheeky Twitter account and merchandise, it’s obvious they’ve got a good thing going on, which is translating to their spirited play on the ice, and in a copycat league, perhaps the (Winnipeg) Jets might want to try and emulate some of the good vibes going forward. Maybe they can start by sitting everyone in the circle at the start of training camp and talking about how they spent their off-season.” Oh, for sure. And maybe they can bring snacks, too. Blake Wheeler is in charge of the crab cakes, Rink Rat Scheifele the nutribars, Jacob Trouba the beef stew, Big Buff the catfish, and Twig Ehlers the Danish for dessert. Sorry, but if there was anything to Carolina Cornball, all 31 NHL clubs would be playing Pictionary and Parcheesi between periods.

Nice to see Paul Friesen and Ted Wyman of the Winnipeg Sun do some day tripping down memory lane, revisiting the last of les Jets World Hockey Association glory days. Paul had a chin-wag with funnyman coach Tom McVie, while Ted checked in with lickety-split left winger Morris Lukowich, and it’s all good stuff. Next Monday marks the 40th anniversary of Winnipeg HC’s third and final WHA championship run, and I’m glad the two Sun boys are reminding youngsters in the audience that there was a time when victory parades were routine in Good Ol’ Hometown.

Yes, now that you ask, I think it’s boffo that Chris Matthews is back where it all started for him in the Canadian Football League, which is to say as part of the pass-catching ensemble with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. I just wish I could be confident he’ll have a league to play in for his second go-round in blue-and-gold.

Apparently, negotiations between the CFL and the CFL Players Association has been reduced to an exchange of notes on cocktail napkins. That’s not to say the two sides aren’t working in good faith on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, but with training exercises due to begin in less than a week it’s awful close to last call. And I’m getting a tad antsy.

Dani Rylan

On the subject of work stoppages, next time you hear someone say women who play pro shinny “deserve” a living wage, remind them that the average head count across the National Women’s Hockey League last season was 954. Sorry, but no one— expect perhaps founder/commish Dani Rylan and her second in command, Hayley Moore—makes a living wage based on those numbers.

It’s important to note that the 200 women who say they won’t be playing hockey next winter have limited their boycott to North America. There’s nothing to stop some of them from suiting up with an outfit in either Finland’s Naisten Liiga or the SDHL in Sweden. Trouble is, no one watches distaff shinny on that side of the pond, either, so they still wouldn’t be earning a living wage.

So, John Daly has been given the okie-dokie to ride a cart in the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island this week. Hmmm. I thought every golf course in America already had a beer cart.

Vlad the Bad

Russian dictator Vlad the Bad Putin scored eight goals in an exhibition hockey match last week. Not to be outdone, Donald Trump claims to have scored eight holes-in-one on the weekend and has already declared himself winner of the PGA Championship. A victory lap in John Daly’s beer cart is scheduled for the White House rose garden next week.

Trump’s paid Pinocchio, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, hopes to be remembered as “transparent and honest” once she’s no longer telling lies for the president. Ya, and I hope to be remembered as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

Is it game, set and match for the Big Three in men’s tennis? Might be that it’s been reduced to the Big One, Novak Djokovic. The Joker laid claim to the year’s first Grand Slam, the Australian Open, and he won the Madrid Open on Sunday, beating upstart Stefanos Tsitsipas in the final. But the King of Clay, Rafa Nadal, hasn’t won on his favorite surface this year and Roger Federer couldn’t get past the quarterfinals in Madrid. Still, I’ll reserve judgment until Rafa is beaten at Roland Garros and Roger falls on Centre Court Wimbledon.

Interesting take on baseball by Mad Mike McIntyre. He reckons the rounders game is losing traction among the rabble because sitting through three hours of sputtering action is “asking a lot of spectators to endure, especially when you factor in time to travel to and from the stadium.” (I’m not convinced travel time to the ball park is greater than to any other sports venue, so that’s a silly comment.) Mad Mike cites statistics from the Wall Street Journal to support his theory, but does a ball game actually take longer to complete than other sports? Nope. It’s middle of the pack. Here are some event times:

And, finally, the dreaded Grip Reaper has come to collect another old friend and colleague, Marten Falcon. A good man, Marten and I started in the rag trade together, working as copy runners at the Winnipeg Tribune, and he spent his newspaper career as one of those necessary behind-the-scenes people who put the sheet together at both the Trib and Sun. Lost contact with Marten after I left the tabloid, and that’s going on 20 years, but I won’t forget him.

