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This Canadian senator's tirade about the Americanization of hockey is read-to-believe stuff
Jonathan Kozub
Meet David Richard Adams. Adams is Justin Trudeau's newest senate appointee, an acclaimed novelist, and, like most Canadians, invented hockey. Given his exclusive rights to the game's patent, on Tuesday, while fellow members of the Canadian senate trifled with Iran Accountability Week, Asian Heritage Month and the Aga Khan’s Diamond Jubilee visit, Adams took some time out of everyone's not-so-busy schedule to bring a matter of actual global importance to the senate floor:
The bastardization of the treasured hockey lexicon by knuckle-dragging Yankee announcers, who have been slanging unchecked through playoff broadcasts in balmy southern utopias like Boston and Pittsburgh FOR TOO LONG.
"Long ago and far away, when I was boy," Adams began, explaining that the hockey vernacular he grew to know and love in that distant, sepia-toned age of innocence and wrist-breaking slashes, has been all but lost as America has slowly supplanted sweaters with jerseys and scrubbed the art of "dipsy-doodling" almost entirely from existence.
“We didn’t deny a shot; we actually saved it. We didn’t delay at the blue line; we stopped at the blue line. Nor did we take a wrister. What an insulting word. We took a wrist shot. Nor did we take a slapper. What an insulting word. We took a slapshot — and not the movie,” Adams roared on, presumably punctuating his diatribe with closed-fist strikes to the podium. "And none of us from about the age of six months on ever needed a laser beam to follow a puck.” (Because yes, that's what those are. Laser beams.)
With the scope of the atrocity too broad to be glossed over in the span of a single hour or even two, however, Adams then waded deeper into the battle, bellowing:
“Tragically, Canadians are often forced to listen to American play-by-play commentators if we want to watch U.S.-based teams in the first or second round. I know, my fellow senators, that all of this seems petty, but nothing is petty about our game, nor the language we used to illuminate it. Our language enhanced and enriched every aspect of the play because our commentators actually knew what was happening on the ice.”
Wrapping with deep reflection on how a Canadian team has not won the Stanley Cup since 1993, Adams was cut off as murmurs of a suicide pact began to circulate throughout the chamber. Thankfully, Adams' office was kind enough to provide a transcript of his final, unrelayed message:
"My fellow senators [pause for effect], we still have Winnipeg."
God bless the queen, amen.