Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
In Memoriam
Ahum.. *taps mic, mic blares*
As we all gather here tonight, let us take a few minutes to honor someone. Please follow all the way to the end, it'll be worth it. I promise.
The L.A. Kings are in town and our erstwhile General Manager, Marc Bergevin, is probably in tow. We never gave him a proper send-off as he was unceremoniously fired at the end of November 2021, so I thought we might do this on this most solemn of nights.
I will not bore you with a full retrospective of his time here, as most of us know the story all too well. What I will rather do, is talk about the man, the myth, the legend, and his time in Montreal as general manager.
Bergy had his critics, myself included, but what can't be taken away from him was his sense of style and his capacity to reinvent his looks. Through his time here, we've seen him transform and shed one skin after another while also becoming quite the fashionista. The chronology of his time in Montreal could straightforwardly be done through the lense of his wardrobe alterations, if one was so inclined.
He started off with the dry and pseudo-intellectual limo driver look (1) and wore it so well you'd swear he could've replaced Richard Belzer in any role. Stimulated by both his early success on the ice and being a media darling, he quickly metamorphisized into Bergy à la mode (2), turning heads at NHL red carpet events. This all burgeoned later in Bergy going into full Derek Zoolander mode (3). The look was so similar, some of us hunted down old tapes of Bergy on skates to see if he could actually turnaround and spin in both directions.
These specific styles progressed from one to the other through his first 3 years in Montreal where he garnered most of his success. It was smooth sailing in those halcyon days. Then Carey Price had a freak injury and missed most of the 15-16 season and everything tumbled down after that, partly due to Bergevin's negligence in suitably replacing Price. This culminated in Bergevin publicly doubling down on his dinosaur coach, the truly despicable Michel Therrien, in the infamous "it's on me" press conference in January 2016, where he uttered the phrase that forever tarnished his tenure; the 'foxhole' comment.
He lost a great deal of the fandom at that point, by not canning the irredeemable bully, and you could see the pressure starting to get to him. He went on to register so many ridiculous comments, it's hard to enumerate them all. The four pillars of a winning team (we only heard two), the playstation comment, trades are hard, Toews not a #1 center, #1 centers are never available, Morgan Rielly is a stud, the defense is better than last year, diamond in the rough, the answer is in the room, and so on... Almost every sentence he spoke out in that period was a treasure trove of comedy material. You could literally feel the rug sliding from under his feet. Afterward, his sense of style crumbled like his team did, offering us the sometimes disheveled and always gruffy Hobo-Bergevin, or as he's more commonly known, Bargainbin. After Belzer, he could now replace late-career Mel Gibson:
It didn't take long for Uncle Geoff and his 'hungry eyes' to leap to Bergy's rescue in his own infamous press conference, known by most as the aptly dubbed 'fan experience' PC. Later that summer, a lone bright spot came along, Alexander Radulov, amidst a sea of sideway and wretched moves in succession that spanned 14 months, in which we saw him trading away notre beau Lars, trading fan favorite PK Subban, trading for Drouin, snobbing both Radulov and lifer Andrei the General Markov, along with strongman Emelin, signing Snow Angel Picklejar Alzner, all of which turned the team from perennial playoff locks to bottom of the barrel shitsville. The fandom's impatience and distaste for the Canadiens' executive grew to outpace their love for the team. Molson's support seemed to have emboldened Bergevin as he got out of the doldrums to kick off a new era with some major beefcake; Bro-gevin (and the biceps club):
The ostentatious bravado and flexing, bulging biceps weren't enough, with the team teetering on the edge of the precipice, to save him from becoming the greatest villain in the history of NHL managers and executives. As a matter of fact, the muscles and boldness only fitted and reinforced his growing reputation as the ultimate heel of hockey, slightly mirroring Vince McMahon's path (not the salacious criminality part, mind you), but without the noble intention to simply entertain. You could've almost called him Mr. Bergevin at that point. One could effortlessly write a pop-psychology article about meatheads hitting rock bottom and solving their woes by intensily pumping iron to mend their bruised egos, but I won't go there.
