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Speak Up

WASHINGTON - A Canadian hockey coach has been quoting the President of the United States to inspire his team, but it isn't the guy in the White House.

"I've been finding a lot of his quotes and using them in the dressing room," Scott Hillman says of the ex-executive. "I've really identified with some of his slogans."

"Give me an example," I ask.

" 'It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit,' " Coach Hillman replies. "And here's another one I found: "I never gave 'em hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell'."

Coach Hillman is a 35-year-old former defenceman who spent most of his pro career with the Odessa Jackalopes, out in George W. Bush boots-and-oil country in Texas. (He also played roller hockey with the Buffalo Wings.) His current coaching assignment, the Missouri Mavericks, play out of the city of Independence, which is where "Give 'Em Hell" Harry S. Truman, the 33rd American President and rabidly partisan Democrat, lived out his long and colourful pre- and post-Washington life.

This is why, when they welcomed the Tulsa Oilers last week to inaugurate their first season in the Central Hockey League, the Mavericks wore a blue and white jersey with the disembodied head of Truman on the front and "GIVE 'EM HELL HARRY" on the back.

The failed haberdasher who rose to become America's head of state would have been proud. From Truman's neckless visage emanated rays of ethereal light, while patriotic stars and stripes fittingly orbited his head. As the Mavericks took the ice, their theme song blasted over the loudspeakers of their brand-new arena, echoing Coach Hillman's second-hand presidential exhortations. It was the All-American Rejects singing:

"When you see my face, hope it gives you hell, gives you hell . . ."

Missouri lost anyway, 5-4.

"We came back from two goals down," sighs Coach Hillman, who has suffered inordinately, having grown up in Ontario as a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who have not won the Stanley Cup in his lifetime. "But then we gave up the winning goal on a five-on-three in the last minute, but I'm not going to talk about what I thought of the penalty calls."

Alas, as Harry Truman understood, the coach can throw his best guys on the ice, but he can't put the puck in the net himself.

"About the biggest power the President has," Truman told a biographer, "is the power to persuade people to do what they ought to do without being persuaded."

Half a century after he left office, Harry Truman is best remembered as the President who dropped the A-bomb on Japan -- twice -- and canned Douglas MacArthur as his commanding officer in Korea. Said Truman, "I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail."

A recent poll of Presidential historians ranks Truman in fifth place, trailing only Lincoln, Washington, and the two Roosevelts. Yet his face is not on the dime or the dollar, there is no grand alabaster Truman Memorial in Washington, no statue in the Capitol, and no Truman International Airport. (There was one in the Virgin Island, but they took his name OFF it in 1984.)

Currently, in comparison with Truman's "buck stops here" decisiveness -- he popularized the phrase -- we have Barack H. Obama, whose first 10 months in office have been summarized in The New York Times as "Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure."

"I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt," Harry Truman once mused. This was a president who, when confronted with a railroad strike in 1946, wrote (but never delivered) a speech exhorting the nation to "put transportation and production back to work, hang a few traitors and make our own country safe for democracy."

Many Americans would like to see the same deserts visited upon the hoodlum viziers of Wall Street, but the message from the Oval Office has been to bow and reassure.

As I write this, both Barack Obama and the Missouri Mavericks are bracing for a hellish stretch. Scott Hillman's boys -- 11 of the 14 men on the roster are Canadians -- are playing three games in three nights in three different cities against the Oilers, the Wichita Thunder and the Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs. (Next week, they welcome the Amarillo Gorillas.) And the 44th President soon will tell us how he plans to both escalate and terminate the fighting in Afghanistan.

In the balance are the lives of thousands of American and Canadian and allied soldiers, and Barack Obama's place in the standings of the Presidential League. If he succeeds, the Mavericks of future ages will have his head on a hockey sweater. If he fails, the Republicans -- "the enemy," Harry Truman called them -- will have it on a plate by spring.

* Allen Abel is a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen who after more than 25 years of journalism in Canada moved to Washington, D.C. He has been a reporter, foreign correspondent, documentary film producer, columnist and author. His column appears here every Monday.