Number Two (6 page)

“Okay,” I said, and nodded. I had watched my share of cop shows. I was trying to appear as co-operative as possible, so as to perhaps be given a lesser sentence.

The cop played the tape. I hoped that perhaps my mention of Hulk Hogan leg drops and Macho Man flying elbows and various other wrestling moves might elicit a few chuckles from this somewhat sombre crowd. Maybe it would start with Robin's dad, who was always pretty quiet but good for a joke here and there. Then upon seeing Daniel snickering, my dad might start to crack a smile. And then finally Edwina herself, realizing how painfully stupid it was for her to listen to a message that detailed her and her husband's decapitation by various wrestling maneuvers and assume that someone in town wanted her and her husband dead, might actually start to burst out laughing and look over at me with a smile that said: “I'm sorry, let's all go for chicken and potato wedges at that gas station by the river that smells like the oil of a thousand chickens and potato wedges.” Something romantic and wonderful like that. Then the cops themselves would have no choice but to join in what were now full-scale belly laughs, putting their arms around each other as tears streamed down their cheeks.

Alas, it was not meant to be. The entire room was silent and unresponsive each and every time I called Robin “Joke” on the message.
The two boys in blue in the room probably thought this would just be the first of many future visits to their station for various calls involving me and offensive or perhaps eventually dirty phone messages left for the parents of almost every other person I went to high school with. “The old Answering Machine Bandit has struck again,” they'd say, as Glenn attached the siren to the top of their Ford LTD and sped off to find and arrest me near the gas station by the river with my mouth full of chicken and potato wedges.

“You understand how serious this is don't you, Jay?” said the real officer as Glenn looked on silently watching, judging, and thinking he was better than me—even though we once played intramural volleyball together and seemed to get along just fine, and even though it seemed painfully obvious to me that he was wandering around this great big world with a giant nightstick shoved very far up his ass.

“Yes, I do. And guys,” I turned to the Bobocels, “I'm really sorry. It was supposed to be a funny little message left for Robin and I crossed the line.”

The real officer spoke again: “The Bobocels are not going to press charges, Jay, but consider yourself lucky. Issuing threats to another citizen is a serious crime.”

“I know, and like I said, I'm very sorry.” I was getting no reaction from the Bobocels whatsoever.

After the interrogation was over, we all wandered back to our vehicles silently. Meanwhile, neither my father nor the Bobocels made any effort to say goodbye, and I felt terrible that I had caused some sort of rift between my parents and my friend's parents. Never a good thing, especially in a small town.

We returned to the house, and Jen and I descended to the basement to pour a couple of drinks while I regaled her with brave stories about myself staring down and taking on two members of the Athabasca Phone Message Crimes Division Investigative Squad.

“No matter the pressure, I wouldn't crack,” I said to Jen, who was now clearly daydreaming about getting the hell out of there.

I don't exactly remember how the weekend with Jennifer ended, but by the next year she and I would gradually lose touch. She realized her dream of qualifying for medical school, and I eventually abandoned the University of Alberta altogether, taking my life down a different path to broadcasting school in Toronto. I'd like to think the reason we drifted apart was because both of our lives were moving in different directions, but a small part of me assumes that seeing how stupid and juvenile I really was that weekend she came to visit was enough to make her start looking elsewhere for companionship.

She probably made the right decision.

The Monday after the interrogation, I was back working at my father's drugstore. That summer I was the receiver, and while that might be a great jumping off point for a highly inappropriate joke about homosexuality, I can assure you that the only receiving I was doing was several daily orders of diapers, formula, prescription drugs, and magazines. I would get to work before everyone each morning, open up the store, make the coffee, and then pop open the back door and wait for the various delivery trucks to start dropping off the merchandise we had ordered. My dad would arrive not long after and start work in the dispensary. As is typical with my father, he held no grudge toward me for my behaviour that had ruined the previous weekend. We carried on like normal that day as if nothing had ever happened at all.

Then around noon Dad walked outside. I wondered where he was headed because this was highly unusual. He never walked to get his lunch; usually he packed something from home. Curious, I
went outside after him and saw that he was walking to meet someone in a pickup truck in the parking lot. The guy got out of the truck, shook my dad's hand, and began talking to him about what seemed like a serious subject.

It was Mr. Bobocel.

The two spoke for a while as I stood at the door watching like an idiot. Finally, they waved me over, and I sheepishly shuffled past the gravel alley behind the store to the paved parking lot and approached them.

“Mr. Bobocel here just wanted to make sure everything was okay between us and them, and of course I told him it was,” explained Dad.

“It sure is,” I said, then added, “I feel like a real idiot.”

“Well, you are,” said Mr. Bobocel with a laugh. “But I'm hoping we can forget all of this.”

Just the words I wanted to hear. He shook both of our hands again and got back into his truck. After that, I stopped calling my friends “Joke.” After that, I stopped leaving phone messages altogether.

Northlands Coliseum

Edmonton, Alberta

October, 1992

“W
ell, maybe the team would appreciate it if the place didn't feel like a church all the time!” I exclaimed.

