I got an email from Ticketmaster the other day, one of the thirty or forty thousand they send me every year asking me to attend everything from the Backyardigans (um, dude, I don’t have any kids, which would make it Michael Jackson creepy for me to be hanging around that show) to various military tattoos and quasi-sporting events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I do not make a habit of opening up the various missives launched into my inbox by my friends at Ticketmaster.
This particular email, though, intrigued me. The subject line read, “Toronto Maple Leafs.” I couldn’t believe that the Leafs’ ticket sales had somehow suddenly taken such a nosedive as to require active promotion and solicitation; why, then, would Ticketmaster be talking to me about my beloved Blue and White? I clicked open the email and all I saw, to begin with, was the graphic reproduced below:
At first, I saw only the first three words in the graphic and I was convinced that Ticketmaster was throwing its considerable corporate weight behind some sort of grassroots political movement to extricate Mats from the seven circles of hell that must be life in the Leaf dressing room these days; I thought it odd that they somehow felt compelled to campaign for Sundin’s liberty, but Leaf fans are everywhere and many of us do love our Captain; perhaps, I thought, big 13’s predicament had moved one of my fellow Leaf fans in the big organization to become the Internet-meets-sports-fan version of Thomas Paine.
I actually felt quite let down when I realized this graphic was not part of a manifesto but rather an ad for a cheap piece of plastic swag tossed in to an otherwise disappointing bargain.