stuff123

Golf has sometimes been referred to by some pessimistic players as “a good walk spoiled.” It would seem that these individuals are missing a key point about the splendid game of golf. It is a fun pastime and should be played for that reason alone. Along with the advantages of getting out in the fresh air, you have the added bonus of playing with friends, associates, customers and even making more new contacts. Put the cell phone away in your bag for the round. You deserve a break, now don’t you?

Try to arrive at least a half an hour before your tee time so you can check in with the pro shop, use the washroom, do some light stretching, putt around and unwind a little before you head to the first tee. Please don’t bring your own supply of brown pops. At some courses, it is also against the local liquor laws, so you are putting the nice folks at the club in a very uncomfortable position. They want you to enjoy yourself so don’t make them become the golf course police. They’re just doing their job.

You may want to ask about the course’s dress code since many courses do not approve of clothing like blue jeans, tattered shorts and t-shirts. And don’t forget to check out the club’s pro shop and do a quick check of your individual golfing accessories in your golf bag. Tees, golf balls, sunscreen, and maybe you need a new golf glove. Check the spikes on your golf shoes, as well. No one is using steel spikes much anymore. On most golf courses today, they are no longer approved for play.

And when your round is finished, please stay and enjoy your playing partners’ company and take advantage of the many fine food and beverage options available at the clubhouse.

After all, the best shots in golf are usually taken at the 19th hole.

It’s Sunday, February 1, and like all NFL fans, I am looking forward to the game today. I don’t think I will watch too much of the preamble to the game because it gets pretty stale after the 893 expert has added their opinion. The two teams today are not what the advertisers would probably want. Phoenix and Pittsburgh are not mass media markets but that shouldn’t stop the advertising dollars from rolling in by the cargo shipload.

As a Canadian viewing this game, I get most of my insight from Canadian television and specifcially from TSN - The Sports Network. Three people in particular make NFL interesting for me—Chris Schultz , Jennifer Hedger and Darren Dutchyshen (pronounced Do-tish-in).

Schultsie, Jenn and Dutchie (that’s how everyone at TSN refers to them) are a lot more like family or good friends than they are announcers. Don’t get me wrong, they are very skilled at what they do as announcers. They know how to talk to the camera in a way that makes you feel that you are the one that they are telling the story directly to. They have a certian energy about them that is not overdone and they seem to really enjoy what they are doing. It has to be hard to work at a station that has only one focus and that is sports. of course. Sometimes some of the shows in off hours make you question that.

My pet peeve with all Sports Channels is the time around 9 - 11 pm. when these nice people get to talk more than once about the same topic in back-to-back shows. The first is usually a shorter filler between a game that has just ended and the full length show that airs at 10. How they make it sound fresh, I honestly don’t know.

Schultsie is one of those gigantic teddy bear type personalities (I think he said he was 6′ 9″ tall) that you know you wouldn’t want to mess with but you really don’t have to worry about that.  (I think I’m finally getting used to Schultsie without his moustache). He is retired from professional football and he brings his unique understanding of the game to the table. He is better at predicting NFL games than most everybody south of the border.

Jenn is a beautiful princess among a throng of warted toads. I’m just kidding. Most everyone at TSN is just as easy on the eyes as they are on the ears. She is obviously a very attractive woman but she also fits in very well in the traditional jock world of sports. She let’s you know that she is aware of what she is saying and her opinion is as valid as anyone else’s at TSN.

Dutchie is that energetic puppy dog that wants to get your attention. He is just full of stuff and vinegar and he won’t put you to sleep like so many other sports announcers do. Dutchie’s honest evaluation of the teams playing today makes me wonder if the game will be as good as hoped. He can’t make up his mind after days and days of absorbing all the other stuff that is made available to the media. He’s not afraid to make a pick. He just says folks I just can’t decide. Isn’t honesty refreshing?

So to the bosses at TSN, when it’s time to renegotiate with these nice folks, consider digging a little deeper into the stash that you are getting from the advertisers that you will tap in Canada today. We don’t get to see the US commercials here during the game because the Canadian advertising industry is taking as much advantage of this game as they can.

Nice folks should be treated accordingly.

I just hope who ever is singing the American National Anthem today doesn’t do the usual butchering job again. The karaoke bar is down the street and they are watching the game, too.

