Thursday, May 13, 2010

I Love Hockey, EH! I Love Drinking, EH! I Love Canada, EH?

Now I will admit that I pick on Canada a lot, and that may be unfair. Because as much as I make fun of them for being drunken, rioting hockey-heads, they are actually a classy bunch of people. Oh, wait, never mind.

Basically, the Montreal Canadiens win a game and their fans then proceed to light their city on fire. By the way, who names their team after their country? It’s a little arrogant don’t you think? Not to mention not very creative (but at least this way, every drunken fan can call themselves the team mascot). Now just to make it clear, the game that the Montreal Canadiens won was not the championship game. It was not even the conference finals. It was the conference semi-finals. I make fun of hockey a lot, but I really do like hockey, and the playoffs in particular are very exciting. But rioting after two series? Of course it’s always possible that this was just an average Thursday in Canada. I would bet money that at least one drunken rioter, when asked about the game, responded: “There was a hockey game tonight?”

I remember sitting on the couch watching fans at the game jumping up and spilling beer on themselves while screaming their lungs out. The sad part is that if I just saw that scene, I would still have no idea who was winning the game. I once went to a Denver Nuggets game against the Toronto Raptors. There was a small section of Toronto fans waving Canadian flags and consuming at least half of the beer in the building. Even though there were thirty of these Canadians in a crowd of 20,000 Americans, the loudest part of the game was the singing of the Canadian national anthem, which I’m pretty sure even the Canadians don’t know the words to. I just heard “Oh Canada!” really loud followed by what sounded like thirty drunk people all mumbling different things. Anyway, the Nuggets were routing the Raptors, yet the happiest people in the building were the Raptors fans, who either are unaware of the rules of basketball, unable to count, or too drunk to give a damn either way.

But you can bet that Canadians care much more about their hockey. When you are only good at a few things (and one of those things are producing irritating singers like Justin Bieber), you have to take pride in those things. I’m sure you all remember the epic gold medal game between the US and Canada a few months ago. Now, we Americans were bummed for a little while that we lost, but we were frankly just happy we got that far. But Canada? If they had lost that game there would have been more suicides than a Jonestown reenactment. To defend their honor, Canada probably would have mobilized their army and invaded our country. Of course, by “mobilized their army” I mean loading seven drunk guys in the back of a truck and by “invade our country” I mean start a few fires in Maine.

What’s ironic is that the hero of that gold medal game was Sidney Crosby, who scored the winning goal. In the days after that win, you probably couldn’t find one woman in the country that didn’t want to have Sidney Crosby’s child. You probably would have had a hard time finding men who didn’t want to have Crosby’s baby. But how quickly things change when most of your country’s population has alcohol-induced short-term memory loss. Canadien’s fans were actually burning pictures of Crosby (who was on the Pittsburgh Penguins, the team that the Canadiens beat), which is pretty much the equivalent of burning pictures of Jesus in Canada.

But we now have to look at the bigger picture. Montreal will now face the winner of tomorrow’s game between Boston and Philadelphia, two cities not exactly known for their restraint either. So no matter what happens, the streets will be filled with drunken hockey hooligans. I mean, if Canadiens fans rioted this much after a second round series, can you imagine what would happen if they won the Stanley Cup? The entire eastern half of Canada will just become engulfed in flames. People in space are going to look down and think “Oh s**t they won.”

So unless you want French-Canada to end up as a pile of ashes (and think hard about your answer to that), we need to take immediate action. We need to start cheering for the San Jose Sharks, who are in the Western Conference finals against the Chicago Blackhawks, to minimize rioting. I’m pretty sure that very few people in San Jose are aware of the fact that they even have a hockey team, much less that they are in the conference finals. If they win, their fans will react the same way they do to everything in Southern California: they will get high and sit on the beach. Of course we could also root for Chicago, whose fans will try to take to the streets to riot but will probably freeze to death before they can do anything.

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