March 12, 1997

For better or verse

  Aboard the ferryboat Malaspina -- Margo Anderson, the chatterbox wife of the chatterbox Kevin Anderson, ran up and slapped two pink telephone slips into my hand before The Fightin' Nuggets left shore for this seafaring leg of their long movement to the Eastern war zone.
  "With apologies to Robert Service," she said about the poem she'd composed on the backs of the telephone slips, and it goes like this:

A stick-y Nugget surprise

Kent Mayhew, owner of Sidewinder Hockey Sticks, wants to stick it to the Dawson City Nuggets. He's offered to make customized hockey sticks, complete with logos and team colors, for each member of the team, now travelling to Ottawa to play Senators alumni. "I thought I would contribute my 2¢ worth," Mayhew said yesterday. The Sun's Earl McRae is travelling with the Dawson City team as it makes the 20-day cross-country trek. "I was laughing at Earl McRae in the bush," said Mayhew, whose work in geophysics once took him into the remote outdoors in search of gold. It'll cost about $200 to make the customized sticks, but hockey's worth it, says Mayhew.

  Margo Anderson didn't give her poem a title, but it could be called The Cremation Of The Senators Alumni.
  Her husband would probably call it The Shooting Of Brad Marsh.
  The Stanley Cup itself will be flown to Ottawa for display at the game, but Kevin Anderson says Brad Marsh can forget any thoughts he might have of hoisting it high after the rumble.
  The spell of the Yukon, says Anderson, will do in Marsh and his mates at the Corel Centre on the afternoon of the 23rd, and Anderson has cross-haired Marsh, the NHL Senators ex-defenceman who, though not an official member of the alumni team, has decided to suit up for the battle.
  "Nothing against Marsh, he's a nice guy," says Anderson, "but I can't wait to go at him. I have Marshmares at night just thinking about what I'm gonna do to that big, overweight Marshmallow with a capital M. Marsh is the right name for him, because that's where he's gonna wind up. In some marsh. He looks like he needs about three months of hard labor in the Yukon to get back in shape. Except Yukon labor would probably kill him."
  Kevin Anderson didn't preface his Bradbashing with apologies to the World Wrestling Federation; the wiry, wired, wacky, whinnying little centre eats conditioning the way most of us routinely brush our teeth. On the trek between Dawson City and Whitehorse, he started off each morning by grabbing his 700-pound snowmobile by its front skis and lifting it a dozen times in rapid succession to chin height, all the while shrieking like a deranged bushman, which some would say isn't far off the mark.
  "Step right up!" he'd howl into the icy Northern dawn.
  "Step right up! Step right up, and buy your ticket to see Brad Marsh and the Senators meet their doom!"
  Tickets, in fact, are already on sale through Ticketmaster and the Corel Centre box office; $9.25 for adults, $2 for those 18 and under.
  The only thing that could short-circuit The Promise Of Kevin Anderson is if the Nuggets do what the original Nuggets did and get whacked by the evil juice the night before the game.
  The Nuggets of 1905, hung over from a boozefest in an Ottawa saloon, lost 23-2 to the Silver Seven in the second and final match of the Stanley Cup challenge; the game where One-Eyed Frank McGee popped 14 goals.
  The night before this one is The Klondike Blowout at the Westin Hotel, (tickets $30 each through the Senators office), an evening of revelry and roistering Gold Rush days style: Blackjack and roulette tables; dancing; games; prizes; Willie Gordon on the fiddle; Lloyd Nicholson on the ragtime piano; the Lady Known As Lou; Dangerous Dan McGrew; Sam McGee From Tennessee; and the high-kicking can-can dancers from Dawson City's famed casino and music hall Diamond Tooth Gerties, featuring the notorious, gorgeous, sexy babe herself.
  All of this would never have happened had it not been for two Nugget players in particular -- Pat Hogan, the Yukon government property manager, and Kevin Anderson, the house painter -- and their inexhaustible drive and belief going back to 1992 when, through the Dawson City Oldtimers Association, they pitched the challenge game to the Ottawa Senators.
  They encountered ceaseless frustrations and hurdles in the form of skepticism and indifference -- "Who are these people anyway; a bunch of Klondike hayseeds?" -- and it wasn't until the intervention of Yukoner and former federal NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin several months ago that it all changed.
  McLaughlin met with the Nuggets, helped them establish co-ordinators for fundraising, special events, sponsors and the media.
  "She was fantastic," says Hogan. "She phoned the Senators and told them they didn't have to worry, that we weren't a bunch of hicks and drunks who were going to embarrass everybody. It's been a huge and costly undertaking for us, but we've bludgeoned the Senators with our determination; we won't take no."
  The Nuggets talk the talk and walk the walk, as they always have. In the 1905 series, Dawson City's Norm Watt was felled by a stick across the mouth from Ottawa's Joe Moore.
  He staggered to his feet, crossed the ice, brought his stick down on Moore's head, knocking him out cold for 10 minutes.
  Norm Watt's daughter Lydia lives in Ottawa and, to honor the memory of her father -- who was a fine player -- and this historic occasion she has donated a family heirloom to help the Nuggets off-set their travel costs. It's an 18-karat gold brooch, studded with nuggets, that her gold-mining dad made for his sister in 1908. It'll be the first prize in a draw March 22 in Whitehorse.
  And something else: On the Corel Centre ice the next day in Ottawa, Lydia Watt will shake hands with Frank McGee, a retired judge and a nephew of the legend who so singlehandedly humiliated the Nuggets on that day at Dey's Arena so long ago.
  Myth has it that the Yukon is a giant holding pen for strange misfits from elsewhere who escaped to the wilderness because they couldn't conform to conventional society. I'd say these people have it all figured out; that they're laughing and winking and running ahead of the pack.
  
  McRae's album: P. 14-15
  
  

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