When I played shinny at lunch time on the ice fields of a Hull arena, I was dubbed "Clobber" - my hockey skills being more to the clutch and grab side of the art as opposed to the shooting, skating, and scoring side. In doing the daily stats for the annual office NHL play-off hockey pool, I began creating little stories/reports about the games from the night before. Eventually, the famous Clobber Report was born.

CLOBBER REPORT Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Hockey Night in Toronto

"If this was baseball, they'd walk me." Jaromir Jagr, New York Rangers

I guess ole Jaromir is getting a little extra cloak and dagger coverage this year as he leads the race for the scoring title and the Rocket Richard Trophy.

Nonetheless, Jagr was front and centre and left uncovered in presenting a gift to the widow of Bernard "Boom Boom" Geofferion in honour of the great Montreal Canadians' star whose number was being retired at The Bell Centre on Saturday night - shortly after the Boomer himself took his final slap shot at life and gracefully retired to the heavenly golden golfing greens in the best-marketed, but least known, gated community in the Universe - the pearly one with the cherubs and horns and the houseboy called St. Peter.

I'm sure the Boomer was handed a silver hockey stick and a pint of Cinquante and shown the way to the "50 Goals in 50 Games" condo section.

And where, you might well ask, was our beloved symbol and endower of National Unity aka the CBC? Well-ensconced at the Centre of the Universe - Air Canada Centre, kow-towing to the modern urban barbarians and the upwardly volatile, disinfectantly known as "Leaf Nation", broadcasting the Leaf-Tampa Bay game.

Do you think some genius might have at least suggested that our national boobcaster show the Geofferion ceremony and THEN, if they must, segue to the Leaf-Lightening game? How'bout employing that there new technological wonder thingy - the split screen? Not on your life. It's gotta be 60 minutes of Leaf Nation on HNIC, including the endless tiresome rattle of some CTV Canadian Idol Neanderthal singing two national anthems... or the ratings will fall and even Don Cherry will be in a snip.

And whom did Leaf Nation have in attendance that night? The bleeding Hansen Brothers from the movie 'Slap Shot'. How bloody despicable and ironic. The Boomer, for those who weren't around at the time, invented THE SLAP SHOT! Was HNIC and Leaf Nation trying to be cute? And what about Don Cherry and his knee-slapping pal, Ron MacLean? Cherry down-played Geofferion's Montreal years - the two Art Ross trophies, the 6 Stanley Cups etc etc - because, well in Montreal, the team was so good back then, all you had to do was put your stick on the ice..and so Bernie's best contribution to the game was resurrecting the New York Rangers after coming out of retirement. Ron MacLean quipped "not to mention the beer commercials". How sad. How terribly sad. How incomprehensibly sick. This is the same gang that held a Tired Dummy night the week before. Tired Dummy Night!! That's scraping the bottom of the barrel, eh? What next Leaf Nation? Evil Knevil jumping his motor cycle over the dug-up graves of King Clancy and Harold Ballard..... with Eddie Shack clearing the track? There's only one word that comes to mind for Leaf Nation Executives and HNIC - "vulgar". You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Les Canadiens, especially of the 50s and 60s, are the legends of the sporting world. Those teams have more Hall of Famers than Mr. Christie has cookies. Montreal and The Forum. Danny Gallivan. Toe Blake. Sam Pollack. We're talking history here folks - Canadian folklore. There's been stories written about hockey sweaters, the Rocket, the Pocket Rocket, Howie Morenz, Jean Beliveau, Doug Harvey, Jacques Plante...and.."Boom Boom" Geofferion....with brown fedora sporting sports' guys pounding type-writer keys late into the night, smoking stogies, drinking gin, setting down the record of yet another Stanley Cup victory by the blue, blanc and rouge....and yet again... with Lafleur, Dryden, Robinson, Savard, LeMaire, Cournuyer......these are our New York Yankees, smell the mystique. Their 'national memory' is as necessary to our culture survival as a Leonard Cohen poem or a Stompin' Tom O'Connor song. And HNIC and Leaf Nation would rather bring you three goons from an American movie on the night one of the game's greatest scorers not only dies but is honoured by ROC..the rest of Canada, i.e those of us living outside the Big Brother influence and mind-altering/controlling drugs of the evil empire known as TOR-ON-TO, the city that has gifted us so culturally with "Honky the Goose" by Johnny Bower.

