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CHAPTER 1
How to Provoke Thousands of Rabid Soccer Fans
[or, as the police run alangside my convertible, I hear shots ring out and hundreds screaming, "Death to Gallagher!"]
Ahhh, soccer, the "beautiful game." Question: What's the "highlight of the night" in a nil-nil tie with zero shots on goal in a game? Just asking. For decades now I have enraged soccer fans by suggesting it's the stupidest game ever invented. I still believe I may have a point when a team can play a whole game without a shot on goal and still win the league championship. Hello, Seattle Sounders (who beat Toronto FC for the 2016 MLS title without one shot on net). Just saying — I hate soccer. I know "hate" is a strong word, but it's such a strong hate. I've seen the game on grand scales — World Cup qualifying matches in London and Dublin. And, more importantly, I've played the game. I get it. I made senior varsity soccer in high school. It was a joke. My team at Montreal West H.S. was brutal. Maybe that's why I hate it so much. Honestly, we looked like the Island of Misfit Toys. You didn't, and still don't, have to be fast or big or coordinated or smart to play. Soccer players are usually the guys who couldn't make the cut in other sports. And soccer players are pansies. I yell, laughingly, at my siblings and neighbours who take their kids to soccer games. Let the kid play hockey, baseball, football ... come onnn! Buy the kid a glove; let him or her play a real sport, I plead ...
You see, soccer is the most popular sport simply because it's the least expensive to play. Let's just break that down. All one has to do is look at the economic status of the countries where it's popular to understand that. Hell, if you have five cans and two old boots for goalposts, then you've got a game. Soccer isn't popular because it earned acceptance; soccer is popular because most countries, underdeveloped or otherwise, had no choice but to accept it.
Soccer players openly weep when they trip over another player, as if they've been shot. Hey, here comes the stretcher! Wait, the "magic" sponge will bring them back to life. Miraculous! And "footy" is freaking boring. Bore-freaking-ing. My standard line on soccer is that the eyes of North American sports fans aren't trained for the sport. We want goals and runs, damn it. Lots of them. Perhaps it's because the first NHL game I ever saw was at the Montreal Forum back in 1972 when the Canadiens beat the L.A. Kings 10–2. I like ten-goal games from flying Frenchmen playing fire-waging hockey. Baseball? Love it. Listen, I saw Bob Gibson of the Cardinals pitch a number of times at Jarry Park in Montreal. The good news is all of his games were under ninety minutes. The bad news is that they ended 1–0 Cardinals. You want a pitching duel, fine. A goaltending duel, great. World Cup soccer? You watch it. But where? When I was growing up there was no ABC Monday Night Soccer game on TV. Or an NBC game of the week. All we saw were snippets of the great Pelé scoring for Brazil during the opening montage on Wide World of Sports, for goodness sake. Truth be told, if there was a soccer game on, you wouldn't see me tuning in. And what is this with kicking backward? We like our offences moving forward, not backward. Then there's the fact that they're not allowed to use their hands — what the eff? David Letterman and I have a lot in common when it comes to sports. He made a great suggestion for improving NBA basketball, and I've been quoting him on it for twenty years: give both teams one hundred points and let them play the final two minutes. Smart, eh? Dave hates soccer too. Among his reasons? Here are some from one of his famous top-ten lists:
* Loud horns make it hard to nap through boring parts;
* Bench-clearing brawls not as much fun without bats or sticks;
* Lots of players with umlauts in their names;
* Doesn't have the heart-pounding action of a five-hour baseball game;
* Too much kicking, not enough rasslin'; and look out ...
* Too many foreigners.
Ouch. Yet some of these "foreigners" kill people over soccer matches. Hundreds of fans have been killed before, during, and after harmless footy matches. The worst killing was that of Columbian defender Andrés Escobar, who accidentally put the ball in his own net at the 1994 World Cup and became a massive national disappointment. Ten days later, the twenty-seven-year-old Escobar was shot dead in a Columbian disco parking lot in a killing that sparked national outrage. The killers yelled, "Thanks for the own goal!" as they shot him six times. Charming.
I certainly don't want to get killed over a soccer match, but it almost happened. This brings us to the 1994 World Cup final game. I was in Toronto's Little Italy reporting on the championship finale of a sport that I categorically, without question, unequivocally, and beyond any doubt, despise. Well, these observations and more were all contained in my wildly popular Q commentary just before the World Cup final. Not to worry; there aren't any foreigners living in the Greater Toronto Area. Or soccer fans, for that matter. I kid.