“We're trying to enjoy the game! We'll cheer when they score,” the lady yelled back at me. She looked to be a bit older than my mom.

“They need more encouragement than that. They're terrible!” I tried to reason with her.

“Oh, why don't you just shut up,” she said, exasperated.

“Why don't
you
just shut up,” I replied.

What the hell was going on here? Weren't we all supposed to
be cheering for the same team? Yet for some reason it seemed this entire section of the Coliseum had decided I was cheering just a bit
too
enthusiastically. Now everyone around me was alternating between watching the action on the ice and shooting me dirty looks over their shoulders. At some point this evening, I figured there was an ever-increasing chance that someone (perhaps that woman I'd been arguing with) was going to reach across the aisle and slug me. How did it ever come to this?

Growing up in the late '70s and early '80s I was one of those extremely lucky kids whose dad was willing to fork over his hard-earned money for season's tickets to the local NHL team—in my case, the Edmonton Oilers. My dad split them with a couple other guys as there was no way he would have been able to make it to every game while continuing to run his own business. But he and I probably went to ten or so games every year from 1980 to 1990—the most glorious years in the history of the Edmonton Oilers franchise. It was the days of Grant Fuhr, Paul Coffey, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Kevin Lowe, and the Great One himself, Wayne Gretzky. Talk about being born and raised in the right place and the right time—and with the right parents.

I remember the weather almost always being terrible—bitter cold and snowy—as we made the hour-and-a-half drive into “the City,” though I don't ever remember missing a single game due to the weather. We'd usually try to find a place to park on the front lawn of somebody's house near the Coliseum where a kid would be waiting outside with a flashlight, collecting money and guiding cars to their spots. This is poo-pooed nowadays, but back then it was common practice to line up the cars right next to each other in front of neighbouring houses close to the arena. Dad liked those
spots because he believed it allowed him to get out of town quicker. Or maybe he was just cheap. Likely a bit of both.

Once safely parked, we would make our way through the snow and cold to the building alongside other bundled-up Oilers fans wearing their Gretzky, Kurri, Messier, and Fuhr jerseys under winter jackets. The buzz around the Coliseum during those glory years was palpable. We Northern Albertans honestly thought we'd have the best team in the NHL for as long as these guys were playing in the league. Why would coach and general manager Glen Sather ever trade these guys? We had the best team in the world! In Edmonton! Even when Paul Coffey justifiably held out for more money and became the first of the great young Oilers to be traded (to Pittsburgh, for a package that included Craig Simpson, which didn't turn out too bad for the Oilers in the end), there was still no sense that this team would be broken up over an inability to pay their superstars. In those days, there was genuine excitement in the air of the city of Edmonton—dubbed “the city of Champions” after a string of Stanley Cup wins for the Oilers and Grey Cup wins for the Eskimos.

I remember the Oilers doing some elaborate pre-game ceremony for Wayne Gretzky's birthday during the early years where then-owner Peter Pocklington came out with a contract that Wayne signed in front of the entire arena. The contract supposedly kept him with the Oilers until 1999! (Legend has it he didn't actually sign the papers in front of him.) The Oilers were all we talked about at school and at our own little small-town rink. And up until Gretzky got traded it was inconceivable that the Oilers would become some small-market feeder team. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened after Gretzky left. Mark Messier led them to one more Cup in 1990, but then everything started to fall apart. The stars of the team began to get traded
away, and eventually the Oilers were unable to compete with the bigger-market, high-spending teams of the league.

Which brings me to the last year my dad had season's tickets to the Oilers. It was 1992, and I very nearly got myself banned from the Northlands Coliseum altogether.

I was attending the University of Alberta and living in “the City.” My dad always kept his tickets at my apartment, so if he couldn't make it in for a game, I'd be welcome to take one of my friends in his place. It was a pretty sweet arrangement, especially for my friends. Naturally, I didn't appreciate my good fortune, and as usual, I managed to embarrass my father completely.

Sometime in October 1992, I attended a game with my roommate and best friend, Trevor Sawatzky. For whatever reason that evening, the fans at the Coliseum got under our skin. We lamented the fact that the crowd was so much quieter than it had been during those wonderful playoff runs leading up to the Oilers' last Stanley Cup in 1990.

I've talked to many people who've gone on road trips through Western Canada to watch their favourite teams face off against the Canucks, Flames, and Oilers, expecting the kind of raucous crowds you'd find in Montreal or Winnipeg. Instead, what they usually find is a decidedly stoic bunch that stay pretty quiet unless it's a playoff situation—and in the case of the Oilers, that hasn't occurred in quite a while.

