Dennis Kane’s Excellent Montreal Canadiens Blog

Remember that wretched “Ole” song we heard all too often at the Bell Centre when Montreal was leading the game by a goal or two, and before you know it, the other team scores a couple and the song isn’t sung after that?

I hate that song. And the other night, watching the Olympics in Beijing, I heard it again during a men’s sailing event.

This song inspires the other team. It’s evil. Montreal has lost games because of this song.

I understand this is a popular soccer song in Europe. If so, fine. Then let it stay in Europe. Keep it out of Montreal Canadiens games. It doesn’t belong. It smacks of smugness and over-confidence, and celebrating before it’s time to celebrate.

I’ve never minded other songs and chants at games, only this one. It creates a positive charge for the opposing team. People who sing this think they’re rejoicing in the good fortunes of the Habs, but all they’re doing is rallying the other team.

There should be a city bylaw outlawing this song.

There’s been some good blog talk lately regarding the origins of the Montreal Canadiens, and the fact that Andy O’Brien’s book, “Fire-Wagon Hockey” later to become “Les Canadiens”, has original Canadiens owner J. Ambrose O’Brien’s own recollections of what happened.

I have both books, and they both print Ambrose’s memories of how it happened.

“On that chill November 25, 1909, J. Ambrose O’Brien was in Montreal buying supplies for a railway contract on the St. Maurice River. He also owned the Cobalt and Haileybury teams in the miners-supported, rip-snorting Temiskaming League. He received a phone call from the owners (George and Jim Barnett) of the Renfrew Millionaires, suggesting he apply for a franchise in the established league, renamed the Canadian Hockey Association.

This is Ambrose O’Brien’s recollection of what happened when he did apply.

“My application was laughed at in Room 135 of the Windsor Hotel where the new CHA was meeting. Out in the hall I ran into General Manager J. Gardner of the Wanderers who said: ‘Why don’t we form a new league - you own Cobalt and Haileybury and represent Renfrew, while I have the Wanderers?” So we held a meeting Room 129.”

At that meeting, Gardner had another idea. He said to O’Brien:

“Why don’t you get together a French team here in Montreal to balance off the Wanderers with a French-English rivalry?”

O’Brien, surprised, replied: “But I don’t know any French players here.”

“So what?” came back Gardiner. “I do. in fact, all you’d have to do is back Jack Laviolette financially and the team will be formed for you.”

So the National Hockey Association came into being in Room 129 - made up of the Wanderers, Renfrew, Cobalt, Haileybury, and a team to be known as Les Canadiens.

J. Ambrose told the author: “My total investment in forming the great Canadiens club was $5000. I paid nothing for the franchise; that amount was for expenses including guaranteeing of player salaries. The understanding was that the Canadiens’ franchise would be turned over to French sportsmen in Montreal as soon as practicable.” (The O’Brien interests withdrew from hockey two years later.)

The Canadiens played their first game on January 5, 1910. They won 7-6 over Cobalt.

It took the Canadiens six years to build from the NHA bottom to the Stanley Cup top.

The author also issues this footnote: “Confusion between J. Ambrose O’Brien and the author often enters because of an interesting coincidence. Both were born in Renfrew, Ont. When Ambrose took over the Millionaires, the author’s late father, Bill O’Brien, was the team trainer. Bill had started a thirty year career as a major league trainer extending through the NHL to baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers. But the two O’Brien families are not related.

‘

Montreal players will get the odd day off on the road this season, and the key to all of this is where their odd day off will fall.

For instance, the team is in Tampa Bay on Dec. 30, and doesn’t have to be in New Jersey until Jan. 2, so they can have a New Year’s Eve party. And what better place to have a party than Tampa Bay? Although the last time they decided to do this, Ryan O’Byrne got his mug shot taken.

So maybe Tampa Bay isn’t a good place to have a day off.

In February, the team goes on a west coast swing, hitting Calgary on Feb. 9th, and they don’t have to play In Edmonton until two days later, and it’s only a half hour plane ride away. So they have lots of time to relax.

Is it better to relax in Calgary, or Edmonton? I’m going out on a limb here and saying it’s Calgary. Only because the alternative is Edmonton.

So if the boys want to hang out in bars and wear shorts and golf shirts, it’s good to have days off in southern states. If they love cold and snow and a short but dreary existance in the land that time forgot, then that would be Edmonton.

However, far and away, the best city to have days off in would be New York. By a country mile. It’s the most vibrant, most interesting, most colourful city on the planet.  It has something for every hockey player. Bars, steaks, women, music, sightseeing, street hip hop for the younger players to get down and boogie, and even serious window shopping.