I used to pull into the same empty parking lot and make sure that I parked my car in the front row on Church street. The northeast entrance was how you got to enter Maple Leaf Gardens if you were on official business with one of the many teams that played there in the mid-1970’s. If it was game day for the Maple Leafs, or the Toros or the Toronto Marlboros (nobody called them that, it was just the Marlies), you had to make sure you could still get out of your spot before the crowds started to arrive.

You never really knew how long you were going to be in the building because there were visiting teams here as well that wanted to see you. I was working for Cooper Sporting Goods at the time as Professional Team Sales Representative. It never ceases to amaze me that even today, I can talk about my experiences with men and boys of all ages about some of stuff that happened at that old building and other arenas throughout North America. And they want more.

The only dressing room in North America that I couldn’t enter was the Leafs. the team in my hometown. That was because of the bozo that owned the team at the time, Harold Ballard. He acted like he was everybody’s friend but the truth is he really didn’t have any that I could see. He just paraded around and preached to everybody and they of course said yes sir no sir because he signed their cheques. But that’s not what I’d like to share about the days at Maple Leaf Gardens.

I made a friend through Facebook that used to live in Ontario and now lives in British Columbia. Andy is his name and we got to chatting back and forth about today’s Leafs and about yet another goalie that couldn’t live up to the standard that Johnny Bower set. I joked about we need to get Johnny out of retirement and eventually the subject of Johnny playing couldn’t happen because he wouldn’t wear a helmet. Well, that isn’t true.

Johnny wore the helmet we gave him with the “Tretiak” mask, as we called it, in practice sometimes when he had to put on the pads because one of the incumbent goalies of the time didn’t show up to practice that day. Rumour has it that too many brown pops had something to do with it. Johnny had a lot to do with getting Mike Palmateer to wear the helmet and cage combination.

And I was lucky enough to have the great honour of returning a favour to my favourite goalie of all time-Johhny Bower, everybody’s grandfather as MW, my friend calls him. Goaltenders of that era didn’t wear too much equipment like they do today. So when Johnny got off the ice, walked across the hall and changed in the scouts dressing room (even Johnny didn’t go in the Leafs dressing room), I was able to see what he wore.

I was in shock. I said Johnny, you can’t go back on the ice wearing that stuff. His arm pads were something that you wrapped a baby in to keep the child warm. No extra plastic. No wing extensions. Nothing. His chest protector was the same one I bet he wore in Cleveland. A piece of leather sewn onto a peice of felt. No extra wings on the shoulders to make you puff up like they do in lacrosse.

So I took the arm pads and chest protector back to our Custom Pro Shop and showed them to our “Pop” Kinesky, Norm Widdis and said make something better for Johnny. He can’t go back on the ice wearing this @#$%. Norm was a master at creating something out of just an idea. He and Dave Dryden worked beautifully together on a lot of goaltenders innovations for the time.

Believe it or not, in those days, the teams actually had to buy the equipment and not directly. It had to go through a sporting goods outlet. It was a company policy and since Cooper was the dominate supplier of the time, everybody did it. But Norm and my boss, “Shelly” all agreed that this one was not going to have any charge attached to it.

How do you expect a legend to pay for something like this. So it was with great pleasure that I showed up the next day and handed Johnny his new armpads and chest protector made with all the latest materials and innovations of the day and also handed him his old equipment that Norm used as the template for the modern upgrade.

I don’t remember if there was any discussion regarding payment for the equipment because there was going to be no bill anyway. Consider it our thanks for what you have done for the sport of hockey and the memories that we will all have of your outstanding efforts as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs. No one could poke check like Johnny.

We also were more than aware that if there was a bill that it wouldn’t be authorized by that guy upstairs. They have a phrase for that, but I’m wise enough to not use it.

Instead, the next time you watch a Leaf game, think of the greatest goalie to wear a Toronto Maple Leaf sweater sweeping the crease with his stick just before the start of the game. That’s what I want to remember about Maple Leaf Gardens. Raise your brown pop and repeat after me. “To Johnny Bower, everybody’s grandfather.”