Thousands upon thousands of fans gathered at the corner of College and Clinton, a perfect storm of Brazilian/Portuguese and Italian fans waiting for the outcome of this classic footy tilt. Classic, my classical gas. After 120 tedious and goalless minutes — yes, it ended zero fucking zero — the match was decided for the first time by a penalty shoot-out. After four rounds, Brazil led 3 — 2, and Roberto Baggio had to score to keep Italy's hopes alive. He missed by shooting it way over the crossbar, and the Brazilians were crowned champions for the fourth time. That made for a lot of pissed-off Italians. And a lot of drunken Brazilians pouring in from the surrounding neighbourhoods. And there's me, Mr. Soccer himself, on top of the CityTV "live eye" truck broadcasting the results to the football-crazed masses. It wasn't even my regular shift! I was just filling in for the weekend anchor, who'd taken the day off. Remember, hockey fans tried to burn down Vancouver after they lost the Stanley Cup. Hell, my hometown of Montreal attempted the same thing and they won the cup in '93. Some of these Italian fans wanted blood. Well, fee-fi-fo-fum, it turned out they wanted the blood of a soccer-hating Irishman. Me.
The word quickly spread. John "I Hate Soccer" Gallagher was in the area. Now, while we had a terrific security staff at CityTV, nothing was going to stop these yobs if they wanted to get at me, so we alerted Toronto's finest. These fans knew the sportscast was over at 6:30, so they got themselves prepared. The police suggested I lay low in the truck until I had to climb up and begin the sportscast. During this time the yahoos were "fuelling up." With pitchers of beer. We were heavily outnumbered, "we" being two or three monstrous station security men, a half dozen police officers, and little old "wine drinker" me against a crowd of thousands. I had been heckled for most of the day by soccer purists who weren't demonstrating the same eloquence as me with regards to their sport, and they knew when the time was to strike. I did get thousands of cheers as we panned the street, zooming in on raucous Brazilian fans, resplendent in green, yellow, and blue, whose team had just won 1–0, but none were coming from the dozen or so jackwagons whose hands were filled with the pitchers of cold, delicious beer that they were planning to use as projectiles instead of thirst quenchers.
Sportscast over, I climbed down the ladder on the side of the truck and braced myself for my first golden shower. No, not that kind. Sorry. Funny thing, though, is these soccer fans should have used their hands more when playing their stupid sport because they were lousy shots. Pitcher after pitcher of beer came heading toward me, but they completely missed, instead soaking the cops and my security guards. Big mistake. A melee broke out. One of the City staffers grabbed a guy. Fists and more beer flew. More shoving. The police, who had been doused and were pissed off because of it, intervened. But the cops knew the golden rule in show business: always take care of the talent. And since I was the nearest thing to talent in the area, that meant me. The boys in blue hurriedly got me the hell out of there. Remember, there were thousands of people in the street and more on the way, and the cops had arrived on horses and bikes. There was no ducking into the back of a police car, because there wasn't one in sight.
Another thing — I always drive my way to these live-eye events and park nearby because the technicians and camera crew on the truck have to drag miles of cable and unhook everything and are usually an hour-plus when wrapping up. My car? A 1992 BMW 325i convertible. The roof down, natch. Another mistake. A German car. Germany was the defending champ in 1994. These fans hated Germany's soccer team. Add in a couple of world wars and the vibe was not good. So we bounced through the drunken hooligans to my parked car, with some of them still in chase. And, like Batman jumping into the Batmobile, I steeplechased myself into the front seat, started the car, and peeled out. Reminiscent of that scene in the Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire, six cops, three on each side, jogged beside the car and ran me out of harm's way and far, far, far from the madding crowd. The soccer douche-waffles were still in chase, shouting, "Death to Gallagher! Death to Gallagher!" Did I hear gunshots, or was that just Guido's '77 Firebird's exhaust backfiring? No matter; I was hammer down, northbound, and out of Little Italy–town. Thank you, 14 Division.
I wondered if any of the cops would have taken a bullet for me. Years later I ran into one of them who remembered the incident well. He said that he in fact had taken a bullet for me that fateful day. It was a Coors Light Silver Bullet. Hey now!
CHAPTER 2
I SHOULD BE BLAH BY NOW
(or, death by ooga booga or John Kordic ripping your limbs off)
There's a terrific and underrated film called Let It Ride starring one of my all-time favourites, Richard Dreyfuss. He plays Jay Trotter, a dreamer and small-time gambler who receives a hot tip at the racetrack. A woman in the film says to him, "You might be walking around lucky and not even know it." And you know, I've thought about that for years. Sounds like something from a fortune cookie.
Near-death experiences? Gee, where do I start? I once got into a car accident so bad after winning a provincial softball championship that I still have shards of glass from a '75 Volvo in my elbow. A crash so bad it took hours to drag the wreckage out of the tangled brush after sending everyone to hospital.
Have you ever had someone break into your house? It happened to me in a nice neighbourhood in Halifax in the early eighties, on a Sunday night. After being awoken by the break-in, my roommate's bat-wielding boyfriend chased the burglar down the back steps. He used his powerized Willie Mays Louisville Slugger and batted 1.000 on his head. Funny, I've never slept well on a Sunday night since.