I have a serious dislike for their hockey team, but the city’s great.

Ken Dryden said he loved New York because of all the museums he would spend time in. He soaked up the culture. He probably didn’t even go for a beer in Greenwich Village. So Ken Dryden doesn’t count.

Forget about Philadelphia, Ottawa, Denver, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and all the rest. These places are just more stops in a long line of stops. The answer is New York. And after that, maybe Miami. And Phoenix if they want to golf and vegetate.  And of course, the notorious Tampa. And Nashville would be good if any of the Habs like country music.

And the silliest question of the day is: New York or Edmonton. Which is the better city to have a day off in?   

I’ve been thinking about something a lot lately. A little reflecting, I suppose.

Instead of working in different blue collar jobs all my life, from factories to bars to driving semi’s, and every other lousy job in between, why didn’t I, when I had the chance, try to get as close to my passion as possible?

Why didn’t I at least try? Oh, not as a hockey player, of course. As a Forum maintenance man.

I remember being at a game at the Forum when I was about twenty, and just a block away was a small apartment building. And I’ve thought about this apartment building, because it would’ve been the key.

I should have saved enough for a year’s rent, went to Montreal as a teenager, and rented an apartment in this building. Then every day, early in the morning, for months, I would’ve walked the short block to the Forum and applied for a job.

Originally I’d be turned down on a daily basis, but then I would’ve swung into step two. And that would be helping Forum workers carry things from trucks and going to get their coffee. I would’ve done this for free, of course, but it would be all part of the master plan.

The workers would soon enough get to know me because I would’ve shown up a the same time every day, and was more than willing to help them. Slowly they’d learn my story about how much I wanted to work at the Forum, and slowly, their boss would learn this too.

Then one day, the Forum needed a new labourer because someone had quit, and because the boss and all the workers liked me and knew I was a good worker, I was hired. Probably part-time to start.

I would’ve worked myself into a permanent position, and stayed there for more than thirty years.  I would’ve cleaned up hats on the ice after hat tricks were scored. I would’ve fixed the glass, painted lines, laid the red carpet for dignitaries, been working the night of the first 1972 Canada-Russia tilt, scraped blood from the ice after John Ferguson had pummelled someone, and became friendly with all the players. I would’ve been at every game and every Stanley Cup in Montreal at the old Forum for more than three decades, helped work out some kinks at the Bell Centre after moving over, and then retired. 

It probably would’ve been a dream job for me.

But I didn’t do any of this. Shit.  

I was a door-to-door milkman in Calgary for a short while, and I’d like to dispel a myth about milkmen.

Not once did a beautiful woman in suburbia meet me at the door in a silk negligee. Not once was I ever invited in for coffee by some buxomy seductress.

The closest I came was when a lady answered the door in her bathrobe and a mouth full of toothpaste.

And because this is a Habs site, I have no problem connecting this story to the Habs. Because one of my milk customers was Doug Risebrough, ex-feisty seventies and early-eighties Hab, and during the time he and his wife and kids were drinking my milk, was GM for the Calgary Flames.

Risebrough was never there when I delivered his milk, but his wife was. And they left me a tip at Christmas.

They lived in a nice house in suburbia in northwest Calgary, with a view of downtown and the Olympic ski jump, in case you’re interested.

 On this day, August 17th, in 1966, the Beatles played an afternoon show in Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens.

I was there.

I was 15 years old and had a summer job on a highway, but the boss let me go early and I went down to Toronto from Orillia with a disc jockey my sister worked with at a radio station. She had got word to me just that morning that he was going and would I like to go with him. I didn’t have a ticket, but believe it or not, the show wasn’t sold out and I got a $5.50 ticket in the the very last row of the floor.

That fall, hockey season began of course, and the next spring, the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Habs in six games to win their last Stanley Cup.

The Leafs were an old team with guys like Terry Sawchuk, Johnny Bower, Red Kelly, and Allan Stanley, but Montreal wasn’t that young either. Henri Richard was 30, John Ferguson 27, Claude Provost was 32, Dick Duff 30, Ted Harris 30, Jean-Guy Talbot was 34, Jean Beliveau was 35, and the goalies, Gump Worsley and Charlie Hodge, were 37 and 33 respectively.

Of course, Montreal also had the kiddies. Yvon Cournoyer was all of 22. Claude Larose was 23. Jacques Laperriere 24. And Serge Savard and Carol Vadnais were just 20.

The Beatles were fairly young. John and Ringo were 26, Paul 24, and George 23.