It’s winter in Canada so the days are shorter and it always reminds me that human beings are just another animal on this planet and maybe not the smartest one either. I think the big bear comes out in me at this time of year. Although I think my “hibernation” is more a reaction to staying in out of the cold because I don’t ski or play hockey like I used to.

So it seems you still get tired and a good nap is in order to recharge the batteries. For the last three nights I have had the perfect accompaniment for this nap. It’s professional hockey’s all star break so there was the NHL All Star game, the AHL All Star game and tonight the Leafs are back playing. They all were more like shinny games we played at the local open air rink as kids. Lots of scoring and no defence.

There is something about the crowd noise and the announcers voices that is comforting. It’s almost like your mother’s tranquilizing voice singing a soothing lullaby. I guess for Canadians, that’s not too far from the truth. It is our game although others argue that lacrosse is more correctly our national game. They both have very strong routes here, there can be no doubt of that.

The preamble to the AHL game was doubly embarrassing when a former American Idol finalist butchered both the Canadian and American national anthems. And somehow Toronto was part of the Planet World Team and got booted out of Canada because Milwaukee, Hershey, Scranton and Worcester all got transplanted to Canada for the game. So I didn’t miss anything there either. When did Wisconsin get a navy—The Milwaukee Admirals?

And the Leaf game. Last time I looked it was 6-1 for the Minnesota Whatevers in those awful red and green uniforms—Minnesota Wild? I remember two teams in Minnesota—the North Stars and the Fighting Saints (NHL & WHA). Once again Wiki came to the rescue when I couldn’t recall the Saints team colours even though I was working in team sales for Cooper at the time. The last two seasons had a notation that I thought was only reserved for car racing—DNF (Did not finish). They folded the team twice in the dying years of the World Hockey Association.

The WHA had two teams with the same team colours—Edmonton and San Diego. Made the equipment managers earn their keep after a fight. It added a new meaning to delaying the game. I guess San Diego Hamburgers in a brown and red uniform wouldn’t work. Ray Croc of McDonald’s fame was the owner.

Oh yeah and the DNF thing. That reminds me, NASCAR will be starting soon. Sunday afternoon will be nap time again. Nothing like the drone of 43 engines on steroids to lull you to sleep.

Those are power naps!!

It was for this guy.

And if you don’t know who Dale Earnhardt Sr. was, you should get out of your cave more often. Yes I am joking, but he is perhaps the most famous race car driver that ever lived and sadly, he died doing what he loved to do, race stock cars.

In the field of auto racing the number 3 is Senior’s for eternity. No one wants to use it in the upper ranks of the sport because it would be considered a sign of disrespect to a fallen comrade. The only acceptable person to take this number might be his son Dale Earnhardt, Jr. but I don’t think he would accept it willingly. I think Junior would prefer to be number 8 but, due to contractual agreements, he has to settle on 88. It is more important to him that he be part of a motivated and forward thinking team than to just stay someplace where he could keep the number 8.

When I think of 3 in other contexts, here’s some of the things that came to mind.

• 3 Coins In A Fountain
• 3 Men & A Baby
• Three Dog Night
• The Three Musketeers

So I looked up the number 3 in a numerology related website—starlightnumerology. A lot of the things they said were true of my personality, but so were 4 and 8 and 11. I think that is part of getting older. You become more well-rounded in your personality because you have experienced more and you learn how to apply the new stuff you learned.

It’s Ernie the accountant at work again. He’s never satisfied if he can’t put something in a box—left column, right column, black, white, 6, nationality, etc. etc. It’s very much the same in psychology where they try to place you into only 4 boxes—thinker, relater, socializer, director. Thank goodness people aren’t that simple!

And only 3 coins means it’s a really new fountain, and 7 dogs would make it a much colder night than 3 and I’d feel a whole lot better going into battle with 4,302 Musketeers. The book and movie would be a lot longer, of course.

The significance of the number 3 in the lead of this story is not the number. It is the man that sat in the seat that drove that car on many Sundays in racetracks throughout the world. My only wish is that he wasn’t so stuck in his ways and wore his restraint system properly. He might have been able to share another magical moment with his son like he did when Junior won his first big race. Junior might one day become a father too and Grandpa won’t be there to spoil the dickens out of the little beater.

So a number is a number. You use it to measure something relative to something else. Human beings are what counts.

