The Envelope

I was around 12. Days of drowsy 4AM ’93 Finals watching with my Dad had been long gone. They drifted into the realm of hazy childhood memories along with teddy bears stashed in the attic, best friends who moved abroad and lullabies. They became memories you’re not entirely sure were real, but which somehow strike a chord when they float to surface by any chance. I wasn’t very much into sports – Formula 1 punched me in the gut when Ayrton Senna was taken away so that interest faded a couple of years after 1994. I casually followed football, played with my buddies, but nothing serious. And oh, I lived and still live in a small-to-mid town in Poland with no ice hockey traditions and no interest in the Montreal Canadiens.

It is funny though – my Dad was a big time sports fan, so my stash of mid-90’s sports memories probably paint a completely false picture of a sports-crazy athletic kid. Even after Senna, I stuck around long enough to remember Hill and Villeneuve winning it all. I remember Mika Laitinen (ski jumping), Kjetil Andre Aamodt and emergence of Lasse Kjus (alpine skiing), Bjorn Daehlie and Vegard Ulvang (cross-country skiing) and Finnish Ice Hockey World Championship title. Jarmo Myllys. Janne Ojanen. Saku Koivu.

Saku Koivu, oh yes, this one I remember well.

Still, what is weird is that despite all that, I still remember myself not particularly liking hockey in the mid 90’s. Too aggressive, too tough, too violent – it wasn’t something for a nice little fattish bookworm like me.

Then Disney intervened.

What happened was my brother and I got taken to a Miracle on Ice show in Spodek Arena in Katowice (still one of my favourite sports places in the world). As we were exiting the place, we noticed posters advertising ice hockey world championship group B happening soon after. I don’t know why, but it caught my eye and it seemed like a fun thing to see.

“Can we go, Dad?”

I still remember the score, Poland beating Great Britain 4:3 in tournament opener. My Mum remembers the drive home much more vividly – it was a night of freezing rain and she still gets chills thinking of driving us back in atrocious conditions at snail pace. I think I remember some of this, but I can’t be sure – I was feverish. The game left me literally burning and that was it. I was hooked.

In the months afterwards, the Red Wings met the Avalanche in the Conference Finals and I read all (read: nearly nothing) about it in Polish newspapers. Patrick Roy was there and I remembered him from that sleepy but exciting night in 1993, so I cheered for him. Still, kid’s allegiance moves fast if there are no local heroes to idolize and then it was on to rooting for Fedorov and the Russian Five and Steve Yzerman, who to this day seems to me like the one guy who waited the longest for his first Stanley Cup.

Then there was EA Sports NHL97 and my Dad mentioning that since we watched the ‘93 Finals together and the Canadiens have always been “his” team, so why not choose them. And that’s how it started. There was little to hang your young hockey love on. Live hockey on public TV was no longer there, newspapers treated NHL as an exotic novelty and the one time I saw a Canadiens jersey at a sportswear stand I ran home shouting about it.

I still have that jersey.

It was a lot of ingenuity, a lot of inventing your own stories based on players ratings in EA Sports games. Lots of taping NHL shows aired on Czech TV (CT Nova, here’s to you wherever you are now). Reception was bad and it was heavily weather-dependent. If there was any storm or clouds or just whatever between my house and Czech Republic, we got crap instead of hockey show. Next week maybe, kid, sorry about that.

Canadiens were historically bad at that time, but that somehow didn’t deter me. I rebuilt my roster hundreds of times in NHL video games, won championships and my parents did all they could to invent some way for an NHL-crazy kid to have access, any kind of access.

That’s how we get to The Envelope.

One time, my Dad found an inventive way to combine my love for hockey with practicing English and told me that if there’s no NHL stuff around here, why don’t we write a letter to NHL teams, tell them how hard it is for a kid to get his hands on anything NHL-related and simply beg for whatever they can spare. So we did.

Now, full disclosure, as an early teenager, coming from a family of collectors (some could say – hoarders), the Montreal Canadiens were not the only team I contacted. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of now, but on the other hand it is harder for me to develop genuine hate towards teams which treated me nicely when I was a kid. Some teams never replied, some replied with some photos and some sent gifts that for a kid in Poland were and still are royal (I got some pucks, for example). All of them are cherished and safely stored in my house to this day.

Still, the first and most awaited were the Montreal Canadiens. I remember the first time I actually got a response, my Dad was holding The Envelope standing by the door when I was walking home from school. Two classmates at my side, they must still think I wasn’t right in the head. What they witnessed was a total delirium, complete meltdown out of sheer happiness.

It was a packing-paper grey envelope with elegant handwriting of my name and address. Spotless, no mistakes and that’s an achievement – my surname is quite high on the difficulty meter and I’m used to seeing it twisted and mangled in various and original ways. There was even a journalist I spoke to later in my life, who heard the name pronounced, DECLINED TO LOOK AT MY BADGE, because “when you hear it, you get it” and then butchered it in the article. But I digress.

