The Smart Money Is on the Ducks

Below the 24 Stanley Cup banners hanging from the rafters of the Montreal Forum, the over-ice scoreboard flickered green and gold, bringing the audience an important pregame message.

LES MIGHTY DUCKS SONT EN VILLE

The Mighty Ducks are in town.

And you know what that means.

GRANDE VARIETE D’ARTICLES DES MIGHTY DUCKS --at every booth, boutique, nook, cranny and kiosk Forum management could squeeze into the place. A very grande variete: Mighty Duck T-shirts for $23 (Canadian funds), Mighty Duck baseball caps for $17.25, Mighty Duck mini batons (miniature hockey sticks) for $5.75, Mighty Duck pucks for $3.50, Mighty Duck ceramic pins for $4.50 and Mighty Duck pennants for $3.50.

Unfortunately, there were no Mighty Ducks warm-up jackets, but at a sporting goods store across town at Bonaventure Place, you could buy one of those, too. It’s the first one you see when you walk into Le Monde Des Athletes, positioned in front of those always-slow sellers, the Dallas Cowboys and the Chicago Bulls.

Price tag: $169.99.

“I just got that from the warehouse today,” said the man behind the counter, Mike Lauziere. “It catches everyone’s eye. People love the colors, the logo. I’m running out of T-shirts and I had to re-order the caps. The caps sold out right away.”

On a Saturday night in chilly Montreal, the Canadiens and the Mighty Ducks played to their strengths, then.

The Canadiens, defending champions of the Stanley Cup, won the hockey game, 4-1.

The Ducks, defending champions of the cash register, moved a few more thousand dollars in merchandise.

Michael Eisner would probably call it a tie.

The Ducks’ first visit to Montreal and the fabled Forum--hockey’s lord of the rinks--was nothing like the facial-slap-with-white-silk-glove that had been assumed and expected from the day Disney decided to fit the NHL logo with mouse ears. Oh, there was the obligatory Duck humor. The city’s largest French-speaking newspaper, La Presse, made reference to The Iceman, now an internationally notorious entity, identifying him, parenthetically, as grotesque mascotte.

On some things we do speak a universal language.

La Presse also ran a cartoon picturing a hungry group of Canadians ogling a much smaller flock of uniformed Ducks and imagining their Saturday night dinner--roasted Duck A L’Orange County, served up on silver platters.

On the ice, however, the Ducks were considerably tougher to swallow. After a jittery first 16 minutes, the Ducks played the mighty Canadiens fairly evenly, closing to within 3-1 before Stephan Lebeau’s meaningless empty-netter.

“They certainly work hard,” observed Montreal Gazette sports editor Red Fisher, who has been covering the Canadiens for 40 years. “And they’re certainly not embarrassing themselves. For an expansion team, it starts there--working hard and not making a career of getting blown out.

“Florida and the Mighty Ducks, they will get embarrassed some nights. As, indeed, the Montreal Canadiens and Pittsburgh Penguins will on certain nights. The key is not to get embarrassed too often. That’s all you can ask from an expansion team.”

As for the affront of a team dressed like the California Raisins and named after a kids’ movie skating on ice that once belonged to Rocket Richard and Jean Beliveau, well, the Forum was desecrated long ago. Advertisements for Coca-Cola are painted into the playing surface, right next to the red line, and midway through the third period, 16,000 connoisseurs of frozen rubber stood and indulged in that tackiest of American customs-- Le Vague, or as we have come to loathe it, The Wave.

Fisher, who has been around long enough to see the California Golden Seals come and the Cleveland Barons go, said he has “no problem at all” with an NHL-sanctioned franchise called the Mighty Ducks.

“I frankly don’t understand all the snootiness you hear in places like Toronto and some parts of Montreal,” Fisher said. “I was around when the (minor league) Long Island Ducks played, so the Mighty Ducks is no big deal to me.”

Fisher also noted that “the damn movie made $50 million. I’ll go along with that any time.”

Todd Ewen has seen life from both sides now--Friday he received a diamond ring for his contributions to the Canadiens’ 1992-93 championship run, Saturday he skated as a Mighty Duck--and was pleased to report that the gap between the two was not so incredible.

“They won the Stanley Cup last year,” Ewen said. “I say ‘they,’ not ‘we,’ because I’m on another team now. It was important for us to come into this building and have a good showing.

“We certainly weren’t awe-struck. We all know we’re not going to out-talent teams like the Canadiens. But we can give them a good run for their money.”

If that was the mission Saturday night, consider it accomplished, on the ice and off.

Judging from the thinning concession shelves in this city, the Ducks will be giving Canadians a good run for their money for quite some time.