Tuesday, April 26, 2011

I was walking around the city today with a friend who is an Argentine ghost. He told me that the buses of our city were very strange. "Why I asked him?"  "Well,"  he answered, " they all seem to be going to the same place, a place called Go Canucks Go. Where is that?"



The only sport I ever excelled at was ping-pong and I was much too early in that game to experience the transition from ping-pong into its incarnation as table tennis. Ping-pong paddles became bats and I was out of the game.

In just about any other sport I have failed miserably. In basketball I was much too short and I had a habit of spraining the middle finger of my right hand. The same happened in my attempts to play volleyball. By the time I almost learned to play cricket I had moved to Mexico where baseball was a complete confusion for me. And in football (the South American kind) the moment I told anybody I was Argentine they expected me to dribble the ball like Omar Sivori or Alfredo Di Stéfano. I had the same chip on my shoulder with Argentine tango and this “sport” I managed to do efficiently (and no better) not too long ago. My attempts at playing American football (the touch football variety) ended with a sprained shoulder. The sprained shoulder came to haunt me years later when I tried to flag a cab and my shoulder went!

Since I was never good at sports I was equally nondescript at sports photography. The only time I ever got distantly close to being good was after following for a month an all female rugby team some 27 years ago.

With hockey my problem has always been an overpowering lack of interest in a sport where they tell nasty boys who have almost killed another with a stick to sit down and behave for a few minutes. Plus I absolutely hate the Hammond organ and the Mexican Hat Dance.

But in spite of my feeling of anathema for the great Canadian sport I have been assigned many times in my past as a magazine photographer to photograph the Vancouver Canucks and the Edmonton Oilers. I can even boast at having been on board a trip between Edmonton and Vancouver on the once famous Canucks Boeing 727.



Some of my better shots came courtesy of Michael Varga who as a CBC sports cameraman (he was the best until he retired last year) who gave me tips on where to position myself.

But my favourite ever hockey shots are the two you see here. I took them from the ceiling of the old Vancouver Coliseum at the PNE with a 300mm lens at 1/15 second.

All the above is the only preamble I can think of for finally being able to breathe in relief at the fact that the Vancouver Canucks finally “se sacaron la espina”. It literally means to remove a thorn from yourself. And this is what the Vancouver Canucks finally did by beating the cucos (the bogey men) of Chicago in game 7 on overtime. They justly deserved to win and I am glad they did so. Now if I could only feel a bit more of a Vancouverite after all these years here (since 1975) I just might become a fan, win or lose.