I am Canadien: Hockey and beer (part I of a perhaps series)

I am Canadian.

No, wait, let me be specific: I am Canadien.

I'll be honest, I grew up playing baseball and basketball, and I was very good at them. I dabbled in football, though I didn't have the (literal) intestinal fortitude for it. Those are fine sports. Fun to play. But, for me, they didn't have meaning. Not really. They're both american pastimes - when's the last time you saw a French Canadian name on the back of one of those jerseys? (ok ok, there were a few baseball players but you get my drift).

Hockey, though, has stolen my bleu-blanc-rouge heart.

First, a confession:

To my great shame as a six foot two french canadian man, I can't skate (don't tell anyone). Well, hardly, and certainly not enough to play hockey. And I've never actually played hockey, if you don't count standing motionless on skates, propped up on my stick, while my cousins whirled around me and played hockey. I flinched each time anything - person or puck - went within ten feet of my eye.

BUT - if I HAD played hockey, WATCH OUT! I would have been Vincent LeCavalier and Alex Kovalev and Maurice Richard all rolled into one. A dynamo. The best thing on ice since beer.

Well, maybe not, did I mention my lack of (literal) intestinal fortitude?

Anyway, all that said, hockey for me, as with many, started on my father's knee - well, more likely his chips were on one knee and his beer on the other. I think I was on the floor at his feet.

I'd watch and see men with names like mine-with accents and le and la - dazzling on the ice, and knew that this team belonged to me. It was part of my history, and it was part of me.

As a French Canadian outside Quebec (FCOQ), it wasn't often that I had something french to connect to - or a reason to be proud of being an FCOQ at all.

I'd like to specify, though, that I'm not a huge fan of the NHL - It's too often run by good old boys from an era long gone. An era of goons and racism. That's changing, but hockey should be about speed and beauty and history and roots, not thuggery and mean-spiritedness. For me anway.

That's why I specified that I am Canadien earlier. I'm a die hard Habs fan. I'm obsessed. I bleed it. But I'm not always happy about the context they're placed in (ie: Don Cherry. I sometimes wonder what he might of thought of the dynamo I would have most certainly become had I ever learned to skate. On the one hand, I'm a "good ole' Kingston boy," on the other, I'm a soft Frenchie with no intestinal fortitude.)

I suppose the old guard would call me and my like some unflattering names. I drink craft beer. I like hockey for the skill and the history. The beauty. I refuse to watch Hockey Night in Canada on CBC. I watch the games on RDS instead because it helps me connect to something that, in day to day life, I have very little connection to. It's also nice to watch a game and feel like part of a community. Perhaps that's what many Leafs fans feel when they watch Hockey Night in Canada - and that's great.

But it's not how I feel.

They're not shilling my beer. They're not showing hockey the way I want to watch it. And they're not speaking my language.