Gratoony The Loony , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Gilles Gratton

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

126 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

'One of hockey s most colourful characters, from hockey s most colourful era, tells all Gilles Gratton was not a typical pro hockey player. He refused to don his equipment and man his net if the planets were not properly aligned. He skated naked at practice. He created one of hockey s most famous goalie masks based on his astrological sign. He fought with coaches and management, speaking his mind to his detriment. Sex, drugs, and rock n roll ruled his life, not stopping pucks. Truthfully? He never really wanted to be an NHL goaltender; he wanted to be Tibetan monk. And so, he quit hockey to seek enlightenment. Now, in his autobiography, Gratton teams up with author Greg Oliver to tell his wild and at times, yes, loony story: from his early days in Montreal, where his brother Norm Gratton became an NHL player, too; through his stints with the OHA s Oshawa Generals, the Ottawa Nationals and Toronto Toros of the rogue WHA, and the St. Louis Blues and New York Ra

Sujets

Hockey sobre hielo

Ice hockey

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	16 novembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773050683
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

CONTENTS
Introduction: A Lion in Winter
Chapter 1: Growing Up
Chapter 2: Put the Little Kid in Net
Chapter 3: General Gratton
Chapter 4: Norm
Chapter 5: Going National
Chapter 6: They Call Me the Streak
Chapter 7: The Loony Takes the Stage
Chapter 8: Beat Me in St. Louis
Chapter 9: The Count of Manhattan
Chapter 10: Back in the USSR
Chapter 11: Imprisoned in New Haven
Chapter 12: Seeking Enlightenment
Chapter 13: European Vacation
Chapter 14: A Second Life
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
Interviews
Statistics
Also By Greg Oliver
Photo Section
About the Authors
Copyright

INTRODUCTION
A LION IN WINTER
A great place to start is near the end—not with a spectacular save, a naked spin around the ice, or the tale of my past life as a solider in the Spanish Inquisition, but with a mask. Not just any mask either, but one of the most famous in hockey history.
My lion mask, vicious and snarling, dark and dangerous, debuted on January 30, 1977, at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It has come to define me, because most of the rest of my career was just a series of fuck-ups.
GREG HARRISON, MASKMAKER: He got more publicity from that mask than he ever did for any of his playing.
Goalies had worn masks regularly since Jacques Plante defied management and put his over his busted-up face in 1959. I was no different. But masks had no style, no personality. In junior hockey, with the Oshawa Generals, I had a really shitty brownish mask; well, it was shitty-looking, but it fit well and protected my face. In the WHA and then the NHL, I tried out a lot of different masks. There were form-fitting fibreglass masks and bulky cages where the bars bothered my eyes. With the New York Rangers, I once wore a different mask each period, but I still wasn’t happy. Finally, I called up Greg Harrison.
He’d introduced himself earlier in the season as a maskmaker, something relatively new in our business. Harrison, who lived in Toronto, had painted masks for the likes of Jim Rutherford and Doug Favell. He was a beer-league goalie himself, and had graduated from art school, so he was an interesting cat with some pretty revolutionary ideas.
We met up at his home and he pitched a couple of ideas to me. We settled on a lion, since my astrological sign is Leo, and I’d found a great photo in a National Geographic magazine. He made an imprint of my face, and I left, waiting for the finished product.
GREG HARRISON: I had various pictures of lions, different angles, different shots, both at ease and snarling, and that’s what I based it on. It wasn’t airbrushed. It was done like an oil painting. The mask was finished on a Friday night. I painted it the next day. Then I baked it for a couple of hours in the oven to dry it, and put it into a box, took it to the airport. It went on a cheap seat on the plane, and off to New York. That was on the Saturday. On the Sunday, he wore it. And the next day, it was all over the press. The following week, it was in Time magazine—it was on the same page as a picture of the Queen.
Greg wasn’t there for the unveiling, which I played to the hilt.
MIKE McEWEN, RANGERS TEAMMATE AND ROOMMATE: I’m sitting at the dining room table, we’re having dinner with my two sisters; they’d come down to visit. We hear the back door open up, the entrance to the kitchen, and he comes in and he’s got the mask on. He runs into the dining room, right at the table, and growls like he’s a lion. We look and go, “Ooooh.” We were the first ones to see it.
We played St. Louis that night. When we got to Madison Square Garden, I had it in a box, under my dressing room stall. Nobody saw it. I warmed up with my cage mask. When I skated on the ice, I had the mask underneath my arm. It wasn’t until they were about to start the game that I put my mask on. The crowd went Ooooh! The referees didn’t start the game—they all came down to see my mask, referees and players. It was neat. We won the game 5–2, by the way, and it might have been the best $300 I ever spent.
My mask was a hit, and newspapers and TV stations in each city wanted to talk to me about it. Truthfully, it was one of the few highlights of that season with the Rangers. I fell out of favour with coach/GM John Ferguson, and was gone by the next year. I was so eager to get out of there that I left my equipment behind—including my mask. Harrison got it from Ferguson and then it went to the Hockey Hall of Fame. But I believe someone else owns it now.
Since then, it’s appeared in books, on hockey cards and even on beer cans—the Molson Bubba mini-kegs as a part of its “The Art of Hockey” limited-edition run. The mask is better known than I ever was, which is somewhat appropriate. But for all its fame, it sure didn’t have as much fun as I did . . .
So consider this fair warning before you read much further. My story doesn’t follow the usual narrative for hockey sagas. While I had supportive parents who drove me to early morning games and worked extra shifts for me to get the equipment I needed, they were emotionally absent, meaning I grew up basically lawless and without discipline.
That carried over to my hockey career, and is much of the basis of my legend. I lived life to its fullest, even if I never bought into a life in hockey. There’s a reason I walked away after my first full season in the National Hockey League. Actually, there are plenty of reasons, all of which you will hear about.
I’ll tell funny stories, sure, but I also want people to understand me a little bit better by the end. I didn’t want to play hockey, it just seemed that destiny pushed me into it.
They called me Gratoony the Loony, and truthfully, I never cared. A name’s only a name, even if it was accurate. Anyway, that was just the press anyway.
You’re in the public eye. You get insulting letters from people. You get booed. You get torn apart in the papers. And at some point, you just stop caring. When people said things about me, it was water off a duck’s back. I didn’t get insulted. Now, if it’s in person at an autograph signing, and they start insulting me to my face, there’s a problem. But what I’ve come to realize is that if someone is a prick with me, he’s probably a prick with just about everyone, because that’s his inner state. I can’t take that personally, since I don’t know what drove him to be an asshole—maybe his wife just left him, or he owes a lot of money. I never take things personally.

