Edmonton Oilers Fan Event Teaches Valuable Lesson

The Edmonton Oilers staged their annual season’s ticket holders event at Rexall Place, Sunday. All of the active players make themselves available for autographs and photos. It is a wonderful family afternoon, for a number of obvious reasons.

But given two very recent developments, this year’s gathering for me is particularly poignant. One is the acquisition of Zack Kassian. The other is the very public vilification of Jake Virtanen, after Canada’s loss at the World Junior’s.

Caveat: This article is not about performance on the ice. It is about something far more important than that.

Pictured (above) is my son, Brandon, with one of his earliest Edmonton Oilers heroes, Sam Gagner. One never really knows what draws kids to their favorite players. Brandon’s first hero in Oilers silks was Ryan Smyth. I remember all-too-well sitting him down the day Smytty got traded, to explain to him what had happened and why. As a father, it was chore I dreaded, and still recall it as one of the worst things I’ve ever had to do as a Dad. Go ahead, laugh…but until you’ve watched tears trickle down the cheeks of your broken-hearted kid, you can’t relate. In his litte 5-year old world, that was crushing.

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When Smytty moved on, Brandon adopted Sam. The whole family did, really. Who knows why. I’m guessing Sam’s quick, creative game and his diminutive stature made him easy to cheer for. Then, when Brandon got a chance to meet him, at an afore-mentioned Edmonton Oilers function, our reasons for being “Sam-fans” were reinforced. #89 treated Our Kid like gold: Chatted with him, signed autographs, & posed for this photo, which has hung in our family home long after Sam was traded. We’ll always “like Sam”.

What Brandon discovered that day was something that I had known for years: That 99% of professional hockey players are genuinely nice guys. I grew up in a hockey family, where friends, teammates and yes…even a handful of Leavins’s…ended up in the Junior ranks and even in the N.H.L. In the years after that, covering the league, my belief in the quality of the people was re-enforced over and over.

I vividly recall Calgary (who I was covering at the time) thumping the Canucks 10-1 one night at The Saddledome. My job was guest dressing room interviews, and that evening was one of my tougher assignments. But Geoff Courtnall volunteered, and spent 5 minutes with me that evening discussing a game he surely just wanted to forget. But he did so with class and patience, and forever left me a Courtall fan. Great guy.

But Geoff Courtnall was generally regarded as a nice guy, anyway. I had a very similar experience with Jeremy Roenick one night. Roenick did not have the same reputation, but with me, he was friendly, funny, accommodating and graceful. A photo of that moment, with he and I, still hangs in my office as a favorite memory.

I have dozens of these recollections, maybe even hundreds by now. I’ve lost count of how many people who have asked me “what is Don Cherry like, REALLY, Kurt”? Really? Mr. Cherry is an extremely nice, chatty, charitable man. His Hockey Night in Canada bombast is more than a bit of an act.

And so it is that I wince over the terrible headline splashed across the front pages of the Vancouver Province, today, with the photo of Jake Virtanen. That kind of Journalism bothers me, because it leads a readership to believe that this 19 year old kid is less of a person than he almost certainly is.

And you can imagine, as Sam Gagner fans, how mixed our feelings are that Zack Kassian is now in the Edmonton Oilers organization. He was our LEAST favorite NHL players, for obvious reasons. How can we bring ourselves to cheer for him? How, indeed? The heart aches at the very thought of it.

But a life touched and impacted over and over by hockey has taught me to remember that that players are people first, and most commonly…really good people, and that occasionally, our passion for the game clouds that fact. And when that happens, it rarely looks good on us.

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So give Jake Virtanen a break. And while you are at it, give Zack Kassian a second-chance (o.k., a 3rd), too. Don’t believe, unfiltered by your own good compass, that Justin Schultz is anything but a really fine, intelligent young man (I can confirm this, as well), despite what one columnist wrote recently.

Hockey, after all, is just a game, folks, as big of a part of our lives that is surely is, or at least…seems to be.

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