Wednesday, June 6, 1990: Whitey can't trump the storytellers
Whitey's a hockey guy, in that he has that square Gump Worsley shape some people have that play hockey. Gump Worsley was a pretty good goalie in the '50s and '60s, and he was shaped square all around - square jaw, square shoulders, square legs when he got the pads on - except for the belly which was soft, and people loved Gump because he was shaped like them, not like some athlete, and he was called Gump, which told you something right there.
When Whitey came into his Gump Worsley shape he took to goalie. That and catching baseball. You find lot of guys play hockey goalie in the winter and catch baseball in the summer. They get used to people firing hard things at them fast, get the mentality for one and find it works all right with the other.
Whitey being a hockey guy gets most of the hockey gear, the hockey stories and the people with the hockey stories coming to him naturally, like some special kind of gravity sorts out the hockey stuff and sends it falling into his lap. Maybe because it's hockey or maybe because it's Whitey, but the stories that fall to him are better than the ones that fall to the football guys or the baseball guys.
Most of the people who call up Whitey about hockey are either from Canada or Detroit. Everyone knows about hockey and Canada, but hockey stuck pretty hard around Detroit too, with Gordie Howe and the rest of the Red Wings being so good and Canada being so close. All the Slovaks and Poles and Bohemians took to the Red Wings and never got it out of their system, plus the guy on the radio did the Red Wings games was so good for so long, so that kids started following the games because their dads did, and their kids followed the games, and maybe even their kids, ones that were born recently enough. When it comes to hockey Detroit is a lot more like Canada than the States.
For being in the business of catching hard things at least part-time, Whitey is aggressive about winning. He doesn’t like losing. Someone tells Whitey a story and Whitey tries to tell a better one, bigger story, larger lie, only it’s hard with the hockey guys. “Canuck calls me up from around Winnipeg somewhere – out there in the muskeg or whatever they call it – and starts telling me about his buddy Garth and the pickup hockey game they have Friday nights,” Whitey’ll say by way of introducing one of the stories that beat him. “Friday nights in Winnipeg, you know, not much going on, gets cold, gets dark early, pickup hockey game’s bound to wind up like a kegger around here. Have a few, skate around some. Then you have a few more, skate around some more, maybe bounce someone into the boards, that calls for a cold one, grab another one, before you know it you’re fresh out.
"Someone yells for Garth to drive down to the LCB – the liquor store, in Canada government owns the liquor stores, there’s something for you – and he says, ‘Hell no, I’m not taking my car down there. You want me to get arrested for drunk driving?’
“’Naw, naw, don’t take the car,’ they tell him. ‘Course you don’t want to take the car. They’ll arrest you in a minute. Don’t want you getting arrested. Take the Zamboni.’
“Okay, so taking the Zamboni sounds all right to Garth, tells you how far gone he is. They open the garage door and he backs out the Zamboni, doesn’t hit a thing if you can believe it, drives it along the side of the road to the liquor store.
"Now no one driving past thinks this is anything unusual, so you gotta believe in Winnipeg people are driving Zambonis everywhere – beauty shop, grocery store, take the kids to soccer games, who needs a minivan. Parks the Zamboni in front of the liquor store, grabs a 24-pack of Molson Canadian, pays for it naturally, then hops back on the Zamboni.
“Canuck tells me Garth would have made it all the way back no problem if he hadn’t made a detour to a Tim Horton’s, donut place named after the dead guy. Winnipeg cop was hanging out there drinking coffee and chomping on a cruller, saw the Zamboni and put the arm on Garth. Finished his donut first, of course.”
“That’s pretty good,” Homer says.
“That’s not the best,” Whitey says back. “Got another call, this time from the Hawk, he calls himself. Ask him if it’s short for Black Hawk and he isn’t just Dale Tallon or Stan Mikita or somebody and he just laughs, crazy kind of laugh. But he’s not Chicago, he’s Canadian; you can tell from the ‘oot’ and ‘aboots.’
“Hawk I’ve talked to before. Don’t know what got him calling me, why I deserve him, but he’s amazing. I can name any hockey player ever in the NHL and he’s got a story about him – and it almost always involves the Hawk. I say, ‘Give me an Orest Kindrachuk story,’ and he goes into how he – the Hawk – shot pool with Orest Kindrachuk all night in a bar in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, almost to Alaska. He’s shooting pool with Orest Kindrachuk and this native babe picks him up – I mean, literally picks him up – and heaves him into a full-length mirror back of the bar the long way, and Kindrachuk couldn’t do anything more about it than a daisy. And this guy’s one of the Broad Street Bullies.
