Auston Matthews and The Last Straw

Dear Auston Matthews,

Auston, Auston, Auston. What the hell am I gonna do with you.

When I was born in January of 1968, the Toronto Maple Leafs were the defending Stanley Cup Champions. They have not won since.

My first Leaf game was in 1976. I was eight years old, and my mother got us nosebleed tickets at Maple Leaf Gardens to see the Leafs play -- I think it was Detroit.

The score clock over center ice was analog. There were no tenths of a second posted. Hell, there were no seconds; the arena announcer, Paul Morris, would announce in his flat, nasal voice that there was a minute left in the period, and then everyone would look at the minute hand and just wait. When a goal was scored, he'd only say their last name -- "Toronto goal, scored by, Ellis, assisted by, Mckechnie, time, five fourteen." -- and click off. There were teletype-style readouts at each end of the arena, like you'd see on the sides of buildings in the 1940s -- that showed the score and the occasional message about concessions, but that was it.

Red Kelly was the coach at the time, and the players looked miniscule. I was enchanted. I idolized Mike Palmateer, as did a lot of the kids in my neighborhood; we fought over who got to play net in street hockey games, just so we could leap across the goal mouth and make those spectacular acrobatic saves he made multiple times a game. Other kids called dibs on being Ian Turnbull, with his booming shots from the point, or Lanny Macdonald, with his wry smile and ability to score from anywhere, or of course Darryl Sittler, the greatest all-around playmaker any of us had ever seen (before you, Auston), and who, in one game against Boston, got six goals and four assists, still an NHL record, knocking the poor Bruins goalie entirely out of the sport.

Even as the politics of the team started to get ugly in the late 1970s, and I became old enough to start being aware of it, I stuck with them. The Harold Ballard years were horrible, for a lot of the reasons that resonate today: the head office was openly hostile to the fans, gleefully sexist and racist, looting the organization for whatever wasn't nailed down, covering for their allies & cronies, there was even a child sex trafficking ring run out of Maple Leaf Gardens in the 1980s. Looking at the end of the American experiment now, any Leafs fan who remembers the darkest days of the Ballard era can genuinely say they've seen a version of it.

Still, I remained a fan. I was full ride or die with these guys. And when Ballard (I spit whenever I hear his name, even now) finally died, and the team started to get better in the 1990s, we really felt like there was a chance, a light in the tunnel. Gilmour, Borschevsky, Potvin, and Tucker took the mantle and had some deep playoff runs in the 1990s. There was hope.

Then came major expansion, and the dead puck era of the early 2000s, and suddenly 1967 seemed a long way in the past. I left Toronto for New York, but I stuck with my Leafs. They were the constant in my churning life. Some years they were good, some years not so much, but hope is free, and I always had some.

The current era, with Morgan Reilly, and Willie, and Mitch, and you, Auston, felt a definite shot of optimism. I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you. But this is starting to look like yet another era wasted. This team continues to squander every scintilla of goodwill given it by the largest fanbase in the sport. We're a national joke, in multiple countries.

Especially you, Auston.

This franchise is over a century old, and you are literally the greatest talent I have ever seen put on a Leafs sweater. I'm admittedly too young for Dave Keon, but I watched Sittler, and Gilmour, and Sundin, through their entire careers. You have more skill than any of them. And you know it. You're the only athlete whose jersey I ever bought. I flew to Los Angeles for the All-Star game during your rookie season, largely to see you play.

The story of how you came to love the sport I love was itself inspirational. Growing up in Arizona, the son of Mexican & Irish immigrants, you went to a Phoenix Coyotes game and fell in love with the sport, the same way I did when I was a little kid. The stories about you scraping for ice time, hunting for players to play with, there really was a narrative built around the unlikeliness of you winding up... here. The greatest Latino player ever. Papi. The Big Cactus. You had a passion for the game that we, as Leafs fans, as Canadians, recognized. We embraced you from the very first day. I sure as hell did, anyway.

It was only logical that you became the captain of Team USA for the Olympics this year, but the conversations about what could happen began early. Trump is Trump. He hates immigrants, and you... is one. If you win, we wondered, what were you going to do? You had the chance to do something truly significant, not just for your sport, but for the world, just by not performing the custom of going to the White House.

All you had to do was nothing.

Kash Patel crashing your party should never have happened, and the phone call where Trump dissed the women's team was awful. As the Captain, saying something about either of those things was more than your right, it was a duty. That locker room is yours. If someone is in there that shouldn't be, you can eject them, even if they're the head of the FBI. (You were in Italy, not Indiana.) And you can tell someone dissing other American Olympians that that's not cool, even if that person is the President. You're a member of the American Olympic Team, and that guy was mocking your teammates.

And you let it happen. You laughed along with him.

And then, you accepted his invitation to go to his White House. So I take it that you endorse what he's doing.

By not choosing, you chose. All of it. You're with him. That's your boy. His stink is on you now.

You're the son of immigrants. Your mother is Mexican. Your father is Irish. Those are two traditions whose histories, whose present day reality, run absolutely counter to what's going on right now.

If it was just the Leafs' on-ice failure, I could handle that. I've been watching this team lose my entire goddamned life, and I think having one absolute lost cause to pull for gives one character. At least, that's what I tell myself. But this week, I've seen something new.

You can believe what you want, and as long as I don't know about it, I guess that's fine. But you're a public figure, and by inserting yourself into the political discourse like this, I now know something about you that I can't un-know. And this, after a half century of loving this team with all my heart, feels like it might be the last straw.

Fifty-plus years of being a Leaf fan turned out to be a waste of my life.

I'm not even angry at you, Auston. You are what you are. I'm just really sad at all the energy I wasted loving this team, and this league.

The women's team showed more leadership and backbone this last week than it seems you ever could. Maybe they deserve my time and energy instead.

May the Sceptres break Toronto's 58-year-long hockey championship drought, because it's clear you don't have it in you.

Congrats on your gold medal, I guess.