HOW I ALMOST FOUGHT JOFFREY LUPUL (ALTERNATE TITLE: ALL-STAR BREAK CLICK BAIT)
On January 2 I directed a tweet toward Joffrey Lupul from our Twitter account. (You should follow us if you don't already, by the way. While we don't always #tweetsweet, we don't bully anyone or make discriminatory "jokes", and our hockey observations are reasonably astute and/or funny).
My tweeting at Lupul was not unusual. I often tweet helpful advice to the players and coaches, little timbits of wisdom like "please stop losing" or "please take Clarkson off the power play."
This being the regular season, Lupul was injured again and had, in a fit of self-pity, tweeted the Radiohead song "Lucky" to his followers. He was being sarcastic. When it comes to staying healthy, Joffrey Lupul has all the accumulated bad luck of a black cat who has just run under a ladder and smashed into thirteen consecutive mirrors. I'm talking really unlucky. "Born Under a Bad Sign" would have been a more appropriate selection. Sample lyric:Â I've been down since I began to crawl. If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.
Legions of Leafs fans have been blasting Lupul for being perennially wounded by saying things like "staying healthy is a skill." I'm not sure I believe that, but if it is indeed a skill, it's not one that Lupul has. The guy seems to spend more time on the IR than on the ice.
So I feel a little bad for Lupes. He's hurt pretty much all the time. And given the theme of this blog, we certainly understand what being hurt feels like. From mild discomfort to screaming agony, we understand. You see, we're Leafs fans. And it really hurts to love the Leafs.
I wasn't mad at Joffrey Lupul so much as about a myriad of other things: the annual collapse (which came early this year!), the paralyzing lack of salary cap space, a decade of futility and empty promises from MLSE, our shitty captain, and Jake Gardiner's inexplicably inept performance this season.
But, after yet another loss to that monolithic conglomerate of human steamrollers that are the Boston Bruins, I took my frustration out on Lupul. Here's what I tweeted to him:
That may seem a little harsh, but my sentiments were actually quite charitable when compared to some of the excessively caustic and homophobic comments some other people were tweeting his way. And I truly do think that Lupul's body is telling him to retire. As Josh Elliot at The Hockey News recently pointed out, he has now missed an entire 82-game season since arriving in Toronto.
Anyway, I sent the tweet and forgot about it and went to work. I labour in the kitchen of a busy/trendy Mexican restaurant near College and Bathurst (no, not Sneaky Dee's). About an hour into my shift I glanced at my phone because it's 2015 and nobody, myself included, can pass an hour without stopping whatever it is they're doing and gawking at a glowing rectangle. Just to see what's going on in the world. Just to stay informed.
I was surprised to see that Lupul had "favourited" my tweet, but the Saturday dinner rush was flooding in and I had to trouser my phone and get to work. I thought nothing more of it until I poked my head out of the kitchen around 10:45 PM and saw Lupul sitting at the bar. The Leafs had played that night in Winnipeg and had suffered yet another lopsided thrashing courtesy of the Jets, who are currently tearing up the Western Conference under the placid guidance of Paul Maurice, former Leafs coach. Randy Carlyle was to gain that odious designation for himself a few days later, but nobody (save for Brendan Shanahan and perhaps Dave Nonis) knew that yet.
So back to Lupul, who was nursing a pint at the bar. He looked glum. I had told my co-workers about him favouriting my tweet that afternoon, and they began joking that he had hired a private investigator to find out where I worked with the intention of confronting me. "He came here for you man. He's gonna kick you in the dick." "Dude, you gotta say something. Go tell him he sucks."
I felt important. I felt the way all obscure individuals feel upon realizing somebody famous knows them (or at least, is familiar with their Twitter account). I even believed, for a moment or two, that Joffrey Lupul had come to the restaurant to fight me. How would he go about it? Would he smash into the kitchen and yank my shirt over my head and elbow me in the spine? Would he furtively slip a waitress a note, cordially inviting me "outside" for "a chat?" I began to imagine how the altercation might go down. I pictured myself victorious, striking a blow for jilted Leaf fans everywhere - that forlorn and battered army I will always proudly belong to. I'd take one for Leafs Nation and brawl with Joffrey Lupul on the College Street sidewalk, a mere five or six kilometres away from Maple Leaf Gardens, that great cathedral of memories, that hallowed place where the Leafs once played acceptable hockey.
I was going to do it. I swear. I was going to fight Joffrey Lupul. I was gonna rip my apron off, storm over to the bar, and bellow "YOU WANNA GO? HUH?" like a belligerent barfly in a bad 90s action flick.
