Word: duking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Billy Duke, rising Toronto superstar. Fast on his skates. A little slower with his mouth, but that's all right. He's honest, and his mind is clean. Sherri Lee Nelson, rising bubblegum folk singer. Well-scrubbed, blonde, vivacious. Smokes dope occasionally, but she's basically committed, one understands, to making this world a better place for all of us to live...
...Duke's life story begins, as they all do, on a frozen lake somewhere in the backwoods of Canada, where his father is calmly, patiently instructing him on how to keep his little four-year-old ankles straight, shift the puck from side to side and let that slap shot go. Father Duke dies, but his creation lives on, and we watch him go from Squirt to Pee Wee to Midget to Bantam to the Junior Leagues, and finally, as Derek Sanderson looks on, to a triumphant performance at Toronto and the OHA championship...
Sanderson and his agent fight their way into the jubilant locker room later, and arrange to meet Duke at the Hub, a downtown discotheque. There, the fateful relationship begins. Duke, the future professional star, meets Sherri, the Ontario Melanie. If you saw Love Story, you know the rest. The Maple Leafs, desperate for a forward who can breathe some life into their faltering team, draft Duke as their first choice, and thanks to some crafty bargaining by Sanderson's agent, agree to sign him to a $120,000 contract for two years. Sherri, meanwhile, has progressed above the club circuit...
...quite reconcile herself to the hockey world, either. No one connected with the game seems to realize that all that violence is sickening, least of all Duke. And the longer you stay with hockey, the more callous, more insensitive it makes you. One afternoon, while Billy and Sherri are frolicking in the woods, he sends his dog after a rabbit, and expresses no remorse when the smaller animal is killed. Things get rocky from that point on, and when the Maple Leafs' general manager tells Sherri that in hockey, "everything has to be put in its proper place, even...
...dedication to peace, Sherri drops acid to clear everything up. Under the circumstances, it is a reasonably unwise thing to do, and she pays for it, lying moaning for a few days in a Toronto apartment while her friends move on to San Francisco for another gig. Duke, meanwhile, goes to pieces, athletically, and the Maple Leafs stagger downward in the NHL standings to the point where they must defeat the Vancouver Canucks in the season's final game to qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs...