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Trash-talking opponents before a match is a big part of the game in professional wrestling, the entertainment biz where Dear Leader first cut his teeth as a showman, but it’s rarely a good idea in professional sports where outcomes are unscripted.
Fans booing each others’ anthems became a thing for the two hosts of the NHL’s recent 4 Nation Face-Off round-robin tournament, and the final between Canada and the USA in Boston on Thursday night was no exception, with Americans raining down retaliatory boos on singer Chantal Kreviazuk from the opening bars of “O Canada.”
Which is a shame, not least because they might’ve missed her subtle lyric change from “true patriot love, in all of us command” to the snarlier “that only us command.”
Not that Donald Trump was there to witness the 3-2 loss to Canada in overtime, likely not wanting to risk being booed himself in a blue-state barn. Or maybe he was miffed the league didn’t call it the 3.5 Nation Face-Off instead as a tribute. He claimed earlier in the day that he planned to watch it with minions on TV instead, but couldn’t resist another opportunity to taunt Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with his wet dream about someday seizing Canada:
I’ll be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State. I will be speaking before the Governors in D.C., and will sadly, therefore, be unable to attend. But we will all be watching, and if Governor Trudeau would like to join us, he would be most welcome…
Haw haw, “Governor Trudeau,” did you see the clever thing he did there? He’s like a toddler who got a laugh once and repeats the same line ad nauseam in the hope it gets another. He may also have seen footage of Trudeau watching the previous match-up in Montreal, and it got under his skin the dude was simply sitting in the crowd with regular fans, not all of whom were Mounties wearing civvies, instead of watching from a bulletproof skybox. It may be worth noting he said Canada getting Canadanchlussed is something that will happen, not might or could. That’s not an implied threat, that’s a threat, albeit one clearly written by someone else given the telltale proper punctuation.
The presidential proclamation may well have been posted on the Canadian team’s locker room wall, given the intensity of the game that followed, although every player wearing red likely already felt they were carrying the weight of the hockey-mad country’s pride and fury, especially after narrowly losing their previous tilt. Current geopolitical realities must’ve made it even weirder for hulking Ukrainian-Canadian defenseman Colton Parayko.
“Well, I just hope Canada’s proud,” coach Jon Cooper told reporters afterward. “Because every player in that room is proud to be a Canadian. And yeah, did we need a win? Not just our team, but Canada needed a win. And the players bore that on their shoulders, and they took it seriously. This one was different. This wasn’t a win for themselves, this was a win for 40-plus million people. And the guys knew it, and they delivered.”
Which is kind of an absurd position to be put in since the 2025 4 Nation Face-Off was really just a one-off marketing stunt to try something new instead of the usual NHL All-Star Game and skills competitions. Finland and Sweden agreed to it because it’s based on a real-life tournament in women’s hockey between the same four countries, but the reason these are the only nations where the ladies vie for world supremacy each year is because they’re the only ones with players who are much good at it. (Women’s ice hockey is barely even a thing in Russia, for example, and their national team hasn’t exactly made the same impact on the world stage as Pussy Riot.) Someone in the NHL head office thought it seemed like a fun idea since best-of-the-best NHLers haven’t faced each other on international ice in nearly a decade. Plus, it provides a convenient PR excuse to not have to honor any the top Russian players, and nobody imagined last year there would be a frothing fascist in the White House complicating things by practically begging Canadians to heckle “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The final was a much more disciplined affair than their previous showdown, where three separate fights (including one involving Parayko, only his third in a lengthy career) broke out in the first nine seconds of the game.
While things may well have gotten off to an ugly start even if Kamala Harris was in the Oval Office, the instigator was mulleted MAGA goon Matthew Tkachuk, who was visibly butthurt on the bench when the US anthem was booed before the previous game. It was hard to miss the visuals of Canadian leftwinger Brandon Hagel gamely going at it with a man 30 pounds heavier. (If ever there was a good time to chant “Let’s go, Brandon,” this was definitely it.)
Tkachuk, of Ukrainian heritage himself, was the only Murican member of the Stanley Cup-winning Florida Panthers last season, and earlier this month visited Mar-a-Lago with the team, where we were offered a fascinating glimpse into Trump’s broken brain.
“Did you ever hear of Wayne Gretzky?” he reportedly asked the group of professional hockey players about their sport’s all-time leading scorer. “Isn’t that ‘the Great One?’ And he was telling me about a gentleman that protected him named Marty McSorley. You know that? You ever hear of him? I don’t know if he was a good hockey player, but they say he was very tough. Wayne was saying he was great as far as he was concerned.”
McSorley is best known for serving as Gretzky’s bodyguard. But he’s also widely remembered for being one of the few players to be convicted of assault for on-ice shenanigans after he whacked fellow enforcer Donald Brashear upside the head with his stick from behind, knocking him unconscious. Trump is likely unfamiliar with an incident I witnessed 25 years ago, but surely it would make him like McSorley even more if he ever finds out about it. Particularly because Brashear is Black. But it speaks volumes that Trump appears more impressed by the scary bully whose job was to look after the physical well-being of a generational talent than he is by Wayner’s own many, many records and accomplishments.
Maybe the Great One doesn’t let the Grotesque One beat him at golf.
The most-watched event in Canadian history was 15 years ago this month when nearly 17 million people tuned in to catch the gold-medal home game against the US at the Vancouver Olympics. Roughly 10 million Canadians, or one in four, watched the rivalry’s most recent installment, which is still a far cry from the country’s second most-watched event, a CBC broadcast in 2016 of the final performance by the late singer Gord Downie. Now there’s a guy who’d surely have something to say about the existential threat his beloved country is facing, although tragically, Americans never listened to the Hip much even in the band’s glory days.
And if you had to google the late poet’s name to find out who I’m even talking about, that’s actually a perfect example of how different the two countries truly are. Republicans are most welcome to take this bananapants 51st state bullshit and shove it up their five-hole.
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