Cussing the Riders for Dad

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/09/2010 (5539 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If anyone reading today expects me to deliver one of those goofy columns where I make fun of the news or myself or your taste in music, you’d better flip the page right now or click on something else.

I’m going to tell you about my father, Harold Kives, who died eight days ago at the age of 73.

My father had been living with Parkinson’s disease for more than 15 years. The neurological condition robbed him of his ability to run, walk, speak and finally, swallow, in that order.

After losing a tremendous amount of weight during his final year, he succumbed to a massive infection and died relatively quickly, over the course of a single night. He remained relatively independent until those final hours and went precisely the way he wanted to — peacefully, with his family at his side and no tubes or wires invading his person.

In the week following his death, I really haven’t written much, except for an obituary, a eulogy and countless letters of thanks in response to countless messages of condolence.

The death of a parent demands some degree of solemnity. But my father was not an overly solemn man.

Had he lasted another weekend, he would be spending this afternoon attempting to curse in Yiddish at a television set.

That’s because the Saskatchewan Roughriders are in town. And my father hated the Saskatchewan Roughriders, whom he simply called "Regina" because that’s how the Green-And-White used to be known.

My father was a Canadian Football League fan. At the summer cottage, he loved watching grainy black-and-white images of CBC television broadcasts until the inevitable crack of lightning played havoc with the antenna reception. At Winnipeg Stadium, he had a pair of season tickets on the upper deck of the east-side stands.

One of my most enduring childhood memories was making the long march up the concrete spiral staircase at the stadium and watching a Dieter Brock-led Bomber squad lay waste the rest of the CFL, which happened more often than not in the late 1970s early 1980s.

My father disliked the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, mainly because the kicker, Bernie Ruoff, used to play for Winnipeg. He disliked the Edmonton Eskimos because they often stood a chance of winning at Winnipeg Stadium.

He disliked the Ottawa Roughriders because they were losers, plain and simple. The Toronto Argonauts and Calgary Stampeders were irrelevant. Montreal was laughable because they paid way too much to bring both Vince Ferragamo and Billy White Shoes Johnson up from the NFL in 1981.

The B.C. Lions were despised simply because Joe Paopao played quarterback. My dad had an irrational disdain for Paopao, on par with his derision for Ruoff, whom he called "Acid Face," which was either a statement about his acne or a warning about his impending disfigurement at the hands of a caustic substance.

But as I said, my father hated the Regina Roughriders. He didn’t like the team, their colours or even their pathetic fans, who would make the six-hour drive past Moosomin and Griswold and MacGregor to Winnipeg only to sit quietly at the stadium and meekly endure the abuse of Bomber fans while the Riders were brutalized on the field.

Needless to say, the last few football seasons were hard on my father. He was heartbroken by the 2001 Grey Cup, when the 14-4 Blue Bombers went up against the 8-10 Stampeders and utterly choked because Khari Jones kept going for long bombs instead of sticking with the ball-control plan.

He had his hopes up in 2007, before Ryan Dinwiddie failed to convert that fateful final Grey Cup drive and the Riders won the championship.

But last year was truly hard on him. "They’re awful," he said of the Bombers after the 2009 Banjo Bowl, when the inept Mike Kelly allowed the home team to lose 55-10.

When a parent dies, you’re left with all kinds of regrets, ranging from the rational to the completely insane. One of my own is entirely reasonable — I wish I could have watched another Bomber game with him.

So I’m going to sit down today and turn on TSN and pretend my dad is watching the Winnipeg-Saskatchewan game with me. I’m not a religious guy, so I don’t believe he’s actually here.

But I’m going to curse the other team, their fans and especially their kicker Luca Congi, who may get to reprise the role of Acid Face, for old time’s sake.

As my friends and family have already heard this week, I loved my father and everything he was and everything he wanted to be.

But today, I’m simply going to channel the worst of him and urge the Bombers to beat those stupid schmendricks from Regina and show no mercy in the process, as if it’s 1981 and I am 11 years old and my father has the rest of his life ahead of him.