About the Lords of Rinks and Drinks…Paul Gowsell curling under the influence of pizza…teetotaler Jeff Stoughton…Puck Finn and PlayStation…Dave Hodge shows his baby blues…so long Satch Maloney…the CFLPA d’oh boys…Dave Dickenson the Mea Culpa Man…and other things on my mind

Another Sunday smorgas-bored from someone who’s never been too drunk to curl…

I cannot recall my curling baptism with any deep level of clarity.

I do, however, have foggy recollections of E.D. Smith jam pails filled with poured concrete awkwardly skimming along a bumpy sheet of ice in the far corner of the St. Alphonsus schoolyard, where we had been instructed to assemble for our first misadventures of the hurry-hard culture.

None of us were too drunk to curl that day. The Sisters of St. Joseph saw to that.

There was a lengthy list of things those strap-wielding nun/teachers frowned upon during my formative years, and Grades 1 and 2 sprigs getting blotto-faced before sliding from a makeshift hack on a makeshift curling rink surely was high on their registry of restrictions. Boozing it up wasn’t something a good Catholic kid did. At least not until Grade 8.

So, yes, all of us urchins were as sober as nuns that day as we bundled up and stepped outside into the Arctic-like embrace of an unyielding Winnipeg winter.

And let the record show this: It was the only day I ever curled without beer being involved.

Thus it was with wry amusement that I’ve read the reaction(s) to the booze-fueled shenanigans of our curlers last weekend in Red Deer, the Alberta burg caught between a rock (Calgary) and a hard place (Edmonton).

Ryan (Small) Fry

If you came in late, the World Curling Tour’s Red Deer Classic was chugging along smoothly when Jamie Koe, Ryan (Small) Fry, Chris Schille and DJ Kidby took a notion to occupy the down time between games by giving their elbows a strenuous bending. Thirty-to-40 bottles of wobbly pop and numerous shooters later, they were good and properly pie-eyed, with not a nun on cite to monitor their behaviour with a piercing frown or a firm rapping of the knuckles with a wooden yardstick. So they went out and curled. At least three of them did.

Koe, recognizing that something was missing (his legs), took a powder. Apparently more brown pops required his attention. Fry, Schille and Kidby gave it a go on the pebble sans their too-drunk-to-curl skip, but what ensued was “a gong show” according to the venue manager, Wade Thurber. There was broom-breaking (Fry shattered three). There was foul language (imagine that, a curler cussin’). Later, a changing room wall lost an argument to either a foot or a fist.

Barney, Homer and Moe talk curling.

These were no piddling hogline violations. The lads were punted from the event. Yup, kicked out, like Homer and his pal Barney Gumble after they’ve had one too many Duff at Moe’s.

In the ensuing days, headline writers and opinionists across the globe have had their way with our “drunken curlers.” Dispatches of the “drunken debacle” have stretched from Red Deer to the U.K., to Asia, to Down Under. CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, the BBC, SkySports, The Independent, Business Insider, the New Zealand Herald, Eurosport, Deadspin, the Sydney Morning Herald, HuffPost UK, the Washington Post, the Korea Herald, Breitbart and The Guardian have all weighed in, basically advancing the same theme: Canadians are a bunch of party people who drunkenly slide around on ice nine months of the year.

Well, we know that to be untrue. We’re drunk 12 months of the year and the ice melts after seven months.

Scott Moir with Bob and Doug McKenzie: Beer, eh.

But here’s what has really surprised me in the fallout of the curling kerfuffle: Seemingly the link between Canadian sports and beer swilling is something the rest of the world has just now discovered. What, they weren’t paying attention to the Olympics last winter when our fancy skater Scott Moir was tossing back pints faster than Boris Yeltsin? Cripes, man, Grey Cup week is affectionately known as the Grand National Drunk. The Brier even has its own pub. At one point in history, the prize for winning the Canadian men’s curling championship was a beer stein the size of a backyard hot tub.

It wasn’t until a kid drowned in the thing that they got rid of it.

So you’ll have to excuse me if I refuse to get my knickers in a twist over a few of the boys going all hoser a la Bob and Doug McKenzie.

Besides, there’s good news in all this: The rest of the world has been so focused on our “drunken curlers” that they’ve forgotten we’re also responsible for Nickelback, the Biebs and Howie Mandel’s lame jokes and germaphobia.

Paul Gowsell

It’s not like Koe and Co. are the first curlers to feel their oats (and barley). I mean, some of us haven’t forgotten Paul Gowsell, long-haired rebel of the Pebble People. Never mind that the former world junior champion had a pizza delivered in the middle of a game during a bonspiel in Regina (“We were hungry.”), he once was flagged down by the gendarmes for drunk driving, possession of pot and illegal possession of liquor—while wheeling his way home from a banquet honoring him as Calgary’s athlete-of-the-year. Gowsell copped a guilty plea on the drunk driving and marijuana raps, and was fined $150 for each. He was not, however, charged for curling while under the influence of pepperoni, salami and extra cheese in Regina.

