The Steve Dangle Podcast - One to Remember | November 25, 2020

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

On this episode of The Steve Dangle Podcast, Ken Reid joins the show and we kick it off with Mr. Jankov stories! (00:00), Ken's experience after Rudy Gobert night (08:30), stories from Ken Reid's new book: One to Remember. Find it at your favourite book retailer now! (14:30), thoughts on Bubble Hockey (34:00), how do we make hockey more entertaining? (47:00), vintage Leaf tough guys and fighting in hockey (1:10:30), and our favourite cards from our childhoods (1:23:00). Originally aired: November 25, 2020 Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/C7dqZKE_vso Merch: https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/fancydangleshirts Follow us on Twitter: @Steve_Dangle, @AdamWylde, & @JesseBlake Follow us on Instagram: @SteveDangle, @AdamWylde, & @Jesse.Blake Subscribe to us on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/steve-dangle-podcast/id669828195?mt=2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Steve Dangle Podcast with your host, Steve Dangle, Adam Wylde, and Jesse Blake. Let's go! Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back a favorite of ours, and it's been way too long, Ken Rees! No one, no one is better at inviting himself onto the Steve Dangle Podcast than me. No one. i know you guys as a journalist you have to track people down i bug dangle all the time time yet time yet podcast yet podcast yet new book new book gotta get on gotta get on you're just you know ken we take you for granted and and we shouldn't you teach me every day that

we shouldn't because i'm always like let's book some fancy pants guests let's let's get this guy let's get that guy and you're like what about mr yankov's pupil yeah i say you know what you're right yeah i haven't talked to you guys since i last saw mr yankov my old high school junior high gym teacher it was a year ago i well no geez uh 13 months ago i saw mr yankov out of the blue he shocked me it was awesome i was home it was wicked he just came over well i was uh i'll brag little boys here okay all right i was being inducted into the pictor county sports hall of fame i had to go back home for the inductions me and arash but danny we we dominate northern and mid nova scotia hall of fames so uh they inducted me and my old science teacher

jimmy nick mr nicholson is on the board of the hall of fame so when they so they you know they they they shout you out they go down all your accolades my list was very short obviously and then someone comes up and gives you the certificate and the button and they shake your hand and they He said, now to induct Kenny into the Hall of Fame, his old gym teacher, Mr. Yankoff. And out of the crowd of 500 emerges Mr. Yankoff. The place goes nuts. It was freaking awesome. And he's like, I love those stores, boy.

I love them. Boy, my daughter showed them to me on the computer, boy, and it's good publicity. So it was awesome. Mr. Yankoff, like a lot of people, like when you were a kid, right, Mr. Yankoff was this tough, intimidating guy. but like a lot of people he's mellowed with age he's this happy guy and it was awesome seeing him right out of the blue it was so cute in time that he he came up and and i was like how bad was i mr yankoff he's like you were easy you're one of our good students not like that mark haroon like every every second class haroon in grade eight he taught us greco-roman wrestling

he's like i need to demonstrate haroon get over here so he's got a room in the chicken wing and the full suplex and then the next class chicken wing steven tellock and broke his collarbone so it was quite controversial oh my god that was awesome does mr yankoff understand how famous he is over here because like i think so okay he has a daughter that's kind of uh she showed in the videos what you guys should do is get him on because uh he's famous and he's famous to me and my buddies and now he's famous in our world here uh on the podcast but i think he would appreciate the fame he was like mr yankov was a good athlete in the day like uh but his famous line was so we play basketball he's like always use the backboard it's there to help none of this modern swish

so he'd show you how to use the he'd show you how to he'd show you how to use the backboard and he's like now do a layup up and you'd be like will you show me he goes i don't have to prove myself to you boy that was his line his line was always i don't have to prove myself to you boy but the one thing he would always demonstrate was the rings remember the old gymnastic rings yeah come down from the picto academy gym and yankov would sit on them and he'd be shaking and shaking cigarette hanging out of his mouth oh yeah yeah he turned he turned beet red he didn't practice yoga breathing during it so he turned beet red and then he'd get down but some of my best memories of mr yankov was when he was elevated like so he'd do the rings

he was elevated when uh scott landry fought the bully in grade six yankov was taking down the decorations from the high school dance the night before and and the fight broke out during calisthenics because you ain't gonna be like left pivot right pivot and yeah and we were we were doing drills i think we were getting ready to jump on the what's the one that where you jump off and you go over the horse you know with the the gymnast ran into it oh yeah we were getting ready to do that and now label took a shot at scott landry and scott landry made this like over the top fist it was slow moan he took her back took her back and i still remember it was slow when he connected, and he got Alan pretty good.

Alan was a good dude. And, like, Yakov looked down, and all the kids were cheering, right? And Scottie pummeled the poor kid, and it was like, it was like the revenge of the bully. Alan's a stellar buddy and stuff, but Yakov, instead of

breaking up, he just stood on top of the ladder, literally stood on top of the ladder and watched it, and then as the fight broke up, he's like, not bad, boss. Out of here. And that's it. So, Yankov was like a good hockey linesman. He wasn't one of these modern hockey linesmen that jump in.

If there was a goal, Yankov would let you go. And that's one of the things I admired about Mr. Yankov. J-A-N-K-O-V, K-R-L-L-B-E-R-I-S, for all your berry needs. Yeah, he's got a strawberry farm, right? Yeah, strawberries outside of Pictou, yeah, on Caribou Island. Not far from the lovely Pictou Lodge. You are literally the one-man tourism committee for Nova Scotia, especially Victo County.

Hey, man, you got to be proud of where you're from, right? I think that was basically a smaller schwa. Oh, well, now I understand what you're talking about. That's good. Ken, the thing I got to ask is, is this the only place you've told Mr. Yankoff stories? Does that make it on the air? Do you tell it like Tim and Sid?

Yeah. I talk about Mr. Yankoff on the air with Ivanka all the time. Ivanka loves Mr. Yankov. So whenever we're doing basketball highlights, I usually bring up Mr. Yankov. And one guy wrote me and I said, who's this Mr. Yankov you always talk about? And my only response was, you haven't been watching enough. So just keep watching.

You'll figure it out. So when I bring up Yankov on the air, it is always for a long three-pointer. Because, you know, before gym class, we'd play basketball to warm up. And if anyone took a shot from outside the three-point line, out of here boy enough of those dream shots boy like he thought a three-pointer was a dream shot because you gotta remember mr yankov is pre three-point shot so right so mr yankov's looking in the paint looking in the paint you know one of those guys right if you even attempted a three-pointer he'd kick out of class

wow that's so ridiculous out of here boy dream shot like harone would always take uh dream shots from the half and he'd kick you out and then they i remember they made the uh they made the small gym for elementary students and gym class in those days i'm not sure if it still is was divided the girls would go in one gym and the guys would go in the other uh the guys would have the larger gym the girls would have the smaller gym every once in a while we'd trade and we traded one day and the nets in the elementary gym are only eight feet so her own dunked on a net and You could hear it snap. That was a quick out of here, boy.

Another time, I think I told you guys this one before, but another time we were in the small gym and somebody fouled somebody really hard and then Jerome fouled a guy really hard. And Jacob goes, all right, boys, you want to play full contact basketball? Set the mats up. So we put the mats around the walls and we played full contact basketball. Amazing. Oh, my God.

No, I don't think you told that one. You could just blow somebody up. That would be great. And yeah, Haroon got pinned under a bunch of the mats and Yankov was encouraging people to pile on. Get on there, boys. And now Mr. Yankov plays the piano for seniors. So it's, you know.

Wow. What a life. It's amazing. He's the best. He's the best. Yeah. I got to ask, Kent, with Ivanka off, you're working with Carly as well.

um like this this whole uh this whole pandemic thing has kind of thrown everybody for a loop obviously but you guys were doing a show without highlights for a long time yeah and you know or or or even now recently like literally it's just the nfl just left right now yeah there's nights we have no highlights yeah so what do you do you chat yeah you're no good at that it's too bad You make stuff up. No, you just, like, I mean, we got our goal, the best goal of the 21st century countdown. You talk to my buddy Kyle Brandt from the NFL Network.

You do the hot stove thing with hockey. You talk to the hockey insiders. You talk to the baseball guys about any rumors. But, yeah, there's no highlights to take you all the way through the show. So we usually, instead of doing a full hour now, we'll loop a half hour because you can't really give people something that's not there. So, I mean, I'm like you guys.

i'm sure you guys don't care about escrow you don't care about a cap i just care about what's on the ice uh there's there's uh websites for nerds that are into that stuff so go there don't come to me for that geeks so i i just i just i just want to see the game i just want to see the game and and all the talk about oh players fighting with owners right now just come on guys serious play both sides figure it out you know figure it out then get back to me that's kind where i stand on that we we were talking to tim and sid about this uh last show uh do you i want i want to know what your day was like or few days were like march 11th march 12th when this all kicked off so that's the that's the rudy gobert news yeah that's the nba shutting down news and

then the next day the nhl by the way i saw the tim and sid exchange where tim sid called me a dick and stuff like that and and uh and and you guys said i was like a grade 10 student i thought i need to come back but then i thought there's nothing wrong with the truth and you guys spoke the absolute truth i am like a grade 10 child i collect it look at my room look at my room exactly and i i have no look at mine look at mine i have no shame in that i'm i'm a man stuck in a child's body and or no i mean a man's body stuck in a child's mind i love it man what what do you need to act serious and and i know you guys are doing that for fun that's fine but i thought it was hilarious i was like peeing myself because i love a good chirp you've been with me in the dressing

room guys i love a good oh yeah it's really quiet yeah yeah he just kind of puts his equipment on and leaves well i'll be honest i stopped playing with the guys from work because no one talked i was like really it was so quiet i'm like i'm not i'm not getting up at the crack of noon to come play hockey with guys who aren't going to chirp so that was that uh yeah rudy gobert night as i call it uh so it was just an ordinary night you could sense obviously that you know you were probably on borrowed time but when it happened i hate to say it but as a news guy it's exciting because the Rudy Gobert thing happened all of a sudden uh they're not playing in Denver and all hell breaks loose those are the nights and I always say this to people who are in our student

broadcasting you get paid for about 10 nights a year the other night you're just on you're not on autopilot but you kind of know what's coming that was one of the nights they paid us for they threw me on the desk right away you're going to talk to this guy from Denver you're going to talk to this guy from Denver this guy was at the game and then you're going to talk to him it was awesome i hate like from my perspective the excitement perspective because it's what's happening what are you seeing what do you think is going to happen with the league so you get a buzz from doing breaking news like that but at the same time you're going oh man this really stinks this is i feel really bad for these people then you got uh you're racking the footage of gobert touching all

the microphones a couple days before and you're going oh man uh but it was wild it was absolutely wild that was my last night on the air was that Thursday night when all hell broke loose because I was scheduled to be off the Friday so I was off the Friday and then Sunday night I got the the memo you're not coming back to work and then I was really on then I was really on autopilot so yeah it was I hate to say it was exciting but it's one of those nights where as a as a news guy and I don't mean exciting in a good way I mean just your adrenaline gets going and you have a job to do and you do it and those are the nights you get paid for it's like when a trade happens anything else breaking news same thing and that's what you signed up for right you want yeah that

