This year I made sure to go to a few Vancouver Giants games with special focus on watching a couple of teams that I knew would be in the hunt for the Memorial Cup – the Portland Winter Hawks and the Edmonton Oil Kings.
Like the Vancouver Giants are to my boys, the Edmonton Oil Kings are to me. They were the heroes of my earliest years in hockey. To see them win the Memorial Cup yesterday over the Guelph Storm brought me back to a time when in 1971 I listened as the heroes of that team – Phil Russell, Tom Bladon, John Rodgers, and of course Darcy Rota – play against Guy Lafleur and the Quebec Remparts.
The games weren’t televised in that day and age when our cable provider was, as one my former hockey goalies called it ‘TFC'(CBC and not-CBC) …so it was broadcast on the radio – ‘the theatre of the mind’ as a former business colleague related to me from his days in the radio business. I can still see the lime green leather encased radio on my dresser as I listened to the game. (Hey, it was the late 70’s and some of the designers had probably tuned out and tuned in while designing the radio!)
I missed the game yesterday sitting at the PCAHA AGM listening to the need to change clause 7, subsection 4, sentence 5, word 3 from “puck” to “pucks”.
But beside me was a new acquaintance, the Director of hockey from one of our local hockey associations. Not only was he a fellow ‘Tsawwassenite’ but he was a former Oil King goalie with the 1971 Memorial Cup team. Upon further research I found out that he also knew my older brother, Jim, through junior hockey in Edmonton. What a coincidence!
After my new friend Jack and his colleague, Eric, left to watch a graduate of their hockey program, Griffin Reinhart, play in the Memorial Cup, I heard from my other friends at the table from North Delta. They were excited to follow the Memorial Cup as well because one of their graduates, Tristan Jarry, was backstopping the Oil Kings in net that day!
For me its a hockey mosaic that extends across generations and across geographies and it connects us as family and as friends – old and new. It was a great day for hockey – it was actually a delicious day of hockey all around!
pucksense 