"Five Reasons I Love the Canucks" is a feature at Nucks Misconduct, inspired by Puck Daddy's "Five Reasons..." series. It features Canucks fans explaining, in their own words, the reasons for their passionate support of the team, and offers readers a chance to contribute their own stories to the site.
Here are five reasons I, Harrison Mooney, co-founder of Pass it to Bulis, love the Canucks.
I have a family friend to thank for the seeds of my Canuck fandom. A huge fan who just wanted to spread the disease, he gave me a Canucks-themed gift for Christmas when I was six. The gift was a massive beer glass with the Canucks logo on it, full of jelly beans in Canucks colors. At first glance, it was a sweet gift. It would hold, like, a gallon of chocolate milk, and in order for me to drink out of it, I had to mine the metric ton of candy within it.
I later realized the gift had more to do with trying to convert me than with whether or not I would enjoy it. Consider that the Canucks colors, at the time, were yellow, orange and black, which meant that one-third of the jelly beans were black. Who gives a kid that many black jelly beans? Ask any person the worst flavour of jelly bean, and they'll tell you: black. Black jelly beans are the worst thing in the world.
The problem was that I loved candy so much that I loved the principle of candy more than I loved specific candies. Once I had worked through the scrumptiously tangy yellow and orange jelly beans, I realized I only had two options: eat, like, fifty black jelly beans, or throw perfectly good candy away. So I ate those jelly beans. I sat there for one committed afternoon, eating some awful candy, telling myself, you will eat and enjoy every last terrible one, and you'll be the better for it. I believe that some of this forced enjoyment transferred over to the team that was implicit in my self-torture, and through that afternoon of anguish, I trained myself to like the Canucks. How else to explain my love for a team that never wins anything?
I LOVE, and always have loved, black jelly beans.
ReplyDeleteOf course, they're black licorice flavored. I love black licorice. I get the black red vines, which don't even make SENSE. I eat black jelly beans. I hate starburst jelly beans, cause while it looks like I've got black ones in there, they're just dark purple grape ones that never fail to disappoint. I love Good & Plenty candy. The original kind, not any of that fruity cheekiness. I wasn't much of a drinker until I discovered that jagermeister is a black licorice-flavored drink. That was the worst night of my life, but subsequently, I still drink jager for its black licorice taste.
I love it so much, when I was reading that you got jelly beans in Canucks colors, I was like, "Good deal, if it was when black was one of the colors." Then I learned it was. Then you crapped all over it.
I'm a big fan of black jelly beans as well, Qris, but I understand that we're in the minority. I'm a big fan of black licorice, though I'm not a fan of all-sorts. That stuff's just weird.
ReplyDeleteYeah, you know, I'm cool with most people not liking it, cause that means I get free black jelly beans all the time.
ReplyDeleteIt's just, why do they have to discriminate against us black licorice lovers? They pretend we don't exist, and that everyone hates black jelly beans.
You don't exist. Not to me. Not to the normal world.
ReplyDeleteStop organizing.
You can't keep us down. Too long have we been content to be pushed into the shadows. No longer!
ReplyDeleteWe shall overcome!
Do you know what happened when my last blog tried to unionize? I shut it down and everybody lost their jobs. I wouldn't hesitate to do it again.
ReplyDeleteI read that as un-ionize.
ReplyDeleteI have been feeling a little charged up.
ReplyDeletecome for the articles, stay for the comments section. you guys are awesome!
ReplyDeleteharrison, great read!
ReplyDeleteNo. 2 I can totally relate. I watched all of those 7 games with my family on the family tv set...and did I mention my family all hates hockey? it was the one time where i was allowed to take up the tv for 3 hours at a time, like you said.
part of the reason i got so into hockey was because i was furiously sucked into the hockey card collecting phase in the late 80s....if you take a look at my collection you will see so many christian ruutuus, petri skrikos, paul reinharts and steve bozeks, it will make your head spin. i kept getting those same guys over and over and over again no matter what card company it was. now i'm angry just thinking about it.
Thank you for providing a further reminder to all those too-young fans: the Canucks' real colors were black, gold and ORANGE, not red. This is a big pet peeve of mine, as everyone knows on Offthepost.org.
ReplyDeleteFor the vast majority of the skate-era jerseys (all of the V-days, the yellow homes-days, and the post-1990 days) the top stripe was orange. There was no red to be found. And it looked awesome, once they finally did the sensible thing and switched their home jerseys to whites.
In 1992 when CCM couldn't produce that nice burnt orange anymore, the Canucks bit the bullet and switched to Calgary Flames/McDonald's colors (ew). For some reason they also lost the deep gold and went with a blindingly bright yellow at the same time. To wit: http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/gg16/jyrki21/compare.png
This was a brief development that only lasted until the next clockwork-like uniform change (1997), but because they went to the Finals in these colors, everyone seems to have cemented it in their imagination that it's what they always wore. They didn't! Otherwise your jelly beans would have been cherry flavored, not orange. So I thank you for this jelly bean anecdote.
(Ironically the Bure jersey picture you posted dates from when they *did* switch from orange/gold to red/yellow... so you ruined EVERYTHING)...
I tell you what, J21, I had no idea about that.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, my memory is coloured correctly by the jelly beans, which, as it turns out, were coloured correctly. Good thing, too.