Oh well, the stands were full, the beer got sold, the ratings were high..ho-hum. Internet poker anyone?

Keep slapping'em Boom Boom.

The Clobber

CLOBBER REPORT Thursday, February 23, 2006
"A Few Odds and Sods"

"At least the men's team didn't run up the score!" Shari Worden, Vancouver, Province, Letters to the Editor

And so begins the post-game analysis in the bars and boudoirs of our nation.

On the cover of today's edition, The Province had prominent pictures of the 4 women medalists followed underneath by a pic of Homer Simpson. " Two Gold, Two Silvers, One Doh!"

Most pundits in Vancouver are saying no one here was surprised at Bertuzzi's performance, including the dumb penalty - that's how he's played all year. A sportscaster from Calgary echoed that sentiment but added..nor were Flames's fans re the inferior play of Jerome Iginla.

Two chances to pick Phaneuf - Gretz took a pass - something his selected troops had difficulty doing.

Many think we got trumped by the Wise One's choice to stick with the Vets..and the same old dry chorus came out re Stall, Crosby, and others Not being on the team. Some saner heads said: "and who would you have not picked?" In the end, the guys that wore the jerseys didn't play up to everyone's expectations. Bob Mckenzie on TSN lays the blame on the Top 7 - the guys who were hired to fire the puck into he net. He's right. Shane Doan and Brad Richards led the team in scoring. If you had been on Planet Orcon during the Olympics, you'd have asked "and why didn't they have Iggy, Gagne, Sakic, Heatley, Thornton, Nash, in the line-up?!!" Then again, one pundit was quite brutal about the line-up choices - that this team was picked last summer and it didn't matter how well anyone played or didn't play during the season. "Gretzky has to learn - has learned - the lesson of all young GMS who have early success - you should never fall in love with your talent."

Pierre McGuire took direct aim at the coaching staff - no one seemed to be in charge; two of the team's assistant coaches were basically shunted to the sidelines and hardly even took part in the practices. I'll go back to my pre-tournament comments - Quinn and Hitchcock don't really like each other. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

Donald S. "I'm right all the time and the rest of you twits are nitwits..and I told you so" Cherry took a pretty good, and rightful, shot at Pat Squinty re how the Russians played a different game than normal. The one man out, 4 man back strategy seemed to surprise Squinty. Cherry basically wondered cynically if anyone had been scouting/watching the Russians during the round-robin....er..like he had. Love him or hate him, Cherry is correctomundo. What exactly was the coaching staff doing the night before the game - watching highlights from Naganno? That's a brutal indictment of Pat Quinn et al. It goes along with the ice surface, lock-out excuses...okay..explanations..no one was making 'excuses'. This team was NOT prepared properly. Hey..the Swizz had a Canadian coach; maybe next time we should hire a European coach.

The Wayner said "that loss against the Swizz really hurt us.." No shit Batman. Two easy wins against the two worst teams in the pool and then wham-o, you face your first competition with NHL goal-tending and you're dumped and can't handle the pressure. Right then and there, not only you but the rest of the teams in the tournament realized that Team Canada was not necessarily the force to be reckoned with as all the pre-tournament hype suggested. The women's curling team suffered from a bout of food poisoning; Team Canada suffered from a bout of constipation.

But you know what, here's some late breaking news which may account more for the loss more than anything else.

The Olympic Village only serves Budweiser beer.

No wonder we looked old and slow and took brutal penalties - we thought we were Team USA!

Another medal today from the women - a Bronze in curling..yahoo! Break out the rum and coke. We're now guaranteed 20 medals with an outside chance of a few more...

Cindy Klassen: absolutely amazing. (James Duthie of TSN asked "can Cindy Klassen play right-wing?")

We have much to cheer about.

Go Canada Go!

Clob

CLOBBER REPORT for Wednesday February 22, 2006 - 'Lament for a Nation'

"There'll be a lot of people tonight suffering from the disease of conceit..." Bob Dylan

Canadian men's hockey died a slow blood-curdling operatic death in Italy. The ghostly lions arose from their slumber and left the Coliseum to devour the Canadian corpses left wounded and screaming on the streets of Rome. The gondolas in Venice, lost in the sudden fog of a speeding Ovechkin, over-turned on their way to the Lido.The fat lady sang at la Scala in Milan. The Venus de Milo shouted "Hey, losers..ya got no legs!". The leaning tower of Piza straightened for a moment if only to guffaw.

