Sal_Butera
Well-known member
Should bring a smile to Sunshine's face.........
http://www.thestar.com/sports/hocke...abs_rivalry_is_over_and_montreal_has_won.html
By: Kevin McGran Sports Reporter, Published on Mon Apr 21 2014
MONTREAL—It’s Saturday morning and Michael Meduri feels like taking his 12-year-old son, Emanuel, somewhere special.
They end up at the corner of St. Catherine at Atwater streets in the western edge of Montreal’s downtown, at the site of the Forum. Now (oddly) an entertainment centre, it is nonetheless the true home of the Canadiens’ storied hockey history.
Inside, they grab a coffee and a muffin, stroll across where centre ice used to be, note the statue of Maurice (Rocket) Richard and sit in the iconic red seats, taking in the history before them.
It’s father and son sharing a moment about their favourite team when an interloper from Toronto approaches to ask about the Habs.
“They’re the best team in the National Hockey League,” says Emanuel, his father smiling beside him. “Find me another team that won 24 Stanley Cups.”
The interloper from Toronto thinks, “Yeah. I’ve heard that one.”
The rivalry between the two cities — as lived and breathed by rabid fans of their two hockey teams — is quite possibly over, a fait accompli. What’s the English word? Oh yeah. Passé.
Montreal won. It wasn’t even close.
From bagels to bistros, smoked meat to poutine, cycling-friendly roads to restaurant-friendly sidewalks, Montreal has Toronto beat. Mayors? Theirs is only controversial once in a while.
Alcohol — if you’re into that sort of thing — is available in corner stores. Joie de vivre? Well, it’s a French phrase, isn’t it?
As for hockey — and we’re into that sort of thing — how is it that Montreal is always better at hockey than Toronto? This is a hockey nation. Toronto is the biggest city. There are more Torontonians in the NHL than Montrealers.
The Habs are back in the playoffs once again. The Bleu-Blanc-Rouge are playing the NHL’s other team that wears blue and white — the Tampa Bay Lightning.
And Montrealers are having a good time while Torontonians watch on TV. The streets are loaded with Habs jerseys. The stores hang signs to support the team. When the Bruins — Montreal’s playoff arch-villain — are playing, fans gleefully cheer for the Red Wings.
“It’s the joie-de-vivre, the love to live, the joy,” says Frank Silva, manager of Schwartz’s, Montreal’s landmark smoked-meat shop. “It’s the bar scenes. People want to party all the time.
“(We have) a winning team. It’s like you’re part of the team.” Lording it over us? They’re pretty good at that, too.
It’s not just the playoff appearances and Stanley Cup titles that set Montreal apart. It’s outside the rink, where the Bell Centre is a recognizable landmark, not hidden underneath expressways and skyscrapers. It’s inside the rink, where the game operations people just have a sense of the moment, like adopting Youppi as the mascot when the Expos left town, or cameos by former stars rather than long, awkward car rides across the ice.
“We put a lot of effort (into game-ops),” said Kevin Gilmore, the Canadiens’ chief operating officer. “We don’t take that for granted. “The challenge is, how do we get better? You can’t get be too over the top.” Regardless, every night, the fans sing. Okay, it’s one word — Ole — over and over again. But still.
Compare that to Toronto, where every time Leaf fans dare to begin chanting “Go Leafs Go,” they are inevitably drowned out at the stoppage of play by some marketing moment disguised as a moronic trivia game, or the ear-blaring sounds of rock music (classic or alternative). That usually is followed by — and the irony here is delicious — the scoreboard telling the fans to “get loud.”
It’s the torch, le flambeau, that is tangibly passed from generation to generation of Habs greats, theirs to hold high. It works both literally and figuratively. While Leaf front office types have grumbled for years that the Habs hijacked In Flanders Fields to get their hands on that torch, the Leafs have tried various copy-cat approaches. Most recently, they placed a boulder from the Canadian Shield outside their locker room to make the team feel “rock solid.” Get it?
Take Vincent Damphousse, the first French-Canadian draft pick by the Maple Leafs. The Montreal native came to the Leafs in 1986, a witness to the end of the Harold Ballard era, a time when captains were ridiculed by ownership, past Leaf greats were told to buy tickets if they wanted to see a game and the team was severed from its glorious past. “The Ballard years were very tough,” says Damphousse. “The team was in a shambles when I played there. We had a committee of three general managers, a lot of different coaches. You could feel in the dressing room that you had no feel what direction the team wanted to go. There were no ex-players around the dressing room. There was no connection to the past. That’s very important. You’ve got to know where you come from.
“In Montreal, I used to see Maurice Richard, Jean Beliveau, Guy Lafleur all the time. They would come in and say hi. The kids that come from Europe don’t have a clue what being a Montreal Canadien means, but they feel it when they get there. “Toronto has lacked that for a lot of years.” The Maple Leafs alumni have been welcomed back to the fold in the post-Ballard era. But their winning ways didn’t accompany them. They say your favourite team when you are 12 is your team for life. Today’s young adolescents in Toronto have only regular-season misery and late-season collapses to bond them, like the missed high-stick on Doug Gilmour in 1993 binds fans from a generation earlier.
Montreal’s young-uns don’t have the Cup championships of their fathers, but to bind them they do have some regular playoff appearances, their hate of the Boston Bruins — and hey, they’ve toned down the whole post-game rioting thing. Maybe we’re maturing as a nation to the point where we don’t need to take pot shots at each other.
Maybe the other sports teams — Argos vs. Alouettes, TFC vs. Impact — have to up their game. And maybe the rivalry is not dead.
Maybe it only feels that way because you’d have to be of a certain age — by that we mean closer to the end than the beginning — to remember the last time the Leafs and the Canadiens played a meaningful game against each other. The last time they met for the Cup was 1967; the last time they met in the playoffs was 1979. So maybe, just maybe, if the Leafs could get their act together and make the playoffs again, this rivalry could be renewed. Because, as 12-year-old Habs fan Emanuel Meduri put it: “I don’t like the Toronto Maple Leafs.”
http://www.thestar.com/sports/hocke...abs_rivalry_is_over_and_montreal_has_won.html