But reality began to infringe on my reverie. There would be consequences to my actions. Serious consequences. I would be fired. Possibly arrested and charged. Maybe even sentenced to a medium-security prison near the Quebec border where they screened Habs games in the common room.
So I didn't fight him. I took the high road. I decided not to hurt Joffrey Lupul. And who knows, my pacific resistance may even have saved his NHL career (though I still maintain he should head to Europe, where the game is gentler). If I had punched Lupul, he might have died. Or exploded.
I'm kidding, of course. I almost certainly would have lost the fight. But perhaps not. There would have been twenty-four years of bitter frustration behind my punches, so it's possible Lupul would have suffered a few broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.
Standing in front of the fryer, I checked my phone again and realized that Lupul had favourited a whole series of negative tweets that day. I wasn't special. There is a comprehensive stack of mean tweets indexed in his favourites as I write this. Name calling, bad jokes, inappropriate remarks, odd requests for extramarital trysts. And there I was, in the middle of them all, advising the guy to switch continents.
I felt bad until I remembered I make around $35,000 a year while the delicate hockey player sitting not ten feet away from me receives 5.25 million a season (whether he plays or not). Then I got really introspective. I thought about the way my life had gone, decisions I'd made or hadn't made that had brought me to where I was, toiling away in a taco restaurant in Toronto to pay the outrageous tuition for my Master's, peering through the pass enviously at the world of Joffrey Lupul, a world of privilege and cocktails and upward mobility.
My boss - a combative and contentious bully - screams at me if I'm a minute late for work (which happens often. In a cycle as vicious and unproductive as the Leafs offensive zone cycle, the team's brutal play drives me to drink, which causes me to oversleep, which makes me late for work). I hate my job with the intensity of a million white hot burning suns, but I have to do it to get paid. Joffrey Lupul gets paid to not play hockey, to sit on his couch and tweet about My Morning Jacket playing Bonnaroo.
Now, I happen to love My Morning Jacket. I think At Dawn is one of the greatest albums of the 2000s (aughts? do people call that decade the aughts? cuz people should). As a music fan, I appreciate Lupul's good taste. But as a Leafs fan it's kinda sad to realize he is tweeting his intention to attend a three-day concert scheduled to occur during the Stanley Cup Playoffs, tacitly admitting that the team won't make it. I mean, we all know the Leafs are missing the postseason once again this year (once again in humiliating fashion), but does the guy really have to announce his vacation plans? Can't he just pretend to believe the team has a chance? Hell, it's what we do. Delusion is what keeps us going as fans.
Lupul's Bonnaroo tweet, considered alongside Phil Kessel's fishing tweet, or Tyler Bozak's showing up to last year's locker clean-out press scrum wearing a freakin' GOLF HAT, for puck's sake, is conclusive proof that these players aren't just defensively oblivious. They're culturally and socially oblivious. They do not care about us. They do not care about winning. They care about Bonnaroo. And golf. And fishing. And going to restaurants.
I'm not saying that the players shouldn't live their lives. I'm not saying they should seclude themselves in their condos and never go outside. Toronto is a peach of a city and it's totally fine that they go to restaurants. I just wish they'd demonstrate a modicum of humility and modesty during these historically bad years instead of ostentatiously flashing their wealth and privilege around the city like an affluent adolescent brandishing the credit card he got for his twelfth birthday. I feel like they should be a little more humble, especially given the dismal state of the team.
Instead, Phil Kessel tweets about eating at expensive sushi joints. Jake Gardiner Instagrams while grocery shopping. Joffrey Lupul tweets pictures of Cabernet Sauvignon. Are these guys hockey players or social networking foodies? And while we're on the topic of conspicuous consumption (and to bring a bit of levity to this despondent post), you might be interested to know, dear reader, that Joffrey Lupul was sporting a cartoonishly large wrist watch that night. Seriously. It was the size of a satellite dish. I'm frankly shocked it didn't injure him.
So I didn't fight Joffrey Lupul. With a flash of his enormous watch, he left the restaurant without incident and I went home and watched the Leafs-Jets game on DVR. I didn't fight Lupul. For I am already a beaten man. And we are all beaten fans.
Since cheering for another team is not an option, there isn't much consolation I can offer at this point, poised as the team is at its annual nadir. All we can do is get mad or sad. All we can do is tweet at Joffrey Lupul. All we can do is grumble and stew and fume. And watch enviously as the players allow us glimpses of their fabulous wealth via Twitter and Instagram. And watch dejectedly as they ring the puck lazily around the boards so that it slides slowly back into the neutral zone, so they can dump it back in again and continue the cycle of futility.
For the first time since I was a kid I'm actually looking forward to the All-Star Game. You should be too. I think will be refreshing to watch good players compete in a meaningless hockey game.Â