O! Canada!

I am as uninterested in sports as any human could possibly be, and try to be a good immigrant, polite and all, but still, I feel a ridiculous amount of satisfaction that the San Jose Sharks went down to the Edmonton Oilers.

Most Canadians originally didn't mind sharing hockey with the northern cities like Boston or Detroit, cities where there are gritty working class families with tough kids who play hockey on frozen lawn rinks all winter and then on the street all summer stopping only for cars. But the expansion of the sadly named National Hockey League to cities like San Jose, Tampa, and Phoenix (Phoenix!), and the marketing of this fast, skillful game as an icy cross between rollerball and world wide wrestling has sat with many of us from the North as yet another arrogant American affront. The land of the almighty dollar sucking up more of Canada, along with our trees, minerals, and water.

I admit here that this reminds me of a line from "Train Spotting," when one character bitterly refers to the English as wankers and his mate points out that it is the Scots who are wankers for getting conquered by the English. So, yes, Canada does not have to sell itself out at every greedy opportunity and we really are the wankers.

And even as we gnash about being swamped and outnumbered by undeserving American hockey franchises, while our own frozen cities like Winnipeg or Ottawa can't get any ice time, at the same time we are oddly proud of the brain drain that flows south. We take inordinate and illogical pride that so many popular American comedians and musicians are actually ours.

But still, hockey. An American friend of mine once likened the affect of hockey on Canadians to the appeal of football in the US. But it's so much more. It's baseball, football, and basketball all rolled up into one sport. It's being a radical anarchist feminist yet still knowing who Bobby Orr is and skipping school to watch the Canadians trounce the Russians in the early melting days of detente. It's weeping over "The Hockey Sweater" and thinking for years that the NHL had an office here in Redwood City and finally realizing that not everything thing that starts with an N and ends with an L has an H in the middle.

It's about embracing California, and still being happy that the Ukranian and French names of a Canadian city triumphed over the Ukrainian and French names of America.

Comments

[Jo]

Heh. Next we'll be taking your Nanaimo Bars! Hahahahahaha!