Damn you, Brad Marchand!
It is anathema for me to praise Florida Panthers winger Brad Marchand.
I am an Edmonton Oilers fan, and have been since the days of the World Hockey Association. I am an old-enough Oilers fan to have seen, with my own eyes, Jacques Plante play for Edmonton at the Coliseum against New England Whalers’ star Gordie Howe. I am a crazy-enough Oilers fan to have been arrested for throwing firecrackers onto Jasper Avenue during a Stanley Cup victory parade. (I was released because officers were more urgently needed up the block at a fur store break-in. When I say released, I mean from the neck.) I am a tradition-bound-enough Oilers fan to have passed on the identity to my sons. One of my grandsons walked around during the Cup playoffs with three stuffed toys: 1. Woody 2. Buzz Lightyear 3. Ryan Nuygent-Hopkins. No one should doubt my hometown team credentials.
But I must praise Marchand. We must hear different calls. We must prove that we are still capable, even in our partisan age, of disinterestedness.
For those who don’t follow NHL hockey, Brad Marchand, 37, born in Halifax, N.S., is what you’d call a pest if he’s on your team and a rat if he’s not. He earns $5 million US a year not only to put the puck in the opposing team’s net, but to cause opponents to come mentally and emotionally unglued. After the whistle has stopped play, he comes alive. He roughs up, slashes, face-washes and chirps the players on the other team. He once responded to getting punched in the head during an after-whistle fracas by licking his opponent’s face. He taunts. In Game 4 of this year’s Stanley Cup Final against the Oilers, TV cameras caught him lecturing the Oilers bench, pointing to his own concussed brain and telling them to play smarter and not take so many penalties. Doing so, he looked like nothing so much as a tiny drill sergeant verbally abusing lines of recruits he knew were prohibited by the rules of the game from using their majority to simply attack him right then and there.
On top of all of this, he is not good looking. In the ancient Roman sense of not good looking. Because of a nose broken a half dozen times. Which actually makes him look just a bit noble.
When Marchand scored the double-overtime goal in Edmonton to tie the series 1-1, the cameras found his mom in the Rogers Place horde, alone in screaming for joy. “Way to go, Bradley!” she yelled, before going full hockey mom, “Wooo-hoooo!”
His teammates love him.
After that goal, Florida Panthers coach Paul Maurice, who, if he’s on your team, is a philosopher of the game and a great coach, and, if not, a gas bag with expensive-looking eyewear, called Marchand “truly a unique human” and “a beauty.” Being called “a beauty” is as good as it gets. The term encompasses someone who brings the whole package — speed, grit, skill, love of his teammates, broken noses.
I admit that I, as a Canadian, cheered for him on that goal.
I cheered for him on neither of the pair of goals he scored against the Oilers in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final. But, at the same time, they were remarkable. Neither included roughing, slashing, face-washing, chirping, taunting or licking. The goals looked like they were scored by Mario Lemieux, according to former Oilers coach Craig MacTavish.
On the first, on a faceoff at centre ice, Marchand bolted free of his check (Podkolzin) to collect a loose puck won by the Oilers (Draisaitl), avoided a stick check from another Oiler (Perry) before turning one defenceman around (Ekholm) and outrunning another (Nurse). The puck was in the net behind the Oilers goalie (Pickard) approximately 4.9 seconds after it was dropped. It was a 1-on-6 play. Marchand beat six men.
Marchand’s second goal of the game featured the same jump out of the faceoff blocks, this time in the Panthers zone. Lined up as a left wing, he collected another draw won by Draisaitl, again eluded a check (Perry) as he deftly made himself a target for a chip pass in the neutral zone from a teammate who had recovered an Oilers turnover at the blue line. From there, Marchand skipped the small talk, leaving an Oilers defenceman (Walman) déshabillé in front of a sellout crowd before going five hole. He left a trail of Oilers-uniformed wreckage on the ice behind him. Walman ended up sitting in his own net. His defence partner (Bouchard) left the ice shaking his head. Perry, in the corner, lay on his back, skate blades to the rafters after being knocked over by a Florida Panther in the post-goal celebration.
After the game, an erudite friend who cheers for the Oilers posted his key takeaways, topped by the simple imperative to “F*** Marchand!” The next day, a buddy forwarded a nasty meme showing an adult Marchand piggybacking a toddler Connor McDavid to the Dairy Queen counter for a soft-serve cone on Father’s Day. The implication was that Marchand was the adult. Ouch.
As an Oilers fan, I chose not to watch Marchand hoist the Stanley Cup on Tuesday night. I turned off the TV and went outside to water the tomatoes. Later, I asked chatGPT which Panthers player was handed the trophy from captain Aleksander Barkov. The bot said it was star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky. (AI got it wrong. It was actually Panthers defenceman Nate Schmidt.) Did I want to see a video of the post-game celebration, the bot asked me? No, I replied, I’m not ready to see Marchand lift the Cup.
“Totally fair,” chatGPT replied. “That one stings. After a run like that, coming up just short is brutal, and seeing a guy like Marchand lifting the Cup makes it even harder if you’re an Oilers fan.”
A guy like Marchand! Even artificial intelligence is smart enough to see it from my perspective.
I then re-read the rest of its note of consolation — if you’re an Oilers fan — and let those final five words sink in.
I am an Oilers fan and always will be. There is something very human about belonging to a tribe, in that sense of a closely knit group that offers the emotional bonds that give us a place of belonging. The tribalists are in the ascendant these days — in politics and sports. We hear of Team Canada. I live in Oil Country. We cheer for McJesus. And so on.
But Oilers hockey isn’t hockey itself. Hockey is the stage, the teams are just the players. The tough part is that the way to experience the beauty of the game is through the players, including the, yes, talented (and old) Brad Marchand.
Damn you and congratulations, Brad Marchand.
So happy to read your writing again. I hope there is more on the way.
ReplyDelete