“Or I’ll say, ‘Give me a Dave Hreckosy story,’ and he’ll say Hreckosy was the most scared player he ever met, scared of the puck, and the reason he scored 40 goals that one season out in California? Psychedelic mushrooms. Hooked up with the guy who supplied the Grateful Dead with their peyote and junk and got on the mushroom-a-game plan. Smoothed him right out. Next year the connection was doing 10 hard in Soledad and Hreckosy was back to being scared of the puck again, and in another three years he was out of the league.
“Finally I figure I’ll test him so I say, ‘Give me a Pete Laframboise story.’ Pete Laframboise is my favorite hockey player ever. I liked the name. That and the Kansas City Scouts. How can you not like somebody with a name like that played for the Kansas City Scouts?
“Hawk says, ‘Pete Laframboise is an honorary chief in the Inuvik tribe of British Columbia. I was there. We were up in the very northern tip of British Columbia, out of Prince George, between there and Quensel, fishing for salmon with an Iuvik guide. Turns out these Indians are just nuts about hockey and hockey players, and when they found out Pete played in the league they had this special ceremony. They crowded 20 people, whites and natives, in a sealskin tent, anointed Pete with this special mixture of bear grease, ashes and juniper, clothed him in a bearskin cape and named him, “He-Who-Dwells-Among-the-Ice-and-Berries.”’”
“I knew everything about Pete Laframboise – kind of beer he drank first of all, and everything else, from hanging out with him for hours at card shows where no one wanted his autograph – and this was in Canada yet, so that tells you what kind of hockey player he was when no one wanted his autograph in Canada – so there was no way he could have been an Indian chief. No way.
“I actually had his number. Gave it to me when he was bored, wrote a story on him, turned out all right. I called him up and told him the Indian-chief story. When he stopped laughing he said, ‘You’re kidding, right? That’s the biggest bunch of crap I heard in my life!’”
“So were you mad?” Homer asked.
“Mad? I wished I’d have thought of it. I admire someone with that much reckless diregard for the truth. Hey, you think if I work on the Hawk hard enough those Indians would make me a chief?”
Whitey's a hockey guy, in that he has that square Gump Worsley shape some people have that play hockey. Gump Worsley was a pretty good goalie in the '50s and '60s, and he was shaped square all around - square jaw, square shoulders, square legs when he got the pads on - except for the belly which was soft, and people loved Gump because he was shaped like them, not like some athlete, and he was called Gump, which told you something right there.
When Whitey came into his Gump Worsley shape he took to goalie. That and catching baseball. You find lot of guys play hockey goalie in the winter and catch baseball in the summer. They get used to people firing hard things at them fast, get the mentality for one and find it works all right with the other.
Whitey being a hockey guy gets most of the hockey gear, the hockey stories and the people with the hockey stories coming to him naturally, like some special kind of gravity sorts out the hockey stuff and sends it falling into his lap. Maybe because it's hockey or maybe because it's Whitey, but the stories that fall to him are better than the ones that fall to the football guys or the baseball guys.
Most of the people who call up Whitey about hockey are either from Canada or Detroit. Everyone knows about hockey and Canada, but hockey stuck pretty hard around Detroit too, with Gordie Howe and the rest of the Red Wings being so good and Canada being so close. All the Slovaks and Poles and Bohemians took to the Red Wings and never got it out of their system, plus the guy on the radio did the Red Wings games was so good for so long, so that kids started following the games because their dads did, and their kids followed the games, and maybe even their kids, ones that were born recently enough. When it comes to hockey Detroit is a lot more like Canada than the States.
For being in the business of catching hard things at least part-time, Whitey is aggressive about winning. He doesn’t like losing. Someone tells Whitey a story and Whitey tries to tell a better one, bigger story, larger lie, only it’s hard with the hockey guys. “Canuck calls me up from around Winnipeg somewhere – out there in the muskeg or whatever they call it – and starts telling me about his buddy Garth and the pickup hockey game they have Friday nights,” Whitey’ll say by way of introducing one of the stories that beat him. “Friday nights in Winnipeg, you know, not much going on, gets cold, gets dark early, pickup hockey game’s bound to wind up like a kegger around here. Have a few, skate around some. Then you have a few more, skate around some more, maybe bounce someone into the boards, that calls for a cold one, grab another one, before you know it you’re fresh out.
