Ice Hockey: Takeover of NHL appals Canadians

By JAMES LAWTON

Canada has two national games - the official lacrosse, and ice hockey which runs so deep in the veins of the nation that the growing threat from the American dollar is seen not so much as a recreational crisis as an assault on the country's identity.

Lacrosse's spiritual home is in some forest glade in Fenimore Cooper country, but for ice hockey it is in a bar where you tend to drink beer without using a glass.

Canada without hockey would be like France without wine or Wales without song.

"Hockey," says Dave "Tiger" Williams, who in the 1980s was a notoriously ferocious enforcer for the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Vancouver Canucks, "is where Canadians live. Americans don't really understand hockey. They can't.

"They can't imagine how it was back on the prairie going to the rink, or some river bed, as a kid, at 30 or 40 below freezing, and knowing that the only way you were going to get out of the half-assed, godforsaken town was being a little tougher than the guy charging at you with his stick raised."

Williams, who now lives in Vancouver, was appalled when the city's Canucks, of the National Hockey League, were taken over by John McCaw, a high-tech multi-millionaire from neighbouring Seattle.

The Canucks still operate at the custom-built General Motors Place - before US colonialisation they played at the Pacific Colosseum - but a trend which left the Winnipeg Jets, absurdly in Canadian eyes, the sunbelt Phoenix Coyotes and the Quebec Nordiques the Colorado Avalanche, is working against them.

In the most serious case, the life of "Les Habs," the fabled Montreal Canadiens, was preserved only when the Canadian beer giant Molson shed its ownership of the team as part of cutbacks. Nightmarishly, even for hockey fans who view them pretty much as a Rangers man does Celtic, the team hovered for several months between life and death.

When the rescue came, inevitably enough, it was organised in the United States. The club, and their newly-built stadium, were bought by Colorado businessman George Gillett jun for a knockdown $C178 million ($272.46 million). In some quarters, Gillett is regarded more as a carpetbagger than a saviour.

Saviour was not the word applied to the Alberta provincial Government this week when it announced a new lottery which promised to deliver $C3 million in aid to the embattled Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames.

The gesture was considered not much more than a flea bite against the weight of financial pressure faced by both clubs.

The Oilers, who under the patronage of oil grandee Peter Pocklington and the inspiration of the game's greatest player, Wayne Gretzky, won the Stanley Cup four times in the 80s, made a desperate cash call on their 97 individual owners.

First it was for $C10 million, then $C14 million. The appeal came soon after the Oilers lost the battle to keep their talented centre Doug Weight from moving to St Louis.

At the same time the Toronto Maple Leafs, now considered the one solid Canadian NHL franchise, were preventing their gifted Swede Mats Sundin from joining the winter migration of the snow geese to the US. It cost them a new contract worth $US9 million.

An emotional witness to the impending disaster was a Seattle-based businessman encountered on a flight from Los Angeles.

"I was born on the Canadian prairies," he said, "and even after 12 years in the States the first thing I do every morning is look at the hockey scores. But I've seen this problem coming many years ago.

"I went home to Winnipeg for Christmas and on Boxing Day I took my father to see the Jets against the New York Rangers. I paid $C30 for the tickets and I knew this was a fantasy. If the game had been played at Madison Square Garden, it would have cost me at least $C200.

"I could see right then the writing on the wall and the next year the Jets moved to Phoenix. Hockey in Phoenix but not Winnipeg. Man, it just burns your ass."

The NHL once had six clubs - Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Boston, New York and Detroit - but the widening of the league sacrificed quality.

Despite this, the game flourished at the highest level in Canada, but now of the league's 30 clubs, only six are Canadian, and five of them are living from day to day under the shadow of the American dollar.

It is bad enough that the American clubs heavily outnumber their northern neighbours. That one of them is called the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim only compounds the insult.

For someone like Williams it is an affront to what he believes is one of the toughest sports traditions. Not one for political correctness, he once said of high-priced Swedish imports: "They are like bananas - they come in green, turn yellow, then go bad."

Williams recalls how it was on the road in junior hockey.

"It was always hard, but some places were harder than others. Flin Flon [a mining town in northern Manitoba] for example. Some of the fans, liquored up, would try to make trouble. If a Flin Flon player didn't get you with a stick or a fist, the chances were that a fan would. To be honest, I rather enjoyed the place. It was a jungle where the animals were fighting for their lives."

In his early days in the NHL he was slow to respond to a rival player who insulted his team.

He remembers: "One of our players came to me as we went onto the ice for our shift and said, 'Don't let that happen again. Someone comes over to our bench, you get the hell out and whomp the bastard. I don't care if he's eight foot tall, that's your goddamned job."'

It was one he never dreamed would one day be imperilled by an American buck and a team called the Mighty Ducks.

- INDEPENDENT