A MATTER OF PRIDE : Swirl of Francophile Fervor in Quebec Disrupts Canadiens

It’s considered all in fun when a group called the Front Row Athletic Supporters Club at Calgary’s Saddledome taunts Wayne Gretzky with a slithery-tongued yellow duck named the Whiner Biter.

Or when those fans hold up eye charts to razz the officials.

But when they press toy frogs against the glass to goad the Montreal Canadiens, that’s going too far.

Fans in Montreal who saw the green stuffed animals on their TV sets as they watched the first two games of the Stanley Cup finals complained to the media about ethnic slurs.

French pride is not to be made fun of. Sensitivities run too deep in the province of Quebec, where fewer than 20 years ago, the minister of labor was kidnaped and murdered by a radical French terrorist group, causing the federal government to send troops to patrol the streets under martial law.

Even this week, debate over new language laws favoring French is front page news here and “incensed” tourists are reported to be boycotting the province.

When Montreal Coach Pat Burns decided to take a slumping, slightly injured Claude Lemieux out of the lineup, an editorial in La Presse, a French-language newspaper, suggested that he was anti-Lemieux because of his anti-French feelings.

Merely one man’s opinion? Well, there still is no end to the controversy that the expression of that opinion kicked up.

At a news conference after the Canadiens’ practice Tuesday afternoon, Burns--whose mother is French Canadian and who grew up in St. Henri, a Montreal district--said, in English: “To say that I am anti-French is crazy.”

And then he said it in French.

Asked, after his team won Game 2 Wednesday night, if the controversy might have brought his team closer together, Burns snapped, “No!”

He added: “I wouldn’t want the guy who wrote that to have the satisfaction of thinking that he motivated our club.”

The guy who wrote it, Rejean Tremblay, was not allowed on the Canadiens’ charter back from Calgary Wednesday night “for security reasons.” According to Serge Sevard, the club’s general manager, there were some players who were angry with Tremblay.

Although the players tried to say that they were not bothered by such a ridiculous opinion, they weren’t taking it lightly.

When Tremblay was kept off the charter, two other La Presse reporters, Philippe Cantin and Ronald King, took a commercial flight instead of the charter as a form of protest.

Tremblay is a separatist, one who believes that the province of Quebec should declare its independence.

As Montreal forward Bob Gainey explained to the Calgary Sun: “Rejean is using his position as a journalist to get across ideas he has. Maybe he should be in the political department and leave sports alone. One thing this club has done very well over the years is judge hockey players as players.”

And Montreal defenseman Larry Robinson said: “This is not the United Nations. This is a hockey team.”

At practice on Tuesday, the players joked that the Czech players should not be expected to play with the Swedish players. When Chris Chelios was asked what he thought of the flap, he answered: “I’m Greek. Everybody hates me.”

But try as they might to laugh it off, the players are aware of the history of the French-English rift in the province and equally aware of the history of the tensions it has caused on the hockey team.

The Canadians have gone through six coaches in the last 10 years and not one has totally escaped the issue.

Fans in the province are aware of how many French-Canadian players are on the roster the way some basketball fans keep track of how many white players are on a National Basketball Assn. roster.

When Tremblay was questioned by a U.S. reporter seeking to understand why he thought the benching of Lemieux was anything more than a coaching decision, he argued quite urgently that ethnic bias could not be ignored, even if it is “subconscious.”

He said: “Would you ignore it if you thought (Dodger Manager) Tommy Lasorda did not know how to handle black players or Latin players? Racism is racism.

“It is often subtle. Like when black players are considered as not being intelligent or, as Al Campanis put it, not having the ‘necessities’ to be managers. We notice when French players are never believed to have ‘character.’ It is not very different.

“What I wrote is that whenever Pat Burns has trouble with a player, it is a French player.”

Burns, a rookie coach who is under enough strain trying to lead the Canadiens to their 23rd Stanley Cup, acknowledged to several reporters on Tuesday that the pressure is beginning to wear on him. “This really makes you wonder,” Burns said. “You wake up and ask yourself, ‘What the . . . am I doing here?’ ”

Asked if he thinks the controversy has led to the turnover in coaches, he agreed. “That’s how it happens,” Burns said. “And that’s why you ask yourself, what the . . . am I doing here?”

The battle for control of the province dates to before British Maj. Gen. James Wolfe sailed his soldiers down the St. Lawrence River to engage the French troops of Field Marshal Louis Joseph de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. The Battle of Quebec was one that has produced an ongoing identity crisis for the Habs.

The Habs. What is a Hab, anyway?

A French-language reporter explains that it is short for les Habitants, meaning the people of the region. The early settlers. But not all of the settlers. The farmers. The rural people.

Which is to say, the French.

Montreal was settled by the merchants. English merchants.

The name Canadiens should identify the team with the whole country, not just with the province, but many of the French fans identify more strongly with the Quebec Nordiques. Quebec is a truly French city.

When asked why he thought a columnist would write an article accusing him of being anti-French, Burns noted the timing of the article. Why raise the question in the midst of the Stanley Cup finals?

Burns said: “It’s too bad somebody thinks like that,” he said. “Nobody deserves that. I know I don’t. Hey, the guy who wrote it is a Quebec Nordiques fan, let’s put it that way.”