The Sound of One Team Sucking
Mindful Meditations for Recovering Leafs Fans
- Publisher
- Dundurn Press
- Initial publish date
- Feb 2017
- Category
- Sports, Hockey, Parodies
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781459738355
- Publish Date
- Feb 2017
- List Price
- $12.99
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781459738379
- Publish Date
- Feb 2017
- List Price
- $8.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
A hilarious self-help book for recovering Leafs fans everywhere.
We’ve all heard it. The sound of one team sucking. Our team. The Leafs. It starts as an almost imperceptible hum, a month or so after the home opener, once the shine of the new season wears off, building in intensity with each defeat until the sound explodes like the noise a star might make if you ripped its heart out. Fact is, being a Maple Leafs fan is a kind of addiction: irrational, compulsive, dependent. You can’t just quit cold turkey. You need help …
And that’s where The Sound of One Team Sucking comes in. Think of it as your own portable support group, designed to accompany you through another disappointing season (plus draft day!), and guide your recovery as you strive to live a more emotionally and spiritually balanced life. Written by Leafs addicts, The Sound of One Team Sucking is a hilarious meditation on the futility of Leafs fandom.
About the authors
Christopher Gudgeon is an author and poet and screenwriter. He’s contributed to dozens of periodicals, including Playboy, MAD, National Lampoon, Geist, Event, and Malahat Review; and has written seventeen books, from critically acclaimed fiction like Song of Kosovo and Greetings from the Vodka Sea, to celebrated biographies of Stan Rogers and Milton Acorn, to a range of popular history on subjects as varied as sex, sexuality, fishing and lotteries. Gudgeon has more than 150 professional TV and film credits including creating, writing, and producing the Gemini-award winning series Ghost Trackers and the documentary, The Trick with the Gun. In his varied and spotty career, Gudgeon has worked a variety of jobs across Canada, the United States, and Europe including psychiatric orderly, rent boy, bartender, rock musician, rodeo clown, TV weatherman, and youth outreach worker. Gudgeon, who is bisexual, has been in an open relationship with author/self-help guru Jasper Vander Voorde since 2009. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Victoria, B.C.
Christopher Gudgeon's profile page
Tavish Gudgeon is a producer and screenwriter. He loves the Leafs and refuses to admit he has a problem.
Joey Mauro is a writer, sports junkie, and aspiring mamma’s boy. He likes the Leafs but thinks they should draft way more Italian-Canadians.
Yusuf Saadi won the Malahat Review’s 2016 Far Horizons Poetry Award and the 2016 Vallum Chapbook Award. At other times, his writing has appeared (or is forthcoming) in magazines including Brick, the Malahat Review, Vallum, Grain, CV2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international, Hamilton Arts & Letters, This and untethered. He is also an executive editor at Sewer Lid magazine. He holds an MA in English from the University of Victoria.
Excerpt: The Sound of One Team Sucking: Mindful Meditations for Recovering Leafs Fans (by (author) Christopher Gudgeon; with Tavish Gudgeon, Joey Mauro & Yusuf Saadi)
GAME 3
The past is your lesson, the present your gift,
the future your motivation.
— Anonymous, internet hacker and quote machine
Being a Leafs fan has never been easy. In fact, things were tough even before the Leafs were the Leafs. Take the team’s very first franchise owner, Eddie Livingstone, for example. He was a blustery renegade, whose o -ice antics would have given Harold Ballard a run for his embezzled money.
Livingstone entered the picture in 1914. After a successful stint in amateur sports — his Toronto Rugby and Amateur Association team won the Ontario Hockey Association senior championships two years in a row — he bought the Toronto Ontarios of the National Hockey Association (NHA), precursor to the NHL. Livingstone got rid of the Ontarios’ gaudy orange sweater, dressed them in emerald green, and the Toronto Shamrocks were born.
Livingstone had a number of legendary battles with players, co-owners, and the press. One of his most famous feuds involved the legendary Cy Denneny, the leading scorer on Livingstone’s rechristened Toronto Blueshirts team. After getting a civil service job in Ottawa, Denneny demanded a trade to the Senators.
Livingstone first refused, then — faced with Denneny’s threat to sit out the season — capitulated in Ballardian fashion, asking for either Frank Nighbor, the Senators’ star player, or the unheard-of sum of $1,800 in return. Livingstone nally settled on a lesser player and $750 for Denneny, but the damage was done. Livingstone lost his best player, and the Senators gained a star who would help them win four Stanley Cups over the next dozen years.
Livingstone followed this disaster by publicly badmouthing amateur star Lionel Conacher, one of the most famous athletes in the country, because the player refused to sign a pro contract with Toronto.
After Livingstone questioned his character, Canada’s future Top Athlete of the Half Century successfully sued … and then went on to enjoy a great NHL career, without ever playing a game for his hometown Toronto team.
GAME DAY AFFIRMATION
Today I will remind myself that for every Harold Ballard, there is an Eddie Livingstone waiting to take his place.
