The Vancouver Flying Vees win the championship!

Sports is a funny thing. Unlike a movie, or a TV show, or a book, in sports, you never know what is going to happen, and it’s never over until it’s over.

On Sunday afternoon, my beer league hockey team, the Vancouver Flying Vees, for which I play goal, won our division championship for the second time since winning it our first season, when we joined the league in 2004/2005.

At the beginning of this season, way back in September, I don’t think any member of our team would have predicted a championship. We lost our first six straight games, our worst start ever, then had another long stretch of the season when we went winless in seven games, during which we were dropped a division, then lost the first two games in the new division by scores of 10-5 and 8-2. We went into the playoffs a couple weeks ago and lost our first game 3-2.

But then, we suited up for our requisite second playoff game that the league owed us (each team gets two playoff games minimum), and low and behold we WON in convincing fashion, 4-1. The following tie-breaker was scoreless, so we went into a shootout. We scored once, they didn’t score on any of their three opportunities and suddenly we were off the semi-final. Goodbye, Irish Heather Wild Boars, hello Jackals. Again, we played hard and fast and beat the Jackals fairly handily by the score of 4-2.

Yesterday, it was the final, against a team called the Buffalo Chicken Pack, which is somehow fitting since their jerseys were take-offs on the original Buffalo Sabres jerseys, and trivia fans will know that the Sabres and Canucks entered the NHL in the same year… Buffalo were almost immediately a great team, whereas as the Canucks sucked for years. Vengeance for the early-era Canucks was ours on Sunday.

Things didn’t look good when they scored first. We had all the pressure, but a turnover at their blue line sent a Buffalo player in on a long, clear-cut, angled breakaway, and he deked me out of my jock-strap to open the scoring. But then, with less than five seconds left in the first period, Chris “Nitzy’s Hockey Den” Mizzoni streaked into their zone and lasered a pass to the goal crease where Nick “Lock-Eye” Thomas (my old partner in crime in The Smugglers), redirected the puck into the net, scoring with less than one second in the period!

Anytime any one scores a buzzer-beater, it’s a momentum swing for the scoring team and we rode it, as Jeremy “Bomber” Bidnall (bassist for International Falls among others) quickly scoring from the same spot, doorstep five-hole. We then held them to that score well into the third period, when the Buffalo Chicken Pack really starting stampeding into our zone trying to tie it.

One of their players fed a perfect pass from behind the net to a wide-open player in front, who one-timed it into the low corner of the net. They started wildly celebrating their tying goal, until they heard the ref yelling “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” What?!?!

NO GOAL! Yours truly managed to slide post-to-post, just getting a toe on the puck, holding it right on the goal line. We were able to kill the final few minutes of the game and then the sweetest sound of all… the final buzzer. A 2-1 championship victory for the Vancouver Flying Vees. Goodbye Buffalo Chicken Pack, hello championship trophy!

Six players remain from the group that won the first championship seven seasons ago.

You can see an entire slideshow of pretty much the whole game, and the locker-room victory celebration, here.

A painting in the mail from the great Canadian artist Stew Jones.

Whoo hoo! My apartment buzzer rang the other day and the voice on the other end said “Canada Post, delivery for a Mr. Grant Lawrence”. Two minutes later the postman handed me a large, light weight package wrapped in brown paper from Toronto.

Inside, to my delight, was a new painting from Stew Jones, one of my all-time favourite Canadian painters. He specializes in angled street scene oil paintings, many from Toronto alleys, main drags and side streets. He’s also responsible for the beautiful cover art of the last two Cuff the Duke album covers, as well as Sarah Harmer‘s I’m A Mountain CD and Escarpment Blues DVD.

Stew and his wife were recently in France, which is where this street scene is from; the painting is entitled Cobble Street – Saint Emilion.

Check out more of Stew Jones’ paintings here.

Hey… our fresh little city by the sea has turned a very young 125 years old TODAY!

This city has always been my home, I’ve never lived anywhere else, I’ve turned down great jobs in bigger cities because I didn’t want to leave, I convinced my wife to move over 5,000 kilometres to join me, and every time The Smugglers went on tour, when we got home we collectively agreed that, through all the cities and towns and countries we visited, we never saw anything more drop-dead gorgeous than Vancouver.

Way back in 1991, at age 19 I wrote an ode to Vancouver, creatively titled “Vancouver BC“, and the reason I wrote the song was two-fold.

I loved “geography songs”; the naming of cities and towns and provinces and states in lyrics. Chuck Berry and Stompin’ Tom Connors were my faves at that art. The second reason was  in the late ’80s and early ’90s, everyone in our music scene was really down on Vancouver. The poker-hot punk scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s had dried up or gone into rehab and the scene was suddenly most definitely 3 hours to the south in Seattle.

I loved Vancouver and wanted to show the pride in song, beauty and warts and all. “Vancouver BC” was released on the first Smugglers album, At Marineland, and then again in 1993 on our first CD, a compilation album called In The Hall Of Fame (cover design by Neko Case!) released to introduce us to the United States. In the early spring of 1992 we made this video with our filmmaker friend Glen Winter (he either directed or shot all of our videos). The video was received warmly on MuchMusic and played many times throughout the years and remained one of our most requested songs at our concerts all over the world throughout our “career”.

In the video you can see what we, and Vancouver, looked like twenty years ago, including Nardwuar, Terry David Mulligan, and our banger friend Fred Thorsen who plays various unsavoury characters. Also note director Glen’s mammoth cell phone. And yes, Dave really did get in a helicopter and fly over the city to get overhead shots (some deal his Dad set up). And that’s Adam Woodhall on the hooky, honkin’ harmonica.

Nineteen years later, we still love Vancouver BC.