Baffoe: John Scott, Absurd Important Hero
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) Two points and 120 penalty minutes in 69 games -- That's John Scott's résumé as a Chicago Blackhawk from 2010 to his trade to the New York Rangers in 2012.
His service in Chicago is immemorable, save for the time he finger-painted Kevin Westgarth's face.
Scott's a goon in the classic hockey sense of the word. He has served no purpose but to intimidate the opposition with his 6-foot-8 frame and scarred knuckles. His trade as skilless enforcer is becoming obsolete in today's NHL that's increasingly faster and increasingly technical and increasingly aware of the problems fighting and thuggery pose for players' brains.
And yet, John Scott's a damn hero.
On Tuesday, the NHL righted a wrong and announced it will allow Scott to captain the Pacific Division's All-Star team after the league had done its best to deny that title to a guy voted in fair and square by the fans. The league's mishandling and exacerbating of an otherwise benign situation only worked to further establish the 33-year-old Scott, a defenseman, as a heroic pawn in an odd chess game of the NHL's own doing.
What little is retained in our minds of Scott the NHL player is likely far more than that of any disposable All-Star Game. We don't watch them, so the league has had to get increasingly gimmicky with the format in an attempt to up TV ratings. And yet it was the brilliant, anarchistic social media gimmick begat by Puck Daddy and Reddit of stuffing the ballot box in favor of Scott -- who in the three-on-three format will be like a semi-truck in a NASCAR race and will definitely draw more viewers, if only out of morbid fascination -- that the league believed would tarnish the sanctity of the exhibition game.
Scott at first balked at the idea of being an All-Star.
A note from John Scott: pic.twitter.com/kDEH7y4vDr
— Arizona Coyotes (@ArizonaCoyotes) December 3, 2015
Humility's a calling card of a hero, mind you, but the movement picked up steam because having arguably the worst player in the NHL be an All-Star captain wouldn't only show that there's hope for this sad world but that the people collectively still held some power against this system and all systems. It showed that witty people could take the flawed-and-sometimes-asinine fan voting structure for the antiquated idea of 21st-century All-Star non-games and turn it all on its head.
But systems don't like to be exploited. When the league and Scott's then-employer Arizona Coyotes saw that the affront to a power structure was becoming a reality, they nudged asked him to not participate.
"(The) NHL initially offered Scott an out from being a participant in the skills competition and in the 3-on-3 tournament by allowing him to attend as though he was an injured player, meeting with the media and attending the related events but not going onto the ice. Scott declined, saying he wanted to be a full participant."
That's because Scott slowly began to realize he was embodying a dream of all of ours. The man understands out of place in a game for which he's employed at the highest level (his assignment to Montreal's AHL affiliate notwithstanding). He's one of the last of the cro-magnon NHLers, and while that's a good thing because even a lovable goon of Warren Zevon lyrics has no place in an increasingly mathematical game that's looking to limit head injuries that have begun to mirror the crisis in football, there's a charm to the self-aware one-trick hired gun like Scott who's by no accounts a malicious soul.
Scott's consciously extraordinarily ordinary. And he wants to take advantage of being lauded for that, even if it's tongue in cheek. Scott is all of us oafs who unwittingly found ourselves part of something cool that we thought we didn't quite deserve, but to hell with it and have a good time anyway. Damn if that ain't heroic.
"I hope everyone who has done my job can take a little bit out of this and say, 'You know what? Finally, one of us is getting recognized,'" Scott said two weeks ago of his existential situation, according to ESPN.com. "If not for just fighting all the time, we do bring a lot to the team in terms of doing a lot things that go unseen. It's nice to get a bit of props once in a while for that. So yeah, I think that would be fair to say (regarding his almost-extinct ilk).
"It's funny, every day you get a different opinion from somebody else. You talk to your management, your coaches, your teammates. At first, it was kind of like a joke and I wasn't really a fan of it. I was like, 'Let's end this quick and move on.' And once it started to gain speed and gain momentum behind it, I started to talk to more people and realized, 'This is probably going to happen.' So I had to start to change my tune from, 'I don't want to do this, I don't like this' to 'If it happens, I'll be happy and we'll have some fun with it.'
This was a good development. John Scott was all of us. He was "just doing it" for us. And if he was in the All-Star Game, we were somehow in it, too. It even had the endorsement of fellow captain and Blackhawks star Patrick Kane, hands down the league's best player this season. It was all so absurd and beautiful. Which meant the powers that be of course hated it.
When polite fascism didn't work, the league and Coyotes (allegedly, probably, denyingly) had the fairly useless and usually healthy scratch Scott traded recently from the Coyotes to the Montreal Canadiens, who promptly sent him to the minors and complicated the integrity of a West captain being property of an East team. The almost $91,000 he would get being on the winning All-Star team -- more than 15 percent of his NHL contract --was compromised and had to move away from his wife, who's expected twins in the coming weeks. His hero status was only being further cemented by NHL brass that was martyring him for no good reason, turning a clown into a sympathetic figure and sending a message that the fan vote doesn't count.
"I can tell you that the Montreal Canadiens had no interest whatsoever in getting John Scott in this trade. The Arizona Coyotes wanted him to be included. You can draw your own conclusions from that. A lot of people have conspiracy theories. Whatever the case may be, but it was Arizona who wanted him in this trade, not the Montreal Canadiens."
Don Cherry, resident lawn yeller of hockey, blamed you darn millennials or something.
But the people didn't trade Scott. They didn't manipulate his finances or mess with his home life. The NHL did (maybe, supposedly, likely). And if Don Cherry and all the conservative sports farts cared about Scott, they wouldn't be siding with management.
Thankfully, the league realized how awful the PR of this fiasco has been (and maybe that they'd get sued for this garbage) and caved. So Scott will be an improbable captain in an All-Star Game that could very well eat him alive. And it's wonderful.
John Scott wins. We the people win because of John Scott. Which is something that nobody thought could be typed in 2016 or ever.
That's about as memorable of a résumé any player -- or any of us with a dream -- can ask for.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.