Dear Friends and Digital Neighbours,
Today’s missive is a guest column. A longtime acquaintance of mine requested a small sliver of our chunk of cyberspace to unburden himself, and naturally I acceded to his request.
Uncle Fun
Mes amis,
They may be handing out the Stanley Cup tonight. This makes me sad.
It always makes me sad when they hand out the Stanley Cup and I’m not there. I used to be a regular guest at the ceremony back in the old days. You may have heard tell of the ghosts who intervened in ways beyond human comprehension to deliver championship after championship to the Montreal Canadiens when they played at the old Forum. The Canadiens have fallen on hard times these past fifteen years or so, and a lot of this has to do, mes amis, with the fact that they have fallen from favour with us Forum Ghosts.
Can you blame us, though? They did move from our mutual home without so much as a by-your-leave from us. All would have been forgiven if they had simply chosen to call their new home ‘The Forum’…‘New Forum’, ‘New and Improved Forum’, ‘Forum Lite’, ‘Forumette’, ‘Forum 2.0’—anything with ‘Forum’ in it, and all would have been forgiven. Instead, they chose to call their new arena ‘The Molson Centre’. Did they honestly expect the Forum Ghosts to move with them? Beer and spirits don’t mix. Besides, my kind is more than just a bit literal-minded. If you’re a Forum Ghost, you’re a Forum Ghost. You can’t be a Molson Centre Ghost. That’s someone else’s job to fill. There’s such a thing as respect within the profession, even in the ethereal realm.
To make matters worse, they didn’t exactly endear themselves to us by changing the name of the new building yet again…and still not to anything with even the remotest connection to the word ‘Forum’. The Bell Centre? What ghost worth his salt could stand for that? Besides the fact that the word ‘bell’ is a profanity among us—people are always ringing bells in churches and whatnot, in the mistaken belief that it gets rid of ghosts—telephone companies have it in for our kind. Anytime something goes wrong with your call, they say it’s ‘ghosting on the line’. What would a ghost be doing on the telephone? Making a call on a ghost-to-ghost hookup, I suppose? It’s not as if we couldn’t just pop in through a wall whenever we wanted to chat with you. So, naturally we, The Forum Ghosts, have yet to make the move from Atwater and Rue Ste.-Catherine to the new rink by the old Windsor Station.
So what has become of our beloved home, The Forum? See for yourself:
It’s a multiplex—a God-forsaken MULTIPLEX—with, to add insult to injury, a bowling alley in it. I can tell you, mes amis, it’s a more than bit of a comedown from guiding a Guy Lafleur slapshot into an unguarded corner of the opponents’ net during the waning moments of a playoff game to helping one of a group of Presbyterian lay readers on a bus tour from New Hampshire convert an easy 4-7 spare for the first time in his 40-some-odd years of recreational play.
And none of us is exactly thrilled with the new name of this place, either. It’s called ‘The Pepsi Forum’. That’s not a name for a building, mes amis—it’s a name for a soft-drink taste-testing focus group. Still, it’s better than ‘Bell Centre’, which sounds like a toll-free helpline for people with complaints about their cellular reception.
You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Well, mes amis, the sad truth is that getting the local sporting spirits on your side has a lot to do with the name of the building you play in. Why are the evil Boston Bruins doing so well this year? They’ve engaged in a deliberate campaign of misdirection. ‘TD Garden’ sounds like a football stadium, not an arena. It’s my opinion that they’re leaching luck away from the New England Patriots.
So now you know why the Stanley Cup will not only be handed to some team other than Les Canadiens for yet another year, but why that team (regardless of the winner of the finals) will be coached by someone who spent a significant amount of time with the Canadiens, and had nothing resembling a championship to show for it. We could have made either Alain Vigneault or Claude Julien just as lucky as they have been this year when they were coaching the Canadiens, believe you me. We simply had better things to do. And we will continue to have better things to do until the management of the Club de Hockey Canadien realizes that history is important. History is all you’ve got going for you when you’re a ghost. I mean, it’s a secure form of work, but there’s no future in it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to make sure that at least some of the audience leaving Kung Fu Panda 2 thinks they got their money’s worth.
Yours with heartfelt regret,
Fant’homme Sortilège LeRevenant
Forum Ghost (on hiatus)
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