With the departure of Maurice Richard at the turn of the millennium, Quebec said goodbye to an image of itself: the low-income earner, a good employee with whom, champion of the people as he was, the Anglo bosses were happy. With their RRSPs and the emergence of Quebec inc. a generation earlier, Quebecers had gone elsewhere. With its true heroes, it is always a part of itself that a nation buries. And through Guy Lafleur, we may be separating ourselves from another Quebec.
We quit smoking, exercise, eat more vegetables, drink less alcohol, get vaccinated three times instead of once, and here we are running to the Bell Center and filling a cathedral to pay tribute to a man who , it has been repeated enough for ten days, lived dangerously.
We also heard this a lot: our time is very wise compared to the Roaring Twenties of Flower. In 2022, the four pillars of wisdom are called health, safety, equality and moral rectitude. So many values that Ti-Guy blithely transgressed during his flamboyant career as a sportsman and public man.
Today, substance abuse and addiction issues are often referred to as the dark side of the Force, but back in the days when top athletes weren’t multi-million dollar investments that needed to be protected, happy revelers were probably more numerous among the elite of professional sport. Maradona in soccer, the 1986 Mets in baseball became world champions by tossing one line of coke after another. If Lafleur had not inherited such an exceptional organism, a kind of biological miracle, after thirty years, his decline would have been much more rapid.
Furthermore, our security-obsessed society can hardly identify with a hero who was notoriously crazy. Montreal-Quebec in 58 minutes, says the legend. Not really a role model for young people.
Equality? If the testimonies agree on one point, it is that Guy Lafleur, even when overly solicited, approached everyone in the same way, simple and direct, in one word: fraternal. As if equality was less a beautiful principle for him than an instinctive way of relating to people. At the same time, the very existence of a gift as brilliant as his reminds us of a truth which, shocking as it may seem in the light of our humanist ideals, is nonetheless verifiable: talent does not know ‘equality.
But this collective homage to the Blond Demon shakes above all the epidermal moral sensitivity and the hypocritical virtue of our hypernetworked world. The fact that the Flower has become this Quebec myth at the antipodes of political correctness that serves as our social religion is perhaps not completely foreign to the cult that it is currently rendered. A deer hunted illegally in Beauce? If the deer entertained such notions, it would be a great martyrdom for the Longueuil livestock and the half-dozen deer which, two days ago, strolled on my street at half past four in the morning. But nothing to trouble the atavistic blood flowing in the veins of Quebecers.
And the champion lied to a judge, but it was to protect the flesh of his flesh. Not sure the ordinary world threw the first stone at him that time. In the cottages, we had understood the main thing about Ti-Guy, and the main thing was that this guy would never strip your old parents of their retirement funds.
Seen today, even the jokes of this great prankster seem to cross certain limits. The neighbor of one of his friends in the Eastern Townships said that, during a riverside party given on a large lot where Lafleur had landed his helicopter, at one point, a boat detached from the wharf went adrift with a young child. gesticulating on board. In the general panic, adults undress and jump into the water to swim to the boat where, suddenly emerging from his hiding place, a hilarious Lafleur greets them. The story does not say how many diners subsequently had to be treated for post-traumatic shock.
Who still remembers Dalida’s song whose chorus said “It was time for flowers / We didn’t know fear…”?
It is the same scent of nostalgia that hovers around the remains of Lafleur. What we envy him is not for having challenged the Giant Ferré in a beer wedging contest, nor for having signed, at the request of the judge who had just acquitted him, the photo of his killed deer illegally in a Beauceron enclosure, nor of having taken the wheel after drinking and getting away with it. Nor is it his legendary outspokenness in a world where the mere act of speaking certain words would soon earn people the opprobrium of a new breed of do-gooders, or even perhaps the adulation of popular masses.
What I think we envy him the most, after two years of pandemic and two months of war in Ukraine, in the face of an ecological crisis that is turning into a disaster and in an increasingly narrow intellectual and moral climate, is is to have lived without fear.