Experiment Goes Awry, Strawbs Fail To Lose

Game Report

Strawbs 1 Aviation Panthers 1
January 21, 2010

The Executive of The Killer Strawberries Hockey and Gentlemen’s Club was less than pleased this Thursday, as the gem in its corporate crown failed miserably in the execution of a double secret mission to throw a game against the Aviation Panthers. The consequences are expected to affect every level of the organization, right down to the poor sod who blowdries Gumby’s gloves and underwear between periods.
The orders, written in invisible yellow ink, had been delivered in a sealed envelope to the team just prior to game time by a young woman posing as Miss White Go Go Boot’s young protégée, Vola Uptuus, a Finnish exchange student working on her PhD in creative gymnastics under various faculty advisors at Nipissing University. While all the orders are now unreadable, it was reported by unidentified sources wearing numbers 6 and 16 that the secret missive contained instructions to play as poorly as possible so as to ensure defeat. When questioned about the strategy, the Executive referred the ignorant press to B. F. Skinner’s experiments on negative reinforcement and enhanced long-term performance in heuristic cognitive based coruscations. Freight Train thought the mumbo jumbo meant it would give the team a better chance to win the cup.

In any event, the squad attempted to do its best to play its worst. The only exception was the team’s replacement in net, student goalie Mark “The Wall” Wagner, who, blatantly disobeying orders, stopped 142 of the 143 shots directed at him by the Panthers. Everyone else sucked beyond the call of duty, as mandated by the thick foreheads at Aloha Baby Compound.

Shiny Shone Brightly spent most of the evening wisecracking and smoking urinal stained stogies in the opponent’s crease with his buddy, Gawdawful Gumby, as their defence mate, Whoahorny Richardson, lay uselessly prostrate on the Strawbs’ bench liberally applying Astroglide Nitro to every extremity of his abused body. Pyjama Man got his head slammed in the door to the bench during the warmup and contributed nothing but a series of sad moans to the night’s proceedings. The Vice refused to leave the centre ice faceoff circle except to make frequent trips to the women’s washroom which he claims is way cleaner than the men’s. Archilles and Freight Train played air guitar with their sticks and Dr. Thug ventured over to the other ice pad to practice his bodychecking on some unsuspecting peewee girls hockey team. The Ice Marshal spent most of the game teaching the scorekeeper how to do cryptic crosswords on the time keeping machinery. The team’s most effective players were Warrin’ Peace who was stranded at home tuning up his wife’s ovulation cycle and MagBoy who was in Toronto showing the Minister of Justice how to bake muffins in his PVR.

Despite the sheer ineptitude of the Strawbs’ performance, the team was still unable to lose. The Executive has reluctantly accepted the failure of the experiment and plans never again to order a deliberate loss . As the official press release from the Compound put it so well “Managing this team islike trying to herd cats in a catnip patch.”

With the Terminal Tavren closed for fumigation, the Killer Strawberries moved their post-game celebrations to the parking lot of the Sweetwater Inn, home of the 12 minute motel room. They drank bootleg liquor from paper bags, played air guitar, accepted the compliments but not the invitations of the working girls on break and repeatedly congratulated Sir Gawdawful Gumby on what turned out to be his 51st birthday. All in all, it was a great failed experiment.
4 quarts of moonshine, a frozen pretzel and some salacious come-ons were consumed but not consummated.