high right that excitement i can i remember that and just on the actual news side being it you know when i was at breakfast television when something broke it was huge like yes you go up to the fourth floor where the newsroom was and you could just feel the energy and i would just sit there and absorb because i was doing entertainment like no one cares but like it was it was uh i can remember when uh i mean god when trump got elected what a what a buzz that was in the in the newsroom right i mean it was negative but it was still a buzz there was still a lot going on and and i think um you know along those same lines ken it's you've got that doom and gloom sitting in the distance uh but you know you you do have i understand that adrenaline rush because there is and that's why

people love it yeah it's one of those days where um you realize why you get hired right because everyone thinks i just read a teleprompter for a living a lot of people think that and some days you get to show that you don't and i'm not saying i did a bernie go thing but you have to be qualified it's one of those days you realize okay i can do the job and and i i love being put out there with no teleprompter i love being thrown out and just go and you rely on your instincts you rely on what you know you lie on the research you've done beforehand and those are those are fun that's that's why i do the job man like uh throw me in the field i quite enjoy it uh throw me on the desk with no questions no information figure your way around it it's uh that's it's it's

definitely a buzz for sure how many books do you need to have behind you for you to refer to yourself as an author because i saw i saw that i saw that you don't like calling yourself a writer there's the latest okay so here's the deal i'm gonna be honest at 10 o'clock now we do the show carly and i and then we do it till 10 30 and then we have to wait around until 1 a.m in case something happens there's nothing happening from 10 30 to 1 there's no sports on we've been playing jeopardy the past few couple weeks on her netflix account while it worked unbelievable and every night i go come on because every night on jeopardy a category comes up authors 19th century novelists you know the written word and i'm like i hate this category

and carly goes you're an author i go i'm a dude who wrote six hockey books i don't know anything about mark twain like six yeah six oh this is this is the sixth angle the latest one to remember uh yeah i'm a dude who wrote six hockey books but that doesn't mean i know anything about authors so when people call me an author i kind of laugh i'm like an author is george orwell an author is mark twain and i know when i say those names guys i'm going over your head but bear with so uh i'm just i don't know anything about authors i just know uh i think i know a good story so i write the stories down so i'm a storyteller and a dude who writes books let me how many books did you write uh over the course of the lockdown while you were off

like how many how many are going to come out in 2021 ken popular question the answer is zero uh people like you must have got a lot of writing done i'm like no i i write when my kids are at school you get a five-year-old and a seven-year-old running around the house for six straight months you get you get no work done i'm kind of i do the hockey books with disney's done to the star wars genre that's just stuff falling out everywhere right you don't even know what it's about after a while it's true yeah but this is this is the sixth one one to remember and it's along the lines of one night only instead of guys who played a single game it's guys who scored a single goal and it's for guys like us just easy reading and and guys who uh when they play hockey

They dream of scoring in the NHL. So what's it actually like? So that's kind of what the book's all about. And it's interesting that you picked that one or that subject, Ken, because I feel like one goal in the NHL would probably mean a lot more than 500. And I know that that seems weird, but it's the one that sticks out. When you've got 500, you're piecing that feeling over 500. But you've got that one to think about the rest of your life.

And that's pretty amazing. That's what I think. That's what you think. That's what I thought going in. It's not what everybody that scored that goal thinks, right? Really? Oh, wow. A lot of guys thought they would score 500, and they only ended up with one.

So is it a bummer? Is it a good thing? You'd be surprised. Some guys were like, yeah, scored a goal in the NHL. Other guys were like, I scored a goal in the NHL. And I could relate to the I scored a goal in the NHL guys a lot more because as four wannabes here who dreamed of it, that's kind of what we think the reality would be.

but that's not always what the reality is. I mean, I talked to first-round picks. They thought they were going to score 500. The guys who really cherished it were the guys who thought they might max out at Junior A, or they dreamed of maybe playing a year of pro in the East Coast League, and they somehow found their way to the NHL, and they scored. Those were the ones that it meant the most to us,

probably guys who were more like us, as opposed to the guys who, from the time they were 12 years old, were told, you're going to play in the NHL. But it's funny. like some of the guys in the book couldn't even remember their goal but then you like the late dale howard chuck who did score a ton of goals he can remember every goal he can tell you every he could dale could tell you everything about every goal it's like i don't know if you guys golf but when i'm done golfing i can tell you every shot of the round uh just the way it is dale can tell

you every goal he ever scored it's just the way dale was wired but uh yeah i went in thinking guys are it's going to be like oh candy and lollipops and rainbows and it wasn't man it's a grind and to get to the nhl for that one goal for some guys was a grind uh to get sent down for some guys was just you know an utter disappointment they looked at their careers as a disappointment where i wrote the book going in is oh my goodness this is awesome you scored a goal in the nhl and i think over time guys have realized that it was awesome but for a long time it wasn't for quite a few of them one guy even went into mental skills coach uh as a mental skills coach to deal with it because he was a guy who was you know first second round pick he was traded

straight up for kirk muller once wow and his name is jason padola and he runs a uh site called up my hockey.com now and his whole his whole thing is mental skills for guys who are in his his skates I should say so that they don't end up fizzling out or, or dealing with regret down the road. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It took me quite, yeah. I thought it was going to be, Oh, I scored a goal on Grant Fiora and I skated off the ice. And no, it wasn't like that at all. I, I, uh, that is, that's fascinating stuff. And like, I'm, I'm,

I hesitate to ask this question cause I don't want to blow the book, but is there a, is there a story in that book that you enjoyed doing researching, interviewing? Like, is there the standout story for you that you're like that is my favorite one i think my i don't i can't don't necessarily have a favorite one but i oh there was a lot of that were just there was one that was wild about a guy being stabbed while he was in the nhl and no one knew stabbed in a bar fight that was that blew my mind the one i could relate to the most was the guy who when we

were talking right there adam is like us that was like wow scoring a goal so his name was frank beaten and you guys will love this because you know i like my old school hockey so frank's from briley brook anaganish county nova scotia was never supposed to play in the national hockey league um ended up playing junior in sarnia works his way through the low minors gets a wha tryout he's 175 pounds but he fights everyone and he beats the living piss on everyone when he starts in pro hockey his nickname so the story goes and frank will set us straight on this story in the book his nickname is never hey never what's going on as in frank never beaten later on his career he becomes seldom frank seldom beaten and of course he knows it's time to retire by the time

his nickname changes to always so then it was time but frank literally fought his way through the mind like i'm talking he played in the north american league which slap shot was based on uh fought his way into the national hockey league for the new york rangers there's actually a great youtube clip of him fighting steve gerbano in a bench ball it's amazing and i've talked about gerbano on this podcast before but he the words he used to describe his goal and how he felt about it when he was telling me i'm i'm going okay this is the end this is the end of the book this is the absolute end of the book okay what he's saying is how i i feel i feel i would feel if i scored in the nhl and he's cursing a lot but he's saying the f word the way people from home say it like

my neck of the woods say it like as mike smith from trailer park boys would say frank is a really good swearist duchy mason the king of the prime minister of the blues in canada was a really good swearist and frank's basically saying i effin scored in the national effin hockey league no one can effin take and i'm just like yes so that was the one as a hockey wannabe as a road hockey superstar as a guy who dreamed of what it would be like to tickle the twine in the nhl that was the one that just was like oh it was like it was poetry to me so i ended the book with that one when you when you started writing the book did it just begin with you go on hockey db and you sort by one goal and then you just try and reach out to these guys look at adam i made adam cry

he had to leave um so yeah so what i did jesse was i had the idea and i went into as the guys know our crack stats guy at works uh steve felon oh he's a a beautiful mind it's he's ridiculous and he's the best he's the best dude so it's funny when people used to go on that what was the score the show the scorehead where people try to be sportscasters and they show up and oh drafted drafted people would go on that and they i know more about sports than anyone someone would say no you don't there's a guy you don't know more about sports than anyone here they were referring to felon so i went in one day i'm like felon how many guys have scored a single goal in the nhl he's like give me a second so he comes back he emails me a list and there's a list of

about 350 400 guys and i'm like how many guys have skated in the nhl 6500 how many guys have never scored 1500 so i'm like well these 400 guys did something pretty special and of course the list fluctuates right because the rookie will score one then he'll score two and he's off the list so yeah i print the list out because i'm old school boys i like my paper i like my paper in my hand not like you millennials so uh i ain't reading this book on kindle right this isn't an ebook so i i go down the list and there's some names i know right dave hansen's on there one of the hansen brothers um and dangle i know you love your slap shot uh yep dennis bondy's on there the most penalized player in professional hockey history you tried to drop the gloves with my

brother when my brother was 14 and dennis was 20 at a summer camp in anaganish he's on there my brother slashes bondi right it's a training camp and don't he turns around he's like you want to go and my brother's a full face mask on my brother just goes no and skates dennis was like okay dennis is a great guy by the way he's a good buddy of mine um so dennis is on there uh dave hansen's on there billy smith the goalie's on there right because he scored a goal but then there's obviously tons of names i don't know so i eliminate the deceased and i start going down So I'm just coming across names, right? I don't know these names.

I come across the name Mike Forbes. I'm like, okay, Mike Forbes. So on his hockey DB page, he scored his goal for the Edmonton Oilers in 1981. I'm like, well, geez, he's got a story. He played the Gretzky and Curry and all the Oilers. And click on the game summary. His one goal is assisted by Gretzky and Curry. I'm like, oh, I got to talk to this.

Come on. Come on. I got to talk to the guy whose only goal in the NHL was assisted by Gretzky and Curry. So I call him up. He tells me his story. i'm like well what happened he's like i thought i was going to score another two that night because i'm on the first unit power play i'm with gretzky curry it's me and coffee on the point i'm like

jesus i'm like well so that you when you do this book you eventually have to get to the what happened question right why wasn't there more than one so his story was i'm on the blue line and paired up with cough and we're both offensive minded defensemen he's like that isn't going to really work and coffee's way better than i am so they need somebody to stay back with cough so he goes i get sent down to wichita they call up charlie huddy huddy teams up with coffee forever the rest is history and he wow he never plays in the nhl again um wow and then i'm like okay i need some guys from the original six right so i uh there's a guy named les kozak so it turns out Les Kozak's still with us, luckily.

And I go, okay, well, how am I going to find a guy named Les Kozak who's 80 years old and scored for the Leafs in 1961-62? So I find out he played at St. Mike's. He played in Rochester. And then I just Google Les Kozak. And the only thing that keeps coming up is doctored Les Kozak. Scientist, Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine. Lectured universities all over the world.

