Under Fire

Babcock.

Peters. 

Crawford. 

Cherry.  

Time's they are a' changin'.  

Finally.  

It's easy to be critical of hockey.  Because .... well, it's hockey.  But the reality is that all sports are going through this re-evaluation of how people are supposed to be treated.  College basketball had Bobby Knight, who between 1975 and 2000 who had a litany of offences, including, but certainly not limited to:

• Grabbed a player by the jersey & pushed him over a chair
• Charged & convicted in absentia of assaulting a police officer at the Pan Am games in Puerto Rico.  
• Stuffed a fan into a garbage can at the team hotel. 
• Stood at mid court during a game and swore at the league commissioner who was in a private box.  
• Threw chairs onto the court during a game. 
• Kicks a mega phone at cheerleaders. 
• Kicks a player during a tirade.  Player happens to be his son. 
• Head-buts a player (not his son)
• Is accused of making a racist remark and chokes the accuser.  
• Throws an assistant coach over a chair.   

Add to this a host of fines and suspensions and you find a person who would never coach another game.  Right?  Not so much.  He coached at Texas Tech from 2001-2008.  Parents still wanted to send their kids to be coached by him.

That's more than a little fucked up.

But finally.  Finally, it looks like the things are changing.  And now, every coach and manager in all four major are sports (I'm including hockey) are under scrutiny and rightly so!

And after putting up with years of the soft-on-crime leadership of Doug Dwyer, there is finally some attention being paid to the captains in the Tottenham Oldtimers.  There has been a high level review of all the captains, interviews with current players, former players, parents and parish priests, and it became evident quickly, that there was some smoke around one particular captain.  And where there's smoke, there's usually fire.  And that fiery captain?

Steven DeLand.  

If you've been in the league for say .... 10 minutes or so, this will come as no surprise to you.  Steve's antics have been talked about inside and outside the clubhouse (Legion) for years.  Literally years.  But when asked to formally comment or launch a complaint, people would suddenly be "off the record."  Sad.

Again, it's really difficult to substantiate this, but if Donald J. Trump can tell you that he "heard" that windmills cause cancer without presenting any evidence; and that "everyone is saying" that hurricanes are coming to Alabama and drawing his own marker maps; then I can tell you what I've "heard" about Mr. DeLand.

Here's is a highlight of some of the major incidents.

May 2015 - Emeil Edwards told me that he overheard Darrell Hager telling Robin Dickson that Rob Farah told him that Chuck Cragg said an unnamed player told him that he heard Steve DeLand call Roger Burton a Funker.  Of course, that is a pejorative term that refers to people from Beeton and is completely unacceptable.  As everyone is well aware, this goes back to when the train that went through Beeton was functional and was owned by the Grand Funk Railroad in the pre - CN and pre - CPR days.  People from Alliston, being pretty mean spirited (because they're from Alliston) started calling Beetoners Funkers.  This terrible term needs to be eradicated from most of our vocabularies. 
Status:  DeLand denies it ever happened and claims to have never used the "F" word.  Burton will neither confirm or deny.

Steve with garbage (supposedly)

July 2016 - At the 2016 Help The Kids Play Tournament, there is surveillance footage of someone who fits the description of Steve DeLand, throwing recycling into a garbage container.  Now I'm not saying that it "IS" Steve in the photograph above.  And I'm not saying its "NOT" Steve either.  You'll have to make up your own mind on that one.  But seriously, the temperature of the planet is going up 1 degree a year, Time Magazine's person of the year was a 16 year old climate activist and the God Damned President's son now needs to go through the hassle of getting a special permit to slay endangered sheep.  The world is a figgin' mess and there's Steve throwing his recyclables in the garbage.  The shame.
Status:  Not surprisingly, DeLand denies these allegations.  However, the All-Star game temperature was 23 degrees in 2016.  In 2019 is was 29 degrees.  Facts matter.  Greta Thunberg weeps for you Steve.

