Sirs, Madames,
I don't know how I forgot this, maybe because it wasn't a player.
Five years back Craig Button was the Calgary Flames GM and I was pretty tight (okay, drinking buddies) with him, his brother and a couple of scouts on his staff going back to days on the road in Europe and juniors. Happy for him getting the top job. I'd promised this one scout to pull a prank on another Calgary staffer at the draft in Toronto.
Button had a scout on his staff who, truth be told, was more boyhood friend than a NHL-calibre scout (okay, thick as two planks covers it). So I printed off a mock-up of a story with a heading that it had appeared not just in the Calgary paper but papers across the national chain. In the story, this loser scout ****s on his boss. Various quotes attributed to the friend: "Draft day the general managers go up on stage and call out the names but at the draft table they don't say a lot. They know they have to leave all the talking to the people who have seen the players." "Yeah, Craig makes it out to junior games and tournaments. He has to keep up appearances." "I've know Craig for years. He was on my high school team ... a role player is what you'd call him if you were generous but the rest of us on the first line were glad to have him around." "European scouts, especially the Czechs, are notorious for padding their expenses and filing reports from games they didn't go to. Not our guy ... but you never know."
It was like a steady drumbeat of shots at the organization and the guy who hired him. The funniest thing is that this guy was so dense: a) you could believe he said it and b) he might actually think he did say it.
The scout I handed it off to is usually as deadpan as Jackie Vernon. He was falling down he laughed so hard. The plan was, I figured, they'd confront the dumb-ass with the document and let him twist in the wind like he humiliated his boss.
Not exactly how it turned out.
The guy I gave the document to handed it to Craig Button and told him, "You better read this ... someone is going to probably ask you questions about it." Meaning the club president. Button almost faints. "What the hell is Bob saying? And I thought FotF was a friend of mine." Button showed it to the p.r. guy. It gets passed around other scouts. Fools them all.
I saw the pr guy in the lobby of the Royal York and say hi -- he glares at me laser-like.
Well, after a few hrs the cat is let out of the bag and the scheme goes ahead as planned. They were going to slip it under the dumb-ass' door the night before the draft but they were afraid his wife would read it first and stab him in his sleep. Funny thing is, next day the dope scout hardly blinked when he was handed it. Button and friends let me watch it all unfold from a closet in the team's suite. They handed the guy the story, told him that it had appeared in all the papers, asked him if he had talked to me (he could never get my name right either). "Yeah," he said, reading it and then handing it back. "So?"
YD&OHS, etc