CFO’s should not have been put in charge of the game in big business. I think that is one of the major reasons why we are in the world wide pickle that we now face. The Chief Financial Officer is really nothing more than the head scorekeeper in the game of business.

He is very much like that kid who played in the local pick up game that everybody picked last. He wasn’t very skilled at the game but he knew all the rules and all the terminology. He just sucked at the game. So if you let him have the ball he wouldn’t give it back and he made a lot of stupid moves with it while he had it.

I really don’t see any difference between this childhood playground scenario and what the big bosses have done in the commercial business world. So stop blaming everything else on your poor decision to let Ernie the accountant try and throw a touchdown or hit a home run or sink any basket at all. He doesn’t know how to do that.

He can only tell you how many times he shot, how many times he missed, how many times somebody else was at fault for his inability to score a point. He’s perfect in his mind. Ernie is an accountant and not a gladiator of the game.

I think the CEO’s need to get out of their over-upholstered executive offices and start looking for the gladiators in their organizations that will provide new and productive ideas on how to make their business a force in the world market. We need new plays, new game plans, new formations, new offensive and defensive strategies. We don’t need Ernie to remind us that we are losing this game. It is already painfully obvious.

It’s time for a comeback. Let the real players show you how the game is played. It’s really quite simple. Just ask them what they think could be done to improve the team’s performance. Just don’t be surprised that you will be hearing a lot of things you didn’t think of before.

Ernie was good at another thing—blocking.

In Facebook, you see it all the time. People joining different groups about all kinds of different things. Thousands of people in each, attaching their name to various banners.

I have never been much on groups but I loved being part of a team. A lot of people will say that a team is also a group but there is a big difference between the two. Groups are intended to align people under a single banner and they spend a lot of time talking about the cause or goal. A team is similar but the difference is they work together to actually do something about it.

A group embodies the true meaning of one of my favourite sayings— “They are like old men and sex. They spend more time talking about it than doing it.”

A team adopts the genuine spirit of one of the best advertising slogans I can recall—Nike’s “Just Do It”

My personal memorable teams involved a few football teams that I played on and a group of young men in their first year of university living in a residence called Edwards Hall. Throughout the year, we banded together in numerous actions ranging from frosh week rebellion against our residence executive. We dropped them off in a farmer’s field (20 miles away or so) in the middle of the night to find their way back to the residence like they did to us.

We peppered a nearby men’s residence’s balcony with locally purchased eggs as retaliation for crimes against some of the hall members’ girlfriends. The opposition dumped garbage cans of water on innocent passers by from that same balcony. We had numerous house parties that made Animal House feel more like a home movie made about our time in Edwards Hall.

But a visit to one team in particular gave me another look at what makes a team as opposed to a group. It was in Montreal while visiting the Montreal Canadiens. I was based in Toronto and used to visit Maple Leaf Gardens 4 or 5 times a week to conduct the business of providing team sales support to the Maple Leafs, Toros and Marlboros on behalf of Cooper Sporting Goods.

The Leafs were more like a group. In fact, it was the only dressing room in North American hockey that I was not permitted to enter as per the owner’s instructions, Harold Ballard. The trainers were always very embarrassed by this, especially after knowing I had just left the numerous visitor’s dressing rooms throughout the building and also the Marlboros dressing room right across the hall.

The Canadiens dressing room in the old Forum was charged with energy. The time was somewhere in the middle of their 4 year run of winning the Stanley Cup. It may have been the first or second season but that isn’t important. You could sense the confidence and shared in all the good natured fun that took place. The status lines between so-called Superstar and front line players really didn’t exist. They were all quite talented, but it is how they worked and played together that made it obvious that they worked together mostly as one unit.

They had techniques that weren’t dissimilar to my university residence experience to deal with non team players. I watched two players drink from another players coke that was chilling in an ice bucket awaiting the return of the other player from his shower. Upon his return the bottle was magically full again and the smiles of getting even were on all the other players because they were all in on the prank.

It was hard to follow some of the conversations because they were switching back and forth between English and French as if they had developed some new language called Frenlish. Most often the sentence was punctuated with group laughter. I now understood the meaning of what a team does to stay loose. Team chemistry is very difficult to develop and is much easier to destroy. Harold Ballard was very good at the latter.

