Protection Farm Journal: Russia Wins the Gold!

Todays post is decidedly un nature oriented. I love sports. Go figure.

Port Daniel's Yale Sudbury interviews a Mexican-Canadian Wrestler outside the HSBC Arena before the Canada/USA playoff game.

Let us now praise men and boys. And with that, if ye be a true blue buffalo let me now appeal to your non-Canadian tribalism. If you live in Buffalo you know what I mean. Over the past two weeks, the city of no illusions has been overcome by thousands of red clad maple-leaf draped Canadian hockey fans. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the habitant. But we have over 175 years of history of living next to each other. You remember the phrase good fences make good neighbors? Take that times 175 years and you can begin to understand that even though each of those years have been peaceful along the longest undefended border in the world, we do have our moments. Hockey sometimes is the catalyst. It is not just the intense rivalry between the Buffalo Sabres and the Toronto Maple Leafs that inspires adversity, but more than a few teeth have been donated to local pubs on both sides of the border over hockey disputes. Eh? But we usually try not to let bad feelings get in the way. As one Canadian scribe recently put it, “You got hurt feelings, tell me where you hurt so I can kick it all better”.

When the world junior hockey tournament came to Buffalo these past weeks, lots of us thought that we were the cat’s schizchizel. After all, the American team was the defending World Cup champion having beaten Canada in the gold game of the previous tournament. Some of us began to have anxieties in the weeks leading up to the games when it became increasingly obvious that Buffalo wasn’t quite up to hosting this kind of major world class event. Public spats between public officials and with tournament officials more than casually leaked to the press. It turned relatively ugly when the world’s sports writers began to review our little town and pretty consistently give us really negative judgments. One Swedish reporter called Buffalo “something out of 28 Days Later, minus the zombies. I think we can blow a hole in his story because trust me friends, we have the zombies.

It got much worse when a major young hockey star citing our (we thought) altruist nightlife, very publically declared Buffalo a “ghost town” and “the worst city ever”. Ouch. Seems confirmed that downtown is closed after 5pm. Too bad the player is too young to drive or he could have hightailed it out to the suburban malls.

Now the true sad fact is that not many American’s seemed to give two spits about this tournament. In fact, hardly any Americans, or Buffalonians, bothered to show up. This left the door open for the hockey fanatics from Canadaland to invade and at ties it began to feel like the War of 1812 all over again. Not that they burned many buildings and there were only a few drunken brawls or 20, but they came here in vast and lubricated quantities. And they were boisterous, anxious for redemption, er revenge, and confident in their pucking superiority.

Not only on the street corners and hotels and bars, but at every turn and at every game Canada folk outnumbered the American fans by at least 100-1. The Canadaerites came to party like it was 1980. You couldn’t move downtown without running into hundreds of boozed up red shirts with a chip on their shoulder and not a good a good word to say about USA. Gradually that focused specifically on Buffalo. “We used to like you, at least until ya burned York” was a frequent assertion, emphasis on the first syllable.

These marauders spent the better parts of two weeks puking the maple leaf all over our spic and span hooterific Chippewa strip like it was their own fresh pair of undies. Thankfully they did dropped their robust loonies in our coffers. That is a truly saving grace and we truly appreciate the patronage. That is why we are here, we must keep telling our cash starved selves.

Word is that the tipping was not so good, but still, they dropped dollars. Thanks canuks, we hardly knew ye! Come back and beer up!

The overwhelming red maple crowd was extremely in evidence when both the Canada Team and the USA Team reached the Semi-finals and had to face each other for a chance to play for the gold medal.

The loser would play in the consolation game for the bronze. Did I mention that the USA team was the defending champion and that they soundly defeated Canada in the previous gold medal game in order to be the world champion? In case you forgot that, I will point out that the Canadian affiliated did not forget. They were here with a certain blood lust. They had, as always, a very good team. Pregame predictions gathered on the street in front of the arena by this reporter and our intrepid correspondent Yale Sudbury, himself a lubricated canuk, were almost exclusively Canada-centric. Even the few American ticket holders were predicting a sound Canada thrashing of the USA’ers. 10-0 was repeatedly the gleeful and evil smirk, accompanied by other ungentle gestures toward us. One American, disguised as a Mexican-Canadian wrestler proclaimed apocalyptic visions of American doom and cataclysm at the arena. Protest was unwelcome and resistance futile. My own jingoism took a vacation as a surly Canada team stunned the USA into submission by a score of 4-1. It wasn’t really that close. One of the USA icers put it best after the game “They played like men out there tonight, we played like kids.”

Canada and Russia went to the gold medal game. USA played for and won the Bronze-3^rd place. Here is where the story gets complicated.

