Mixing music and hockey

CALGARY — There is an interesting point where hockey, music, war and the spirit of altruism all meet — and Jim Cuddy has been criss-crossing that intersection frequently in the past fortnight.

Cuddy is just back from Kandahar, in Afghanistan and you may have seen the footage of him and his Blue Rodeo band mates playing ball hockey with Canada's servicemen and women. He was on the road this past week for a couple of dates with his solo project, the Jim Cuddy Band, while Blue Rodeo is on a short break from the Small Miracles tour. In the meantime, Cuddy is coming to town Thursday for the Juno awards ceremony and more particularly, for the Juno Cup, music's answer to the Stanley Cup, in which a selection of Canada's "Rockers" will play an exhibition hockey game against an NHL alumni team, with proceeds going to charity.

The opposition for Cuddy and his team will include members of the Calgary Flames' 1989 Stanley Cup-winning team, including Lanny McDonald, Doug Gilmour and Jamie Macoun, along with selected ringers, such as Paul Coffey, Russ Courtnall, NHL alumni president Mark Napier and others.

On the musicians' side, apart from Cuddy, there'll be Greg Keelor, Tom Cochrane, Barney Bentall and members of the bands Sloan, State of Shock, Wintersleep and others. The game, to be played Friday at the Stampede, is designed to raise money for Musican, a charity near and dear to Cuddy's heart, which provides grants to schools so they can buy instruments for their music programs.

Marrying music and sports, said Cuddy, was "a good thing and such a good fit that it was really easy to get the musicians involved. Obviously, they want to come and play against NHLers and the music connection made it easy for them to get behind it.

"Plus, it was a way of getting people to come to the Junos. The Junos are only valuable if musicians come. And really truly for years, musicians had such antipathy towards the whole week that if they were big enough to avoid it, they did.

"So this is a way of getting people there and on all levels, it's been really successful. The charity has really grown. From the first year, of being at about $215,000, we're now up to about $500,000 or $600,000 per year. At $10,000 per grant, that's a lot of schools.

"And the game, of course, has grown. It's now a very established piece of entertainment/humiliation." Interest in being humiliated by the NHL alumni is so high among the musicians that this year, there are two full teams entered and each will play just half a game.

Over the years, the one thing Cuddy learned about the NHLers is that retired or not, they play to win. "The musicians, we go from competent down to really inept, so the NHLers have to be careful," said Cuddy. "They are so used to being heroes in every walk of their public lives, so if they abuse the musicians too much, the crowd turns on them and they seem like bullies. That's sort of what we hope for.

"One year, Jamie Macoun had the greatest line. He said, 'it's very dangerous out there. You had to be careful you didn't step on anybody."

The musicians have a few good hockey-playing men, including Cuddy's long-time Blue Rodeo band-mate, Greg Keelor, who once had a tryout with the Toronto Marlboros when they were a junior as opposed to minor-pro team.

"So he played up to that level. More often than not, we have some good beer leaguers and then we go down from there. The first years we played, we had some NHL stars and then some guys who didn't have long careers, so there was a little bit more of a possibility. Now, it is just stars - Paul Coffey, Doug Gilmour, Lanny McDonald. Coffey actually said after last year's game, they could spot us 25 goals and still win.

"Now this game is only 40 minutes, running time. That's more than a goal every two minutes, without any goals scored against you. That's a bold prediction.

"For our side, we get one NHL goalie and one of the best of the musicians and we give them goalies we think are fallible. So … we try. We just don't get in their end very much. We keep them hemmed in our end."

It sounds like fun …

"It is pretty funny," clarified Cuddy. "It appeals to all mortals."

Cuddy was just getting over his jetlag from the Afghanistan trip last week, a memorable experience and one that band might not have undertaken five years ago.

"Somehow, things have changed so much," said Cuddy. "The army are now like employees of the state and therefore the same as TTC drivers and very worth our support. So it was very easy. The band was very up for the experience and happy to go and support the troops. So we went over to play music. We went with a bunch of NHLers to play ball hockey with them. It was an unbelievably fascinating trip."

Cuddy said he was surprised by what he found, seeing the Canadian mission, up-close-and-personal.

"I didn't realize that the soldiers were involved in all the reconstruction of the country; that they were actually out there, helping pave the roads and build the schools. The only workforce out there is Afghani citizens and coalition troops."

Cuddy called life inside the Canadian camp as "so normalized, it just seems like you're on a college campus. Half of them are in civvies. They're wearing shorts. They just look like kids. That whole archetype of the lunk- head male that has nothing else in life and joins the army — that is just not evident anywhere. They could be anybody, and yet they're all carrying firearms. So there are all these times when you just seem to flip out of a reality you're comfortable with.

"Having talked to so many of them, they are all so clear as to why they're there. I didn't meet one person who said, 'oh, I just did it for the job' or 'I did it for the education.' They want to be in the army. They want to be doing whatever particular skill they're doing. They want to be as close as they can to the action. It was quite something."