It struck me as quite strange that I had to leave the room to talk to their starting goalie and go into his small and private dressing room to talk to him about the new designs of equipment that his brother worked so closely with us to develop.

Yes it was the Dryden brothers, Ken and Dave. Ken was not much of a team player while Dave was almost the total opposite. I guess their future careers reflected that. Ken became a lawyer and Dave taught school and worked at different levels in the educational system. Ken was more comfortable behind the scenes while Dave was in the middle all the time.

Some years later, I was at a conference where Ken was the guest speaker. He talked about his book, The Game. It is a very good book about hockey. I don’t remember the finish of his speech. Someone nudged me when it was time to clap.

While going on a long walk today, the thought came to mind of a friend I have made in Italy, PB and I thought about how he may have played as child. I try to understand his status updates in Facebook and use Google Translate to attempt to get a better understanding of PB’s comments. He is, of course, speaking to his friends in Italy in his native language although his English is very good.

His latest status actually was about playing 5 on 5 football (soccer in our country)  and the fact that he had scored 3 goals and something must be going right because he doesn’t normally do that.The translator came back with a reference to triplets and scoring so I thought it might have something to do with a visit to the local club last night (lol)

This new translator from Google is far from perfect but it amazes me that it can help someone like me get a better understanding of people in other parts of the world. So far, I have used it in Italian, German, Spanish and Slovak. I have limited knowledge of Italian and Polish and sometimes I wonder if my English is that good because I use so many metaphors.

I thought it would be an interesting experiment to take the feel of the pick up road hockey game and attempt to get the feel of what it might have been like to be a boy growing up in Italy and starting a pick up football game. So the following is alternating English and Italian. I made minor adjustments to the translator’s approach like Johnny became Giovanni. I have a few Italian friends here in Canada that call me that and hope they will read this and give me some feedback.

I think just the sound of people speaking Italian is very beautiful. If you want to try the Italian, just remember to say it twice as fast, with increased volume and use your hands a lot.

 The Game

 Il gioco

Johnny one grabs his running shoes on and grabs the old worn out soccer ball and goes to the centre of town.

Johnny one kicks the ball straight up in the air and bounces it off of his chest and then his shoe and again off his chest and then his head.

He repeats this again and again until Johnny 2 shows up.

What is you name?

Do you want to play net or forward?

And again when Johnny 3 arrives.

What is you name?

Do you want to play net or forward?

And when Johnny four arrives, it is a whole new ball game. You have teams now.

Your teams are AC Milan and Juventus.

You play as Diego Maradona and Pele.

You could try this with a home made cricket bat (I joined into a pick up cricket game in the parking lot of my hotel in Barbados and I was instantly accepted by the rest of the players who were much younger than I was.)

I have to believe that children all over the world all play this way and it is always for the same reason—the love of the game.

I’m not too sure you can still do this today in Toronto what with all the buildings and lights and stuff. It doesn’t seem to get cold enough for natural ice rinks anymore.

We used to dress up in our hockey gear at home. Some were more fortunate than others. They had shin pads and some guys even had real hockey pants. Then you’d take your old worn and chewed up skates and line ‘em up side by side and spear the blade of your stick through the opening of those tube blades that some players today only know from old hockey footage.

Then you’d sling the whole mess over your shoulders like Freddy the Freeloader from the Red Skelton show. You’d truck 10 or 20 blocks to a local park and slide down the hill to join the game in the open air natural rink that they made each winter. Sometimes you even took the bus. You were on a road trip. You’d put your skates on in the local building or outside the rectangular boards that surrounded the hockey rink. You just threw your boots somewhere near the boards and hoped you’d remember where you put them.

You never worried much about the puck not being frozen. Wait long enough and mother nature took care of that and a lot of your various body parts. The game would go much like it did in “You wanna’ play in or out? ” except now we’ve got blades on. And usually a lot more Johnnies show up. Fifteen a side, no problem. Nobody rides the bench. Most of the time we played under the lights and the only reason we would stop is that somebody would turn off the lights. Otherwise, nobody would know to stop. We all would have ended up being human popsicles.