Advisor, staff, Louisiana State University. now semi-retired and i'm like okay so i keep going keeps coming back to this doctor so i call the place like oh yeah that's less he used to play for the leafs i'm like what wow so so i i i get him on the line i get him on the line and he starts telling the story and i'm like okay there's no junior player out there right now who can relate to this story so cole's notes version he's playing at St. Mike's he's on a team with Dave Keon he comes up to his last year junior and he's like you know what I'm not going to play junior this year I've decided to go into the priesthood so he gives he gives up his last year of junior hockey goes to a monastery

uh April May comes around he's like I don't think I want to be a priest uh the team he uh didn't play for wins the memorial cup so he's like I missed out on a memorial cup because I was at a monastery uh that summer he signs the pro deal with the leaps they're playing in rochester one night punch him like comes down to see him scores two goals on a friday night punches like i need somebody in the lineup in toronto tomorrow night they go up to toronto he plays i believe he scored in that game i think he scored in his first game or one of his first few he's so he's in on the leaps and he's playing regular and uh by his 12th game he tries to cut inside on the guy and remember this is when the boards were the boards okay there's no give back in the day uh there's

not plastic lining boards or boards he gets hip checked and his head gets crushed between the boards and this guy's hip he's not he's not wearing a bucket collapses on the ice they rush him to hospital this is in boston they drill a golf ball sized hole in his skull to stop the bleeding so still has a hole in his head uh he stays in boston he eventually goes back to rochester where his girlfriend is so he's going oh my god what am i gonna do he's like i always wanted to go to school right enrolls in the rochester institute of technology does his undergrad there gets a scholarship to study at notre dame goes there ends up being this scientist who lectures all over the world who has a hole in his head who once upon a time scored a goal

for the mingles so wow yeah that's the story story yeah so that's that's why jesse i love going down the old hockey dvd page and all it says is one goal but that's to tell you the whole story so yeah that's what i that's what i like doing i'm a nerd man i'm a hockey geek so i like i'm unearthing those stories that's uh and what's funny is back when you were talking about bonvi I'm like, I'm going to bring up his hockey DB and blow everyone's mind. And then you started telling a story about a hole in the head. And all of a sudden I don't want to tell it anymore. So Bondi,

when I was a kid was the local tough guy for the Antigonish junior a Bulldogs. And he, he was 17 playing in the old maritime junior hockey league and the maritime junior hockey league boys. It was made up of a lot of 19 and 20 year olds from outside of the maritime times who were cut from the dub or the O or the Q and every team had about four or five heavies it was a freaking gong show it was awesome i loved it so i ended up being a play-by-play guy in that league in 96 my buddies all my my buddies played in it from 92 to

95 bonby's in it from in around 90 91 and bonby's 17 years old and he's fighting guys that the halifax olin exports okay let's say they they took in a 20 year old who fought for the own three years but he loses his overage spot bonby's fighting him at 17 and beating the tara so he gets drafted by north bay in the ontario league and he says i go to north bay he goes i had trouble turning both ways and then he's basically like well i couldn't turn both ways and actually he didn't get drafted by north bay first he got drafted by i think it was kitchener yeah kitchener was traded unreal was traded to north bay and he told his coach who the legendary burt templeton who loved his tough guys he's like i'm gonna be the toughest guy in this league

dennis went out and did it wow in dennis's words he did well most tough guys won't tell you they beat the tar out of him that's up to writers like us guys like us to to expand on it but uh fought his way into the old fought his way into the pros was signed by the cape retinol i remember dennis bond be playing in a four-on-four tournament in picto after his first year with the Cape Breton Oilers uh we had the ice and picto for uh Barry Wisner's hockey school and guys are in the rink yelling at him they're all the guys would go down and drink at the one end of the rink and they're all screaming at Bobby screaming you Bobby I think you're good right you're a picto style and then at the end of the end of the game they went down they shook

Dennis's hand like you're not bad Bobby so Dennis made his way all the way to the NHL started with the orders he you know he fought probert you know that story's in the book and he scored his one goal against chris osgood so dennis is a guy if you talk he's won three cups as a scout chicago and boston dennis is a guy if you you talk to the fellows have all been around the game for a while they all have a dennis bomby store so wow so very cool and to support uh his dream of becoming the toughest guy in the ohl uh starts with the kitchener rangers in seven games he has 23 penalty minutes goes to north bay in 49 games he has 261 that doesn't count then that doesn't count your 10 minute misconducts no my oh my god really yeah the old and the old in the

dub don't count pens the q kind of pens well that's staggering because the next year in 64 games he had 316 but that has nothing on his career high in the american league with the hamilton bulldogs 96 97 in 73 games 522 penalty wow so dennis is the most penalized player in pro hockey history and he jokes he's like it's it's safer than the gretzky records and it is because we see the way the game's played now nobody's nobody's gonna rival that you know no i mean the game the game has changed you know no kidding and not for the better i might add so he passed 200 penalty minutes as a professional 14 times all 12 times and then two in junior and think how many he would have got if he wasn't suspended for a bunch of games probably two right oh yeah no he cracks

he cracked 60 games five times that's it his whole career wow so bonby's famous line to bob probert the first time he lined up against him they line up on the wing and dennis's looks and he's like bobby make me or break me and then the gloves came off wow that's a pretty bold thing to say to bob probert yeah and uh dennis was 5 11 he wasn't a giant guy he was dennis is stocky man he sees him he's an absolute powerhouse but yeah to go up to bob probert and say make me or break me but you got to realize for, for guys like Dennis fighting Bob Probert, that was like for a guy like Mike Medano taking a face off against Wayne Gretzky. It's the guy you grew up worshiping, admiring, right?

So everyone has their, their, so for, so for a guy like Mike Medano say you'd want to test your skills against Wayne Gretzky. Well, Dennis wanted to test his skills against Bob Probert and Probert when he was the champ, man, he would always give guys the green light to go with him. A lot of older guys will kind of say earn your stripes, but Probert was, that's why he fought so much because the guy wanted to test himself against probe or probably be willing to do it. Cause guys did it for him.

Wow. Yeah. That's pretty amazing. Crazy. How it used to work too. Right. Cause it's just, you don't see that anymore. It's beautiful. How it used to work. Ken, you obviously night after night, when you came back, um, from, I don't, I mean, it's, I guess isolation, but when you came back to work, when, when hockey came back and baseball came back basketball came back um you got to see highlights of every game you get to see probably every game in one way or another um what were your thoughts on on that in terms of like the

bubble hockey league and and the way they finished the season i think it was absolutely incredible that they pulled it off um i didn't think they could do it i thought it was awesome uh i was thrilled that the nhl got through it uh i you know we can get into the style of hockey and all that if you want but i just think that the fact that they pulled it off was absolutely amazing i think the team that won deserved to win i think the best team won which i think is always good um i would love it if river hockey was successful in the playoffs we could talk about your leafs if you want to but river hockey unfortunately is not successful in the playoffs if river hockey was the game would be a lot more entertaining but uh yeah i was just super impressed that the nhl pulled it

off like everybody i love the first round you know that's my favorite and when i say first round i don't mean the play-in i mean the actual first round but uh i just love how things get turned up in the playoffs and i was i think it looked great too i was i i was like you i was like everybody going what's it look gonna look like no fans in this day well the nhl did a brilliant thing they kind of eliminated the empty seats as opposed to baseball who just said i'd help with it so and it's easier for the nhl they only have to do a couple of arenas but it looked great uh i you know kudos to the nhl and i hope that the players and the league get back on the same page here now uh and uh can pull it off again it seems like they will like it's you know i know

everybody everybody's upset with each other but i i can't imagine a world where both sides want to lose that much money i just can't gary betman doesn't lose right if the last 30 years have shown us everything when it comes time to negotiations gary betman doesn't lose no um and i mean i i see the players argument the owners made an agreement four months ago that they want change and i see the owner's argument maybe they thought fans would be back at the stands by now so like all great things you got to meet in the middle somewhere right like i'm in the basement because my wife sent me here right i wanted to do this up in the nice natural life but she's conducting a conference now with with where she works at rogers and she's leaving

the conference so she needs her loud beey eyed slightly overweight pale husband in the basement where he belongs so my my wife is the gary batman of this house she gets what she wants and now i realize that you know i'm happy to be here but you're just in it for the love of the game and that's why you always buckle that's right that's right daniel i always give into my heart i always give into my heart um if you uh let's talk about the style of play and i actually well you know actually before we talk about the style of play i do want to mention that um uh one can read on this very show several years ago said uh the leafs are going to have trouble in the playoffs because the game changes in the playoffs and said they're going to need a little bit more grit and

toughness and don't they go out a couple months ago or i guess six weeks ago now and address it in just that way zach bagosian wayne simmons you can imagine i don't i don't see joe thornton as a tough guy but he's a grizzled vet who's got the mental toughness that probably the team needs to learn um are you gonna are you going to celebrate uh here or do you want to celebrate on twitter later like how do you want to say i was right you mean gloat yeah exactly oh i'm sure all your little analytical fans thought i was a dinosaur and i do read the comments i saw that i was the hockey dinosaur the old dinosaur is right analytics geeks and uh yeah i mean i don't want to i don't want to gloat although i just did no i i think uh i think you need both i think i love skilled

hockey i mean you look around this room i got pictures of lafleur gratsky bossy you know but i also got pictures of guys who are tough so i like it i'm i i subscribe to the brian burke school of top six bottom six um i'm not an analytics guy i don't think i ever will be i know i'm out of date that's fine i'm happy with it um i think yeah you almost need a team to get into the playoffs and then you need a team to win in the playoffs you need two it's like a jekyll and hyde thing now you need two different versions and be like i mean back in the day 21 teams 16 made the playoffs you could play the same style the whole year now you you got to adjust i think the leafs are addressing it i don't think they're anywhere near close right now sorry dangle um but i think i i

give kyle dubas a lot of credit for going out and signing the simmons because it's tough to change and i know that i've been the same for 46 years or however old i am uh i like the game old school and kyle dubas likes the game new school but he's changing and i totally admire that and i'm i'm not dumb enough to think you can win with a team of fourth liners you can't you need skill but you need guys to make room for that skill and I think that's what a Wayne Simmons will do you guys know I've talked about Josh Anderson on this podcast before I've had a man crush on him since he was with the London Knights I love the way he played I love that the Montreal Canadiens went home got him and and part of me says okay Wayne Simmons isn't enough you can't win with just one guy like

that but then part of me has to realize okay the game has changed maybe one or two guys like that is enough as opposed to six um i think they the leafs need to be way tougher on the back end way tougher uh jake wasn't good he's the one guy that plays with a little edge it can't be just one guy on your back end to me you need at least three guys like that uh but they're you can't change your roster overnight so i think they're moving in the right direction that should make you smile dangle it does i what i wonder is okay how about this can you think of a player who was not a tough guy was not a tough guy at all when he began and he didn't necessarily become one but he became a player who didn't take any shit because what i what i keep saying with this team is you don't

need to go out there and rack up 250 penalty minutes you just need to honestly honest to goodness once or twice a season punch someone in the face yeah because they got in yours that's how you make room right you got to do something stupid once in a while and i think a lot of hockey fans don't realize that why did he do that that was unprovoked he did it to make room it's the regular season's a marathon the playoffs are a marathon you got to make room um can i think of a guy that became like that not off the top of my head but it usually works the other way around right a lot of guys come into the league used to back in the day and they just beat the living pulp out of guys for a year and then they'd get their room they'd get their respect like when

