29 April 2009
 
East is Red

(Claude Provost)
 
I remain concerned about harsh treatment of prisoners, really. I am just confused about who we are at war with: is it the people who are supposed to protect us, or the guys who are sworn to kill us? Maybe it should be the New York Times, those schmucks.
 
I had launched off yesterday into a survey of pandemics- it is time. The news is saying the first US death attributable to the New Flu happened last night, and we could be on the edge of a precipice with a very long fall. It is a hundred days of the new Administration, too, and the talking heads are all agog.
 
But the hell with it. There is plent y of time of the End of Life As We Know it tomorrow.
 
I am not much of a sports fan, though I change with the rhythm of the season, enjoying football, baseball and basketball in their moments. I enjoy watching paint dry and corn grow, so I will occasionally watch the Masters golf tournament.
 
If you peeked in the back bedroom at Tunnel Eight, though, you would see some fine art and a Red Wings crimson home sweater on the wall, the winged wheel insignia in embroidered bright white stitching.
 
It is time. The home team here on our part of the east coast is the Washington Capitals, of course, and they are a pretty good club. Their practice facility is jammed on top of the parking structure not even a mile away, over by the office, and to justify the public money that went into building it, there is open skating twice a week between one and two in the morning.
 
Anyway, it is the start of the quest for Lord Stanley’s Cup again, and the Caps were down 1-3 against the Rangers in round one. Mild depression, I suppose, though I don’t have that much emotion invested in the team. My loyalties will always be with the Motor City.
 
The Caps got my attention, though, clawing back to game Seven against=2 0the odds. There is also an old friend on the team, and here on the Potomac, I saw The East is (still) Red.
 
Downing the Rangers last night, center Sergei Fedorov played in the 176th Stanley Cup playoff game of his NHL career. I listened to tunes on the iPod with the big screen on mute due to the sheer tension. Could the Caps do it at The Phone Booth downtown?
 
As usual, the burden was on the shoulders of Sergie, the wily Kalmuk, and he came through with the wrist shot over the outstretched glove of Henrik Lundqvist at 15:01 of the third period.
 
Big Pink erupted in muffled cheers in units on all eight floors- you could feel it through the concrete.
 
I checked my note-book. Fedorov is now one game shy of tying Hall of Famer Al MacInnis for 25th for most play-off appearances. Thanks to that game-winning goal Fedorov won’t have to wait till next year to catch MacInnis.
 
The game winner was the 52nd of his playoff career, and the 172nd point of his Stanley Cup playoff career. He is the consummate money player: he has six career points (three goals, three assists) in eight career Game 7s.
 
Our Favorite Russian is now tied with Hockey Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux for 15th place on the league’s all-time playoff scoring list, 12 of them game-winner, which makes tied for 17th on the NHL’s all-time list.
 
Fedorov has since become the most consistently booed player at Joe Louis Arena when his team comes in to play the Red Wings, first as a Duck, when he left the Wings to take less money in LA, and then as a Columbus Bluejacket before sliding over to the Caps.
 
Octopi fly and Wings fans jeer him every time he touches th e puck, but what the hell. He walked off CSKA Moscow at the Goodwill Games in Vancouver to defect to the Wings in 1990, so if a man can leave the Soviet Union, why not the Wings?
 
The Caps are big on the whole Red thing, so it is a little eerie watching them. I almost forget that they aren’t the Wings in their crimson jerseys. Regardless of what people think of the consummate capitalist center-icer, Sergei is forever writ large in Motor City Hockey: he is fourth in nearly every offensive category in Red Wings history behind only Gordie “Methuselah” Howe, Steve “Mr.Wonderful” Yzerman and Alex “Dentures” Delvecchio.
 
Only Howe, Yzerman, Delvecchio and Nicklas Lidström have played more games as Red Wings.
 
For the whole career, Fedorov passed Alexander Mogilny for most goals by a Russian-born hockey player last year (then 473), and obviously is still racking them up.
 
Great as the wily Cossack might be, with 15 payoff campaigns in twenty years in the league (19 if you count the lock-out), he has won only three champagne cocktails from Lord Stanley’s Cup.
 
It would take a series of miracles to scale the heights of Cup Valhalla even if they went all the way this year.
0A
 
Yeah, sure it was a smaller league, and yeah sure, there were no Russians fleeing the Red Army Central Team or Swedes on the ice, only those pugnacious French Canadians and some plug ugly Anglos, but remember les Habitants on Hockey Night in Canada on CBC Channel Nine?
 
It was heaven being in a cosmopolitan city like Detroit in the days before satellites and cable- we could get Canadian television with prime-time ice sports like Hockey and Curling almost year round. You think golf on television is boring?
 
Try club-league curling on for size. The stone slowly moving down the ice, the sweepers moving slowly along with it. The paint never does dry.
 
But I digress. We had rink-side seats to one of the great sports franchises of all time growing up, better than the Yankees. Check the team, the players and their Cup stats:
 
    * Henri Richard won 11 Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens- 1956-73.
    * Jean Beliveau won 10 with the Canad iens from 1956 to 1971.
    * Canadien Yvan Cournoyer won 10 Stanleys between 1965 and 1979.
    * Canadien Claude Provost won 9- first Cup in 1956, the last in 1969.
    * Jacques Lemaire won 8 Cups with the Canadiens from 1968 to 1979.
    * Maurice "The Rocket" Richard won 8 with the Canadiens, 1944 to 1960.
 
We had our moments, too, out West. In addition to Go rdy Howe, the Greatest Player Who Ever Skated (sorry Wayne and Bobby), Red Kelly was the most successful NHL player who never played for Montreal. He won 8 Stanley Cups with Detroit and Toronto between 1950 and 1967.
 
I was jotting in my notebook frantically. With the Game 7 loss, the Rangers have hair-balled a 3-1 series lead for the first time in their franchise history.
 
Screw them. On to the Penguins, first game on Saturday. And wouldn’t it be fine to see Sergei in the Cup finals against the Wings?
 
If it happens, we will get to the story of why the Octopuses are thrown on the ice in Detroit.
 
But check it out- whatever the spurned fans of Detroit think of Fedorov, he is going to be enshrined as one of the Great Ones whenever he hangs up his skates. The Caps are only paying him $4 million on his current contract, but times are hard all over.
 
The poster boy for hard luck is poor Claude Provost. With that gap-toothed old-school hockey grin and nine Stanley Cups under his belt, he has the most of anyone who is not a member of Hockey Hall of Fame.
 

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com