NELSON: Finally! Resume the love affair
Hey, Andy, hockey’s back! Finally!
OK, so Saturday night, I’ll dust off my Trevor Linden jersey, jump on the SkyTrain and meet you at the Shark Club an hour before the Ducks game.
Painted faces, the cheery concourse, the hype, water cooler discussions, continuous hockey talk, Canuck flags fluttering from car windows, sports talk radio post mortems — I can hardly wait.
What’s that? You want to, what, boycott NHL hockey? Why?
You want to teach players and owners not to toy with our affections and withhold our passion again?
No, please, I can’t. Canadians can’t.
We Canadians have an insatiable hockey libido — we need our passion three to five times a week.
Hockey, like a lover withholding affections for five months, has at last relented. Finally, it’s batting its eyes and fluffing pillows and you want us to withhold our love, to teach them never to do it again?
You go ahead, take your puck and go home, but now that hockey, Canada’s true love, is finally willing to get physical again, most of us will be opening white wine, lighting candles and putting on Lou Rawls tunes, not withholding our ardour to teach some futile lesson.
If we were in Phoenix or Carolina or Nashville, maybe — although no one would even notice as they’ve been boycotting hockey for years, satisfying their passion with NASCAR and guns.
And by the way, Andy, it’s a bit rich for you to want to teach millionaires and billionaires a lesson. You, who weekly on these very pages, so relentlessly defends corporations and the rich. It’s a bit ironic you only chastise hockey’s rich folk.
Instead of boycotting the NHL to teach rich hockey guys a lesson, couldn’t we just use your usual strategy for influencing millionaires and billionaires: Call them job creators, give them tax cuts and blame their mess on on minimum wage beer sellers and arena workers?
Boycotting hockey will do nothing but further deprive Canadians of their beloved passion. I boycotted Expo 86 (something about spending money on mega projects instead of people) — I sure taught them a lesson.
Come on, Andy. As briefly spurned hockey lovers, let’s forget the hockey spat and passionately embrace this brief hockey season all the way to its early summer climax.
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