Lyle Odeline started with the Montreal Canadiens he fought every night then later in his career he didn't have to fight a lot because guys left them alone so usually the way it works is you come in as a bit of an agitator a bit of a PR as Dennis Marouk would say and you get your room so you don't have to do it all the time um and i think if you kind of establish that off the top you'll get your room so i can't think of any guys who kind of came in as wimps and evolved into uh guys who didn't take any uh shik but i think a lot of guys who came in real tough and then it it seemed on the surface that they calmed down but i think they only calmed down because they got their room and uh i mean i mean you go back in time but doug gilmore didn't take any crap off anybody he was

165 pounds good god wendell wendell clark wasn't a giant he took less crap than anyone in the history of the game so uh and every once in a while you got to explode you got to freak out to get that room now i don't know if you have to but you got to let guys know that i'm not gonna take that crap because it it really is all about room and if you get this that little extra bit then you can make things happen on the score sheet i think when you said when sorry is ovechkin not a guy like that yeah ovechkin man hey he makes a ton of room for himself he's huge he hits like he hits like he's beyond tough he hits like a monster sydney crosby's tough in the corners he's tough there's a lot of guys that are that are tough that are skilled and tough that make

room for themselves um yeah like i mean you don't have to be a guy that racks up a ton of penalty minutes but i mean do you want to go into a corner against alexander ovechkin i don't think so because every once in a while he just explodes and annihilates a guy uh look what he did to shveshnikov a few years ago beat the living tar out of him he's a nine that's a 19 year old kid that's going oh i could fight ovechkin i've never seen him fight before he's not that tough he's that is a miscalculation i forgot about that that's like that's like me at the pick the lobster carnival getting a few uh alexander keys in me going you know what i can roll with the boys oh no your role no your role no your role so yeah if you if you go back in the day

um there is a lot of really tough players back in the day and they you'd look at their pams and you'd say you didn't fight that much and they'd tell you i didn't have to after a while i didn't have to so ryan reeves has to fight like twice a season see there you go there you go i see when not exactly he has to fight twice a season no one's going to challenge him anymore right there's not a tough guy in every team to challenge him ryan reeves makes more room for his teammates just by sitting on the bench like if i read one more comment from some analytic dork who says ryan reeves is the worst player in the nhl i'm like you don't get it ryan reeves makes his team bigger and when i say bigger he gives them more room on the ice ryan reeves is a huge asset that

any team in the nhl would want any team and just because a spreadsheet says he's not the greatest player in the world that doesn't mean he's not a useful player i would take ryan reeves on my team any day and ryan reeves he's a good hockey player man he's decent he's not gonna hurt you when he's out there he's not gonna score 50 goals but man he's a good hockey player we thought we thought pittsburgh were nuts didn't they pay a first round pick for him and then they dealt him like 40 games later when they got when they got him i said finally pittsburgh's done the right thing because Crosby's never had a designated protector in his whole career they tried George the Rock that didn't it just didn't click but when they got Reeves I said finally Pittsburgh's doing it and when

they traded him I go that's the dumbest trade they've made in eons and it was I mean there's just because you don't show up on the score sheet doesn't mean you're not useful I I but I say that because that's how I justify my midget sea career you know I was on the peak I was on the PK you know i saw yeah that's right yeah with with reeves in pittsburgh i mean we questioned the trade at the time but if they paid a high cost if you're gonna if you're gonna make a decision stick to it absolutely yeah stick to it right and that's the other thing right with uh with with modern sports fans there's no patience right uh um i people go oh they gotta at least get rid of dubas like no they don't this is his vision man he's got to see it through and just because i'm not philosophically

aligned with it doesn't mean he's not correct I could be the one who's wrong and that's another thing about society because no one will admit they could be wrong right so I think uh I love the way that Dubas sees the game man I man I grew up in an era where the Oilers would beat the Leafs 12-11 on a Saturday night it was freaking awesome and there was four scraps so there's nothing wrong with river hockey you just gotta you gotta get that other team to engage and I think that's one thing the nhl should look at is uh to make the rules or at least enforce the rules so that both teams engage in offensive hockey instead of both teams engaging in defensive hockey because to be frank some of that late round playoff hockey was tough to watch oh yeah the conference final was

bad the island straight up boring it was boring when my when my friends who are lifelong fans contact me and they say they haven't been watching that's not because they're bad hockey fans it's because they don't like watching bad hockey and it was tough to watch so very trots teams are notoriously tough to watch yeah so so the nfl and the nba have adjusted their rules so that offense is rewarded the nhl has to figure out a way to do the same thing because my kid my son and i were at the uh the christmas game december 22nd leafs eight carolina six yes friggin blast so now i know there's guys out there who you don't understand the game that's not good hockey because this guy was defensively irresponsible that's what i want every goal happens because

somebody makes a mistake let's make mistakes happen so ah boys i got a ton of theories on how you can make mistakes happen and how you can open the game up but you know what do you got can we hear it oh you want to hear it yes come on okay okay hear me out one rule only yeah there is a one one here's your one one coach only only one coach behind the bench okay oh and he doesn't have an earbud in his ear he can meet with the guys in the sky between periods but so i want to take technology out of the game right i want to go back to instincts so no laptops or monitors on the bench either and i know i was like well that's the modern bring off so i don't hate that so no earbuds on the bench okay so with one coach

guess what's gonna happen he's gonna be down talking to these guys uh on the forward side where the defense have to change on the fly and so chaos is gonna erupt chaos equals goals because chaos is a fancy word for people making mistakes right chaos doesn't associate with everyone doing the right thing players will have to police but will have to manage themselves uh like old reg dunlop boys player coach reggie couldn't talk to the second line while reggie was out there right so i want i think that would create more mistakes more mistakes equal more offense get rid of the trapezoid and get that out of there uh and if a goalie goes out to play the puck you can absolutely hammer him like back in the day that'll keep the goalie in the net which

will make more loose pucks uh put the red line back in there's too much of this pass from your own blue line buddy chips it right before the other blue line it's a glorified 200 foot dump in i love getting pucks in deep but not at the expense of offense so those are just like i could go on all day also like enforce the rules i know that's tougher but but here's the other thing i was always big on call the game by the rules and then they started doing that in 2004 but and there was like 18 penalties a game yeah it's been over correction not only that the game is and i hate saying this it's too fast right you need to be able to pick a guy a little and you can go back you can adjust to the way it was and if it gets too back you can go back to the way it was but if

you guys watch the game from back of the day everybody laughs because it was so slow the players were just as fast they just didn't have as many open lanes right now granted most guys can skate a lot better than they did back then like the the the the water bug in 1990 everyone's that water bug now right everyone's that fast now theo flurry basically yeah yeah the speed of the game is insanity so if people ask cindy crosby what do you work on most he's like speed because That's what's changed most since he's come into the game. So put the red line back in one coach on the bench. I want to go back to one ref. I want, I want communism boys.

I want a dictator on the ice. Okay. I want, I want a guy missing calls. I want chaos. So, but my, my big thing, my big thing is one coach on the bench with no outside communication to the bench. I think that'll, that'll encourage a lot of mistakes. and you can still have all your guys on the staff and just keep them up in the press box because i mean you watch a game now guys are breaking out their laptops on the on the bench and all that is is an immediate way to correct mistakes and uh more mistakes equal more goals and i know there's a lot of people that are going to scream and yell like well it's

modern technology you got to use everything you can and i agree but if the league eliminates it it's illegal so there's there's a lot of ways to i think to change the game and we got to start some outside of the box thinking because i don't want to watch two teams put the other one to sleep and the first one is alarm suddenly goes off wins the game that's you get bottom line this is entertainment and more people will spend their hard-earned cash if they're entertained right there you go what do you got what do you guys think they should do oh you know oh and goalie equipment for god's sake oh yeah it's ridiculous this idea that it's about protection like come on uh you can protect a body and not have it be this wide yeah and if

you know what if you don't want to get bruised don't be a goalie yeah how about that well the i mean if they protect marines and they're supposed to be as thin as possible right they're they can they can protect a goalie and not make them as like a tree and i think my kid's a goalie i took his second shot i was on the ice with him the other day i hit him right in the can he didn't even flinch and he's huge when he goes in that so i'm like man you're a little wee man also i mean you could go back to like like uh what do they use that the feathers in the pads the pads get heavier by the end of the game yeah i'm not sure but that's what's amazing right the pads are light uh the gear is so light and it's so big it doesn't have to be that big and that's

and you know what's funny it's like that's the players association rallying against that as a like it's a work safety issue or some weird terms they might use i don't know that's not the exact quote but man there's there's 23 guys in every roster 21 of them aren't goalies let's go let's rally against the goalies man as i wear my against the goalies where my goalie hat right i love that that's i think if you were to if you were to like change the game to make it more fun like the the defensive teams unfortunately like if you look at the late 90s devils who were the worst just the worst team to ever watch ever you know and they would stifle their stifle their way to a stanley cup it was a great way for a team that couldn't spend a lot of money to manage their

lack of talent and win a cup and and that's sort of what i saw yeah yeah 100 and you see to sort of see that with um nothing against the islanders but you couldn't say that the islanders top end skill is up there with elite in the game and i think any islanders fan would tell you that they have some elite skill but it's not like anders lee is like whoa holy man he's the next sydney crosby um barzell is great uh but it's just him in that in that league i would think and i think with barry trotz when he was in washington we forgot what it was like to watch when he was in nashville and so he's he's gone back to what it's like to watch barry trotz coach in nashville and there wasn't a lot of top end talent on those nashville teams uh like david leg one at your

number one center um and so i think i think you've got you've got to find some way to break the tendency for teams to manage their lack of skill with just playing defensively and and and you know basically holding down the fort until the the game runs out uh because as you said can be on just a purely economic standpoint it's not good it's not good for the game it's not but so how do you do that because the coaches are paid to coach and the easiest thing to coach is defense and if i was barry trotz and i've said this i would do the same damn thing you have to work with what you have i don't i don't blame the dairy trotz at all but what you do is you gotta gotta take some of that power out of the coach's hands and i think that comes from

taking some of them out from behind the bench the game is so over coached so everything's a system used to play hockey now you almost system hockey right and you got to take that power away and the league has to figure out how to do it um like people say make the ice bigger don't do that go watch watch an international game there's a reason i hate soccer because it's boring i don't want hockey to become soccer and like try to work your way to the net when the rink's that wide that's no yeah well and people seem to think that that's going to up scoring and if you look at the no point of game players are pretty rare yeah there's that there's that's not gonna up your scoring you you could make it a little bigger maybe a foot or two on each side but no you can

you can take the posts and maybe angle them in as opposed to making them round you can do things like that like but i i'm big on smaller goalie equipment and start eliminating the coaches like not not their jobs they can keep they can still have five coaches on your staff just put four of them upstairs during the game and what do you think of serving the entire power play see there's where you're going to get into trouble i i think that's probably a good idea but then guess what's going to happen then refs will be even more reluctant to blow the whistle right right refs are reluctant to blow the whistle now i think they'd be even more reluctant to blow the whistle then so that's like a that's like a pandora's box one but i it like logically yeah it should