See how fierce I look in my mask! International Hockey Archives
In the end, they can’t see the real me anyway. All they see is my body.
Growing up, my friends called me Joe; damned if I know why, though Gilles always sounded feminine to me. On the Toronto Toros, it was Cookie—because I do a great impression of the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street —or Gilley. My teammates with the Rangers called me Count. Now, at work, they call me Pooch, Poochilina, or Poochie, all in reference to the queen of blow jobs in Cherry Hill, New Jersey . . . I’ll tell you about that later.
You’re going to read about some of the usual hockey shit, of course, but I’m going to tell you the real stories—the sex, the drugs, the booze, the lonely nights, the wacky owners and clueless coaches . . . and my own personal search for the meaning of it all.
Some of the names have had to be changed or omitted to protect the not-so-innocent. There are plenty of reasons why. Kudos to those who have stepped forward and offered up their own recollections of those days to help tell my story—it’s not like I remember it all.
In fact, I’m still looking for my shirt from that New York Rangers booster party in late 1976.

CHAPTER 1
GROWING UP
A line from the movie The Accidental Tourist has stuck with me through the years, and it perfectly sums up my childhood. William Hurt is talking to his wife, Kathleen Turner, not long after their son died, and he says, “I endure. I’m holding steady.” That was me. In French, it’s malaise de vivre , a sickness or trauma over living.
Some would probably label it depression, but it wasn’t exactly that. Another way I might say it in French would be mal-être , which could translate as continual unease in being alive, or angoisse existentielle , which means existential angst.
My childhood was very difficult because of all the questions I had. I was very surprised to end up in this body. What am I doing on this planet? I especially had a hard time pretending things were important, and still do. You win the Stanley Cup, but what does it mean? People skate around, they kiss the Cup. What does that mean? It means fuck all. It’s insignificant, just like the fact that there are more stars in the heavens than grains of sand on a beach. In the grand scheme of things, being a good person, treating your wife and kids and other people well, means far more than winning the Stanley Cup.
When I was a kid, that was my main frame of thought. “What am I doing here? Why did I end up in this body?” I was in utter anguish, and would wake up in the middle of the night and just sit at the kitchen table for hours, thinking.
I never did talk to anyone about the way I was feeling, because I didn’t want anybody else to feel like I did. I thought that if I told them the way I felt about life, the universe, how lost I was, it might affect them and make them feel the same way. That’s why I kept it to myself. I certainly never talked to my parents about it, because I didn’t think they would understand. These were very deep, existential thoughts. Today, there is a lot more help available—people to talk to—but when I was growing up, there wasn’t.
The best way for me to get away from the suffering was to participate in sports. In the winter, I would skate from morning to night, only taking breaks for meals. The c