RE-POST: AT THIS AUCTION, YOU'LL BE SELLING YOUR SOUL

(Originally posted Feb. 24.)

Disgraced former NHL Players Association kingpin Alan Eagleson, that famous fraudster, is auctioning off some of his hockey memorabilia, as detailed in this morning's Ottawa Citizen.

What Eagleson did to Bobby Orr and dozens of other long forgotten players -- some of whom left the game permanently crippled and then couldn't even get their disability benefits and insurance paid out since the bastard apparently didn't think helping injured workers was a top priority for a union boss -- is a dead issue to most people, but it shouldn't be forgotten. (Go pick up Russ Conway's book Game Misconduct, or the Bill Houston's Eagleson: The Fall of a Hockey Czar.)

Anyway, the proper action here would be to place a curse on all of Eagleson's ill-gotten items and anyone rich and/or ignorant enough to buy them. The curse would go something like this:

If you're some bar or restaurant owner who buys Eagleson memorabilia -- for example, Bob Gainey's sweater from the '81 Canada Cup -- to display in your establishment, be warned, you'll be out of business inside of a year. Creditors can be nasty to deal with... uh, so I'm told.

Oh, you're just a guy who thinks that would be great to display in your home? Two words: Flooded basement. And that upwardly mobile, top-of-his-class finance major your pretty daughter is engaged to be engaged to? He's gone. Your future son-in-law is now an emo film major who plays in a Loverboy tribute band called Working For The Weekend (which includes former members of Raise A Little Hell: A Tribute to Trooper), lists "poet laureate" as his career ambition and manages to cover up that he's from a town of less than 2,000 people.

Hey, don't look so downcast, Rich And/Or Ignorant Guy. At least you'll always have someone around to admire your purchase, since emo son-in-law dude and Ashleigh, Alison -- whatever white-bread cognomen you and the missus hung on her 22 years ago -- are going to be living with you for quite some time after the wedding.

If neither of those descriptions fit your current situation, buying Alan Eagleson memorabilia will also cause you to finish dead last in your hockey pool for the next 12 years, no matter how much research you do before your league's draft, or how many beauty trades you pull off.

Now, do witch doctors advertise in the Yellow Pages?

Related:
The Most Embarrassing Canadian, Alan Eagleson Wikipedia entry

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.