You know what ‘they’ say: he who laughs last, laughs best.
In November 2016, Gerard Gallant was fired by the Florida Panthers one night after a road game against the Carolina Hurricanes. Photos of him waiting for a taxi while the Florida Panthers team bus was heading toward the airport went viral on the almighty Internet.
Fast forward 19 months and let’s see how everyone is doing: the Panthers haven’t made the playoffs since and Gallant, a Prince Edward Island native who is in Pictou County this week, is the current NHL coach of the year, after taking the expansion Vegas Golden Knights to the Stanley Cup final.
“It didn’t look good, the way things went down that night,” he says of being let go by the Panthers, which came just months after he had coached in the NHL all-star game and also coached Florida to the playoffs.
“Coaches get fired every day. It hurts for a couple of weeks, but you move on and look for your next job. There’s no grudges, you just worry about tomorrow.”
I just looked it up: Vegas beat the Panthers in both games the two teams played last season, so that must have made Gallant’s smile a bit larger, even if he wouldn’t admit it.
He says he’s not bitter (and good for him for taking the high road), but if there’s a small, secret part of Gerard Gallant now laughing at Florida Panthers management for firing him, no one could blame him.
Oh, and ‘they’ also say this about Karma: she is not a nice girl, unless she’s smiling your way. When she is, she is a delightful lady that lights up a room.
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Non-Sports Thoughts of the Week:
• Also in Pictou County this week was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to make the formal announcement on funding for the twinned highway project from Sutherland’s River to Antigonish.
I wasn’t there, but apparently, he seemed guarded when asked about Northern Pulp’s proposed effluent treatment pipe, and just wanted the day to be all sunshine and blue skies, with wispy clouds made out of cotton candy.
He kind of blathered on for a while about Northern Pulp, doing what politicians often do: say a lot of words without saying much of anything.
But like my lefty aunt likes to say, he’s still better than Stephen Harper.
• To paraphrase both Pink Floyd and the Bible, money is the root of all evil and when that old lady in Guysborough had to split $1.2 million in Chase the Ace winnings with her nephew, she turned to him after the photo-op and said, “I’ll see you in court”.
She thinks she’s entitled to it all (and maybe she is – I can’t make my mind up one way or another about it).
No war is nastier than a civil war and when you factor in more than half-a-million bucks, it can get really personal. You’d think someone would be happy to win $600,000, but if there’s another $600,000 out there that you think should be yours, then $600,000 doesn’t look nearly as good.
Even a dog knows when they’ve had enough to eat, y’know.
One of our problems as humans is that we want all of it. Not a little, not some of it, but the whole damn thing. If we were more like dogs, we’d probably smile a lot more often, too.
Kevin Adshade is a writer with The News. His column appears each week.
