Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

The CHL got it right in returning the Memorial Cup to a place far removed from the noise and glitz of the NHL.

It seemed like a small-market team would never again host the Memorial Cup. It seemed like the Canadian Hockey League would only ever look to franchises in big markets, locales offering easy access to the national media and venues equipped to seat 7,000 or so.

Recent Memorial Cups that I’ve made it to had a big-event feel. By that I mean that it felt a lot closer to a professional event than to ye olde time junior hockey.

And then the QMJHL and CHL awarded this spring’s tournament to Rimouski. It’s enough to make you believe in major junior hockey once more (if you ever lapsed).

The conventional wisdom is that junior hockey in bygone days was a mom-and-pop deal, the stuff of smaller, bucolic Canadian communities a long way from the noise and glitz of the NHL. The conventional wisdom does have some foundation in fact; yup, some of those teams in the black-and-white photos were in proximity to the frozen pond. Cup games were played in Sudbury and the Soo or Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivieres. But junior hockey back-when was bigger than you might presume. The first Memorial Cup contest I ever attended was Bobby Orr’s last game with the Oshawa Generals. Please don’t do the math and, no, I wasn’t working it. The game was not played in Oshawa but rather at Maple Leaf Gardens and it was a tough ticket. Suffice to say that junior-hockey was a fairly big business disguised as a much smaller one. It had grass-roots values but, then again, grass is green.

Another piece of conventional wisdom is that the CHL today looks at the Memorial Cup as a revenue-maker first and foremost. Or maybe nothing more than cash-grab. And if you’ve gone to recent Memorial Cups and if you’ve done the math—attendance times ticket prices—you know it can a multi-million-dollar enterprise. I was out at the tournament in Vancouver a couple of years back and it had something a lot closer to a NHL feel than a celebration of hockey tradition. In fact, it was a lot closer to a NHL feel than I’ve experienced in a few NHL markets, Phoenix being only the most pointed example.

I’m sure that the CHL, the QMJHL and the Oceanic will make out just fine financially with the Memorial Cup in coming days. Aesthetically, though, I don’t think they could do any better.

You don’t have to be a cynic to have believed that certain franchises in CHL have no shot of ever hosting major-junior’s biggest event. Rimouski would have been up there. After all, the Colisee seats about 4,200 and accommodates another 800 or so in standing-room and bird-nest perches. (No exaggeration: For the first game I watched there in Vinny Lecavalier days, I stood with my back against the wall along with ten other souls on two-by-eights balanced on a couple of cinderblocks. This makeshift arrangement allowed some sort of perspective over the shoulders of the jam-packed standing-room crowd.)

Back when the Saint-Jean Lynx moved out to Rimouski in 1995 there was some doubt about the viability of a franchise in a community of 30,000 or 35,000. Support for the team had to transcend all expectations going in. Back when I went out there in 1997 the Oceanic games were selling out even though local games were on community-cable TV. Lecavalier and Brad Richards were the big attractions and the latter went on to become the centerpiece of Rimouski’s Memorial Cup championship team of 2000.

Even after that triumph, there was doubt about the willingness of major talents to park for a couple of seasons on the snowy south shore of the St Lawrence only a couple of subway stops from the Gaspe Peninsula. The doubts escalated when it came to the matter of Anglophones from the Maritimes, who were a growing presence in the Q. Any and all doubts were put to rest by Sidney Crosby.

If you’ve read this far and if you care just a whit about junior hockey, you know the basics of that story. Crosby wins a couple of player-of-the-year awards. Crosby leads the team to the Memorial Cup final in 2005. Crosby learns French. Crosby expresses nothing but love of playing there.

I was out in Rimouski a few times during Crosby’s time there. It was easy to see why he enjoyed his time in Rimouski—and why, in fact, he has gone back several times in recent Augusts to skate with his old team as prep work for NHL training camp. Crosby and his teammates weren’t big-time celebrities in the community. They played ball-hockey with kids on the streets where they lived or jumped into pick-up games at pads out at the parks. They practiced, played games, did their schoolwork and otherwise led the nearest thing to regular teenagers’ lives. It never felt like a smaller version of a NHL franchise. Not when they had to wait for eight-year-old figure skaters to get off the ice so that the Oceanic practice could commence. Not when they passed beer leaguers in the hallways after games. No, it felt a lot more like a community team. Granted, it was a community team that possessed a talent who was probably ready to play in the NHL at age 16, but a community team nonetheless. And for that reason Crosby is still close to Oceanic teammates—maybe even closer than he is to his contemporaries on the Penguins.

I’ve made seven trips out to Rimouski over the years though not since the Colisee had its facelift, a big part of the Oceanic’s bid for the Memorial Cup. I’ve been there in heady days with Lecavalier, Richards and Crosby. I’ve been in there in much harder stretches, like the last time, back at the end of the 2006-2007 season, when the Oceanic finished in the basement with a young, often over-matched team. It was then, at the end of the franchise’s toughest season, that team president Andre Jolicoeur told me that his team was pointing to the 2008-09 season and to a bid for the Memorial Cup. I wished him luck but I thought he’d have a lot more luck building a winning team than landing the tournament. I figured the tournament would go to Quebec or Halifax or any other franchise that could run 7,500 or 8,000 ticket-holders through the turnstiles. Thankfully, I was wrong.

All my favourite Memorial Cups have been off the NHL axis and a lot closer to hockey’s grass roots. Great players at the Memorial Cup make for great memories -- in my case, seeing Orr or, later, Gilbert Perreault and Guy Lafleur and Marcel Dionne and, yes, Crosby. But the best times aren't necessarily tied to future Hall of Famers. No, my favorite Memorial Cups are intimate enough that you’ll bump into fans at breakfast or on the street. Peterborough in 1996 was a shining example of that. No matter where you went in the city you knew the tournament was going on. No matter where you went in the arena you felt close enough to touch the players.

I’m the first one to criticize the CHL and its member leagues when they get things wrong. It’s only fair that I congratulate them for getting this one right.