The Oshawa Whackers had a season unlike any professional team had ever had in any sport at anytime. They went from a dismal last place finish last year in the Ontario Hockey League to a nearly undefeated season. The franchise had to thank Otto Werner for the turn of events.
Otto was born and raised in Kitchener, Ontario and came from a long line of Germans going back to Prussia. Otto’s grandfather jokingly told Otto at a young age that their family was related to Bismarck and for that reason Otto was named after his great, great uncle by marriage on his mother’s side; Otto Von Bismarck.
At a young age, Otto believed he was born special because he was German and a descendant of the man who was responsible for unifying most of the German-speaking people.
Otto like all young Canadian boys, learned to play hockey and he excelled at it. Otto made it all the way to the NHL and did well at the top level of the hockey world until he was forced to quit due to concussions. Otto had well over five solid concussions during his two years of NHL hockey. Since leaving the NHL, Otto became a coach who knocked around all over Canada at various levels. Otto coached for a few years at Waterloo University and it was while he was at the school that he received a BA in philosophy. At the age of fifty, Otto was the picture of health and virility. Otto ate well, played hockey five days a week, lifted weights, listened to Wagner and studied Friedrich Nietzsche as if he was a god and that is sort of funny since Nietzsche claimed god was dead or worse, never was.
Before the championship game with a 3-0 lead over Guelph after at 74-6 season, Otto made love twice to a young female student who came from a farming community in western Ontario. She read passages of Nietzsche while Otto did pushups naked. Rather than touch his chin to the ground, when his flaccid cock hit the ground, Otto would spring back up. Melanie, with her exposed swollen breasts, full of life, sat on the bed reading a poem out loud which was written by Richard Wagner while Ride of the Valkyries blared on the an actual phonograph.
Is this still German?
Out of a German heart, this sultry screeching?
A German body, this self-laceration?
German, this priestly affectation,
The insense-perfumed sensual Preaching?
Otto stopped Melanie who was not reading the poem as if it was a question but rather a statement. Otto popped two pain pills to stop what he described as broken glass pressing against his brain. Without the pain pills, it felt like shards of glass were digging into his skull. After a glass of German white wine and two pain pills, rough sex and a shower, Otto left for the arena. The young men filed in and began stretching out and taping their sticks. Otto entered wearing a suit with his hands in his pockets. His black hair was slicked back and his eyes made him look as if he was somewhere else all together. The players thought their coach was a whack job and that moniker would be fitting for a hockey coach of a team called The Whackers.
“Between good and evil… Lays victory. Several thousand people from this town will come today to see a victory… A man who says, “I like this, I take this for my own and want to protect it and defend it against anybody”. This is what I have sought in each and every one of you all season long. You trusted me and I believed in you. With so much starvation in the world, what will this victory ultimately mean in the larger scheme of things? Well, not a fucking thing actually to anyone but us. You become a permanent statistic in a book and on a cup so that when we leave this place, it will be noted that on this day, we did something that meant something to several thousand residents of this town and to every man who put everything into achieving something tangible and something memorable. We are less than tiny grains of sand in a cosmos we cannot begin to grasp and yet I must tell you that of all the things in this life that you could undertake, playing ice hockey is among the noblest of occupations. It is a secret we hold dear to our hearts and is our national treasure. It is more than a sport, it is life itself. For those who toil at menial tasks for a pittance to sustain themselves, they always come back to the arena to honour and appreciate those who have mastered the art of working together for a common goal and a greater good which is hockey. Every attainment, every step forward follows from courage, from hardness against oneself. There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too might be admired someday… Simply put, finish off these suffering Guelph bastards. They couldn’t hold your jocks at a Sunday mass. You all are aware of where you stand in the history of modern day sports if you win this game. Where we go from here is not as important today as what we can and will achieve… Fucking bury them and then say a prayer.”
The Whackers won handily and the coach who was a cross between Adolph Hitler and Vince Lombardi, quietly slipped away during all the celebrating. At a hotel off route 401 that runs from north of Toronto to Windsor, a fire broke out. This fire was a magnificent blaze that took firemen from several small towns to help extinguish. News reporters arrived at the scene to interview those that were able to escape. One of the survivors was a man by the name of Otto Werner. He wore a white robe and had his arm around two young women that looked young enough to be his daughters only they weren’t. The news reporter recognized Otto and asked Otto if he was relieved that he made it out alive and then asked what he was doing in a hotel in a town that he lived in. Otto never took his arms off of the young women that were shy in front of the cameras. Otto smiled and grasped the shoulders of the two young women and then kissed them both on their cheeks before speaking.
“Around the hero, everything turns to tragedy…”