totally make sense to serve the whole power play shouldn't it from a logical standpoint but i can see um people being more reluctant to call a penalty at that point i just say whatever they pick whatever they pick i go back to the the ryan reeves trade thing make your decision and stick to it i keep saying because like the goalie equipment um this rule change that rule change offside reviews and now we're going to alter it so if your feetsies are on the ice but now if they're if your feet are off the ice when there should be a rule where when you change a rule there's a there's you are not allowed to alter it for 10 years and if you don't like it you sit in your mess they're sitting in too many lawyers in the world right like who saw offside

becoming what it's become like oh well and tell me how tell me how it's fair that a team that has sustained uh offensive zone pressure for 45 seconds but may have meant maybe maybe entered illegally by an inch is penalized for scoring a great goal like that you're killing the game thank you and i i look boys people laughed at me for this before and they go you can't go back and i've said get instant replay out of the game one league should be the first to step up and go enough enough we're we're take like the game is played by humans right when hockey was invented when baseball was invented was football was invented they didn't invent the game going oh in the future will we have a machine where we can review all this stuff which is pure it was so

let's bring it back to that and mistakes are going to happen man there's going to be like there's people who still think bob nystrom's cup winner in 1980 was offside and that's great gives us something to talk about the foot in the crease goal brett hall yeah that goal lives on forever mistakes happen we have to learn to live with mistakes it seems like we've learned to live with mistakes in a lot of aspects of society except for professional sports and i get that yes you have to get it right and we should use all means necessary to get it right but should we really should we really review that offside down to that little millimeter of a skate blade and 45 seconds later take the goal away is that really the right thing to do but

once you put it in print the legalese says you have to well if humans are playing humans should be reffing and human things are going to happen and uh and i i look at the look at baseball they've done more with instant analysis and baseball than they did with the entire houston astros cheating like it's crazy like they they've they've tried to get that right they didn't even bother with the astros and the and the and you know something as stupid as banging on a trash can you know i think yeah i think the best quote to come out of baseball in the last little while was theo epstein who stepped down from the cubs and you know he got the world series title in boston you get it in Chicago he's an analytics guy and he said you know what I used it to win the games I'm paraphrasing

but he goes the analytics it's it's at the cost of producing an entertaining product baseball now man it's painful to watch and it's because every decision is made not on feel and it shouldn't always be on feel obviously but every decision is made by a pie chart or a graph like what happened in game six with blake snell coming out is freaking ridiculous and and is that going to be the turning point and if you watch baseball now guys it's not entertaining like it used to be tim rains would get on first base and on the broadcast they'd show rains on first and they'd show the picture they'd split the screen and rains would be leading off you go is he gonna run and a ball would go into play and he'd take off and it was exciting or they'd try to pick him off and it was

exciting and now no one's gonna steal a base no one you're either gonna hit a home run or hit a strikeout they've sucked the entertainment value out of the game and it's tough to watch and hockey man it's that far away from going down that same slope because these analytics folks they're just taking all the feel out of the game it's so over coached and it's over coached because everything is done on well this well what happens in this battle in this corner in this match up and it's driving me nuts as an old school fan with his gordy hell pin on the side of his hat i just you're just taking away the pureness of it and yeah i the argument on the other side is we've got to evolve and i get that i do but i just want the game to be entertaining and if

if you watch a baseball game and any old baseball tape you're like what is this why are they bunting why are they throwing over to first why is this guy running and in hockey man people aren't taking risks anymore and risks it's risk reward right you're either going to score or get scored on and i want the i want the game to be a gamble evolution doesn't mean it has to go one particular way to evolution can be balanced yeah right well it's like uh well when you talk about fashion right i didn't think in 2020 i'd be walking around in skin-tight jeans that the lead singer a winger wrote in 1987 but here i am sometimes things from back in the day are good yeah well i wonder if you know um if the nhl looks at uh looks at the product because when i watch games

now i feel like i'm slowly very slowly being suffocated like it's just it's a very um i and i've noticed it in the last year year and a half and it might just be because i watch a lot of leaf games and they've been for long stretches frankly under babs painful yeah but it's almost like you know when you you know when you're in high school and like your friends kind of body check you against the locker and you sort of have that moment where you're like and no no but i know what it's like when they pile on you and they beat the living crap out of you with punches about the same but it feels like we went to school a few years apart yeah there's but there's a a tenseness that's there that it's like when i there's um it doesn't breathe do you know what

i'm saying and i don't know how else to put it because the players aren't allowed to breathe they have to do what they're told with the exception of maybe the first line on every team or a couple guys on every team the rest of them have to do their exact job and now that exact job results in is one team doing exactly what they're told the other team doing exactly what they're playing whack-a-mole with the puck between the hash marks right i don't want to see that and the game's been overcoached and now overanalyzed kefal cully had a great article in the globe uh about a month ago and it was about declining ratings in sports and his argument was uh people don't want to watch because you used to be able to just watch a game for fun right you sit

down and watch a game for fun now you have to be an expert right everyone's an expert on everything and oh they're not playing the left wing lock properly the average fan doesn't give a crap the average fan doesn't give a crap about escrow the left wing lock for the salary gap they just want to be entertained and as broadcasters too we have to realize that like people always like I'm I'm not a numbers guy I'm a stories guy right so I go on the air I'll do an on camera about Mr. Yankoff and about Slapshot and about Degrassi junior high and like what's that have to do with sports they might ask I'm like nothing but it's fun so I just make it fun man and I know it's not a coach's job to make the game fun i get that but it's the league's job to make the game fun

and entertaining and that's where the league has to step well maybe it ought to be though don't they all get paid by the same for that product like you know it's got the job for how many years of straight in nashville because he kept a bad roster competitive right you're right coaches get paid to win you know you know what i i've noticed back when i was allowed to talk to people in person is is um you should never be in a position where fans have to bashfully tell you who their favorite player is yeah like when when you were talking about you know you got to be an expert or whatever some fans just like players for no reason really or you know their own very peculiar reasons and you know what i should not have to explain why i love james reimer i just do yeah i just do

mike mcphee i love mike mcphee there you go but you should never have to be like i don't know kind of like a mike mcphee jersey yeah something like that kind of like i'm a i'm a middle-aged guy and i collect hockey cards kind of like that you should never have to mumble what you love yeah you should be able to say it with your chest kenny yeah i love it sorry what like we do we're guys like that i think look at your look at your background look at my background you know unashamed absolutely kenny speaking of things that you love yeah actually i want to stay on this subject a little bit longer if it's okay oh i got all that because i i do want to i do want to i do want to stay on this steve i hold that question for a second okay hold that okay he's

upset no it's okay he'll just I wanted to talk about things we love but no okay no get into it get into it because I do I don't know he'll just go play with the James Reimer action figure so Ken I think I think the thing is you know um how do you as a like you know because you're you're talking of you're just in the product that you're talking about right so you're you're you're tough on that when you're when you're when you're looking at like there was something that dave could know told me once when i worked for the fan for like a month right dave's a pretty smart guy thank you steve appreciate it and what what dave said was we've got we got the tendency in toronto at least about talking about the business of sports rather than the games themselves and

the reason for that is the teams were so bad for so long the jays were awful the raptors were awful the Leafs were awful and it was for 15 years so at a certain point you had to talk about either trades or salary cap considerations or buyouts or something yeah you know because they were so bad for so long and it seems like we've even as broadcasters and we're guilty of this too gotten away from telling the stories you know when you look at an NFL broadcast all you hear about is players on the field I don't know how the NFL salary cap works I'm fucking clue but what's great about it is that i'm like this guy's matching up with this guy and they're gonna go head to head it's brady versus breeze and it's like fireworks are going off and it's exciting

whereas i watch hockey now it's like well you know we're during the first intermission we're going to talk about um escrow it's gonna be very exciting pumped well i think we've done in sports had a good effort to put escrow off the table but the problem is god damn right kenny yeah shut up bell guy so but unfortunately in the NHL it keeps coming up right like look what's happening right now this isn't a media driven story this is this is what's happening like come on guys yeah so I put that on the owners and the players not on the media I agree I'm not trying to put it on the media no I but I totally buy into that argument Kado made to you about Toronto I mean uh you guys and your crap teams and what else can you talk about i mean my god but yeah it should be about

the product on the ice it should be about the players we tell fantastic stories but the reason i want the game to be better is i love it the reason i don't talk about how soccer should improve is i don't care about soccer i could care less but i want like hockey is the best game is the best stories it's so exciting and even when the game's bad for me it's like pizza right it's still good you got to grind through it but when a when a great game happens and you go how come every game can't be like that and every game's not a winner right not not everything's perfect all the time but I think if the league the league when I look at what the NFL does and what the NBA does to increase entertainment that's what the NHL has to do

they got to find a way to just go look we like I'm sorry but you just and I know that Kate Whitmore's done so much work to cut down on goalie equipment and the resistance he puts up with trying to do it is it's crazy I mean a goalie I always say what's that behind the goalie on that old 1985 opici hockey pad oh it's the net you can see it back then you had a target to shoot at there's nothing for guys to shoot at uh the league's got to figure out a way to increase offense or at least entertainment and i'm sorry i'm gonna tick a lot of people off out here but when two guys would step up and say let's have a go that was entertaining man i absolutely loved it uh you know when two teams hate each other that's when everybody gets on board and

then after the game everyone goes oh that was awful well then why were you so excited what did you think was gonna happen right come on steve sorry you go ahead now i just wanted to get that in there and speaking of things you love yes are you uh are you done recording your audiobook yet or what i recorded one audio one of my books on audiobook and dangle uh you contacted me once said what about this job on audiobook i said never do it it took me five days like i don't know if it's my maritime accent if i have sloppy diction if i don't enunciate properly but recording an audiobook was painful for me uh there's certain things in life that people are good at i'm not a good audiobook recorder so for my latest book one to remember stories from 39 members of the nhl's

one gold club we had a professional through the audiobook version so you won't hear my awful voice on it dangle did you like the audiobook uh process i i did i did and it was it was a grind i can't remember this this is how long it took i can't remember if it was six four hour sessions yeah or four six hour sessions yeah it's crazy it's crazy it was very it took a long time and and yeah like we do this for a living we talk about you know we talk for a living and i think i'm good at it and i get in the booth and after half an hour i'm like i can't read no i don't know how to read and the other thing like so when you read as an adult you kind of read at your pace right you want to read fast when we get through it you know you have to slow down and say every word

you know it's just it's i wasn't good at it you know like but i wouldn't be a good doctor either right there's people that do that for a living and i realized this isn't something i should do again because i'm not good at right so you wouldn't want to square up and fight your patients uh no no you know what's so funny for a guy who loves hockey fights as much as i do i'm a horrible fighter and i hate fighting like it like in a in a public like i think everyone should be able to work their arguments out but in hockey i just love the scrap i absolutely love it yeah and it's not so here's the other thing too it's not so much i love seeing guys fight like i love going to a game and there's a couple tilts love it but i i need to go to a game and know that i might not

see a fight but i could possibly see a fight like i need to know that the guys are playing with edge right that doesn't mean they're going to beat the tar out of each other but i need to know if you do that wrong and you do that wrong we're going to meet and we're going to figure this out and i just find there's no edge to a lot of the games now i you know it's funny when i go to a game and there's a fight i'm surprised oh yeah for sure yeah especially a leafs game yeah yeah it used to be it used to be the complete other way around i used to get to go to like one leafs game a year yeah and i remember my mom and i for the only way we used to get tickets is like a friend of a friends they died and they gave it to a neighbor same as today stole it and like nothing's changed

no and we got to sit fifth row wow my mom and i and it was right when um they started introducing people come into your seat to to ask you like hey do you want some nachos or whatever and my mom i just remember her looking around going so this is how the other half lives yeah and and we're sitting fifth row and wade belak drops the gloves and i just remember being like oh my god i'm here for a way to be like this is the best this is the best moment of my life now i get to go to all the leaf games i want and i was sitting there going oh oh my god there's a fight yeah for the first time in maybe 10 games that i've been to there's a fight and there were a grand total of 0.5 punches

between Kasperi Kapanen and Jared McCann. I'll do highlights now. You know, Daniel, you guys know I get the highlights cold, which means I don't see them. They'll be like, there was a line brawl, so I'll read line brawl. Halfway through it, I'm like, this isn't a line brawl.

