Béliveau!

   For the better part of the last fifty years, I have hated the Montreal Canadiens.
   I have admired them for the wonderful teams they produced and I have envied them for all the records they hold. At the same time, though, I have hated them for the roadblock they always presented to just about any and every team I had pledged my allegiance to.

Béliveau and his favourite accessory.

   For the first decade or so of that fifty years, the player that personified the Canadiens mystique was Jean Béliveau, a center and captain of the team. Both in stature and playing ability, he stood the tallest among a team of very talented and driven players. In this way, he could and should have been the lightning rod for all my distaste and anger. It was, however, impossible to hate the man.
   I, begrudgingly, adored Jean Béliveau. He was the epitome of grace, style, ability and quiet leadership both on the ice and off. It was hard to see him almost perennially lifting the Stanley Cup and not think to yourself that this was simply the way it was meant to be.

Two of my faves--Béliveau and Sawchuk, the goalie!

   As Canadian hockey legends go, none stood much taller than Jean Béliveau. On December 2, however, Le Gros Bill, as he was known in Quebec, passed away. Most Canadian hockey fans went into a variety of forms of mourning with his passing and nowhere was there heard a negative word, indicative of our admiration for both the hockey player and the man. Such was his stature that a state funeral was held for him in Montreal. The city was in the middle of a blizzard the day of the funeral and yet there was still an overflow crowd. Many dignitaries attended, including the Prime Minister of Canada, the premier of Quebec and the mayor of Montreal along with many former and current players.

Béliveau---at center one final time.

   The pallbearers were all former Canadiens players and I was reminded of the Crash Test Dummies video for "Superman's Song", wherein all of Superman's pallbearers were aging super heroes. Beliveau was as close to a super hero as you might come in the real world.
   I am one of the fortunate ones who are able to say that they saw Jean Béliveau play. A younger generation than mine might compare him to Mario Lemieux---the size, the reach and the stick-handling ability were similar. Béliveau also had the ability to take younger players under his wing.
   Part of his mystique was that he was revered by anglophone and francophone alike and, in the dressing room, he could get his message across well in both languages. Invariably, his message centered around the players' duty to themselves but, much more importantly, also their duty to the Montreal Canadiens and all the former greats who'd played before them.
   Béliveau was worth buying a whole league to the Canadiens. In the fifties, he played in the Quebec Senior Hockey League, an amateur league, and was quite content to do so, having no great interest in playing in the NHL. The Canadiens had tried to sign him to a pro contract as a teenager but his family balked at this idea. Instead, they signed him to a a contract stating that, should he ever turn professional, he would then be the property of the Montreal Canadiens. Montreal then bought the Quebec Senior league and turned it and all of its players into professionals! At this point, they were then able to sign the young Béliveau.
   In his professional career, Jean Béliveau won the Hart Trophy (MVP) twice and the Art Ross Trophy (scoring leader) once. Along the way, he won the Stanley Cup (league champions) 10 times. As an executive with the team, his name was engraved on the Cup another 7 seven times for an astonishing total of 17 times, a record. He played on the All Star team 10 times and was the first recipient of the Conn Smythe Trophy for MVP in the playoffs. The year after he retired in 1971 he was inducted into the NHL Hall of Fame.
   An ardent family man, Beliveau graciously turned down offers to sit in the Senate and be considered for Governor-General of Canada after his playing days, so that he could be with his family.
   It is sometimes hard to explain to non-Canadians the hold that hockey seems to have on us. America has its football, basketball and baseball and much of the rest of the world has its soccer and I suppose those sports are held in a similar regard. The thing those other sports have in common, though, is that they involve having their players firmly grounded, on grass or a court somewhere. Hockey is played on ice, for goodness'sake, and its players are only connected to this ice by narrow, almost razor-sharp strips of steel. We are the best in the world at this sport and Jean Béliveau was one of our best, both as a man and a hockey player. There will almost certainly never be another one like him.

                                                                                                     

   

   
    
   

Welts

   I discovered this evening, as I was perusing the fairly pristine parts of my body visible in the bathroom mirror, that I miss welts.
   It has been the longest time since I was able to glory in the puffy purple raised redness of a good welt. I used to get them all the time when I was playing ball hockey and was quite happy to bring them home, roll up a pant leg in the living room and say to Doralyn so do you wanna see something...?
   She would always wrinkle her brow and say something like oh, Sweetie, why do you do that? and I never really had an answer for her, at least not one she'd be able to relate to.
   I used to feel the same way about black eyes, deep lacerations, sprained ankles and dislocated fingers---they were all bodily abominations I was happy to put on display for the world's amazement and tacit approval.
   

Black eyes were really the best. Nothing about a black eye truly looked accidental, I think every one's first assumption was that you'd perhaps been engaged in fisticuffs somewhere, more than likely in a bar brawl. This, of course, was never how I got my black eyes. My shiners were invariably the result of random balls or elbows or sticks and, for the most part, were accidental. One of the best parts about a black eye was that you never had to go out of your way to show it off to someone---they were always just there, like a neon sign in the middle of your face. Of course you were just dying for someone to make a comment and when they did you always made it sound as though you'd almost forgotten it was pasted to the middle of your noggin, like you were so damn tough it had actually slipped your mind.
   Lacerations and cuts  were always good, too. Granted, they tended to be messier than bruises and the showoff appeal didn't last as long because, necessarily, bandages needed to be applied.

   I ran into a birdbath once while using a neighbour's yard as an endzone. It was one of those plastic birdbaths and, as I was looking backward for a pass (football was the game at the time) I ran into it and it shattered. This left a foot-long elongated and bloody "s" on the inside of my right thigh. It wasn't deep enough for stitches but was deep enough to scar me for life. And I loved it.
   At the ripe old age of sixty-one, I am still attempting to get back into ball hockey. The running I've been doing the last couple of years has convinced me that I can keep up with the youngsters and I have no doubt, emotionally, that I could still play. Intellectually, though, ageism has provided me with some doubt---it doesn't make common sense that I should be able to do something like that. I guess.
   I will, however, play ball hockey again. The ball will go into the corner of the rink and I will follow it there and run into two or three other players and sticks and elbows will fly and I will possibly come out of all that nicked. Someone from the other team will wind up to take a slapshot at our goal and I will race out to him and throw myself into the path of a hard plastic ball travelling at about ninety miles an hour. 
   I will have welts from all of this and I will be a happy man!