BY GORD PAYNTER PHOTOGRAPHY BY CATHERINE CAMP

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Gord talks with Blast players
Tyler Pelton and Jim Baxter.
BY G O R D PAY N T E R
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY
C AT H E R I N E C A M P - PAY N T E R
F
or days now you’ve gone without sleep.
You’re like a child waiting for Christmas
morning to finally arrive. Like Harper
anxiously envisioning a Conservative majority. Like Leaf fans dreaming of a June
parade. Where is it, you wonder?
Well, it is here. Today. Now. Your copy
of ViBrant is in your hot little hands. You
rip through the pages of the magazine with
a frenzy that makes ‘Jaws’ look like a flick
about guppies in the wild. And during your
frantic search you find yourself asking,
screaming aloud, “WHERE? WHERE?
WHERE? Where have Gord and Catherine
gone this time?”
Hockey. It’s Canada’s game. So how is it
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that a travel column stretches to the rink?
You think: ‘Well, perhaps they’ve taken in a
game of shinny played on the polar ice
cap. Or a trip to Russia for some international competition. Those Muscovites love
their hockey.’
Well we’re not in Russia. Nor gone to the
polar ice cap, but stayed right here in
Brantford. It’s one heck of a journey.
This April, Brantford gets to play host to
the one-hundredth-anniversary challenge
for the Allan Cup. In Senior A hockey, it is
the ultimate prize. Our Brantford Blast as
host club for the playoffs automatically
earns a bye into the tournament. But knowledge of that bye did not seem to dampen the
team’s drive or determination to prove they
deserved to be there. So, when I was asked
to focus my column on this special anniversary and the Blast’s participation, I fumbled
through a slew of possible column ideas.
Perhaps I would travel with the Blast for a
month, ride the team bus, sit on the player’s
bench or drive the Zamboni?
I was fishing around, trying to get a handle on the story. I spoke with Blast players
Tyler Pelton and Jim Baxter and with the
club’s General Manager, Steve Cheeseman.
They all expressed their love of the game.
Each spoke with a calm sense of reality.
No thoughts that winning the Allan Cup
was going to launch an N.H.L. career or
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win them world wide acclaim, but what shone through in their
words was a sense that each goes out there and does the best
they can. Every time. I thought of building on that collected information with similar tracking efforts of a midget triple A hockey
club and finally an electric wheelchair hockey team. But none of
those pursuits rang true. (Well, except driving the Zamboni. That
would have been a blast. Okay, more likely an accident.)
I decided that to properly write about this event, I needed to
attend a few Blast games. That first game showed me how to
shape this column. I was blown away by the entire experience.
Catherine and I had second row seats right on the blue line.
The first thing I noted was the pre-game sounds. The goalie’s
skates sliding back and forth across his crease, getting rid of
any excess water left by the Zamboni. The goalie created a
smooth surface that his skate blades would cut into. There was
the slap of sticks on the ice, calling for a pass. The delicious
sound of pucks booming off the boards and of skate blades cutting into the ice as players sped past during their warm ups. I
recognized all these sounds instantly from my own hockey days.
But the signature of my hockey career was not my bone jarring
checks, stick-handling ability, bullet-like wrist shot; perhaps I
was most recognized for my giant red Afro. The thing got
sheared once a year. That was in the spring. Which meant that
by hockey season my Afro had grown to hedge grove dimensions. Often any spectators at our games were not there to
observe our play making ability, but they would watch with anxious anticipation of ‘The Donning of the Helmet’. So great was
my mass of hair that it often took two or three teammates to
wedge my brilliant green helmet down and on while a third raced
to fasten the chin strap before my hair would sproiing and
launch the helmet through the roof. There was a certain coronationish quality to the whole event.
You likely wouldn’t think of the Brantford and District Civic
Centre as a site for a coronation, but this April the building will rock
with all the pageantry when the Allan Cup champions are crowned.
I hadn’t been to the Civic Centre to witness a hockey game since
my Dad took me to see the Chicago Black Hawks play an exhibition game against the Pittsburgh Penguins. And just how long ago
was that you ask? Bobby Hull played for Chicago and he had hair.
Continued on Page 84 >>
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Capture the Love
Gord checks out the
Allan Cup merchandise.
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“Hey Dad, who’s Bobby Hull?”
“Go ask your Mother.”
What I remembered about the Civic
then I felt at the Blast games this year. The
Brantford and District Civic Centre allows
every spectator to be right in on top of the
action. That includes the blind spectators.
As you watch the flow of play, I listen to
the flow and there are plenty of clues as to
what is happening and where. The sound
of the puck off the boards or the goal
posts, or the goalie’s pads or blocker are all
very different and distinctive. There is the
crushing, crunching sound of an opponent’s body slamming into the boards and
glass. And those checks elicit the same
‘OOOO-wow’s’ from me as if I felt each hit.
And every action on the ice is accompanied by the fan’s cheers or boos. It is great.
And the speed of the game is electric, there
are end-to-end rushes and a referee’s whistle that stops and starts play again within
seconds.
I think we’ve become so accustomed to
the many lengthy stoppages that occur in
televised NHL games that the speed of
these Blast games was both a shock and
delight.
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Dave Levac
M. P. P., Brant
www.davelevac.on.ca
Welcome all participants
and fans to the
100th Anniversary
of the Allan Cup
Queen’s Park Office:
Room 251, Legislative Bldg.
Queen’s Park, ON M7A 1A4
Tel: (416) 325-6261
Constituency Office:
96 Nelson Street, Unit 101
Brantford, Ontario N3T 2N1
Tel: (519) 759-0361
E-mail: dlevac.mpp@liberal.ola.org
Both Games that I attended began at
seven-thirty and were over by nine-forty,
just over two hours of great entertainment for great value. Of course another
reason why these games wrapped up so
quickly was that after two hours and sixteen minutes in the Civic Centre any living form was reduced to a frozen lump.
As a Canadian youngster I loved the
cold, but as a fifty-three year old spectator, I did not. As a kid, I played hockey on
the neighbourhood rink for hours on end.
Oblivious to the cold. I’m not certain
whether it was my aversion to cold weather or my loss of eyesight that prompted
me to give up playing hockey. That was
until one winter’s day when a good buddy
twisted my arm and got me to lace up the
skates, pick up a stick and head out to an
outdoor rink. Well at a glance you might
not realize that I was visually impaired.
(Okay, okay blind.) But the kids that
selected me for their pick up game quickly discovered that they’d drafted a dud.
“Just our luck. We pick the blind version of Andrew Raycroft.”
In those younger years I would often
Continued on Page 86 >>
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Gord tries out for the team.
fall asleep imagining myself playing for
the Stanley Cup, carrying the puck from
behind our net, knifing my way through
the opposition with speed and dexterity
that would make Gretzky envious, with a
final deke of the goalie I lift the puck over
her sprawling form. (It is 2008 after all.) It
is the game winner, the Cup is ours and as
I hoist it to my shoulders the cheers and
shouts are thunderous.
Maybe you too have shared that lovely
childhood fantasy. And perhaps like
myself, you have begun to realize that the
likelihood of you scoring that winning
goal grow dimmer with each passing year.
And probably the Great One will never be
envious of any of your moves.
Nor are you likely to be at the final
game of the Stanley Cup playoffs unless
you win Super Seven that week, but here
in Brantford you do have an affordable
opportunity to share in some tremendous
hockey excitement.
The one-hundredth-anniversary challenge for the Allan Cup comes to
Brantford and Brantford’s own Blast team
will be among the challengers for this coveted prize of Senior A hockey.
And as for driving the Zamboni…
maybe I will, maybe I won’t.
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