Ed Willes, "Never Boring": SportsLit follow-along fan notes
The author's latest book is a deftly detailed character study of the Vancouver Canucks that shows the "domino effects" of how dysfunction and panic can "get into the DNA" of an NHL franchise.
Reading Ed Willes’s history of the so-close-but-no-Cups-so-far Vancouver Canucks prompted thinking about the next great sports simulation game.
There are arcade-style games where you exist at Level One, trying to earn as many wins as possible, and there is also Level Three, AKA Dynasty Mode. Level Two is the mood of the public — how are the fans takin’ it? — and Level Four is outside factors beyond the control of the sports industries, such as pandemics and the climate crisis.
Across 38 years of covering hockey, Willes’s writing always conveyed a sensitivity that he wrote to assist the fan with demystifying all of that. Never Boring: The Up and Down History of the Vancouver Canucks (Harbour Publishing, October 5, 2024) toggles through all the levels of cascading Canucks’ torment — Neil Acharya’s turn of phrase — with the only Canadian-based NHL team west of the Rockies.
“I do believe, kind of that, that things can get into a franchise’s DNA — of chaos, of de-settlement, of destabilization,” Willes says in the latest episode of SportsLit. “I think that was kind of set before the puck ever dropped for the first Canucks game (in 1970). And it really stayed that way for a long time … There’s kind of domino effects.”
“One of the recurring themes in Canucks history has been that the ownership has been kind of unstable, and at times chaotic,” Willes adds. “And when you have that in the boardroom, it leaches into the locker room, inevitability. I think they have had the wrong people in the wrong positions at the wrong time. And I think they have had buzzard’s luck.”
As always, or at least as often as my good mental health days allow, here are follow-along fan notes for the episode. Further info on the book, and a link to buy, is on sportslit.ca.
Introduction
If/when you read Never Boring, Willes shares that he is a fan of baseball’s Boston Red Sox, who infamously had an 84-seasons championship drought.1 I also have some familiarity with ring-less angst, as a Minnesota Vikings fan.
Moreover, though, Neil Acharya points out it is cliché to make the “ ‘oh, we have bled more than you’ sort of argument”; it’s better to absorb and study the “comprehensive history that feels ink stained,” since Willes covered the Canucks for many years for The Province.
It is, wearing the Vikings swag, kind of freeing to know luck and outside factors always sway who wins in the end more than the hot-take chambers care to admit. There is no getting beyond ring-counting binarism, but knowing the history and appreciating the effort will make the payoff all the sweeter. If it ever arrives, eh?
Some explanation of my hockey math. The NHL dissolved the Arizona Coyotes (né Winnipeg Jets) and count Utah HC as an expansion franchise. That leaves 20 franchises that were either the quote, unquote Original Six (more like Surviving Six) or joined the NHL through expansions in 1967, ’70, ’72, ’74 and ’79.
Seventeen of those teams have won the Stanley Cup at least once since the Philadelphia Flyers became the first expansion club to win in 1974. By process of literal eliminations, that leaves the Toronto Maple Leafs, and 1970 expansion siblings Vancouver and the Buffalo Sabres. The Canucks are the only one of the three to get as far as Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final, doing so twice in 1994 and 2011.
Interview (starts at 11:00)
14:00 The first principal chairman of the Canucks was Tom Scallen, a Minnesotan who helmed a medical insurance company and served prison time for “securities fraud.”
16:00 The Canucks have had a dozen general managers in their 54-season history. The late Pat Quinn served 10 seasons and a partial 11th (1987-97), while Brian Burke (1998-2004) and Mike Gillis (2008-14) each served six. Patrick Allvin, the first Swedish general manager in the NHL, is in his fourth season.
18:00 Neil mentions the ruckus stirred up in the mid-1960s when Leafs executive Stafford Smythe (1921-71) wanted to build an arena in downtown Vancouver. The land Smythe had his eye on circa 1965 is less than 1 klick from where the Canucks play in (Insert Conglomerate Name) Arena.
Ultimately, instead of being in the six-team 1967 expansion, the Canucks arrive three seasons later and pay thrice the expansion fee.
Neil mentions the book Net Worth: Exploding the Myths of Pro Hockey, by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths (Viking Press, 1991). It was a must-read for hockey fans in the early 1990s.
22:00 The empty promise Smythe’s contemporary Harold Ballard made to build an arena in Bath, Ont., came while Ballard was a guest of the state at Bath Institution on 47 counts of fraud. It was local lore, growing up around there, that Ballard was so charmed by his surroundings that he promised a bunch of rec facilities, which never materialized.
Smythe died, at age 50, just before he would have faced trial on a similar suite of charges.
25:00 Hockey is unique relative to the other three major men’s team sports, where general managers and team presidents are increasingly likely not to be former players. There has to some role for authenticity and lived experience playing the game. Really we are talking about how big a slice of the pie chart it should get.