"Someone yells for Garth to drive down to the LCB – the liquor store, in Canada government owns the liquor stores, there’s something for you – and he says, ‘Hell no, I’m not taking my car down there. You want me to get arrested for drunk driving?’
“’Naw, naw, don’t take the car,’ they tell him. ‘Course you don’t want to take the car. They’ll arrest you in a minute. Don’t want you getting arrested. Take the Zamboni.’
“Okay, so taking the Zamboni sounds all right to Garth, tells you how far gone he is. They open the garage door and he backs out the Zamboni, doesn’t hit a thing if you can believe it, drives it along the side of the road to the liquor store.
"Now no one driving past thinks this is anything unusual, so you gotta believe in Winnipeg people are driving Zambonis everywhere – beauty shop, grocery store, take the kids to soccer games, who needs a minivan. Parks the Zamboni in front of the liquor store, grabs a 24-pack of Molson Canadian, pays for it naturally, then hops back on the Zamboni.
“Canuck tells me Garth would have made it all the way back no problem if he hadn’t made a detour to a Tim Horton’s, donut place named after the dead guy. Winnipeg cop was hanging out there drinking coffee and chomping on a cruller, saw the Zamboni and put the arm on Garth. Finished his donut first, of course.”
“That’s pretty good,” Homer says.
“That’s not the best,” Whitey says back. “Got another call, this time from the Hawk, he calls himself. Ask him if it’s short for Black Hawk and he isn’t just Dale Tallon or Stan Mikita or somebody and he just laughs, crazy kind of laugh. But he’s not Chicago, he’s Canadian; you can tell from the ‘oot’ and ‘aboots.’
“Hawk I’ve talked to before. Don’t know what got him calling me, why I deserve him, but he’s amazing. I can name any hockey player ever in the NHL and he’s got a story about him – and it almost always involves the Hawk. I say, ‘Give me an Orest Kindrachuk story,’ and he goes into how he – the Hawk – shot pool with Orest Kindrachuk all night in a bar in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, almost to Alaska. He’s shooting pool with Orest Kindrachuk and this native babe picks him up – I mean, literally picks him up – and heaves him into a full-length mirror back of the bar the long way, and Kindrachuk couldn’t do anything more about it than a daisy. And this guy’s one of the Broad Street Bullies.
“Or I’ll say, ‘Give me a Dave Hreckosy story,’ and he’ll say Hreckosy was the most scared player he ever met, scared of the puck, and the reason he scored 40 goals that one season out in California? Psychedelic mushrooms. Hooked up with the guy who supplied the Grateful Dead with their peyote and junk and got on the mushroom-a-game plan. Smoothed him right out. Next year the connection was doing 10 hard in Soledad and Hreckosy was back to being scared of the puck again, and in another three years he was out of the league.
“Finally I figure I’ll test him so I say, ‘Give me a Pete Laframboise story.’ Pete Laframboise is my favorite hockey player ever. I liked the name. That and the Kansas City Scouts. How can you not like somebody with a name like that played for the Kansas City Scouts?
“Hawk says, ‘Pete Laframboise is an honorary chief in the Inuvik tribe of British Columbia. I was there. We were up in the very northern tip of British Columbia, out of Prince George, between there and Quensel, fishing for salmon with an Iuvik guide. Turns out these Indians are just nuts about hockey and hockey players, and when they found out Pete played in the league they had this special ceremony. They crowded 20 people, whites and natives, in a sealskin tent, anointed Pete with this special mixture of bear grease, ashes and juniper, clothed him in a bearskin cape and named him, “He-Who-Dwells-Among-the-Ice-and-Berries.”’”
“I knew everything about Pete Laframboise – kind of beer he drank first of all, and everything else, from hanging out with him for hours at card shows where no one wanted his autograph – and this was in Canada yet, so that tells you what kind of hockey player he was when no one wanted his autograph in Canada – so there was no way he could have been an Indian chief. No way.
“I actually had his number. Gave it to me when he was bored, wrote a story on him, turned out all right. I called him up and told him the Indian-chief story. When he stopped laughing he said, ‘You’re kidding, right? That’s the biggest bunch of crap I heard in my life!’”
“So were you mad?” Homer asked.
“Mad? I wished I’d have thought of it. I admire someone with that much reckless diregard for the truth. Hey, you think if I work on the Hawk hard enough those Indians would make me a chief?”
posted by Kit Kiefer | 8:04 PM
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