Every so often the game would stop because the puck was getting stuck in the two or three inches of snow that we would build up on the not-so-even ice surface. Everyone would jam their sticks into the the nearest snowbank (another puck eater) and we would all start a new game—the human Zamboni. Everyone would find a shovel or the big scraper blades that the municipality would provide. Sometimes it took two Johnnies to push that big blade. We were all one team now.

And if we were really lucky, the local custodian would come out and give the surface a flood with a big fire hose. No problem, we just moved to the pleasure skating rink right next to the boarded rink. You had to jam your stick into the snowbank again because no sticks or pucks were allowed on that rink. You’d practice skating backwards where  most of us looked like stumbling giraffes and windmilling stuffed bears. Some guys wore way too much stuff.

And after a bit, we’d all assemble at the edge of the opening at the end of the boards where the big tractor could drive through and wait for the custodian to say “OK boys the ice is OK now.” I think he got to the second K before  he was surrounded by a whole bunch of Johnnies doing their warmup.

And then everybody would take a spot on the same teams we had before and two guys would be Davey Keon and Henri Richard. Another Johnny would act as temporary referee and get ready to drop the puck but either Davey or Henri would stand erect and say “Just a sec. I gotta’ shift my cup”. He’d dig down deep like a junior Al Bundy and take care of business and bend over centre ice. Johnny 3 would drop the puck and the game would continue.

And there would always be one bozo in the group that broke the golden rule—no raisies. He would say I was going for the top corner while the poor guy he just fired the frozen black thing into was rolling around in pain screaming “Ow Ow Ow” like some sort of vocal machine gun. There was no top corner. The posts were usually two of the rubber boots that were left on the outside of the boards.

It was always a guy who didn’t have shin pads on. The one’s we could afford always went flat because they more like pressed cardboad over felt.

And the one guy would apologize to the other and say “Sorry man, I won’t do that again. Are you OK. I didn’t mean it”. And the other guy would say “That’s OK, I’m much better now” Especially after both of them rubbed the wound to “make it better”.

And it would start all over again, but not until one guy says, you guessed it.

“Just a sec. I gotta’ shift my cup.”

Something that we used to do as kids, here in Canada, is that we would go find our road hockey stick, worn out old tennis ball (the one in the picture is almost brand new—still got lots of hair), ball glove (in case you were going to be the goalie), home built hockey net (wood & potato sacks) and truck all the gear over to local schoolyard. Nobody used the cellphone or emailed a text message. They didn’t exist yet. You just showed up in the playground. You waited for the game to start. So you shot the worn out old tennis ball at the net.

Sure enough, a Johnny 2 would show up and say “Can I play?”. The answer was always yes.

It didn’t matter because after a while you’d just switch.

You did that long enough for Johnny 3 to show up and you went through the same questions. Now if Johnny 4 showed up, well then it was a whole new game. You got 2 teams and now you have to decide who’s gonna’ pair up with who and which one is gonna’ be Montreal and which one was gonna’ be Toronto.

If you didn’t have a second hockey net you got creative. You used the nearest wall, found a rock, a piece of wood, one of your rubber boots. It didn’t matter what you used as posts. You agreed on the rules and you negotiated whether it was in or out. You did this for 5 or 6 hours and the score was probably 824 to 810 but nobody knew the score. It didn’t matter. The game is what mattered. Making new friends was the reward. Not how many guys were in your mob/horde/team/crew. We all took a break and went home for dinner.

And when dinner was done, you trucked all the gear over to the local grocery store parking lot and started it all over again. Stores closed at 6:00 back then and they chained the parking lot access so there were no cars in the lot. They had lights. Once in a while, they even repaved it. It was our Maple Leaf Gardens, our Montreal Forum. We used to negotiate back and forth as to which one it would be.

Everybody was their favourite hero. Sometimes you had to negotiate because you couldn’t both be Johnny Bower.

The tool of choice was your favourite hockey stick and if you used it as a weapon against one of the other players, the decision of the two teams was swift and close to final. You were no longer allowed to play the game until you apologized for your bad behaviour. If you didn’t apologize you were sent home crying because no one would give you the ball. You were dismissed from the tribe.

They weren’t cruel. If you showed remorse they would invite you to play and the game would continue. All is forgiven.

Where did it all go wrong?
How did we forget how to play?
How did we forget how to seek out new friends?