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a Aaa a aaa eS 12242 A505 1a Re A SR a ASR Bt AAS Sn HL ESL EV AR NE NET - x RR TE her TR A JARS ATE RES A. tg a ti A A AA UU Ee LS editorial poge Hockey, Humbug The sport of hockey in this country is wearing more than just a bit of black eye these days, and a couple of incidents over the past weekend indicate that our once proud national sport is fast becoming our national disgrace. Nothing much more needs to be said about the Roger Neilson -- Harold Ballard debacle which turned the Toronto Maple Leafs, a team with a proud history, into the laughing stock of professional sport. It is hard to comprehend how the owner of a professional team like the Maple Leafs could first of all fire his coach, and then two days later re-hire him, stating that it was "all just a hoax" to light a fire under the players and try to get them into a play-off position. If hockey in this country is bankrupt at the top, and there is simply no other way to describe the circus, it is little wonder that the rot is beginning to appear down through the junior and minor ranks. About the only thing positive to come out of the weekend shenanigans at Maple Leaf Gardens was the fact that Neilson's re-hiring was apparently a direct result of a threatened sit-down strike on the part of the team players. Now, if only the paying - customer would go no strike for a few games, the idiots in charge of that zoo might start to take the game a little more seriously. Closer to home, the Scugog Arena Saturday night was the scene of a depressing display on the ice of how hockey should not be played, and an absolutely disgusting display of spectator participation by a bunch of ninnies who think the price of a ticket is a licence to drop out of the human race for a couple of hours. The game itself was marred by high-sticking, flying elbows, chopping, hacking and an assortment of other cheap shots by players on both sides. The end result of course was a series of fights on the ice " which led to more fighting off the ice on the part of a few kooks in the crowd. Any entertainment value of the game as sport was lost. The game was less than a third of the way _ completed when the score ceased to be a factor. While hockey players at the Junior level more or less have come to accept the nonsense when they step on the ice, it was not a very happy display for the couple of hundred impressionable youngsters in the audience. Even more damaging is the way some spectators feel they have to conduct themselves at a hockey game. What went on there Saturday night - was not especially violent, but it was ugly, mean and vicious, especially some of the '/cheering" from . some of the fans. If that's what a game of hockey does to people who "CYEER Up, FAL, /7) GIVING YoU A CLEAN BILL OF CREDIT . / # THEIR pay a buck and a quarter to get in the door, one can't help but wonder if they are the problem, rather than being just part of it. The people who run hockey in this country, from. Harold Ballard at Maple Leaf Gardens to the coaches and managers at the tyke level had better take a good, hard look at the writing on the wall. Hockey is in trouble, serious trouble, and it looks like it's getting worse instead of better. Now's Your Chance Scugog Township is close to giving the final OK to one of the largest, most costly, and potentially controversial construction projects undertaken by the municipality. . Just about everyone agrees that Queen Street in downtown Port Perry is in terrible shape and needs a massive overhaul, and it looks like 1980 will be the year. However, this year, the design and engineering phase of the project will be completed, and the local council has suggested that now is the time for any groups or individuals to make comments and suggestions that may be incorporated 'into the design. Maybe the Chamber of Commerce, which, after all, has a vested interest in the well-being of Queen Street should take the opportunity to have a little input. Once the shovels start ripping the street up - next summer it will be too late. bill BLUE MONDAY By the time this appears in print, the worst of the suffering in Canada will be over. And I don't mean that dreadful February cold snap which turned us into our annual winter condition, a nation of misanthropes. - Burst water pipes, cars so cold you can't even put them into reverse to back out in the morning, and temperatures that would freeze the brains of a brass monkey are bad enough. But we're used to them. We know that in another four months, we'll be gasping in a heat wave and beating off mosquitoes. * No, that's not the suffering we did this February. It was being smugly satisfied on a Thursday night, mildly dismayed on a Saturday afternoon, and utterly humiliated on a Sunday night that caused this suffering. Talk about blue Monday. That Monday in Feb., after them Rooshians had kicked the living stuffing out of Canada's finest, was so blue it was almost purple. I'm not saying that I, personally, suffer when Canada's primary export, hockey players, is no longer marketable. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that I bleed a little, internally, when a bunch of rotten red, smiley pinko communists make a group of fine, young, liberal, capitalists look like a bunch of old-age pensioners whose Geritol has . been cut off. Right after the second game, I went to the clinic and had a cardiogram, just in case. I might say we took it well, as a nation. For once, there were no alibis. How could there be, when hundreds of millions of people saw our collective Canadian noses being rubbed in it? Sports writers, their guts churning, praised the play of the Russians and intimated that they knew all along what would happen. As they always do, after the event. : The Canadian players showed more grace. The best of them simply admitted. they were beaten soundly by a superior team. But they knew in their hearts that they, and all their highly paid buddies, were facing not a physical Siberia, but a Siberia of the soul. : They were the Best in the West, and they had not been just beaten but thoroughly trounced, by the Best in the East, where hockey is a relatively new sport. Not for me to ask, "How did it happen?"' All the experts have agreed that the Russians skate better, pass better, and are infinitely superior in physical condition to the pampered Canadian pros, who weighed an average of nine pounds more than their opponents. It is only for me to ask, '"Why do we suffer so much when we're licked in hockey?" And I think I know the answer to that. For a century or so, Canadians have been hewers of wood and drawers of water. Fair enough. We had lots of wood and water, and still have and other people need them. But we also had three superior finished products, manufactured at home, that nobody else in the world could touch, when it © came to quality: maple syrup, rye whiskey, and hockey players. iy Our supremacy in these departments is virtually ended. Our whiskey has been watered more and more, our maple syrup has been thinned to the consistency of greasy-spoon gravy, and our hockey players, with a few stalward exceptions, are most impressed with their hair-dos, their press clippings, and their financial state- ments than they are with beating their opponents. There is a sadness here. Rye whiskey is bad for the liver, maple syrup for the teeth, so perhaps their denigration is not a national disaster. But to have a hockey team that is the second or third or fourth best in the world? That is unthinkable. Every red-blooded middle aged male in Canada has hockey in his veins. He personally knows, or his best friend does, or he lives in, or lives in the next town to, or is sixth cousin of, or grew up with, or was preceded by only 10 years by, in school, a genuine hockey player, who made it to Junior A, or Senior A, or even the NHL, or one of its farm teams. Two of the quarterbacks on my high school football team, Les Douglas and Tony Licari, made it to the Detroit Red Wings organization. My brother-in-law, Jack Buell, played Junior A and Senior A and became a referee. My grandson, at the age of two, was given a hockey stick and demolished his grandmother's hardwood floors in the living room, smashing a puck around the floor with the great vigor and a certain lack of control. (She finally put her foot down when he insisted on scrimmaging around the piano while she was giving lessons.) To add insult to injury, this idiotic idea of Iona Campagnola, Minister of Jocks, has popped up. She wants to give $18.5 million of my money and yours to four Canadian cities, so that they can build big arenas to accomodate four more losers in the NHL that is already so watered-down with mediocre talent that 60 per cent of them couldn't have made a Senior A team 30 years ago. What she should do is support an Order-in- council which proclaims that, with the emergence of Red China, Russia is now a second-rate power, not worthy to be faced- off against. : Then Allan Eagleson can organize another Series of the Century with China, where they learned to skate about eight years ago. We'd probably win it by- one goal in 1980. And lose it by 10 in '81. 8