August 2017 - Sometimes you're lucky with pictures and sometimes you're not.  Intrepid photo journalist Paul Gyori took the above photo which "seems" to have him training a dog.  But mere seconds later, Steve was witnessed yelling at the very same dog!  I know what you're thinking, "why didn't Paul get a picture of that?"  Simple.  While the Pentax 67 is a stellar camera, it does take several minutes to load film, plus those flash bulbs can be hot to handle!
Status:  Paul can't undo what he witnessed, at least that's what he told me at the 2017 banquet.  However, there has clearly been some subtle pressure applied by the DeLand mob and, not surprisingly, Gyori's memory is suddenly "foggy".  And DeLand keeps grinning like a cat from south-east of Liverpool.   And again, he denies these allegations.

Water Goblets from a 2018 DeLand Dinner party

A lot of us of are imports to Tottenham .... immigrants if you will. And while we willingly accept the customs of our new land, there are some things that we struggle to overcome.  One of those things is Tottenham water.  Also, the no sidewalks on the south side of town are at least curious, if not down right dangerous; but the water is even more troubling.  I'm not getting political here, not in the least.  I know the water has been tested repeatedly and is "safe", but there's no getting away from the fact that it's straight-up ugly.  At a 2018 dinner party, to which I was personally invited, Steve had a wonderful array of traditional Tottenham foods.  Chicken wings, a Firehouse pizza, delightful frozen appetizers from Foodland and fresh fish form the Conservation area.  Steve set out water goblets of water that you clearly couldn't see through.  Initially, I thought they were fancy jello shots, but it turned out to be tab water.  Tap Water!!!  When challenged, Steve would only say, "tastes fine to me."
Status:  I know what I saw.  My only regret is that I didn't take a sample home with me to verify later.  Steve, to this day, claims that the water only looked dark due to the flickering lava lamp that he was using for the evening's ambiance.

Steve actually prefers the metric system!  Let's get real about metric. It was slowly transitioned and then finally cut over officially on Labour day of 1977.  Yes.  Just three weeks after Elvis died.  I know, seems like yesterday to me too.  The point is, in actuality, it happened a long time ago.  We have a lot of players in our league that think the Imperial System has something to do with Star Wars, but;  the real fact of the mater is, that even our oldest players has lived in metric world for over half of their lives.  True story.  It should be innate by now right?  So how many kilograms do you weigh?  How many centimeters tall are you?  How many milliliters make up a bottle of beer?  Pounds, inches and ounces, that's what we all use; despite the fact that many of us were educated in metric and the rest of us have been around it for 43 years!  But our friend Steve just can't leave well enough alone.  I'll let you all in on a little secret.  The REAL reason Jens quite as captain as the Gruesome Devils.  August 28th, 2016, Gruesome Devils versus the Hot Tub Woody's.  Jens needs a hit in final game to finish top 10 in the league in at bats, runs scored and hits. The only one left for him to achieve is a single hit .... the last notch in his personal triple crown.  He goes to the bat rack and and can't find his favourite bat, the 1983, blue Worth, 29 ounce bat.  He's freaking out.  He checks the Woody's bag, in case there's been a mix up.  Nothing.  Checks under the benches.  Nothing.  He asks Steve, have you seen the 29 ounce Worth?  Steve says, "Oh, you mean the 822 gram bat?  I threw it out.  It was heavy and hard to carry.  I decided that we'd only use bats under 800 grams going forward."
Status:  You be the judge.  Jens finished top 10 in at bats and runs scored, but 11th in hits as he was shut out that day.  August 28th, 2016 was Jens' last game with the Devils. Jens says that this isn't the reason he quit the Devils, but when he tells you, there is definitely a tear in his eye.
 

Steve DeLand seen protesting outside of Banting Memorial High School

I hate to announce this here.  It's pretty disheartening actually.  Steve is openly anti-semestic.  Yes, you read that right.  He's against semesters and is demanding a return to terms for high school students.  If terms were good enough for him, then they're good enough for his boys!  His one man protest at Banting in 2017 is now legendary.  A lot of people distanced themselves from Steve with this stunt as we're quite an open town and decidedly pro-semesitc.
Status:  Mr. DeLand claims to be misunderstood on this account and while he says that some of his closest friends are semestic, he can't seem to produce a single one!

I can only hope that this year's executive has the strength of character to do something with a mountain of circumstantial evidence. 

Tune in next week where we'll take a look at registration and some of the ground breaking communication work being done by our new executive!  Unless, of course, something strikes me as odd or unusual and I go off on a tangent.

Happy new year!