The pressure inevitably came back to haunt him, along with Covid. We then saw a stark deterioration of the derided biceps persona. I'm willing to bet he earned more than half his grey hair between 2017 and 2021. He also let his hair grow without mercy. Halfway through this new transformation, he almost kinda looked like he could've been Anton Chigurh's old man:
The unkempt hobo look made a type of resurgence as his hair kept growing to epic, mad scientist-like proportions. You could tell by simply seeing him that Bergevin felt defeated and could see his end nearing, as the job had finally taken its toll:
We can fault him for all his shortcomings, but in the summer of 2020, he used all the experience he had gained to patch up the team to a standard that saw Price and Weber offer the greatest of swan songs that lifted us to our first finals appearance since 1993. It seemed to have somewhat rejuvinated old man Bergy, sporting his best attires from his à la mode period:
Unfortunetly for Marc, this was to be the highest peak he would reach, without the ultimate prize at the end, and it cost him everything. From losing his two franchise players to permanent LTIR, to losing his job a few months later when the team completely cratered because the talent well to replace them ran completely dry. Due mostly of his own doing.
I left out a lot of stuff, for the sake of brevity. It's still lenghty despite my efforts. I prefered to leave some space to remember him in images. I previously alluded to Geoff's 'hungry eyes', to symbolize how enamoured the owner seemed to be towards Bergevin. It always felt like Geoff wasn't the only one who starred lovingly at his mug and muscles. Use the following link if you need a refresher to what comes next:
(Go to 1:00 for the verse)
So in the spirit of this, let's watch a diaporama of Bergevin's time here:
*presses play at verse of 'hungry eyes' on turntable*:
*abruptly stops the disk, major screeching*
I would be remiss in not offering a farewell gift to our former GM. After spitballing a few ideas, it was deemed essential that we bestow upon him a kind of lifetime achievement award. He has captured our attention for almost 10 years and sort of made his mark in the media world. It's just crazy the number of pics that will pop-up in a google image search of Bergevin. Unparalleled in the world of hockey executives, if you don't count pics from their playing days. Truly a GM for the digital age. I mean, you know you've made it when clones/proxies of yourself start appearing in major works:
So without further ado, we at HFHabs would like to offer to Marc Bergevin this prestigious trophy. An accomplishment that will probably never be surpassed nor equalled:
Farewell Marc. Best of luck.
We lay your personas to rest.
A-f***ing-men
And Habslelluia for Gorton, Hughes & St-Louis. May they save us from the horrors of the past and guide us to a better future.
(1-Marc Bergevin was unfortunately unavailable to receive his award. It seems that he doesn't want to talk to anyone anymore in the public arena of the province. Look-up JDQ article. 2-Sorry for the meme-o-rama size, there's a limit of 18 images for an OP 3-I included Bergevin's minions in the meme-o-rama because they were ultimately his creation)
Soooo... here comes the ending I promised. At the beginning of this, uhm, eugoogoly(?), I said I wanted to honor someone, but as it should've become obvious by now, it wasn't Bergevin I was looking to honor, nor celebrate. Sorry if I fooled anyone, but if there's a trophy to have, to give, it should go to people like @MoenInGlory (username not found?), @Bloumeister, @Runner77 and anyone else who made memes and jokes in the Bergevin era (some names that I lamely forget), because they made this a place worth coming to, despite the pervasive antagonism among factions and lamentable state of the team. So I wanna hear a huge collective shoutout to them! That ginormous wall of memes is not only a testament to Bergevin's supreme memeability, but stands as a towering monument to the great level of humor and passion that persists on this Sub of HF. Not only did they bring a much needed dose of levity, they also inspired others, like myself, to follow in their footsteps. You were the anti-Bergevins, bringing joy and humor, rather than the gloom and hopelessness that permeated his tenure. The trophy shouldn't be limited to them, au contraire. It belongs as much to all those who make GDTs and other interesting threads, the moderators (yes, even them!), and the whole of you, each and every poster, for coming day in and day out to dish it out about the Habs in here. For all of us, for making this the best damn board on HF. Cuz, really, I've traveled the boards, far and wide, and compared to here, most of the other ones feel like you're in a damn funeral!!
Game on!!!
Since this is a funeral of sorts, I will gladly accept any requests for individual full-sized replications of the memes (gifs, jpegs and pngs) that appear in the meme-o-ramas.
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