When Canadians stop being polite, and start being real

What typically happens when Canada wins gold medal hockey (all photos via)

When it comes to hockey my friend is what you would call intensely devoted to a point where you fear for your own safety. Which explains why when he woke me up last Sunday morning to go downtown Toronto and meet him to line up for a bar, before noon, so that I could pay a $10 cover charge to wait for more than three hours for the Canada / U.S.A game to start, I did (with only minor hesitations). As crazy as I thought he was, and as much as I made fun of him for it, this was no joke. The doors opened at 11:30 and I needed to be there to help secure a table for the day. My friend posed it as a question, but it was definitely leaning more towards one of those ‘shit I better do this cus if this guy misses out on the game because of me I might not wake up tomorrow’ things. Thing is, I don’t think he is alone in his temporary loss of sanity when it comes to team Canada hockey. Actually, I know he isn’t – the non-stop, all day 45 people deep line that wrapped around the bar could attest to that.

One couple, shockingly, said they travelled from Vancouver to watch the game at this very bar, which, by the way, happens to be eponymous with the greatest hockey player to ever play it, number 99 himself. Gretzky wasn’t at his bar, of course, because he was in Vancouver, where the actual game was. These Vancouverites were, however, which could mean one of two things: either they are pathological liars; or this couple is the perfect synecdoche for how crazy hockey makes an entire nation of otherwise “polite, nice” people. And if it’s that important to watch a big hockey game at a bar named after a big hockey player, then who am I to question it?

No sooner than 12:30 pm and a group of about 20 people inside Gretzky’s start chanting “Ca-na-da, Ca-na-da,” for no reason really. The game isn’t on for almost three hours, and as far as I can see no camera crews have shown up yet. The last time I saw a similar scene was when I was walking by Much Music, but instead of a large group of intoxicated 30-year old men dressed in red and white, it was a gaggle of giddy ‘tween girls in skinny jeans, and they weren’t cheering for team Canada either. It was the Jonas Brothers.

At 1:15 the crowd, which had now been consuming beer on mass for the last hour, started singing “Oh Canada” for the first time of the day, but definitely not the last. At 2:27 the second one kicked in, which also blended into the third, fourth and fifth, competing with several “Go Canada Go” chants. Just to remind you, not only had the game not even started, it hadn’t even been mentioned on the TV. Yet here we were, a group of mostly male adults, chanting for our country’s hockey team even though most of the international media painted us out to be unpatriotic and insipid. And I think we are, or at least, we appear to be, on the outside. On the inside, and inside a safe haven like Gretzky’s, we are as unabashedly and annoyingly patriotic as even the staunchest U.S. supporter, and not one of us feels any shame for it.

The game coverage finally started at 3:00, and by this point the line up outside was only slightly shorter, the doormen letting one person in for every person that left, even though it should be noted that no one had any intentions of leaving.

In fact, the line up continued to grow and stretch around the block, making it clear that the next best thing to watching the game in person was to flock to a sports pub in the tourist district of Canada’s largest city that is identical to Jack Astor’s or East Side Mario’s, except for the fact that it doesn’t have free salad, buttery good bread loaves, and there is hockey paraphernalia locked behind glass. As silly as it seems now, at the time it felt like my patriotic duty, like if I wasn’t there at that exact place, at that exact time, Canada might have lost to the Americans, thus stopping the spin of the globe and life as we know it for the next four years until we had a chance for redemption at the 2014 Games.

When footage of both teams walking from their buses to the dressing room came on the few dozen or so screens, you couldn’t help but notice the American’s poofy silver jackets. This is unlikely the reason why the crowd at Gretzky’s booed, but when the footage switched to the Canadian team, everyone went insane. Some had been waiting for six hours, drinking copiously in that amount of time, and this was the closest yet to the game starting.

When the team finally took to the ice at 3:15 the bar gave them a standing ovation. One guy actually yelled, “cheer like they can hear us from here,” which is of course impossible, geographically, and which of course everyone did. So did I, to tell you the truth. In instances like this, it feels as if you are performing your civic duty by yelling incoherently at the top of your lungs for your country. If you didn’t, not only was this a spot where you would look completely out of place (perhaps similar to Stephen Harper standing beside the real Gretzky at the game, and no one wants to be compared to that), but it would just be bad luck.

Even Jack Layton took this opportunity to show his patriotism that was surely a win-win situation for any politician – cheering for team Canada at a bar, rather than the VIP section of the Olympics. Ever the opportunist, Layton got so into the spirit that he situated himself right in front of the CTV cameras, front and centre for every goal celebration. One of the clips even show Layton trying relentlessly to push his way into the view of the camera, but when that fails, he simply grabs a girls arm who is in front of him, gently moves it down so that it is no longer blocking his face from TV viewers at home, looks at the camera and mugs. Nice and humble my ass. Canadians wanted this medal just like Layton wants to be Prime Minister, and none of us were afraid to show it.

When Toews scored the first goal of the game off a rebound from Richards, the place erupted in double high fives, chest bumps and cheers. Goal two. Perry scores, and I forgot all other inhibitions and start double high fiving anybody who wanted it.  If a hand was raised I was slapping it. I remember an old man with a big rotten bandage on his thumb looked at me, arm in the air, dirty bandage dangling, and I slapped the shit out of it. Hepatitis be damned, Canada was going to win the gold.

Words can’t describe the atmosphere when with just 20 seconds left in the game, the Americans tied it up, sending us to overtime. I was taking celebration pictures at the time and when I kept shooting after that goal, a very somber guy in a Canada jersey came up to me and said with the utmost sincerity, “Just stop taking pictures man.” I thought he was going to cry.

Contrast that to the final result, a goal by Canada’s next “Great One,” Sid Crosby. The ebullient crowd flooded out into the streets, people jumped on taxis and broke windshields, flags waved, a fire truck drove by and a group of us jumped on as it drove around the downtown core, following the wave-like energy of the crowd that was pulling everyone to Yonge and Dundas Square. That intersection was literally a mosh pit, just with less music and more crowd surfing. People were playing road hockey, faces were being painted, flag wavers had climbed on top of traffic lights over what would otherwise be one of Canada’s busiest intersections.

When I saw a police officer help one of the flag wavers down from the light, then simply pat him on the back and tell him to be careful, I knew this was something different than any other Olympic win this year. This was (men’s) hockey. When other countries try to sum us up as hockey loving simpletons, it comes off as an insulting stereotype. But when we behave like hockey loving simpletons on a day like that, it transcends any notion that other nations may have of us. Truth is, when it comes to hockey in Canada, both the players and the fans become more than just nice, diplomatic and polite. We leave all that in the dressing room and become just like my very serious friend – someone you don’t want to fuck with on game day.