Metal Garden | Bombers’ Surreal Season
WINNIPEG – Returning to the toy department, Monday, it seemed as if I’d woken up from a 20-year sleep, a la Rip Van Winkle, instead of simply escaping to the lake for some R and R.
I mean, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers finishing the first third of the CFL campaign in first place, at 5-1?
That hasn’t happened in, well, more than two decades.
Then there was the crushing news the Bombers lost a member of the family, assistant coach Richard Harris, simply one of the kindest men you’ll ever meet.
Coaches just don’t die on the job, dammit. And didn’t the man’s loved ones deserve some sort of warning, a chance to say goodbye?
Of course, life’s more unfair than any game could ever be.
And yet the Bombers soldiered on, winning a couple of days after the tragedy, and again last Friday, under circumstances nobody practices for, nobody has a how-to guide for.
It’s all still a little surreal.
Longtime Bomber fans must be wondering if it’s real, too.
So I went to the place I always go when I’ve been away for a while: my neighbourhood hardware store.
For the uninitiated, Hardware Hank is a veteran Bomber booster. Has season tickets at midfield, Section 10, in the upper deck.
What I like about Hank is he tells it like it is, not how he’d like it to be. He may wave pompoms at the game, but amidst his garden hoses, tools and vacuums he sees a team for what it is, leaks and all.
Monday, between cutting keys for one customer and telling another how to silicone a sink, Hank took some time to talk about the inner workings of his favourite football team.
“The best defence, bar none,” he began. “They come out a little slow… then they just shut ‘em down.”
The most recent exhibit: the Edmonton Eskimos and quarterback Ricky Ray, the hottest hand in the land.
“Until he got here,” Hank said, referring to Friday’s dismantling of the Esks attack like it was one of those cheap, metal garden sheds, the Bomber defence banging away at it until it
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