The Junior A Crushers will be sporting new jerseys this season, and their road sweaters will be predominantly red, as opposed to the blacks they’ve used for years (unfortunately, they’ll still use the black ones as an occasional third jersey).
They’ll trot their new gear out Thursday night at the Pictou County Wellness Centre, when they open the Maritime Hockey League season against the Valley Wildcats, whose fierce-looking wildcat logo stands out nicely against their black and white, it must be said.
The new Crushers sweaters look spiffy, and as they say, ‘if you look good, you play good’, so nothing derails a season faster than awful-looking uniforms: not injuries, or poor goaltending, a lack of talent, mediocre coaching or 15-game losing streaks.
Nope, the jerseys make the hockey team.
That being said, I don’t know how the Yarmouth Mariners do it every year, with that yellow/blue combo that looks like someone blew up a sofa that’d been manufactured in 1978.
The Amherst Ramblers and their dark purple? An utter fashion catastrophe. Their jerseys are actually, literally, hard on the eyes, but could be salvaged if they’d work some gold trim into their colours and get rid of the black pants. Major, major fail.
On the plus side – this is important, so read closely – a couple of my favourite jerseys across the MHL are the Miramichi Timberwolves’ black jerseys with the old-school lettering for their logo (subtle, not garish); while the Summerside Western Capitals with their New York Rangers-like motif (and white helmets, a nice touch) are also close to fabulous. But not truly 100 per cent fabulous.
A big racket:
• Tennis star Serena Williams went ballistic at the U.S. Open, just before she lost the women’s final to Naomi Osaka. Somehow, through the power of social justice warriors everywhere, getting coached from the stands (illegal), smashing her racket (a big no-no) and calling the referee “a thief” in the midst of her overdrawn, boorish tirade gets turned around; now, some folks (her included) think she was persecuted because she’s a woman.
Because no man has ever been punished for on-court transgressions (John McEnroe was fined more than $69,000 in total in the 1980s, which would be well over $100,000 today, and he was also kicked out of the 1990 Australian Open for telling the referee what he should do to his mother. He wasn’t, I assure, you, suggesting that the referee buy his mom flowers).
Non-Sports Thought of the Week:
• Just as one of the towers came tumbling down on Sept. 11, 2001, a friend of mine was being wheeled to the delivery room in Truro to give birth to a son, whose birthday is an easy one to remember, as you can imagine.
Cindy White, then a colleague of mine, told me at the Pictou courthouse that terrorists had crashed planes into the World Trade Center, and they were now just smoking rubble on the Manhattan streets, with more than 2,700 people dead, whether they were aboard the doomed planes, jumped out of windows or died in the collapse.
Less than two years later, U.S. president George W. Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and declared that “the war on terror continues, yet it is not endless.”
I’m almost certain he was wrong about that.
Kevin Adshade is a writer with The News. His column appears each week.
