Vancouver Courier
for January 18, 1998

I'm always amazed how we're all so much like Charlie Brown.

Lucy holds the football and just before Charlie is to kick it, she pulls it away. And she gets away with it year after year. And Charlie is always confident that this time it'll be different.

Now this is no pontification from on high. If anyone goes into instant, defy-all-lessons-from-the-past denial it's yours truly.

No, merely some observations about how we all not only ignore history's lessons, but deliberately bury those lessons where they can't help us. We don't want help - we want to believe!

Take the Vancouver Canucks (go on, you cowards, take 'em!). We always told that salvation is nigh, but, more importantly, we believe it!

This Spring what we lacked was a leader on the ice and in the dressing room. That would get the job done for sure. So, at enormous expense, we bought Mark Messier lately of the Rangers, Kings, Oilers and such. Now if there was ever a Moses on skates, it was Mark. Why we'd even trade Pavel, if necessary, to get him.

Well, that somehow didn't quite do it.

Then the light dawned - aside from players, who's been around throughout this entire catastrophe which started right after the Canucks 7th game loss to the Rangers in the '94 Stanley Cup Final?

Why there was Coach Rennie (notice how jocks confer this lifetime title to anyone who has ever coached anything?) and there was dear old Pat Quinn whose toughness is exemplified by his propensity to blow cigar smoke in your face. Lovely man. Let's get rid of both of them and hire a real genius.

(Now I realize how churlish it is to remind people that not all that long ago Pat Quinn was such an unalloyed genius that the Canucks hired him from another team illegally and had to pay a huge fine while Quinn stayed home under luxurious suspension. Genius in hockey is, it seems, of short duration though it does seem to rise again like the phoenix as in the case of Coach Rennie's successor.)

Which brings us to the latest Moses, Coach Keenan. He was a genius then a hockey moron back to being a genius several times including a recent bout of both with St Louis where he and a certain Mr Hull (who scores almost as many goals as are scored against his team when he's on the ice) had a feud which made the Macdonalds and Campbells seem like child's play. But never mind that - he'd won a Stanley Cup in New York after 54 years and that had to show genius.

The results were spectacular. The Canucks, delighted to be rid of their former tormentors, went crazy and actually won a few games.

But, suddenly, the lamp of genius burned out and Coach Keenan was a dumb bell again.

Not to worry, though. After Keenan had been fired by St Louis he gave an interview, which I happened to catch, where he opined that he would be back in the NHL shortly. He knew that even though he was rapidly becoming one of the most fired coaches in history he was also one of the most hired. The "old boy" network could be counted upon to keep him in the lap of luxury, and so it proved. (It's pretty well accepted that the genius cum idiot cum genius cum idiot, Pat Quinn will hook up to an expansion team which will, as they announce his new multi million dollar contract, tell the fans that here we have, after all, a proven hockey genius.)

We now have a league where it is not only difficult to keep track of players, you can never remember who's coaching where. That's probably because we have 26 teams, all having convinced their fans that they're real contenders. all looking for instant gratification. That combined with players who are paid enormous sums of money to do something which, in the greater scheme of things is irrelevant, but somehow must be motivated to do what they're paid the obscene sums for.

I suppose that none of this matters very much. The real idiots in the piece are those who spend their hard earned money to watch this ongoing tragi-comedy. There is no continuity any more. No great rivalries like the Canadiens and the Leafs. No one stays in one place for more than a couple of seasons.

The beer's warm, the hot dogs cold and everything three times as expensive as it should be. And we'll go on being Charlie Brown, believing each new batch of press releases from the Canuck's overworked department of barnyard droppings.

And hockey will plod on, hiring geniuses, waiting for them to become terminally stupid, firing them, hiring someone else's idiot who has rehabilitated himself on some warm island, while someone else waits until the idiot you just fired becomes smart again.

It's even possible for a fired coaching idiot to find safe work as an idiotic colour man on TV - after all, Harry Neale did it.