Martin St-Louis and Kent Hughes have really lost my esteem. They don’t care, but I really don’t care that they don’t care.
I’ve seen coaches and batsmen humiliate hockey players. It goes back to Dick Irvin, the father who made Dickie Moore go on all fours in the dressing room, and it goes back to Jacques Lemaire, who sent Guy Lafleur to a bench penalty, or Mario Tremblay, who wanted to play hard with Patrick Roy , with disastrous results for the Canadian…
It was an idiot and I wrote it down.
And I understand just as well that Jonathan Drouin is a major disappointment to his bosses and to the Canadians’ fans and fans. So I understand that the coaches and general managers who have had to reconcile the Drouin case may have run out of patience.
But that doesn’t give the right to humiliate a man like Martin St-Louis and Kent Hughes. You could take disciplinary action. But fair. Weighted by the severity of the offence. There were ways. But they had no right to do what they did. The public death penalty, the televised lynching, disappeared from mores on January 1, 2023. And we are in March.
IT’S DISGUSTING
Jonathan Drouin was two minutes late for a team meeting in Tampa. Be aware that the Tampa team hotel is a five minute walk from the arena. On the other side a large parking lot. Let’s assume there’s no excuse for congestion. I agree.
Many other players have already missed the start of a meeting. Peter Stastny enraged Michel Bergeron by jumping on the bus just seconds before departure. It was privately settled. They were never publicly crucified as was the case with Drouin.
Have him don the uniform because an obscure rule dictates that the team must have 20 players in uniform, put him on the bench for three hours while TV cameras are trained on his face, and let hundreds of thousands of people during one evening speculating and estimating your reactions is crazy. It’s unreasonable and cruel. In today’s media world. With the planet as witnesses to lick each other? It’s unspeakable.
Other solutions
There were other solutions that protected a man’s dignity. Especially since the Canadian knows he’s a fragile man. We could get an employee to sign a contract, bring in a boy from the underage, or even let Drouin play the game to help the team, even if it meant leaving his hot dogs in the press box at the Bell Center tonight in Security would eat from sadists.
The Canadian knew. Hughes and St-Louis have no excuses. Jonathan Drouin was so mentally fragile that he was sent back from Calgary to spend a full spring healing and recuperating in Montreal. So in bad shape and fragile that Drouin didn’t make a playoff game, a miracle of the 2021 pandemic.
Worse, the same frail dude serves as a hunk of meat to stuff a uniform with cameras in his face for three hours! No, but did you fall on your head?
You couldn’t just put up with him until the end of the season and throw him a little farewell party with a nice press release from Chantal to wish him the best of luck. Antarctica maybe?
Meanwhile, glorious in my heart, you’re 1-9 in the last ten games. It’s all your faces that should be on TV for three hours!
Shame should be shared.
A” five stars “at the casino
This will be the first “Five Star” match ever presented at Casino de Montreal. Christian MBilli versus Carlos Gongora from Ecuador. It will be the 13th “Five Star” in 43 years since the fight between Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard at the Olympic Stadium in 1980. Jean Pascal was involved in 6 of those 13 bouts with Adonis Stevenson being the other major medalist. David Lemieux netted Laval’s only five-star win, and Artur Beterbiev against Marcus Browne was the last to do so at Bell Center.
But a “five star” in the casino? It never happened in front of 600 spoiled people, and you might as well enjoy it. I can’t see how it could happen again.
To get “five stars” from BoxRec, you need two opponents at a very high level and a lot of competition between the two opponents. Christian MBilli and Carlos Gongora meet these conditions. And I hope for the rest that Christian MBilli will fight the fight of his life against an extremely dangerous opponent. Also, he’s left-handed.
PASCAL WANTS TO CONTINUE
I spoke to Jean Pascal yesterday morning. Morale is up but the champ admits this is the toughest defeat of his career.
“Because it’s totally unforeseen.” Pascal intends to continue his career, even as he realizes he was terribly exhausted on the night of the fight. “But I know what I did that weakened me so much. It’s a mistake I won’t make again,” he said.
But Pascal is smart. He wants to move on, but there’s no question that he’ll serve as a pie offered to promising youngsters looking to make a name for themselves. It has to be worth it.
Strange, that’s exactly what happened to young Ahmed Elbiali in Miami. PBC wanted to climb its new star on American television and Pascal had to serve as a step. We remember the rest…a series of fights against Marcus Browne, Dimitri Bivol, Badou Jack, Fanlong Meng later…