Gold Medal is Russia v. Canada. Next day. Come game time, gold medal redemption for the Canadians, the arena is full to the rafters with the surging red shirted crowd. Ok maybe 20 Russians, a smattering of Americans, and 18,000 Canuks. Scotty Bowman flanked by an idiotically grinning Chris Collins and an unsmiling and nervous Byron Brown dropped the first ceremonial puck to jeers. Of course when Scotty finally waved the place erupted in cheers. He is true hockey royalty and the Canadians adore him.

Game on. Jamie and Jonna and I were at Sportmen’s Tavern watching on a big screen tv. By the end of the second period Canada was up 3-0. Russia hardly had a presence on the ice. It seemed like the gold medal would be passing through the arches of the Peace Bridge in just 20 more minutes.

At the intermission of the 2nd period Jamie leaned over to me and said, watch, the Russians have come back in every 3rd period in this tournament and I bet they will again.

Less than 2 minutes into the 3rd the Russians scored. Canadian faces got a little sour but the voices were still shrill and they were looking for fights in the crowd. Russia scored again. Canadians began to release the surly bonds of sanity. Fights developed. Canadian on Canadian. After 10 minutes the Russians tied the game. They were putting on a clinic. The Canadian spirit, the Canadian surge, and the Canadian game, disappeared. In the end the Russians won the gold medal 5-3. I don’t think that I have ever witnessed a team collapse as dramatic as this one. The Canadian press agreed. In the coming days the commentary would be savage and destructive. The Canadian players seemed to know this and at the end of the game the ones that were not openly weeping were laying around the corners of the ice, sullen, eyes swollen, staring off into some memory myth that no longer existed.

The weeping of the Russians was another matter entirely.

The Russian players, or kids, all about 19 years old were still on the ice and in a state of apparent ecstasy. I have never seen a team so lit up with joy. They were jumping and leaping, waving their arms, hugging one another, huge toothless face-splitting grins and congratulations. They would leap against the glass as family members and fans on the other side would weep and laugh.

The Russian players literally tried to jump, each of them individually, into the championship cup. They held it, caressed it, and tried to fit themselves inside it. That was kind of weird, but true. They had to move around or over the mentally disabled Canadian players who were still literally strewn disconsolate all over the ice, and they did. One of the Canada players was helped off the ice. He later returned to get his silver medal with a new cast on his leg helped by two giant weeping Canada kids. It was really something to see. Opened bottles of vodka appeared on the ice. Shots, many were downed. Songs, or a particular song began to be sung. The Russians continued to party and sing. The TV broadcast ended. Hail Russia!

The next morning at about 8am, I awoke to a breaking news story that the Russian hockey team had been detained at the airport. According to the many news stories they had been removed from a plane for unruly and disrespectful behavior. They have been (temporarily) refused flight permission because, according to several witnesses, they were completely (and I say this in the best Canadian accent I can muster) drunk.

By noon the news is breaking that they had a rather engaging and extensive celebration time last night at the Adams Mark bar, which now stands accused of breaking liquor served to minors law. Many witnesses are saying that the young Russian team was quite party-licious well into the night, tossing down vast amounts of vodka, giving away sticks and skates after autographing them, posing for photos, and singing over and over "mother the gold is ours!" In fact many observers have declared that they never slept, just went off to get on the airplane at the appointed time. Seems like they have a holiday to celebrate in Russia. Now delayed. Of course it is illegal to drink, or to serve alcohol in Buffalo to anyone under 21. Oops a daisy!

The Russian hockey team and several witnesses including other passengers on the plane that they were removed from protest the allegations. Most say that the team was calm, a few may have been unconscious, but no one stirred up any, rowdiness. The airline says that the flight crew deemed the team to be a threat to the security of the flight and they can refuse to let anyone board for these kinds of reasons. The flight crew won this one. Team Russia ejected. Come back tomorrow, or sometime when we can schedule another flight to Mother Russia.

That turned out to be a few more days. So they missed their homeland holiday celebration and instead had to hole up in a seedy airport hotel while they figured out how to get home. Here the story gets really interesting.

The local TV news teams were on this story. They began carrying reports of the irresponsible original hotel (Adams Mark) serving liquor to minors and the growing alarms about lawlessness and the investigation that was launched by the local district attorney. And they began to cover the team as it waited in the new airport hotel, players and coaches lounging around the pool and in some instances recovering from wicked hangovers. This went on for about 24 hours. Someone saw this. Someone whose son plays floor hockey that lives near the hotel. Someone who’s floor hockey playing son had a birthday party scheduled that afternoon and it happened to be at a floor hockey facility with the sons floor hockey team. And he went to the hotel and invited the Russian Hockey team to come to his son’s birthday party and play floor hockey, And they did.

And so, in the midst of a sometimes soul trying, raucous, verbose, obnoxious, depleting, hair singeing, and sometimes funny and overwhelmingly fun and joyous international hockeyland experience, this really remarkable thing happened. A Buffalo kid got to play the Russian Gold Medal winning hockey team at his birthday party. It doesn’t get much better than that. It just doesn’t.