Our Summer of Discontent

Thus begins another long summer of a Canuck fan’s discontent.

Don Cherry challenged my father to a fight. The year was 1968, Cherry was a member of the Vancouver Canucks and my father was an over-served spectator, seated a few rows behind the team bench. The Pacific Coliseum was a notoriously quiet arena so when my father shouted his opinion of Cherry’s skating ability, the cherished Canadian icon heard every word of it. After finishing a shift, Cherry stood up on the bench, leaned over the glass, pointed at my father and said, “Meet me in the parking lot and we’ll discuss my skating, man to man.”

That’s what it’s like to support the Vancouver Canucks: The team wants to punch you in the face and you probably deserve it. Our fans are the kind of despicable maggots who set cars on fire, the team never wins, and our front office has proud history of incompetence. If doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the definition of insanity, then any fan who expects the Canucks to win should be institutionalized.

Only the clinically insane would riot after a loss, right? To be fair, we know that losing wasn’t the reason that Canucks’ fans rioted, because the Canucks lose every year and the fans have only rioted twice. If not crazy, Canuck fans must be idiots because it’s idiotic to love a team that never wins.The Kenora Thistles, Quebec Bulldogs, Seattle Metropolitans, Victoria Cougars and the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association have more Stanley Cup rings than the Vancouver Canucks.

It’s admirable to support a loser if that loser comports itself with dignity. Sadly, the Canucks do not. Our best players are Swedish twins. We have a bunch of French Canadian pests who bite people’s fingers. The best goaltender in the history of the franchise has been run out of town because the fan-base thinks that the backup is better. That backup is a ginger. One of our American players is a Jesus freak. The team exhibits zero toughness excluding one time when a player (who will remain nameless) beat up a fan at a bar called Pierre. I was there when it happened. That fan had it coming.

It’s unlikely that Canucks’ management has ever punched a fan in the face. Instead, they’ve changed the team uniform thirteen times. The Canucks’ original logo was a white hockey stick embedded on a blue rink. It was supposed to look like the letter ‘C’ and, if you squinted, it almost did. In spite of its flaws, the design had simplicity and grace so, of course, management decided to change it. Their next uniform is widely considered to be the ugliest in the history of hockey: The Flying V. I won’t befoul your mind with a description of this hospital fire of a jersey, but I will note that writer Stephen Cole said it looked like ‘a punch in the eye.’ Seven years later, they euthanized the ‘Flying V’ and introduced the ‘Flying Skate’ which is also known as the ‘plate of spaghetti.’

The Flying Skate existed in various iterations until a company called Orca Bay bought the Canucks. Orca Bay jettisoned the skate in favor of a logo featuring an orca. Having a corporate logo on your hockey sweater is lame for too many reasons to list. In 2007 the Canucks did yet another redesign, marrying the original colour scheme of green, blue and white, with the orca logo. The word ‘Vancouver’ was stitched across the front of the sweater to remind the players which city they’re paid to disappoint.

Thirteen uniforms in thirty seven years is the kind of erratic decision making that one might expect from the Gornyak Rudnyi of the Kazakhstani Ice Championship, not a professional hockey club from Vancouver. Then again, Vancouver has always been an island unto itself within Canada. Hockey is our country’s most popular sport yet many Vancouverites can’t skate. Edmonton has about one third the population of metro Vancouver, yet they produce nearly three times more NHL players than we do.

Vancouverites aren’t wise hockey fans because many of us have never played the sport, and this lack of understanding might explain why we continue to cheer for the Canucks. Milan Lucic is probably the best Vancouverite currently playing in the NHL. During last year’s Stanley Cup Final, some idiot spray-painted a cock and balls onto the exterior wall of the church that Lucic’s family attends. The idiot also painted, “Go Canucks.”

Writers in Canada like to use the game of hockey as a metaphor for life. As a Vancouverite and a Canucks fan, it would be nice to think that my virtuous support of this school-shooting of a hockey club is a poetic indication that I am loyal, genuine and unashamed. Unfortunately, it seems more likely that I’m just another idiot who thinks that Don Cherry can’t skate.