Stranger in a Stranger Land

Editor's Note: This should serve as a guideline on how to raise children. Take notes people who have kids and think it's not their place to force their team on their children. Do it. 

The night before my life changed forever, the Toronto Maple Leafs dropped an exhibition game in St. Louis.

Former Leaf draft pick Brad Boyes, picked up a couple of points and future Leaf Lee Stempniak potted a pair of goals but I didn’t care much about that.  Nor did I do more than shrug at the 7-3 scoreline because less than twenty-four hours later, hockey, the Leafs—everything—was secondary to the turn of events which would remould my understanding of parenthood… and my role on this world.

On October 2, 2008 at 4:15pm Eastern Time, my wife and I welcomed into the world our first child—a boy—Liam Kenneth.  The birth or accouchement, was long (11.5 hours) and both my newborn son and my wife were kept in hospital for a week.  All thoughts of who made the team out of training camp and the preseason were ushered aside in short order as I prepared to enter the world of fatherhood.

I ran into Mathieu, a friend/neighbour of mine and a cynical Quebec Nordiques fan to boot, on my way to the hospital one morning.  Always quick with a remark about my downtrodden hockey team, he was in rare form that day.

"Your boy," he started with a smirk.  "He’s going to have a tough time around here as a Leafs fan—if you choose to raise him that way."

You see, where I live it’s Le Tricolore or Le CH—our blood rival, the Canadiens.  And, to a lesser extent, it’s also the Pittsburgh Penguins.  For that, we may thank Sidney Crosby who transformed the Bas-Saint-Laurent into two-sided fan base where locals can usually find at least one team—if not two—to cheer for during the playoffs.

As if reliving Johnny Cash’s "A Boy Named Sue" for a split second while I considered my friend’s comment, I threw Mathieu a smile with little warmth.  "Shit.  Then he’ll be tougher for it in the long run."

My response must have been slightly unexpected for him because he withdrew before further remark and I got in the car and drove to the hospital.  Along the way, I recalled my own youth where growing up in Nova Scotia, I’d had the luxury of choosing any number of NHL team as my own.  The Leafs, Habs, Bruins—hell, I even had a friend who was a Kings fan before they resembled anything near a contender (see: Gretzky trade).

What made me a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs as a kid?  I hadn’t considered it before then.  In a journal I wrote during the first grade, I admitted my three favourite players being Dale Hawerchuk of the Winnipeg Jets, Petr Svoboda of the Montreal Canadiens and Gary Leeman of our Leafs.  No help there.

Of my 23 uncles who follow hockey, most are Leafs fans.  My maternal grandfather was perhaps one of the biggest fans of hockey—and a gigantic Leaf fan also.  His influence was likely the biggest reason of all why I evolved into a big fan of Toronto.

In some ways, having a specific sports team to root for can be about as important as having a favourite colour.  Or it may very well be as important as believing in God (see: Celtic F.C. and Rangers F.C.).  But whatever level you measure it upon, it still rates as an opinion and those can be as varied as the stars in the sky.

And so as I drove to the hospital to prepare to bring my wife and newborn son home for the first time, I considered my upbringing and how no one really came out and took a crap on me for being a Leafs fan—and this was during a time when we had a fellow named Allan Bester between the pipes for us.  John Brophy was the head coach and the team’s best players included Gary Leeman, Vincent Damphousse, Al Iafrate, Russ Courtnall and Wendel Clark.  Those were tough times for the Maple Leafs as a team and still nobody so much as went beyond teasing me about wearing a blue-and-white Leafs toque.

Here in Rimouski—not near the heart of the enemy, but maybe it’s liver—there are a few kids who play road hockey on our street.  They all have their Montreal Canadiens toques and jerseys so when my son and I come out wearing our Leafs gear, there are usually a couple of cold stares.  Even the fat kid with the Senators jersey appears slightly more "with" his buddies as if seeing that blue maple leaf galvanized their hatred.  Yes, it’s a different animal to be a Leafs fan in Québec than it was in Nova Scotia.

Recently, my mother-in-law purchased the famous Roch Carrier book and DVD, "The Hockey Sweater".  In case anyone hasn’t read this landmark in Canadian literature, it’s about a kid from Montreal whose mother orders him a new Canadians sweater from Eaton’s but there’s a mix-up with the order and instead he ends up with a Maple Leafs sweater and feels humiliated among the other children.  When my son and I watched it for the first time together, he didn’t seem to care what colour the sweater was.  Then again, he’s only two but I often believe the hill will only become steeper for him as time goes forward—that is, in terms of being raised a Leafs fan around these parts.  But I digress.

A couple of weeks after my wife and son returned home, one of the few tricks we could manage to put my son to sleep was to rock him in his car seat in front of the TV but hockey had to be on.  More often than not, it would be the NHL Network.  Within minutes, my son would be fast asleep.  (Not sure what that says about Brian Duff.)

By the time my son could walk at 13 months-old, he was already shooting hockey pucks around the basement with alarming accuracy.

At 17 months, shooting a hockey ball in the net in the driveway was fast becoming a daily ritual and quietly observing the other kids on the street as they played ball hockey seemed to be part of the experience for him also.

By March of this year, Liam could identify and say the names of four Leafs players—Gustavsson ("Monster"), Phaneuf, Grabovski ("Grabbo") and Schenn.  (We’re working on Kessel and Bozak at the moment.  MacArthur is next.  Zigomanis could prove difficult.)

Though it’s fair to say I’m shaping the interests of my son, I consider the whole idea of passing the proverbial torch to my son in a land of crazed Habs fans frighteningly similar to Brian Burke’s transformation of our beloved team, the whole thing is an allegory for something bigger… does the way in which I discovered myself as a Leafs fan on my own with outside influences make me more of a diehard than my son will be for being force-fed the Maple Leafs behind "enemy lines"?  Either way, it’s finally good to have some company when I watch the games on TV.