I have debated a long time whether I should take the plunge and start writing on this website/app, and whether to do it both in French and English.
In the last piece I wrote for Le Droit last September, ending my 37-year run with what used to be Ottawa’s French daily newspaper (now a website/app as well), I hinted that I might end up on Substack, and then I came up with what I think is a pretty good name for it, considering the main subject will be goaltending.
A period of mourning was necessary after writing more than 30,000 stories for that paper and covering some 2225 games, hockey for the most part.
Over the years, I particularly enjoyed telling the stories of our local athletes and coaches, like Daniel Brière, Derick Brassard (no relation, apart from the first Brassard ancestor who came from France), Jean-Gabriel Pageau, Alexandre Picard, Maxime Talbot, Érik Bédard, Pierre-Luc Laforest, Phillippe Aumont, Sébastien Boucher, Francis Charron, Denis Potvin, Gino Odjick, Stéphane Richer and Claude Giroux, as well as Claude Julien, Benoît Groulx, Bob Hartley, Brian Kilrea and Pat Burns. I’m also proud to have written the biography of the late Roberto Bissonnette, (Gorgée, la vie trop courte de Roberto/Bob Bissonnette), which was a best seller in Quebec.
Loyal readers, and those who followed me on Twitter (now X), certainly noticed that I had a particular interest in goalies, being one myself while the middle of my three sons, François, has been playing professionally in the ECHL for a few years.
The title, My 2-pad (Sub)Stack, is intended as a tribute to the two-pad slides that were popular in my younger days, and which I still use whenever the opportunity arises in my Tuesday night beer league pickup.
Marc-André Fleury sometimes uses the technique, which more often than not results in spectacular saves for the man who recently passed Patrick Roy for second place in history for wins in the NHL.
My only visit to the Canadian Tire Center this season has been on the occasion of the Senators honouring Craig Anderson for his decade as their last line of defence. He’s another goalie who would sometimes try to surprise shooters by using the double pad stack.
I haven’t written anything in English in a long time, I think the last time was a piece for Expos Magazine on Denis Boucher when he pitched for the Ottawa Lynx in the mid-90s. So you’ll have to forgive any syntax errors not detected by the automated dictionary (I promise not to use Google translate).
The plan is to write about goalies and everything that affects them: the equipment and the artwork on their masks, the goalie goals and fights, the EBUGs (emergency backup goalies, for the non-initiated). Maybe even the backup towels.
There also a possibility that I’ll deviate sometimes to revisit some of my old columns where I did some “Participaction” journalism, in the mold of George Plimpton, an American journalist who wrote a book (Open Net) about his tryout at a Boston Bruins camp as… a goaltender.
I intend to start slowly, once a week probably, sometimes in French, others in English, sometimes both. In the spirit of this medium, I will try to adjust to your comments and questions, don’t hesitate to send them my way. And sign up to receive the next columns directly in your inbox, it's easy and free to start.