32:00 Prominent sports executives Tom Anselmi and Tod Leiweke were around the Canucks in the 1990s when they were getting settled into modern arena. And neither was there for very long once the building opened.2
Current chairman Francesco Aquilini and his family gained control of the Canucks in 2004. This current season is the 20th of the Aquilini era, and so far there have nine playoff appearances in 19 tries — 47.4 per cent success — and just the one advancement to the third round.3
That is right in the meaty part of the curve among the six Canadian-based teams that have been operational all that time. The Montréal Canadiens are tops with 11 playoff appearances in the salary cap era. The Edmonton Oilers have the fewest with seven, but have twice come within one victory of capturing the Cup.
39:30 Love this section where Willes talks about his rules for reporting on background and not “cheapen(ing) the content, or dilute it by using hearsay.” Stephen Brunt, one of the foremost sports writers in Canada, gets the attribution for, “All great newspaper stories start with disgruntled former employees.”
40:30 Respectively, Brian Burke graduated from Harvard Law; Pat Quinn earned his J.D. degree from the Widener University School of Law in Delaware; Mike Gillis earned a law degree from Queen’s University at Kingston, before becoming a player agent.
42:00 Stan McCammon ranks as the character who isn’t there in Canucks history. The episode where Wayne Gretzky almost signed in Vancouver happened during the summer of 1996.
47:30 Willes references Anatoly Tarasov (1918-1995), who is considered the father of Russian ice hockey. The hockey landscape changed very quickly during the wind-down years of the Cold War.
The historic three-game final between Canada and the USSR, which Willes chronicled in Gretzky to Lemieux: The Story of the 1987 Canada Cup (McClelland & Stewart, 2008) took place in September 1987. Within about 24 months, some of those Russian superstars were in the NHL, and Wayne Gretzky had swapped Oilers blue and orange for L.A. Raiders-ripped-off Kings silver and black.
That was the hockey world Neil and I cut our teeth on. Speaking for myself, the current one cannot touch that.
48:30 During the 1989-90 season, there was, no word of a lie, a caption in Sports Illustrated that said Vladimir Krutov “needs to diet.” Krutov (1960-2012) can only be seen as a tragic figure. In some other realm, Igor Larionov probably would have put up Peter Stastny-level 100-point seasons if he had arrived in the NHL in 1980 instead of in ’89.
How someone hasn’t made a motion-picture dramatization of how the Québec Nordiques spirited Stastny and his brother, Anton, out of eastern Europe is baffling. It’s not too late.
52:30 Willes is referring to the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs, when the Canucks were depleted by the time they ran into the Boston Bruins in the final.
54:00 The sixth episode of SportsLit featured Daemon Fairless and his narrative non-fiction work, Mad Blood Stirring: The Inner Lives of Violent Men. There is a chapter on the 2011 riot in Fairless’s book. The long and short of it, too many young men in too confined of a space makes trouble inevitable.
57:00 The night of March 8, 2004, when Canucks scoring winger Todd Bertuzzi assaulted Colorado forward Steve Moore amid “a moment of madness” (Ed’s phrase) was truly a flashpoint.
I remember feeling sickened, and outraged. But did I want to, as a 20s-something, be sickened and outraged? The thought behind the question posed to Willes was to show, well, every deep story has contradictions, and Todd Bertuzzi, or anyone who made a grievous error, deserves a chance to reform, or pause and reflect.
1:02:00 There was no resisting throwing in some CFL talk, since the conversation was recorded two days after the 2024 Grey Cup was staged in Vancouver.
The general vibe is that the CFL has managed, as an alt-league, to still command attention from about one-quarter of all Canadians. BellMedia says 9.9 million people, in a nation of just over 40 million, followed the game on Nov. 16.
A franchise in the Maritimes has been discussed on and off since the early 1980s. If it was such a winning idea, it would have happened already.
1:06:00 A mention of Gare Joyce would be a great end note. However, Willes one-ups that with a dynamite drop-in of Milt Dunnell (1905-2008), who wrote for the Toronto Star until he was 89 and lived to age 102. Through PressReader, let’s evoke this great bit of Dunnell lore, crafted by Warren Gerard and the late Randy Starkman:
One award he didn’t win was a National Newspaper Award, the country’s top honour for newspaper reporters and columnists. Dunnell didn’t believe in them and he refused to enter his work into the competition, saying, “All winning proves is that you were better in the eyes of a few people on the day you wrote that particular column than the other guys were with what they submitted.”4
Afterword
My marginalia on other topics are posted in Notes. Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
Nov. 1-Dec. 4, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
The Red Sox did not win the World Series in any completed season from 1919 till 2003. That works out to 84 seasons.
This is discussed in Chapter 6 in Never Boring.
See Hockey-Reference.
Warren Gerard, Randy Starkman, “A sports writer’s writer and more,” Toronto Star, Jan. 5, 2008.