What I want to say, for a strangely-named kid in southern Poland, having somebody across the ocean take the time to carefully hand-write it correctly on the envelope meant something. It was dignifying and in some way it gave dignity and class to the person who wrote it. Years later, when I read Pierre Houde saying that he takes extra care to learn how to pronounce foreign names of players, I literally clapped. “French and our culture is a vital part of our identity, I think it’s only right we treat others the same way”. It’s not a direct quote, but that’s how I remembered it and I experienced that attitude from this hockey organization.

And oh, it wasn’t one envelope. After a while, the list of teams I contacted slowly trickled to one club and throughout that time the Montreal Canadiens were the only team I could bet my allowance on responding every time. They blew my mind when they responded to a request for ANYTHING related to Patrick Roy or Jocelyn Thibault (my NHL97 hero) with two photos and a polite letter stating that in 2000 they really don’t have anything else, as the trades happened a while back, y’know. During that time I was a proud Fan Club member, I got photos of those glorious rosters from the turn of the century. There’s even an unused, mint block of season tickets for their last season at the Forum sitting in my house. Crazy, space stuff for a pre-Internet kid in small-town Poland.

And every one of those letters came in a handwritten envelope, the same handwriting of an older, classy person. No mistake in the name, ever.

For that chubby kid with a new-found hockey love, NHL and Montreal Canadiens became a matter of personal identification. Before Internet arrived, I didn’t know anybody following ice hockey in my surroundings and definitely nobody who’d get the same meltdown because of some letter with photos of a couple of dudes on skates.

Of course, in all the years that followed, no love affair can last without a row or two. I’m an emotional fan, so there were some dumb bets or maybe a year of not wearing anything Habs-related due to a trade of a certain Slovak goalie. I’m still disgusted at how the organization treated Mike Cammalleri. I find it contrary to everything the Canadiens stand and should stand for and somehow I think that the person writing my envelopes would agree. I still make judgements on players that turn out to be mistaken though I stand by my assessment that sometimes more flair and less conservatism would help the team. Too bad, it is how it is and when you haven’t experienced a championship run in nearly 25 years following a team, you tend to be trigger-happy sometimes.

I’m writing this before Game 6 of the Vegas series, so anything can still happen. The Habs can still get eliminated or they can bow out in the Finals. After all, every Canadian team save for the Jets and the Leafs (oh my, what a joke) had a shot in the Finals since the Habs last went all the way and nothing came out of it. Hell, they can lose in Game 7 OT, be one goal away from winning it all and still end in tears.

It doesn’t matter.

They’ve had a glorious playoff run after a puzzling regular season in most difficult circumstances. They started like a rocket, woke up long-asleep hopes for a deep run and then regressed to the most depressingly infuriating mediocrity that we had seen all too well in the previous quarter of a century. Against Toronto, I seriously thought there was no coming back after a 0:4, no way. A game, yes, but that was it, yet another wasted season and yet another embarrassment.

This team is not an embarrassment though, far from it. They found something special, took it and have gone on a run like no other in my memory. Not only are they winning – they are winning by being a better team. Game 5 against Vegas was a showcase of a visiting team closing the door on an opponent out of answers. I watched that game weirdly calm, somehow knowing that this is a different group, different team and they came there to win. It can still crash and burn, but after this run it will end in a standing ovation. Cup or no Cup, I’m proud of them and I’m happy to be around to see it.

Here’s where we get to The Envelope for the last time. In the last couple of days I’ve thought about people who made that fickle 12-year-old tie himself to the Canadiens for better or worse. My Dad for sure, and I still cherish the games we watch together, even when it’s grumbling and cursing etc. Many players, adored for reasons more or less logical – Jocelyn Thibault though nobody will ever retire #41 for him in Montreal. Alex Kovalev. Saku Koivu. Jose Theodore. Steve Begin. Trent McCleary. Jean Beliveau who was kind enough not only to return a request for an autograph, but also to write a few words thanking me for the letter. Many, many others, most of them grinders trying their best on teams destined for no success, leaving their hearts on the ice for some kid to read about it in a small section of a newspaper or in later era to hear about it on CJAD800.

Still, nearly all of that came AFTER. What made that one particular team special, what has left such an impression on a kid who could have easily gone for Detroit or Dallas or Colorado (my, those jerseys!) or Toronto or any other NHL team? When I think about it now, some 20 years later, it was the fact that no matter what I asked, I could be certain that a little grey envelope would arrive, my difficult name perfectly handwritten, silly teenage me treated with respect and dignity even though I was as far from being a Quebecois in the stands as you could imagine.

Dear Unknown Person, I have no idea what happened to you down the road and even whether you’re still with us (though I very much hope so). Your small gesture meant a world to a kid in a country far away and it tied him to your hockey club for better or worse for a lifetime.

Win or lose, Cup or no Cup, I’m just thankful to be around for the ride. Thank you.