To wit: we got our cocky little fanny's smacked and were sent to our rooms.

Worse than Naganno. Much worse. In Japan, we were defeated by key injuries and the Dominator. In Turin, well...there's a lot of sharing, sharing, sharing among our badly beaten beavers. What happened?

Okay, so getting off the plane may have been a bad idea..but lets' look beyond that.

In no particular order:

• A lot of quality players choked and the coaching staff couldn't find a way to figure out an alternative plan fast enough...so, much of the blame lies on Quinn and company. The benching of Rick Nash was inexcusable...that sent a bad odour message to the rest of the team - "make a mistake and I ain't playing, so be careful and don't rock the boat. Look busy". Stomper says and says often..get rid of these old farts as coaches - the game has passed them by..they're living in the past. Thank goodness that's the last we'll see of Pat Squinty behind the bench - he seemed bored and lifeless - maybe cause his players had tuned him out; Nick Kyperos said that Quinn has always been brutal on young players...and Rick Nash may never recover. So the kid made some dumb plays, he's a kid...that was part of Wayne's plan you dolt!!! Blend in the kids. Dumb plays! Well..there's a long list...so did..and maybe moreso..Pronger, he of great experience and composure at such Games..yeah right! Yet he played oodles more than he should have! Cut Nash's ice time down, have a talk with him after the game..but benching him was an act of inexcusable blindness..even meanness.
• Some of the post-game hoopla I saw was non-sense..the lock-out is NOT an excuse; the big ice surface? Maybe..but you had 6 games to adjust...and hey..did they surprise you with that when you got there!!??? We've known about the ice parameters since like 1937!! Grow up!
• Stupid penalties throughout the tournament. And, I worried, along with Kelly Hrudy, that Todd would cost them a goal at some point and he did..to start the third; Pronger took some stupid ones throughout the tourney..as did McCabe;but ya can't hang today's loss on them. (Actually McCabe played very well today.)
• The coaches changed the lines to experiment not because they weren't working... and then panicked and changed them again..hmm..that's not working..oh well, better leave fair-enough alone and hope it works out. Iggy and Joe weren't exactly lighting it up..how come they stayed together till the shower after the last game? Todd was never the same after his first and best game..when he played with Brad Richards. On Thornton's line with Nash, he looked smaller than Gagne!!"What's my role here?" Then the Moore suit hit and he skated around like a doomed Hamlet..."to be or not to be..to hit or not to hit..that is the question..". Okay, not to be too hard on the Todster, he made some great defensive plays early in the game....but looked lost offensively and then..that stupid penalty.
• Our best players were not our best players. Our best players were our grinders - Drapper, Smyth, and especially Brad Richards.. But again..what signal was Pat trying to send at the end of the 2nd period by having those guys on the PP? Again, stupid move..what were Iggy or Burnaby Joe or others thinking at that point? We need a goal and our best scorers are watching the game from the bench. Then again..who were supposed to be our best players? (See below for more comments.)
• Where was our vaunted team speed? For that matter, where was our size? Neither Bertuzzi or Nash or Thornton made much impact upfront..or along the boards. They'd get to the puck and then...despite some out-sized matches (Pronger vs Koivu comes ot mind) lose it or make a stupid pass to nowhere..well, everywhere but in front of the net cause most times there wasn't anybody in front of it! Sorry to say but Heatley was absolutely terrible today and was basically a non-factor through-out the tournament.....take a few shots, not score, "ho-hum..what the hell...guess I'm snake-bit...better go to the bench..check my e-mail"...but he wasn't alone..add Vinnie and Iggy..a few flashes but no finish on passes, checks, anything!! Too tentative....when was a Canadian team ever that shy about going to the front of the net, creaming someone into the boards, taking th epuck and screaming one to an in-coming defenceman??? Etc etc. Again - see notes under "coaching staff".
