Read Online Number Two by Jay Onrait - Free Book Online Page A

on they’re watching not talking. And that means the buildings can get eerily quiet. It all makes perfect sense to me now.
    That said, I simply cannot defend the great fans of the Oilers, Flames, and Canucks for staying quiet and contemplative when the home team scores a goal!
    I can remember many a late night in Toronto when I’d be sitting in my old leather chair watching the second half of a Hockey Night in Canada double-header on the CBC featuring the Oilers, and the second Edmonton scored a goal the camera would scan the crowd at the Coliseum to gauge their reaction. And every single game it’d be the same: Although many fans in the crowd would be standing and cheering, there’d be just as many (if not more) inexplicably sitting down with their hands tucked underneath their legs and a look on their faces that screamed boredom. I mean, I understandthat you’ve paid your hard-earned money to get into the building and you can react to your home team’s scoring any way you like, but for God’s sake if your team scores you should be required to stand up at the very least. Stand up and clap. Maybe even let out a “woo.”
    So there I am with Trevor at the Coliseum in the fall of 1992, and the Edmonton crowd is being typically quiet. Frustrated, we decided to take it upon ourselves to liven them up a bit. So we started cheering. Loudly . We weren’t using foul language or anything—we were just yelling really loud, telling Shjon Podein to hurry up and finish his check and Kelly Buchberger to drop the gloves. Giving it to the referees a bit. Throwing in a few “LET’S GO OILERS” chants. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before we started to draw the attention of the other fans in our section. A few people asked Trevor and me to “quiet down” so they could “watch the game.” Many others just shot us angry looks. Soon, the polite requests turned into angry shouting. In typical Onrait fashion, I didn’t back down from these requests to keep it down, suggesting instead that everyone in my section needed to wake up a little bit.
    I still maintain I was absolutely in the right. I was cheering loudly for the home team . Most pro sports teams would encourage this. They would expect it, even. But not in Edmonton.
    I suppose the quiet atmosphere in the Coliseum that evening got to me, and I ended up making a few new enemies in our section. Still, there were no physical confrontations or anything, and we left the game that evening without any real incident. In fact, I didn’t give the night a second thought until two days later when my dad called me at home from his drugstore in Athabasca.
    â€œHey, Jay, were you a little loud at the Oilers game the other night?” he asked.
    â€œI dunno. I guess, maybe,” I replied.
    â€œMaybe a little too loud?” he continued.
    â€œMaybe a little. Why?”
    â€œI just got a call from Bill Tuele.”
    Bill Tuele—the director of public relations for the Oilers. This wasn’t quite as exciting as the last phone call my dad received from the Edmonton Oilers front office. That time, it’d been legendary Oilers tough guy Dave Semenko—the most famous of the Oiler tough guys, the man responsible for protecting Wayne Gretzky during the early years of the Great One’s career. Dave was now working for the Oilers in a ticketing capacity, calling up season’s ticket holders and encouraging them to renew. One can only imagine the team’s strategy: Who the hell would say no when Dave Semenko asked for money?
    Mr. Tuele called my dad to tell him there had been twelve separate complaintsto the team’s PR department about a “tall, loud, lanky, and obnoxious young man” who’d been disturbing everyone and preventing them from enjoying the game. Twelve separate complaints! Mr. Tuele wasn’t threatening to take my dad’s tickets away or anything, he just thought