“The Washington Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin celebrated his 50th goal by putting his stick on the ice and then mimed warming his hands over it. Some observers called it hot-dogging; when Alex was a toddler in the Soviet Union it was called central heating.” — Comedian Torben Rolfsen, on the Web site of Vancouver’s The Province.
Alex Ovechkin’s Hot Celebration Leaves Pundits Fuming
The Burning Stick Routine Looked Good from here
By Terrance Gavan
Let’s get one thing straight.
Alex Ovechkin isn’t trying to rekindle the Cold War.
He hasn’t invaded Czechoslovakia.
He hasn’t moved any strategic missiles into Cuba.
And he has not, as far as I am aware, popped poison from an umbrella tip into any rogue secret agents.
So far he has no ties extant to the Russian mob.
He’s a young Russian hockey player.
He obviously loves playing the game.
He brings exuberance, excitement and a certain joie de vivre to this game.
Maybe we should just leave the kid alone.
Maybe the pundits, like Michael Farber (Sports Illustrated, TSN’s The Reporters) and Toronto Star’s Damien Cox, and yes, maybe even Don Cherry should just cut him some slack.
The three guys above, who all get paid a King’s ransom for popping off like popinjays at all things hockey, have taken fulsome swings at young Alex the Great for his on-ice celebrations.
Last Sunday on TSN’s The Reporters both Farber and Cox slavered loopily on about Ovechkin’s inappropriate celebration after scoring his 50th goal of the season.
For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see it during the 2,134 replays on TSN, it involves young Alex dropping his stick as if it’s too hot handle, and then warming his hands over the presumed flickering flames on the titanium shaft.
Fifty goals. Anyone else from Estevan, Saskatchewan or even Cole Harbor, Nova Scotia scored fifty yet?
Give the kid his celebration. Let him rant, jump, and burn that stick up. Smoke to the rafters.
Beautiful. Remember folks, this stick burning was an allegory, a metaphor if you will. People pay great money on Broadway to watch these little passion plays roll out across the stage.
Cox, for his part, just shrugged, in that way that young Damien has, going on about the lack of professionalism and yadda, yadda, yadda … forgive me I can’t remember the rest, because frankly Damien Cox is just plain boring when he gets on these “good for the game of hockey” screeds.
Farber, a Rutgers Phi Beta Kappa graduate and an erudite writer who has risen to hockey guru status at SI, said last Sunday on TSN that he found Ovechkin’s celebration trivial and banal. “It was staged and I thought it was stupid,” said Farber. Yeah, take your Phi Beta Kappa and go Kappa Beta bye-bye Mr. Farber.
Take your whine and cheese, go out to Central Park and have a picnic. Invite Cherry and Sydney Crosby and have a group groan and moan session where you pop, prattle and poop endlessly on about the lack of decorum in the NHL today.
We are raising hockey robots here in Canada. Most of the guys in the NHL today sound like Harvard MBA grads on a mission.
Think about this. In 1972, during the Summit Series, the Russians were pegged as robots, incapable of celebration. The Canadians won, it was said back then, because we brought heart and soul to the game.
There is a case to be made that the tables have swung full 180 since that Summit Series. Young Russians are showing the heart and young studs like Sydney and other Canucks are fast becoming the grumps.
And the pundits like Farber and Cox last Sunday on TSN are even grumpier.
Luckily, for us, those two guys are just plain boring. They’re not dangerous, they’re just well, ho-hum, banal, and frumpy.
The Mad Hatter, Don Cherry, is another story all together. Don Cherry is probably borderline dangerous.
But because he comes to his audience pimped up like a latter day dime store mannequin, dressed in material gleaned from the drapery section at Woolworth’s, we have tended to cut poor Don some slack over the years.
But people get grumpier as they age. Don is no exception. He’s morphed from joke, to funny, to sad and now to just plain precarious.
And please don’t tell me about those good deeds and the causes he supports.
The Teflon Don, Mafia Boss John Gotti (deceased from natural causes in prison, by golly) was loved by the residents of his old neighborhood, was a generous contributor to hospitals that help abused children, and to Hale House, which cared for infants exposed to illegal drugs.
That didn’t change the fact that John Gotti was John Gotti. Head of Murder Incorporated, and someone you probably shouldn’t follow into an alley at 2 am on a Saturday morning.
When Crosby Stills and Nash penned, “Teach your Children Well” they were not singing about John Gotti.
And for gosh sakes I’m not comparing our Rose-bedecked, dapper-dappled Teflon Don with the guy from Murder Incorporated. I’m just sayin’ that, good deeds notwithstanding, it’s time maybe for the CBC to pull the plug on the antics, the rhetoric and the borderline balkanism that Mr. Cherry is bringing to the airwaves at a chock a block and frankly scary rate.
Cherry, in an on-camera rant a few weeks ago (sounding somewhat Stalinesque, while we’re on the topic of Russian misdemeanors) even posted a verbal warning - a little pas de deux, sprinkled liberally with that oh so dainty jingoist rhetoric - that Alex the Great better watch his back lest some dull-meloned Canadian farm boy, not quite enamored of his boyish celebrations, greet him in the crease during one of those goal celebrations and “cut him in half.”
Please let this nifty piece of Canadian-exuberance sink in, for just a moment.
And forget the good deeds and the loving portraits painted of our boys in Afghanistan. And the beautiful little moments shared with our up-and-coming boys of winter. And his lovely dog Blue.
Forget all that, and remember what Don Cherry said, with muffled glee on our tax-funded network.
Don Cherry said someone’s “gonna’ cut him in half.”
And left unsaid, but certainly implied, was the concomitant fact that Alex Ovechkin would deserve it.
In the same piece Mr. Cherry teed up a clip of some black soccer players celebrating after scoring a goal.
He stared into the camera and warned aspiring young players that this was un-Canadian and not the way we civilized lads from the great White North do it.
Implied here, well, it’s actually too distasteful for me to imply. I’m wondering why the clip was of black players celebrating and not some English star or some Italian player sliding along the grass.
What’s implied in the clip is less important than what’s implicitly inferred by the clip. Inferred by me and some others, who have stated categorically that it made them very uncomfortable.
Let’s just say that Crosby Stills and Nash didn’t have Don Cherry in mind either, when they penned that seminal song on mentoring.
Let me put Mr. Cherry on notice here.
There is no place on any network anywhere and especially not on the CBC for that type of rhetoric.
We’re too busy right now, but perhaps there will be a time, when this economic tsunami subsides, for an MP to take this to Parliament.
Mr. Devolin, can a brother get an amen?n
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