It was a summer Saturday, early in the morning. With my twin brother and two friends from the neighborhood, we had met at the corner of the street. It couldn’t have been much later than 7 a.m. There was still dew on the lawn. We left our bikes lying on the pavement, climbed the three concrete steps in front of the house, and rang Gary Carter’s doorbell.
the Kid, a future member of the Baseball Hall of Fame – the first in the colors of the Montreal Expos – was at the pinnacle of his career. I was 9 or 10 years old, I played in the local ball team and I liked to watch This Week in Baseball on a cable channel to which we were finally subscribed. I collected the Major League stickers from the Panini album, and Gary Carter, who lived two blocks from us, was one of my idols (along with Mike Bossy and André Franquin).
I don’t remember if I rang the bell. I do remember very well, however, that Gary Carter stepped out in a bathrobe, disheveled hair and half-closed eyes, his daughter Kimmy behind him. We had obviously woken him up. He nevertheless greeted us with a big amused smile. He understood the reason for our visit without our having to tell him. He apologized a few seconds before reappearing with photos of himself in our Z’Amours uniform, on which he stamped his autograph.
Gary Carter might be one of Major League baseball’s biggest stars – he was traded the following year for no less than four New York Mets, with whom he won the World Series – the Kid lived in a quite ordinary house, a split-level in a generic middle class suburb.
There were many of them, the ‘stadium gods’ of the 1980s, who lived in my small town on the West Island, like Manic star Tony Towers and Alouettes star catcher Peter. Dalla Riva.
Our backyard neighbor was the Canadiens captain, Bob Gainey, Yvon Lambert’s house was on the next street and his trio mate Mario Tremblay also lived nearby. The Bleuet bionique had also come to our house for supper, his wife being, like us, from the Gaspé.
At that time, I played in the same soccer and hockey clubs as the sons of Réjean Houle, Larry Robinson or Jacques Lemaire. I sometimes saw Guy Lafleur drop off his son at the arena, in his sports car. My cousins from the Gaspé were very impressed. It has become almost commonplace for me. They were parents on the sideline or in the stands, hockey Where soccer dads not much different from others under the circumstances.
Even though they were adored, and not only by children, these professional athletes did not earn astronomical salaries at the time. The Blond Devil was making $ 250,000 a year in the early 1980s, like Gary Carter. That is to say the equivalent of approximately $ 650,000 in today’s dollars. They were well paid, of course, but not like the current all-star players in their respective sports, who make $ 10 million (in hockey) or $ 30 million (in baseball) annually.
One day, while I was door-to-door in a building in my neighborhood to sell tickets for a raffle to finance the activities of my soccer team, I stumbled upon Mats Naslund, a Swedish striker. of the Canadian. He kindly agreed to take tickets from me, even though he had already bought some from Réjean Houle’s son, our goalkeeper.
The Little Viking lived in an apartment that was far from a palace, 100 m from a charming boulevard, even if he had just managed two seasons of 42 and 43 goals (and that he remains, 35 years more the last CH player to have amassed 100 points or more).
The mid-1980s saw professional athletes grow into multimillionaires. Gary Carter’s salary had almost increased tenfold when he was traded to the Mets. Most of the Canadiens’ players preferred to live in isolated “McMansion” in the inner suburbs or luxury apartments overlooking the city center. Far from this middle class that fills the seats of the Bell Center. Away from prying eyes, as they say in ATMs.
The suburban homes in the neighborhood when I was a teenager were no longer opulent enough for professional hockey players. They no longer corresponded to their “standing”. They stopped living with the common people, unlike the Stanley Cup champions of the 1970s.
For almost 30 years, the Glorious have lived apart, in their prefabricated mansions or ultramodern towers. And they haven’t won a single championship. Ironically.
When he was 9 or 10 years old, Fiston wrote a handwritten letter to one of his favorite soccer players, Frenchman Antoine Griezmann. It was a letter full of admiration for a young striker who had not yet played for the national team and was just starting to gain recognition on the international stage. Naively, I thought that Griezmann, or rather someone around him, would take the trouble to respond to this young admirer from Montreal, who had himself posted his letter from the other side of the Atlantic. The answer never came.
Something, it seems to me, has been lost since my own childhood in the relationship of proximity to idols. These dreaming stars seem more distant than ever, while the means to reach them have continued to multiply. It is perhaps, quite simply, that they do not live so much any more among us.
I had the opportunity, thanks to my profession, to interview the idols of my childhood, from Michel Platini to Madonna. But I never asked anyone for an autograph again, after that much too early Saturday summer morning at the late Gary Carter’s house.