I'll go down to the highlight row and I'll go, guys, I'm going to show you what a line brawl looks like. Line brawl is five on five. Everybody chucking. Maybe the goalies are going two. Not a bunch of you guys hugging. whatever. I'm not saying I'd chuck admire those who do, but okay. Here's one dangle. Name me the five most popular Leafs of all time.

Just right off the top of your head. It depends on the generation, but you'd be hard pressed to have a, you'd be hard pressed to have a conversation with a Leaf fan that doesn't include Doug Gilmore. Yes. That doesn't include Wendell Clark. Yes. daryl sittler tiger williams like just from our generation maybe for you maybe you'll be lack i don't know well math tell me i died oh yeah you get into the arguments you start getting into the arguments of but you cannot have a conversation across any generation that doesn't

include doug gilmore and wendell clark right i know exactly where you're going and why was wendell so popular he scored a lot of goals and sometimes he beat people up exactly he took no crap from nobody at no time and he got everybody out of their seats and he got people out of their seats by either scoring on a wrister by hammering somebody with his body or hammering somebody with his fists and going all out when you saw Wendell you're like there's a guy that if I was in the NHL that's what I'd play like he just gives it his all every night and if you if you can't beat him on the ice you beat him in the alley and those are the people that resonate with guys and in hockey we've and I get it I get the legalities I get the concussion problems I

don't want to see anyone suffer after hockey I don't want to see a guy go fight twice a night for 80 games that's not going to help anyone but that edge has to be there and Wendell played with the ultimate edge and I think that's what makes him so so popular in uh in Leafs lore and I think the game is at times lacking that edge well it's true and I mean I think if you were to like if anybody that watched Boreas Salming play that guy, uh, that was, there was no messing around with Boreas Salming. No, uh, there was no messing around with, um, you know, like what, like Darcy Tucker was enormously popular.

Tucker, the best Bob Cole name of all time is Darcy Tucker. Tucker. Every, every time I see Darcy Tucker, Tucker. I love watching his Instagram because every once in a while in the Insta stories he'll be watching his old games oh darce yeah he's just there's a guy that loves hockey loves hockey i always say he has i always want we do a lot of banquets and hockey events together and i say best angry face in the world belongs to darcy tucker when he get angry there was one last night he was going after it was on instagram who was he going after i want to say the geez it was somebody on the bruins or something i'm looking for a photo i'm going

to show you guys so uh but yeah darcy would get so angry and i absolutely loved every second of it because he just he just played with pure passion oh here's it here it is so whenever i see tucker i just yell out tucker so here we are one night after uh scotia bank hockey day in canada wrapped up if you can can you see what the sign says there's a glare on it it's a bit of a glare that's awesome yeah we've we've told the story often and we won't tell it again but he yeah look at that oh yeah that's that's there but but you love him because he's playing the way you think you'd play just come on i gotta win and i'm gonna do anything for the guys around me to win the way you think you'd play that's such a good way of putting it it's a fantasy we all think we

would do what these guys could do right well with the goal the reason i ended up with frank beaton was he feels the way i think i feel if i scored and those are the guys who resonate with people those in the in the the absolute greats right the absolute greats is wow i couldn't do that but with the guys who just play with that edge you're like that's what i would do to make it that's i think that's why they resonate speaking of absolute greats did you see uh connor mcdavid's house okay why is twitter so worked up about what did you what did you guys think he was gonna live in shack like i live in yeah is that a problem he makes 12 and a half million dollars it was did that become a problem no why why are people like oh my god look at his house i'm like well what of

course look at his house all right like what what do you think he's gonna fashion his house out of ikea furniture like i do his pads his pads awesome man that's exactly what i i would jeez i'd have water slides and i'd have a i'd probably have a slushy maker you know or something like that yeah so you know what i did love about his house and i quickly went over it because i don't try not to get into that he had a jimmy hendrix poster which means he likes good music not not this modern day dance music the players warm up to i was talking with i was talking with one player at a golf tournament and i go i go i gotta be honest when i when i go to a game i can't watch you guys warm up it's like why not this guy's like 24 25 a good player i go because i hate

your freaking music all this boom boom dance techno crap like put on some kickstart my heart get some motley crew going get some acdc's like i love that stuff i'm like i'm lost on you guys i'm so old i just don't get anywhere i used to love watching warm-up right guys like i'd go out i'd be looking at the other players i'd be grooving getting my groove on guys have no buckets on skating around you know now those days are over boys i because i can't tolerate the music And I remember going to the games and the old guys sitting around me go, well, they turned down that music and that's me now.

And for more of that dance techno crap, turn it, turn into Virgin mornings, Virgin radio, Monday through Friday in Toronto or on the radio app. I got it. Like if you play your music and here, here's another thing,

Adam, you're an actual DJ. When I go to some place and I see some moron calling himself a DJ, play music off a mac like you're just a glorified cd player bud like why why why do the djs need an ear thing if they're just playing the music off their mac computer oh yeah spotify can do that spotify can do that a halifax story for you i used to go to a bar uh when i was doing overnights at 101.3 the bounce which is now 101.3 virgin radio yeah bjch fm ken okay what bar what bar peddlers which was yeah you remember peddlers yes it's closed now which is a shame but peddlers was

like a spillover bar but we went because we could get in every time and you never had to pay cover on that one yeah and uh they were the first bar in halifax i think to have videos associated with the music they were playing which was a big deal you know 12 years ago yeah and this one guy came in and we realized we kept walking in at different points of the night but when we started getting in at the same time he was playing the exact same playlist and he would yeah and it was just a playlist that he'd pre-mixed and it was the same playlist every friday and he had his headphones on and we're like wait a sec this guy's not actually djing at all he was lip he's the millie vanillie of djs yes got paid well for it though i mean good for him i guess but it's all

aesthetics man it's all it's all about the look isn't it it is it's all about the look so you saw a fake dj oh yeah many many many many many i remember we did uh we used to do live to airs it used to be called fahrenheit friday so anybody who's listening from uh halifax who remembers that about 10 years ago we do it at the dome which yeah i've never heard ever yeah which is al brown used to go to the dome al brown real name uh he was an adult film star from halifax and he'd always be at the dome you guys would know him but you guys would know him by his stage name but since this is a family podcast i'll tell you after we stop recording all right it isn't it is restricted but yeah that's okay if you want to tell us no no it's fine okay all right it was

it was peter north he's from halifax peter north was from halifax yes yeah he's from halifax yeah so my buddies would always see him at uh at uh the dome yeah yeah my buddy you know the graft you know the grafton street dinner theater yes anyway my buddy was an actor in that and he had to serve peter brown peter north he comes over he's like you're peter north it's like call me al that is amazing wow wow so that you know and i've told this on the podcast before ken but uh when i moved there they had just outlawed dollar shots oh yeah that was that was a bad day in halifax it was because and and because somebody had been thrown through the window at the at the dome and it was also a bad day in halifax bad yes so so then the next day i'm at

the bar and it's two dollar shots instead yeah which is still pretty good it was a it's a wild place to party halifax is great so well my buddy of mine signed in the nhl when we were just kids i was like i don't know 21 22 he got a sign a bonus so he went out that summer and we were at jj's where the shots were 50 cents and uh we we got like 30 bucks worth and it was like we were multi-millionaires it was awesome yeah oh yeah i'm like just trays of it yeah he's like i think i can afford this like 30 bucks wow but the thing wasn't in the in the facts back in the day man if you had 10 bucks in your pocket you were good to go it's not like that anymore but yeah you could you could have a good night for 10 back in the day yeah i used to i'm honestly right up until

i was there i used to drink on 10 15 bucks a week yeah that's that's all i had money for nuts i don't know well and here's real hardcore so back in the day uh so you could get a drink for a dollar there's 50 cent shots or whatever but the real hardcores would get an in where they could go on the navy boats and get a shot of rump for 10 cents so you know if you can't if you can't stretch that 10 far enough you know was that just like recruitment get them drunk enough and get them to sign up it might have been might have been yeah uh yeah that was that was the truth yeah but it's a wild city it is it's calm down uh which is probably for the best but because then we have the stories right absolutely now i gotta ask you guys uh because jesse you did you collect

hockey cards growing up uh i did uh pokemon cards and baseball cards okay wow you talked to fewer girls than i did oh i was a worker me too uh me too i also collected those so i want to ask you I'm going to ask you the whole, the whole panel here, the whole hot stove, your favorite card growing up and your favorite card. Now, if you still have it, which is specifically targeted at Stephen Ken, because I don't believe I've got my cards anymore. Favorite one growing up my 79, 80 Wayne Gretzky rookie that my mom brought

home for us. It was in a box of cards. She didn't know if there was a Gretzky rookie in there. She got the box for 10 bucks. We read through, there was a Gretzky rookie. My brother and I share it. And yes, I still have it. What's it worth? uh geez you know what uh gretzky book like gretzky rookies have been going nuts for the last couple years the last six months they've just gone insane so you like book value on a gretzky rookie was 800 bucks and it shot up to 2500 this month but like but that's just because

the guy finally caught up uh the one i have isn't in the best condition it's probably 750 a thousand bucks but uh i had one a while back that was worth quite a bit and i unloaded it before all this insanity started uh i you know but it's yeah but the thing is condition is everything right everyone's like oh my gretzky's mint no it's not uh no so yeah it's so it's uh psa 10 went for 450 000 and there's another one for auction right now there's only two graded 10 in the world it's people think it might go for over a million bucks so there you go there's i'm on i'm on ebay right now there's a gretzky rookie that's graded four which is garbage yeah and it's got 29 bids just under 800 so the specular value is there right you can yeah but the amazing thing

about the gretzky if it's not a rare card like they're everywhere but everyone wants one right so if you have let's say 500 000 hardcore hockey card collectors across canada and there's still 400 000 gretzky's made or 300 000 200 000 whatever everyone still wants one it's going to drive the price the better condition the more rare you know so that's that's what drives the value supply and demand as i learned in grade 10 from mr from ron mason economics i was another classic picto academy teacher i might have been grade 11 i can't remember i found another four that's 1300 dollars yeah that's wild yeah yeah four is only what vgx it's very very good excellent condition Yeah, it's not mint.

