Dave Bidini

Heavy times in hockey Babylon

Life is good, despite the Leafs

Help wanted: how the Leafs can improve at the trade deadline

Well, thank God that’s over. The all-star skills competition may be the league’s marketing department’s idea of an irreverent teen dream, but to me, it comes off as trying-too-hard and embarrasing: we, too, can be as dumbass goofy as NBAers and could you believe it when Patrick Kane wore those sunglasses oh man that was rich, I tell ya: rich! The all-star game used to be a place where Mike Walton would fight Gordie Howe, or where veterans from the previous year’s spring wars would exact vengeance on the league’s Cup champions. It was the season’s first heated battle, where hip checks were thrown and stickblades were eaten. Talk about skills.

If winning isn’t everything, why bother keeping score?

The morning sucks. Especially with a family; especially with kids.

The Internet killed the sports journalism star

Once upon a time, I despised the writer Eric Duhatschek. I despised him because he wrote: “People in Toronto aren’t hockey fans; they’re Leaf fans.” When I first read this, I wanted to hit him. Hard. In the stomach; maybe the ribs. Using his column’s postage stamp photo as my guide, I looked out for him whenever I travelled to Calgary. I imagined seeing him in a bar, and pouring a beer over his head, or finding him on the sidewalk, and pushing him into thorny shrubs, or watching him climb with groceries into his car, only to club him into submission with a can of stewed tomatoes.

The World Junior Championships are obscene. But we better win.

This is not a Leafs column, so let’s put the sorrow and hope and impossibility of faith aside for a moment. Let’s take a breath, let’s launder that blood and mustard-splotched Boimstruck sweater. Let’s set aside the schedule and the standings and forget that Luke Schenn was ever born, for in a few weeks, NHL teams won’t matter. Pro hockey won’t matter. What will matter is what happens in Calgary and Edmonton, and even there, the Oilers and Flames won’t matter. Soon, it will be Christmas and New Year’s: junior hockey time. Players you don’t yet know yet will fill your screens and busy your papers and crowd your radio dial. Canada will be playing. Canada is always playing. And they better win. They better.

Among the ink-stained wretches at the Air Canada Centre

A light, twinkling snow fell against the towered streets as I made my way to the rink last night, my first visit in two years. That this blog had such pull with the Leafs’ press office made me remember the means by which I’d crashed other media rows in past years: fudging credibility to sit in old Memorial Auditorium to watch the Sabres; an anthem-singing guest appearance at the Gardens on the eve of my wedding; and a plea to a novice university pop writer from Expos’ brass in the late 80s to cover a team that no one outside of Quebec wanted to cover. On this visit, however, it appeared as if I’d found legitimacy, passing easily through the glass doors of the rink to the tableclothed media desk in the guts of the Platinum Club, securing my card—my name on it and everything—from a nice woman in whom I confessed procedural unfamiliarity. “That’s okay,” she said, adding, “The elevator is just around the corner,” guiding me with the voice of a nursemaid and a flight attendant’s wave.

My marriage is better than the Leafs—but the Leafs are pretty good, too

This past Sunday came my wedding anniversary: 19. We were married at St. Lawrence Hall in 1992, and I remember walking home in the mild weather to our hotel—the King Edward—where we immediately ordered room service, having been too distracted during the ceremony to eat much of anything. The voice on the other end of the phone told us that the hotel’s chef was in the throes of apendicitis, and would we settle for soup and a clubhouse sandwich between us? We said that would be fine, and besides, it would give me a chance to check Leaf highlights, maybe on SportsDesk at 2 am. There were no iPhones, no instant scores in 1992. Back then, you went to the car and turned on the radio to know what was happening.

What do you get when you mate a Leaf with a Lion?

Perhaps Ron Wilson can borrow the Swiss particle accelerator to create a squad of über-Leafs

This is the Leafs fan’s weakness: we get way too high and way too low

The editor is laughing. He is laughing and holding his Habs belly. He is laughing and slapping his Habs knee and pointing at the screen with his Habs finger because he knew this would happen. He bet some friends that it would. He is filling his Habs wallet with his winnings. He is getting a beer. This is too funny. Way too funny.