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| National Post Picture |
Wow! I can’t believe a major Canadian Newspaper would try to paint Matt Cooke in a positive light. The fact remains he is one of the dirtiest and most hated players in the NHL. It’s hard to get to that level. No matter how the National Post tries to portray Matt Cooke, he is a major P.O.S. and one of the dirtiest hockey players that I have ever witnessed play the game during my lifetime.
National Post ---- One of the National Hockey League’s greatest villains finds peace in a garage near the water east of Toronto. Matt Cooke has stocked it with the essential tools, sanders and saws among them, while eschewing any of the chatter that might remind him of what he does during the winter to earn his summer retreat.
“The crash of the waves is my radio,” he said.
Cooke collects antiques. His prized find is a pine cabinet, six feet long and seven feet tall, that he refinished himself after stripping off several layers of paint. There was pink, baby blue, green, white and grey.
“You could tell it came through different eras, where that colour was ‘in’ at the time,” he said. “It wasn’t the easiest thing to get back to wood, but I managed to do it.”
The cabinet is still standing, eight years after its rebirth, in the kitchen of his cottage near Belleville, Ont. It is a testament to the constructive skills of a man with legions of critics screaming about his destructive behaviour, most recently and notoriously with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Highlight reels have been dedicated solely to his apparent willingness to abandon almost all sense of human morality on the ice. Don Cherry railed against Cooke in one segment of Hockey Night in Canada last year, an animated dissertation on Cooke’s decade-long hit parade that ended with a prediction — correct, as it turned out — that without adequate protection, such violence would eventually find Penguins captain Sidney Crosby.
The catalyst for Cherry’s rant was Cooke’s (unpunished) headshot on Marc Savard. The Boston Bruins forward had just released a shot on goal when Cooke slammed a shoulder into his right temple, sending him to the ice with a severe concussion and, ultimately, toward the prospect of an early retirement.