Not even close. What makes something mint, Ken? Well, there you go. That's the eternal argument, Adam. Perfect. And there's been two Gretzky's graded 10 by PSA, and one, to me, is not even close because it's got – so the cards from Opici back in the day were cut with very thin razor blades.

They never replaced them, so it's got the cardboard kind of hanging off the side. So it has to be centered perfectly. There has to be no creasing. There has to be original gloss on the card. It's just got to look like it has never been touched by human hands, basically. So a lot of people think they're going to open up a pack and the card's going to be mint. Well, that's not the case.

So I'll show you what makes mint right here. So this is a Johnny Bar. This is a reprint. It's just hanging around. The kids like it. But if you can see from this border to this border, it's not perfectly centered. So that's not going to get you a 10.

There's no creases. This corner's a little dinged. I would say if that got graded, it'd be like a 7 or an 8. And just by the looks of it, it looks perfect. so uh yeah i went to a friend's house he had a bobby or it was the best bobby or i've ever seen a bobby or rookie card has never been graded a 10 it's from this set the wood borders chip really easily so there's often white on the borders and his i'm like that geez that might be like an eight or nine he's like is it a 10 i'm like i don't want to say that but he got

he flew it to uh psa it came back at four it had a hair it had a hairline crease on it somewhere and we still to this day can't see the crease i got an 80 81 gresky card it's the closest to perfect i think i've ever seen and i got it created it came back at two and they don't tell you what the problem is right i'm like where is there a crease on this and i still i can't understand it but it's uh when you're grading a card you're basically just giving it to someone else to judge so that if you and i have a deal on a card there it's like an arbitrator right he's going to judge that this is a seven so that you and i can go okay it's a seven problem is the card guys get together like well that's a weak seven it's not a strong seven and i'm like

oh my god it's like it's like salary cap grading cards is like salary cap and escrow i don't really it's interesting to know though for like outsiders like me oh yeah it's like and it's i feel bad for people who go to sell their cards that inherit them there's a lot of sharks out there obviously and anything where you can make money and it's so confusing because you can have a gretzky and someone who can hear it's sold for 450 000 but they don't know what makes it 450 000 and who do you trust to tell them what what it's what's going to make it that great so but this is the most valuable card i have right here it's got a 120 price tag on it it's not worth 120 but that's my son geofobian no hey come on ken that's beautiful look at his jersey dan jersey jersey you're

Raising them right. Now, listen, growing up in Toronto, I'm like, my one fear is my child will be a Leafs fan. And it's not that I don't want him to like the Leafs. I just don't want him to have a life of misery, right? I want him to be happy. You can't live a life without heartbreak. So as long as he's getting it over with the Leafs,

he should be good. Yeah. It is something that haunts me. I don't know if I want to put my kid through that. Oh, my God. Well, you've already started, I see. Yeah. I've already started, but like, I don't know.

I was an Expos fan in baseball, but he'd die hard. So that's heartbreak as well. So I feel your pain. Maybe not to your extent, but I feel your pain. People do not believe me, but if Leo grew up to be a fan of another team, I think that'd be fun. Because then, let's say he's a fan of, I don't know, Detroit. Every game between the Leafs and Red Wings in this house is a pay-per-view event.

like we it would be a full day and by full day i mean full week like the whole lead up if there's a home and home don't i'm i'm writing him sick notes he doesn't have to do any homework like ah god i can't wait my brother was a huge oilers fan and on the rare occasion where the oilers played the habs on hockey night there was it was like a three-hour fist fight like it was i remember one night there was blood uh yeah it was we just went at her man that's amazing yeah it's so amazing yeah it was awesome yeah and my brother's two and a half years younger than me and he could beat the living hell out of me so it shows you how tough i am steve what's your uh your favorite card you've ever had it doesn't have to be hockey by the way it can be pokemon

if you wanted to because i know you got those too now i wasn't a huge pokemon cards guy um the cards didn't get big until i was getting a little older jesse was still a kid i think that's why it was so huge to him oh yeah um i got an olvechkin rookie uh when i was young and uh young guns oh wow that's a good one yeah i got a i got a stammer rookie oh uh i know well here i'll pull this one down it's right in front of me one sec this one is a one of 15 so there's only 15 in the world it's a game used felix pot van uh it's got the logo oh in the card the o and the m from the toronto maple leafs that's very cool it's extraordinarily cool well and to think to think that you know i grew up watching this guy and idolizing this guy and to think i probably saw

this part of this logo i probably saw this part of his jersey on tv yeah it's pretty neat this is probably something that i grew up you know idolizing hence the essence of the hobby right it's your connection to the game or your connection to a player that's like some people for some people it's an investment for some people it's an emotional investment so there you go best best hit i've had is i pulled a funny looking mark stevard card that was all yellow and i didn't understand why it was all yellow and it was like kind of metal or plastic and what i actually did was i don't know if upper deck still does this but i pulled a printing plate oh wow so what what they do is it's it's like a what is it a three or four color system that they use to make every

cards and then they'll take the plate once they're done and they'll put it into a card or they're they'll make it a card and you can find it in a pack and the plate is one of one like girl there is so if you pull the yellow plate like i did there is no other yellow plate they use that one yellow plate so it was a one of one do you ever tell savvy you got that i don't i don't know if you'd care no but i think mark wouldn't care he'd be like how are you taping your stick though so i got i i regret it because i had no money and my uncle was a big uh ebay seller so i was like here put this on ebay and it got like 60 bucks yeah that's that's what you should tell mark yeah 60 bucks you bum i wish i pulled a better card i i wish like i needed the 60 bucks

bad at the time and now i'm like god i would gladly pay twice that just to get that card back like something that i owned um another really bad oh so i made two really bad mistakes with hockey cards kenny and again i was making these decisions when i really needed the money i had two ovechkin young guns and i sold one in his sophomore season okay his sophomore season is when i think he scored 45 and everyone's like oh he's a bust yeah he's never gonna hit 50 again yeah so i got i think i got 45 bucks for it oh wow i remember selling uh three steve eiserman rookies at a flea market for two bucks a piece this is in 1989 oh that that's what they were worth then uh i sold my mcdavid rookie right away i got it in the pack and i and i don't like new

stuff so i'm like i'll take the money uh uh it's worth more now but it was worth what it was then but that's the thing when you sell cards you kind of like you just move on right you got what it was worth at the time you got what it was worth at the time um yeah and everyone has a horror story about selling something but uh well my eyes are all doubles so i still get the original you know that was my thing i sold doubles back in the day so right right yeah and uh my my other my other horror story was there was a rookie card or no there was a card that i wanted and i want to say it was like 15 at the flea market it was a game it was a it was a felix pot van uh card with a piece of game you stick in it yeah um from when he was with the canucks and i was like well it's

felix poppin i don't care what team he was with i want it uh and i had a rookie card and i was like this rookie doesn't mean anything to me so i'll sell it i'll trade it and i traded it straight up that guy became a leaf i want to say like three months later it was phil kessel oh i could have got i don't know it's a leaf like i could have got so much hey i'll bring in a bunch of felix pod vent upper deck rookies from when he was on team canada you probably got that the world junior one right yes hey you know what i got behind me what you have my stick your stick no yes yeah you look stick isn't that awesome amazing family across the street was getting rid of a bunch of sticks like you want this i'm like that's fine by felix pot van dangle like that

it's like 10 bucks right no it was nothing they just gave it to me what yeah and i was good at you can you could have brought that on the market it was uh you gave me that when uh you brought eddie shock in yes i did i was gonna i was gonna bring you a bunch of felix cards this time but you're gonna you got your uh your well we can't see each other but i got a good shikutami one for you too so there you go oh shikutami oh by the way uh before jesse goes that everybody has their hockey card regret story uh in hot well so sydney crosby was nice enough to write the forward to hockey card stories too for me and his story is he got ripped off for a he traded his uh mario lemieux rookie for some pro set cards at the penhorn mall back in nova scotia back in the day

so everybody has a has a regret but he wanted the pro sets man it's all about what you want oh man yeah yeah i feel like he needs the money now if sid wanted to he could buy a mario rookie but see that's the other thing the other thing is it's just you get a story editor right so what's more valuable to you the lemieux card or the story and that's to me that's what it's all about the stories guys that's so we all get stories here right that's the beauty of it all i feel like jesse and i should have gone first because yours is going to be way better than ours but uh jesse what is what is yours favorite card all time i still have all of my cards from when i was a kid i have a giant stack of yugioh pokemon uh digimon and baseball cards in like a shoe box in my condo

locker somewhere so i still have those but they're all in bad condition and my cards especially because i used to put them on the floor and then flick little balls and pretend like i'd line up as a field and be like okay this is the pitcher and he's pitching this guy and this guy just hit a home run i remember my favorite card as a kid was um i think it was raw mondesi because oh any blue jays cards and then one day i got a raw mondesi card so i was like yes this is it i got a jays card because my peak of jays fandom was probably that little 98 2003 swing where ace was like an actual cartoon on the jersey so yes oh my god i like how you guys are you guys are talking about the rookie card yet as a kid and i'm like i was playing old-timers

hockey then i saw round modesty hit a grand slam once it was cool the only grand slam i've ever seen uh they won the game which was not it was like ninth inning and he was he came up and cracked one and uh old man behind me hits me on the shoulder he's like you never see those you say you may never see one of those again so enjoy it so that's why i remember and then i walked away yeah i gotta beat the traffic but jesse from the from what i hear the pokemon stops on fire right now too but i don't know anything about that um i do have a binder filled with my pokemon cards so maybe a couple of those are in good condition down payment on a house man i gotta check it out those are going nuts right now i have a lot of them so i'll take a look you should

i'm excited to hear what what you get um i had a an 89 doug gilmore calgary flames opg oh with the mullet he had the full yeah beautiful people don't give doug gilmore's mullet enough credit everybody gives it to jogger doug gilmore's mullet was gorgeous down with shoulder blades dangle can you uh quickly google doug gilmore pinnacle hockey card there's a close-up of him and it's also on his and it's also on his upper deck i'm talking like 92 93 all-star mcdonald's card where he's in like 92 mullet and doug's cool because he'll talk to you about the mullet again he was in one of my books and it was the upper deck one where he was posing with the jeans he had the mullet going like doug embraced it man and you gotta you gotta own it right like we were