The Habs have continued on over the years in glorious fashion. The Beatles remain in the hearts of millions.

And the Leafs have continued to suck.

Today’s a day when time has run out.

I work for BC Ferries, and the weather’s been blistering hot. So therefore, it’s been busy. Really busy. And the days at work are long. Did I mention the days at work are long? And busy?

And my wife wants me to look at some paintings on the beach put up by local artists, before I go back to work, which is soon.

And then I go back to work and do it all again. It seems that every human being on the face of the earth is travelling this weekend on the Sunshine Coast by way of BC Ferries. Except you, of course. You’re stuck in a room reading this right now.

NHL training camps are still a month away. A lovely woman named Carol Huynh from Hazelton, BC, which is way up in the northwest of the province, won gold in wrestling. The Habs signed third round draft pick Yannick Weber. I saw a bear a couple of weeks ago. Last year my wife saw a bear on our street, two doors down. Schools sit quiet. There’s lots of plus-sixty year olds who drive Harleys. And my cat loves me.

So I have to go and look at paintings on the beach now, and then I have to go to work and help travellers travel.

It’s really hot.

Sorry about this.

It’s been such a disappointment for me. I had fully intended to be in the Beijing Olympics, probably as a gymnast, but 2008 just crept up on me and before you know it, the Olympics are in full swing and I never got a chance to practice or anything.

But I’ve decided to change gears and concentrate on the London Olympics four years from now. This will give me time to train, and find a new sport because my wife and friends finally convinced me that overweight people over fifty aren’t usually gymnasts.

But Archery, now that’s sport! And I noticed in the paper a little story about Canadian archer Jay Lyon, who says, “I’m not much of an athlete. I eat a lot of McDonald’s, and I’m probably overweight.”

But I’m an athlete. I was a smallish yet shifty right winger for Byer’s Bulldozers Bantam hockey team, for goodness sakes. And I don’t care much for McDonald’s.

However, I like beer and sitting in a chair.

Watch for me in London four years from now. I’ll be the one with the bow and arrow and several beer in the quiver.

I have to admit it. I miss der Habinator.  We hit the wall not long ago, and an era ended. Not a long era, but a colourful one.

Der Habinator was a regular reader and commentor to this site, and I’m hoping that soon, I’ll look and there will be his name, and under his name a rambling, abstract commentary that veers off into different spheres, from hard-core Habs talk to pretty well every subject in the history of the world, from Mongolia to Montreal.

He reminded me, and I told him this, of some of the 1950’s beat writers, with long essays, often one- sentence paragraphs, that went from here to there and made you wonder what he was on about. But also, if you read, sometimes more than once, what he was saying, he made unusual and strong sense. He forced you to read carefully.

He was aggressive, funny, maddening, smart, outrageous, strange, controversial, confrontational, and complicated, sometimes all in one sentence. But I always knew he was someone who deserved his dues. He wasn’t just whistling Dixie, he had valid opinions, but you had to sort it out from his sometimes head-scratching meanderings.

I’m really hoping he comes back. I was only mad at him. I didn’t want him to leave home.

The Habs’ big  year is coming up, and der Habinator knows his Habs. I’m gonna want his thoughts as the season unfolds.

It took me all of a couple of days to figure out that I need to say this. I hope the difficult and frustrating son of a bitch comes back.

This is, of course, a Habs site but the following is a football thing. But there is a Habs connection at the end of the story.

Several days ago I posed three questions, one of which was, “could a good US college team beat a Canadian Football League team?”

I got some mixed answers, and so I phoned a friend of mine, Al Ruckaber, who’s now retired and living in Powell River, but was a long time sports editor for the Calgary Sun. Al covered the CFL for years, and is now a member of the media section of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame. He also lived in the US for many years, and football, whether it’s Canadian or American, is his passion. 

His answer of who would win is this:

Forget about the hundreds of US colleges with football programs down there, just think about the big ones, like Ohio State, Southern California, Miami, etc.

If one of these top US college teams came up here and played on a Canadian field, which is much wider and even slightly longer, and played Canadian rules, which is three downs instead of four, then a CFL team would win.

The American players would spend the whole game doing a lot of chasing. The Canadian game is more open, the American game more defensive.

If a CFL team went down there and played on the US field, with four downs and the smaller field, with much more of a running game, plus the tight defensive game, the CFL team would lose.

But, Al added, it would never happen. The NCAA would never allow their players to play professionals.

And because this is a Habs site, I thought I’d throw in that Al spoke to Red Fisher many times over the years.