If nothing else, the Red Deer episode of the Lords of Rinks and Drinks has provided others cause to double down on their dumb stereotyping of the roaring game. My favorite comment was delivered by a Los Angeles Times reader who wrote: “Curling will never catch on as a popular sport in America because it all looks too much like tedious janitorial work that requires basic householding skills.” Why do you think curlers drink, dude?

Jeff Stoughton with the Tankard Trophy.

For the record, I knew just one curler who never allowed booze to pass his lips—legendary Manitoba skip Jeff Stoughton. There might have been other teetotalers among the Pebble People that I wrote about, but perhaps I spent too much time in the Brier Patch to notice. (Just kidding. I never once set foot in the Patch—I did my elbow bending in regular pubs. But only after filing my copy. Honest. I wrote sober. Or did I write drunk and edit sober, as Hemmingway suggested we do? Can’t remember. Must have killed too much grey matter.)

Okay, let’s move on to other stuff, like Patrik Laine. I turned on my flatscreen to watch a hockey game on Saturday and PlayStation broke out. Seriously, what Puck Finn did to the Blues in St. Loo—five shots, five goals in an 8-4 Winnipeg Jets win—was pure video game stuff. And, to think, a week ago this morning 41 National Hockey League players had more goals than the Finnish winger. Today there are zero. Usually when a guy climbs that high, that fast, he needs a Sherpa guide and oxygen. I don’t think Puck Finn had to hit the shower by the time he was done. Yes, he made it look that easy.

Puck Finn will be due a pay raise at the end of this crusade. Can you say “Ka-ching!” kids?

Ron MacLean and Dave Hodge

I have one thing to say about Dave Hodge returning to Hockey Night in Canada (in a baby blue blazer, no less)—flipping brilliant. And if you’re of a certain vintage, you’ll know what I mean when I say “flipping.”

Sad to hear about the death of Dan Maloney, former coach of the Winnipeg Jets. Like all Jets bench jockeys, Satch wasn’t there for a long time (1986-89), but there were good times, most notably a playoff series victory over the Calgary Flames. Satch was a good, sincere, soft-spoken man. I always enjoyed dealing with him while wandering the continent with Winnipeg HC.

I can’t say for certain, but I doubt there’s ever been a tougher head coach-GM tag team in NHL history than Satch and John Bowie Ferguson. If their teams couldn’t beat ’em on the ice, Satch and Fergy sure as hell could whup the other team’s management in any UFC octagon.

Going into tonight’s game between the Edmonton McDavids and the Kings in Tinseltown, Milan Lucic has scored one goal more than me. And I’ll make $5,981,000 less than the Looch this year.

What’s up with Canadian Football League Players Association members? You’d think the large lads in pads would know better than news snoops on the beat when it comes to quality performance. But no. They’re “D’oh!” boys. Evidence of this is found in the CFLPA collection of all-stars that does not include the league’s most outstanding player, Bo Levi Mitchell, the league’s most outstanding defensive player, Beastmo Bighill, the league’s most outstanding O-lineman, Stanley Bryant, and the league’s leading ground gainer, Andrew Harris. Oh, and let’s not forget they anointed June Jones of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats the top sideline steward. That despite the fact six of nine head coaches compiled superior records. All of which can mean just one thing: Curlers aren’t the only athletes who drink too much.

The Mea Culpa Man

I can’t decide if Dave Dickenson is a football coach or a conspiracy theorist, but I do know the Calgary Stampeders head knock has established a Grey Cup record for apologies.

Double D doubled down on mea culpas during Grey Cup week in Edmonton, first apologizing for his gutteral description of Mike O’Shea and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ homebrew braintrust as an effing Canadian Mafia, then for his ‘oh, woe are we’ suggestion that the entire nation will be root, root, rooting against his tribe in today’s CFL championship skirmish.

“Sometimes you just talk to much,” the Mea Culpa Man mused. “Maybe I fabricated my own little storyline. Maybe I should have kept those comments to myself.”

No, no, no. A thousand times no, Dave. Keep yapping like an annoying little lap dog. And the dumber the better.

Apparently Bytown RedBlacks O-lineman Jon Gott has a chip on his shoulder any time he plays against the Stampeders, his former outfit. And here I thought that thing on his shoulder was a can of beer.

I’m liking the RedBlacks to haul the Grey Cup back to the nation’s capital with a three-point victory over the Stamps this afternoon/evening in E-Town. Final score: 28-25. Game MVP: Trevor Harris.

And, finally, just wondering: Did anyone actually watch the Tiger Woods-Lefty Mickelson con job?