talking about earlier guys if james ron is your favorite player you own it so yeah dougie owned it but those cards are huge those 89 op cheese that was a very good one he was uh he was my favorite and there's it so i'm looking it up right now to see if i can find look at that look at that right gorgeous right looks like he's piggybacking a dog yeah that was the style then i love it mine wasn't mine wasn't opg it was pro set okay okay it was this it's this guy oh yeah oh yeah that's the second year pro set but you know funny is we're like look at doug's hair back then i'm like his hair was awesome because i was the geek with wheels from the grassy glasses wishing i had hair like that yeah you know and i did have

wheels from the grassy glasses they were like did you oh yeah they were awful size of your head yeah oh yeah if you guys ever saw that picture man it was it was i laughed i lived a very lonely life for a number of years so did jesse he played baseball card baseball yeah i just learned you're a dork like you rival us i didn't if it makes you feel any better jesse i lined my cards up by position as well on the floor but i oh yeah i i did not uh throw balls at them because i knew i had to keep them in pristine condition so you know i wasn't screwing around with that but yeah the pro set were huge back in the day and they printed those things 24 7 i don't think the press has ever stopped they may still be printing off 1991 pro set that's the problem

oh yeah they're not worth anything right yeah all my friends are like can you take a look at my hockey cards and i just i just go when are they from and they go to the early 90s i go throw it in the garbage i get i get so many i get people reaching out to me i get people reach out be on instagram today and then twitter going and i'm like what year are they from 1990 i'm like i'm sorry like it makes no sense it makes no sense that an eric lindros rookie card's only worth about a buck but they printed off a bazillion of them right bro you're not gonna believe this i got four sundine rookies and i always go i'm surprised you only have four yeah no no kidding like i had i had a sundine rookie go back uh with the visor and everything

yeah yeah sundine yogurt yeah worthless oh and it's so crazy because that era produced so many great rookie cards but there's so damn many of them it's just like you know what do you do so um jesse are we doing a press conference uh no okay all right well listen i think uh i mean kevin we've kept you for two hours already buddy so boys i have no life i don't mind i'll be honest i'm gonna be down here in the basement when this is done anyway you know well here one last plug uh ken's book is called this team is ruining my life it's available at uh all chapters dangle how many books have you sold have you figured it out yet you are a prestigious author and are you gonna write another book uh i'm uh actually yeah i am

working on another book cool what's that what's it on can you divulge didn't even know that it's i have an idea for a kid's book actually that is that breaking news that's brilliant uh i i suppose so oh i don't know i haven't i've i i was uh tweeting about uh i was looking for illustrators and i'm talking to a brilliant um but uh no i've been asked to do like a sequel to uh this team is ruining my life and i'm like it's a biography that i finished two years ago like you think i've lived like three decades worth of life over the past two years no that's brilliant though man like you could easily do uh children's books that's that's brilliant that's working on hot cakes that'll sell hot cakes way to go buddy uh in terms of in terms of how many books i've sold

i don't i got it i think it's it's close to 20 000 good for you good for you when you got when you got your royalty check did you like just pimp it out for a night like just went to red lobster went crazy all that i think did i get it no you know what i think i got i want to say i got my royalty check during covid yeah during the pandemic so i couldn't go anywhere which is good because with royalty checks from writing books in Canada, you can't afford anything anyway. Yeah. Well, yeah.

I was told don't write a book for the money. And yeah, it was true. It was very true. In the words of Kim Mitchell, some say I'm in it for the money. I'm just in it for the love, love, love. I'm just doing my rock and roll duty. There you go, boys.

Evidently, none of you know that song. Oh, I know that song. Because it was released in 1990. You would, Adam. I know that song. you're actually obligated to play it uh well yeah and that's on the rockland wonderland oh nice buddy thank you see i'm a fan i'm i'm an awesome man yes huge and i love i love rockland wonderland i think it's a great song um so yeah no i'm a i'm a big classic rock guy ken so like

when you so i i messaged ken directly guys he made a gary charone reference you have no idea who that is but he made one on an nfl uh an nfl segment and gary sharon was the third lead singer of van halen and so i was like kenny oh my god and that was did you know that when when the van halen hired gary sharon sash jordan also auditioned for van halen at that time really tell somebody it's true no it is true sash jordan auditioned for van halen she can sing man yeah she can canadian singer oh yeah good set of pikes yeah like let's respond boys speaking of music steve i just want to let you know that a canadian gold album is certified at 40 000 units so you're halfway there wow but how pumped were you when they told you a canadian best-selling book is

5 000 you're like oh that's that seems attainable oh that when they told me i'm like i think i could do it but then you start selling books you're like it's really hard to sell books like uh luckily for you you have a cult right like that's the one the one thing i'm annoyed about is i want to know i want to know where i ranked in terms of i know they don't sell in 2019 no they don't tell you and you probably made the toronto star list did your best sellers and all that stuff uh seven times but who's counting what way to go buddy way to go and i'll forever i'll forever hold a garage against aaron davis because uh because i finished second to her wow and that's the highest i got i didn't get one you were second that's amazing man i was i was uh yeah it was top 10

seven times you're you're my peter mansbridge that's amazing peter mansbridge my peter mansbridge because he was on ice surfing the first time i met peter mandrich it was at uh the leaps gift shop like peter he's like hey ken i'm like oh that's why he knows why yeah he's he was uh i don't know why he chose to do this but when he was on ice surfing he was uh he was just like oh no i watch your stuff or whatever and and he was like uh you you know keep keep going because you got a magic he said that and even jason york who played in the nhl for many years you you hear him he's not on camera but you just hear him on his mic go oh my god that's amazing anybody watching or listening from the states uh peter mansbridge is our

kent brockman but a lot more trustworthy um and uh and and you know a national treasure we love you didn't you picked kent i know i'd go tom brokaw i'd go tom brokaw yes i'm just going pop culture but yes a hundred percent i am kent brockman reporting live how do you know it's live penis i'd like to think i'm the kent brockman of the sports world because if i did win the lottery i would go on tv like kent brockman did covered in gold oh yeah i hope you do ken just so we can yeah i hope i win the lottery too yeah there's 17 more books you'll get there i mean really uh it would take more than 17 wouldn't it dangle uh i'll tell you right now if you buy my latest book wonder remember i'm what

dangle i'm looking at what royalties off out of at least 50 cents you think oh uh yeah yeah i would i'll say this ken is your book available on amazon it is yes okay order it at another place because ken will make more money i just order it i need it for the ego you want you know one of my favorite things about writing books is though dangle and i don't know if you did this it's when i make the thank yous at the back i always just sneak in stuff for myself so i don't know if you guys did this but in the so thank you too i go blah blah blah uh warren christian so so these are legitimate people okay uh jackson out scott gray darren burns uncle jesse duke so that's uncle jesse from the dukes of hazard so i i do i do stuff like that uh thank

you to tim boyce brent cron terry ryan todd warner dr grant roberts grant roberts was the dad on danger bay see i just do things like that for me you guys know what danger bay is no idea it's in cuba i think i learned about it in school it was it was a cbc show in the late in the 80s and late early 90s and it was about dr grant roberts and he was a uh he worked at the vancouver aquarium and he's single he's a single dad who has kids jonah and nicole and at the end of every episode he would knock a guy out and then hug his children it would end in a freeze frame the story arc would always lead to grant roberts knocking a guy out and ending in a freeze frame so he made my thank you so one day on the radio in edmonton i'm making jokes about dr grant roberts

and a gut because we had the callers the guy calls and he's like yeah the guy played uh grant roberts he's my second cousin i'm like how can he do this amazing wow wow well ken real pleasure one more time on the book what's called where should we get it yeah the book is called one to remember uh you can get it at your local bookstore please support your local bookstore uh you can get it at chapters indigo all bookstores and on amazon but if you can buy it at your local bookstore i'd appreciate that because everybody needs a little help right now and uh one last thing steve are we allowed to say who's on the show next week it better not be tim and sid or i'm not coming back That's not Tim and Sid.

Wait, did I invite myself on next week, too? Well, Steve? Adam, I like how you're asking my permission if we're allowed to. Yeah, go ahead. Brian Burke will be on the show next week. Me? Speaking of books. Speaking of books.

Man, his book's awesome, too. Isn't it great? Buy Kenny's first. So, Ken. Buy mine. This is a bookmark in his. This is a lot. Ken?

Yeah, if you guys thought I was old school hockey. Oh, yeah. I was like the opening act for Berkey. So let me ask you this, Ken. It shouldn't be playing with sticks. If there's one thing you can tell us about talking to Brian Burke, like a pointer, a suggestion, what are we in for? Listen, have your questions ready.

Sometimes Berkey gives real short to the point answers, so be ready. So I will go on for days and eons, and you guys can rest, get a coffee, then go and play with this James Reimer action figure. Oh, by the way, he's going to chirp you hard about your action figures. Dan, go get ready for that. You know,

I would love it. And yeah, get ready for chirping. Berkey's a really good chirper and he's to the point. If you can ask him anything though, ask him about if the Philadelphia Flyers were tough in the late seventies, how tough were the main Mariners?

That was the Flyers farm team and Berkey played for them for a year. So make sure you get some good main Mariners stories out of them. Okay. That's my, one of my favorite parts of that book is his main Mariners thing. Yeah. Yeah. He puts off Harvard to go to play in the AHL. That's amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So I can get some,

I get some AHL stories out of him for sure. Ken Reed, thank you so much. It was beautiful as always. And in a couple of weeks when your next book comes out, feel free to come back or don't have a book and just come back anytime. Two goals only. I'll invite myself on anytime. By the way, Colby Armstrong's brother, Riley played two games and didn't score a goal. so he was so close on both ends. Bud, I played one game too many, Bud.

Didn't score any goals, Bud. And Colby wrote the forward for this one. Oh, that's great. That's awesome. By himself? Well, listen, he played in the WHL in the early 2000s. He might have had some help. No, Colby wrote the forward.

My forward was Merrick and Colby, and I'm like, No, this is just Jeff holding Colby's hand. Yeah, no, Colby wrote it. So one more final one. So we're talking about escrow last week and we're just like going, Oh God, we're at work. I'm going, I got to talk to Cole. I go, I got to talk to Colby about escrow.

Cause I bet you he'd say, I just bought, I went to the dub, but I'll just listen to the NCAA guys. So FaceTime rings on Sunday and it's Colby's watching football. And I go, Hey, we were talking about escrow last week. And he goes, but I just listened to the college players, but exactly what we thought man all-time beauty they're they're you know they were talking about like stuff you miss and man i missed that eight-year-old colby armstrong just walking around and being an absolute child and brightening everyone's day yeah i can see why him and i

hit it off because it was like two star-crossed lovers right like you act like you're eight i act like i mean you played in the nhl i wish i played in the nhl you know uh my my dad my dad when he met colby i'm like colby show dad your nose my dad's a doctor dad's like so what you think doc and my dad goes it's a medical marvel ken reed thank you so much man we appreciate it thanks for having me boys appreciate it the steve dangle podcast follow the guys on twitter at steve underscore dangle at adam w y l d e and at jesse blake connection complete