Sapurji: News and Notes

Quite a few OHL stories today with training camp just around the corner. First up from the West:

Don Brankley, the longtime trainer of the London Knights, will retire after the 2007-08 OHL season. I'm sure there will be a farewell tour of sorts for the man who has dedicated 38 years of his life to the junior hockey team.

Brankley, 59, at one time was living in the old London Ice House in a make-shift apartment he had created.

There's a great little anecdote in today's Free Press about Brankley's first meeting with former Knights forward Brendan Shanahan after he was drafted by London.

From the Free Press:

"I introduced him to everyone at the table. After a while I leaned over and said to him, 'Brendan, never wear white socks with a black suit.'

"About the fourth round, standing there waiting for one of the kids to come down, Brendan comes over and says 'Branks, look.' He told his parents what I'd said. They went to the store and bought him black socks.

"Years later he's on the cover of GQ magazine for how well he dresses."

Here's hoping the next 38 years for Brankley are as eventful and joyous as his 38 years with the Knights.

In the East:

The Kingston Frontenacs have announced they're going back to the future by unveiling a new third jersey... which is really their old "circle K" jersey.

It's about time.

I'm not sure why, but in the late 90s and early 2000s --roughly the time the IceDogs and Battalion came into the league -- every team decided that they had to become more "kid friendly" and carted out the cartoon-logo jersey.

One of the worst, in my humble opinion, had to be the Fronts going with a guy in a pirate hat with a meat cleaver coming out of his shoulder.

The other bad ones included the Soo Greyhounds "scooby doo" monstrosity and the Peterborough Petes trashing their classic logo in favour of a character who looked like Marty McSorley on a rampage.

The London Knights also had a disastrous run with a logo that looked like something out of the Marvel comics refuse bin.

Thankfully, the Fronts are just the latest team to go back to their roots with simplicity. The classics never go out of style.

Here's the story from the Whig-Standard.

WOLVES REVO JOB: The Sudbury Wolves are in the process of renovating their arena with -- among other thing -- the addition of a new video scoreboard at centre ice.

NOTE: This is a good thing, but I hope this doesn't in any way hinder the wolf on the clothesline.

In order for the new advancements in the arena, the team had to take out seats -- making their overall capacity smaller. According to Northern Life.ca, standing room has dropped from 1,000 to 500, while the seating capacity has dropped by 150 seats.

The shocking thing is the money for the renovation is being put up by the Wolves themselves and not the local taxpayer. Which is the way it should be.

"I’m a taxpayer too," Wolves president Mark Burgess told Northernlife.ca. "Our city has a lot of other issues which need to be addressed other than renovating the arena. We need new roads, rinks for kids and a performing arts centre — three things I strongly believe in – so we decided I would put the money in. The city gets a renovated arena and I get a 15-year operating lease agreement. It’s a win-win situation."

Good for the Wolves, their fans and the taxpayers of Sudbury.

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