*
This is spooky. One afternoon in 1973, my dad dropped me off at a theatre on Saint Catherine Street in Montreal to take in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (easily the worst film of the franchise). I planned to take the subway home afterward. A good-looking gentleman in his late twenties struck up a conversation with me on my way home. We talked about stuff like the Canadiens' Stanley Cup parade, which I'd attended, on that very street a few weeks before. Harmless chatter. While film of the Habs victory over the Blackhawks was rare, this "nice" man told me he actually had footage of the Canadiens' Cup victory on 8mm that he could play for me on a screen back at his apartment. "Neato!" Well, trying to be polite as possible, I told him I had to decline. He persisted as he "walked" me to the Guy Street subway. He even paid for my ticket and escorted me down to the platform. What a nice man, making sure I got home safe. Right. He kept telling me how cool this footage of the Stanley Cup playoffs was and that I would really enjoy it. He even, coincidentally, got off at Atwater subway stop, where my bus home — the famous 162 — was waiting. It didn't dawn on me what his intentions might be until he put his hand on my arm as I went up the stairs from the train. I quickly pulled my arm away. I'll never know if he had a chloroform-soaked handkerchief in his coat pocket, but I wasn't going to hang around to find out. As he lunged at me one last time, I kicked our perverted friend in the chuckies and ran for the bus. I told my family over dinner when I got home, and they were aghast. They told me that, although I'd completely done the right thing, I was one lucky young eleven-year-old.
*
The clock had already struck midnight on New Year's. My friend and I had just left a party in Notre Dame de Grace, which can be a tough 'hood in Montreal. He lived a block away from Walkley Avenue, which has had a bad reputation for decades in my hometown, what with street gangs and murders. The old expression still stands: "Run, don't Walkley." We were walking on Sherbrooke waiting for a bus or a cab that never came. We were just kids, and we were being silly, trying to wave down cars and being loud. Not good for two a.m. on any night, let alone New Year's Eve. We saw some guy across the street walking with his girlfriend and yelled something at them. I'm not sure what it was, but it wasn't "Happy New Year." Minutes later, after the guy had escorted his girlfriend home, I saw him crossing the street toward us. Out of nowhere, this guy just started kicking and punching the two of us. We got a couple of shots in, but he floored me and started pounding on my friend Jim. Did he have a knife? Screw this, I thought, and I ran back to where the party had been and crashed there. Let that be a lesson to you: When confronted by an assailant, you don't have to outrun the attacker; you just have to outrun your friend. Works for bear attacks, too.
This was another close one. It was the mid-1990s. I was driving a Molson Indy Corvette Stingray, and my girlfriend and I were hammer down, westbound to Windsor-town, where she'd grown up. We decided to join some of her friends in their BMW to go across the river to Detroit for dinner at a lovely seafood bistro in Grosse Pointe. On the way, we had to go through a somewhat shady area of Detroit. At a stoplight, we saw a guy on crutches obviously struggling as he tried to cross the street. He even fell in front of our car — several times, mind you — while flailing and waving at us to help. The guy driving the car said to us, "Don't get out of this vehicle." The man continued to lie there and scream in pain for two or three red lights, pleading for us to help him. And all that time we hardly noticed the two cars that had pulled up on either side of us. We were waiting for someone, anyone, to get out and help the poor soul. Of course, I was told later it's all part of a scam. Here's the trick: The thugs wait for an unwitting motorist to get out and help the crippled man. Once out of the car, it's a gun to the temple, and kiss that Bimmer, and perhaps all of us, goodbye. Our Windsor/Detroit friend said it happened all the time. Well, I'm just glad I kept my ass in the car, or else it would have been a "Saturday Night Special" that didn't end well. I could hear the cocking of the unseen gun's hammer for hours in my head.
*
How about your affable author being killed by a flying truck tire while driving on Highway 401? I know that "almost" only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and the back seat at a drive-in, but ... I'm driving back from my morning show in the westbound lane on a gorgeous sunny day with the roof down on my BMW 325i when here comes this big, black bouncy thing headed right toward my windshield. If you've seen pictures or news footage of tires hitting cars, it's almost always instant death. Yeah, this wheel came loose from an eastbound truck, bounced over the concrete median, and had me in its sights. It would have been a direct hit. I swerved out of the way into another lane (thank goodness it was 10:30 a.m. and traffic was light), but it still skimmed inches over my head (remember, the roof was down) and I saw it bounce down the highway in my rear-view mirror. I called the OPP to ask if anyone got hit. Thankfully, no one did. Not that day, anyway. I told the officer who I was, and he said, "Gallagher, it happens all of the time, and all or most of the trucks in question are big rigs from Quebec!" He said, "The highways and streets in some cities in that province are in such bad shape that the potholes loosen the lug nuts on the wheels and off they fly." He was right: 127 incidents of detached wheels were reported on Ontario roads in 2015. It was even worse in 1997, when 215 runaway truck tires were documented. Man. That was one close shave and a haircut. Two bits?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Big League Babble On"
by .
Copyright © 2017 John Gallagher.
Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
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