Back in the '80s,
The Hockey News
published the results of an anonymous survey of NHL players that asked questions including “What's the quietest building in the National Hockey League?” Edmonton's Coliseum and Calgary's Saddledome were at the top of the list. The buildings were the loudest during playoff time, but for
the rest of the year it was akin to playing hockey in a well-supervised library. I've always thought Calgary native and former NHL goaltender, broadcaster, and current Columbus Blue Jackets president John Davidson had the best explanation for this phenomenon. Fans in Edmonton and Calgary, he explained, don't come to games to get loaded, socialize, and scream for their favourite player to score the winning goal. They come to the games to
watch hockey
. They are students of the game and know it better than anyone. They don't need to yell “SHOOT!” every time someone touches the puck on a power play the way Kings fans do whenever I go to games at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. They've watched the sport their entire lives, and they understand every nuance because most of them played the game at some point during their prairie upbringing. They love watching a fight, but it's not the only reason they attend, which may very well be the case in several American markets. Sure, prairie hockey fans love to socialize as much as anyone in North America, but when the game is on they're
watching
not talking. And that means the buildings can get eerily quiet. It all makes perfect sense to me now.

That said, I simply cannot defend the great fans of the Oilers, Flames, and Canucks for staying quiet and contemplative when the home team scores a goal!

I can remember many a late night in Toronto when I'd be sitting in my old leather chair watching the second half of a
Hockey Night in Canada
double-header on the CBC featuring the Oilers, and the second Edmonton scored a goal the camera would scan the crowd at the Coliseum to gauge their reaction. And every single game it'd be the same: Although many fans in the crowd would be standing and cheering, there'd be just as many (if not more) inexplicably sitting down with their hands tucked underneath their legs and a look on their faces that screamed boredom. I mean, I understand
that you've paid your hard-earned money to get into the building and you can react to your home team's scoring any way you like, but for God's sake if your team scores you should be required to stand up at the very least. Stand up and clap. Maybe even let out a “woo.”

So there I am with Trevor at the Coliseum in the fall of 1992, and the Edmonton crowd is being typically quiet. Frustrated, we decided to take it upon ourselves to liven them up a bit. So we started cheering.
Loudly
. We weren't using foul language or anything—we were just yelling really loud, telling Shjon Podein to hurry up and finish his check and Kelly Buchberger to drop the gloves. Giving it to the referees a bit. Throwing in a few “LET'S GO OILERS” chants. Not surprisingly, it wasn't long before we started to draw the attention of the other fans in our section. A few people asked Trevor and me to “quiet down” so they could “watch the game.” Many others just shot us angry looks. Soon, the polite requests turned into angry shouting. In typical Onrait fashion, I didn't back down from these requests to keep it down, suggesting instead that everyone in my section needed to wake up a little bit.

I still maintain I was absolutely in the right. I was
cheering loudly for the home team
. Most pro sports teams would encourage this. They would
expect
it, even. But not in Edmonton.

I suppose the quiet atmosphere in the Coliseum that evening got to me, and I ended up making a few new enemies in our section. Still, there were no physical confrontations or anything, and we left the game that evening without any real incident. In fact, I didn't give the night a second thought until two days later when my dad called me at home from his drugstore in Athabasca.

“Hey, Jay, were you a little loud at the Oilers game the other night?” he asked.

“I dunno. I guess, maybe,” I replied.

“Maybe a little
too
loud?” he continued.

“Maybe a little. Why?”

“I just got a call from Bill Tuele.”

Bill Tuele—the director of public relations for the Oilers. This wasn't quite as exciting as the last phone call my dad received from the Edmonton Oilers front office. That time, it'd been legendary Oilers tough guy Dave Semenko—the most famous of the Oiler tough guys, the man responsible for protecting Wayne Gretzky during the early years of the Great One's career. Dave was now working for the Oilers in a ticketing capacity, calling up season's ticket holders and encouraging them to renew. One can only imagine the team's strategy: Who the hell would say no when Dave Semenko asked for money?

Mr. Tuele called my dad to tell him there had been twelve separate complaints
to the team's PR department about a “tall, loud, lanky, and obnoxious young man” who'd been disturbing everyone and preventing them from enjoying the game.
Twelve separate complaints!
Mr. Tuele wasn't threatening to take my dad's tickets away or anything, he just thought my father might like to know that the person using them had alienated pretty much every single person around him and that he might want to think twice about who he gave his tickets to the next time.

“Mr. Tuele gave me his number,” explained my dad. “I suggest you get on the phone with him
now
and apologize.” It wasn't really a suggestion.

“Got it,” I replied sheepishly.

Mr. Tuele was actually very gracious. “I appreciate the fact that you called, Jay,” he said. “We just want to make sure that everyone who comes to our games can have an enjoyable time.”

I wished I could've asked Mr. Tuele to join me in our section
for a game sometime. I'm not sure if he would have seen
everyone
enjoying themselves.

Dad punished me by taking back the rest of the year's tickets; and he decided not to renew them the following year. Soon after, I moved to Ontario to begin my career in broadcasting, but I watched with great interest when the Oilers made their surprise run to the Stanley Cup Final in 2006. Sadly, they lost in a heartbreaking seven games to the Carolina Hurricanes. On the bright side, though, watching from across the country I could see—anyone could see—that the atmosphere in the Oilers' arena was absolutely incredible.

On one particularly memorable night, as the Edmonton crowd sang “O Canada” at full volume, led by longtime Oilers dressing room attendant and local legend Joey Moss, the camera focused on NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. The look on his face said it all. He simply could not believe that an NHL building could be so loud. It could be that way every night if we wanted it to be.