• I kept waiting for that ole Canadian can-do spark, the swarming of the net..the late game heroics. (I saw a few signs of that in the Swizz game.) But, even at the start of the third, with the game up for grabs, they came out flat. It was only a matter of time till Todd did a Todd by taking an unnecessary penalty in the offensive zone...but ya can only keep the Russian PP quiet for so long before it's so long been good to know ya. Too many penalties - they never had a flow to their game. Anyway, when a team continues to play that flat game after game...maybe you do have to look behind the bench and in the locker room for more answers...what exactly was said between the 2nd and 3rd period? I dunno..did anyone else sense that the team came out..er..different? Maybe I was just expecting too much; maybe I've under-estimated just how great a defensive gem the Ruskies played..a novelty! Especially when you consider Pavel Bure is their leader! Hey..even Yashin was back-checking!
• The offence was snake-bit and we got little or no attack from our defence - who may have played their best game today but too little too late. I could make a convincing argument that the turning point of the whole mess was when Nash scored on the Swizz and it was reviewed and discounted. If that goal is counted maybe we pop a few more, confidence builds.. and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
• Yes we legitimately tied the game today. In my opinion that whistle went-off much too fast from a guy standing BEHIND the net..okay, stay out of the play but adapt to conditions!! How can you call the play dead from that angle and say the rules say when the ref loses sight of the puck yadda yadda...but there ya go..disallowed goals didn't help us in this tournament..but when you're shut-out three games out of four, 11 periods out of 12..don't blame the refs or the goal judge...look at your exploding broken hockey sticks.
• Gretzky - the man who will take and to his credit will shoulder most of the blame - perhaps took the high-road, the safe route - hire the same guys, as well as many of the proven players, despite the lay-off, and their poor play so far this year...yet, some of those guys were looking great just before the tournament began. More critically, in hindsight, was his continual lament re no Mario or Stevie..and the message gets through....the boss doesn't think we're made of gold. Maybe If you're a certain captain whose name happens to be Joe Sakic..maybe your'e thinking.."the boss doesn't really have confidence in me; I'm just the oldest..that's why he picked me"...especially when you hear the boss saying much the same thing after every game. You can't pass the torch to a proven winner like Burnaby Joe and blow on the flame at the same time. And maybe Gretz, by inference, in saying the young guys have to step up, put too much pressure on them..which young guys or guy? "Me? Him? I'm f...ing confused? I'll wait and see what happens." Then again...no one stepped forward. No one. Nada. Nyet nyet. Even when Burnaby Joe dressed and played - better than most that day - with a broken cheek-bone..no one stepped up... and shouted "follow me you princes of Maine, you kings of New England". Sorry Wayner, this time you should have wired it - your mouth that is. Ironically, maybe you should have talked only about gambling! Alas, it ain't your fault, certainly not entirely - second-guessing I'll leave to others re Stall, Spezza et al; you picked a great team - some of the same people who were screaming for Stall were also cursing when you picked Doan, Smyth, and Drapper. Something funny happened, or didn't happen, on the way to the forum; the team never jelled....but maybe Mario was right; you should have sent the kid..or at least someone who could skate faster than Moses.
• In the end, maybe most of all, it was what Peter Cussons said: too many stars looking at too many other stars, thinking this would be a cake-walk...after you Alphonse; maybe Canadian men's hockey suffers tonight from the disease of conceit.

We have 4 yrs to get over this embarrassment...and make no mistake about it, this is a huge embarassment....time enough to figure out who should represent us next time out...and if I'm picking the team, I already have my captain: Brad Richards..and my assistant: Shane Doan.

Light? A silver-lining? No much to rely on but the silver medalists from Salt Lake are coming home as well. Okay..maybe Nabobkov just had an especially brilliant day.

Well, maybe we should send some good ole Canadian hosers instead since 97 million dollars doesn't buy you happiness...or a piece of gold.

"You play hockey?"
"Yep" "Drink beer?"
"Yep" "like Stompin Tom?"
"Yep" "You're on the team!"

One last note: after all is said and done, I feel sorry for these poor buggers - they have no idea what kind of negative press they'll be coming home to. So, let's not put the knives in too deeply or for too long..they tried. They just weren't prepared or good enough.

And hey..what about them Skaters and Skiers today!! Yahoo!!

Go Curlers Go!

The Clobber