The Great Once

As history was made this month, The Great One sat in a luxury box with the NHL commissioner and... the conspiracy-theorist director of the FBI. Has Wayne Gretzky become a political Mr. Magoo? Or legitimate friends with an American president who's trying to make the GOAT’s homeland his 51st state? Bruce Arthur, the Toronto Star columnist and conscience of Canada, says our neighbors are "incandescently angry.” And we investigate the world of Kash Patel and the Congressional Hockey Caucus. Further reading: Alex Ovechkin breaks Wayne Gretzky's unbreakable record, but his greatness is only part of the story https://www.thestar.com/sports/nhl/alex-ovechkin-breaks-wayne-gretzkys-unbreakable-record-but-his-greatness-is-only-part-of-the/article_aadfb162-f387-4289-b144-ebe18e4c3002.html Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 0:42Pablo Torre?

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• 1:54Pablo Torre?

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• 2:36Pablo Torre?

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• 3:07Speaker 02

  I have no political power with the Prime Minister or the President. That's between those two guys, and that's why you hold elections. And that's why people get to do what they want to do and say what they want to say.

• 3:18Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  I have a buddy in politics who wants me to become a Conscience of Canada podcast, and I'm like, I don't know, man.

• 3:42Pablo Torre?

  Your brand as the Conscience of Canada, though, is why you're here talking to me. Because you are. That's what you... Bruce, stop fighting it. Stop fighting it. You are the Conscience of Canada. It's a great tagline.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  I don't know if I should be. Should I be? I don't... That's a weighty one. That's a heavy one.

• 4:00Pablo Torre?

  It has never been more urgently required as I...

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 4:04Pablo Torre?

  Dude, I ask myself, who do I want to talk to as I have imminent questions and fascinations about what the [bleep] is happening as it regards the American-Canadian relationship? And immediately, I was like, I just gotta, I just gotta get Bruce on a call.

• 4:26Pablo Torre?

  One of the most dramatic stories in sports turned into one of the strangest mysteries in politics this month. And all of it made me think of my old friend Bruce Arthur. Because Bruce is from Vancouver, and he spent a dozen-plus years as a sports writer for The National Post, which is how I first met him. And he has since spent the last 11 years or so writing columns about pretty much everything, from hockey to COVID to politics for The Toronto Star. And so, once Bruce's home country was all over the news, in large part due to two iconic figures that Bruce has covered extensively, in Wayne Gretzky and Donald Trump, I wanted

• 5:05Pablo Torre?

  to find out what's really happening up there, and how patriotism in Canada feels at this completely, and I would argue, uniquely bizarre moment.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  When you grew up in Canada, for someone like me, who was relatively middle-class, right, and tall white guy, all of that stuff, it is a comfortable place because nothing has ever gone that wrong on a national level in the country. I remember when COVID happened, I started asking people, "What's the biggest crisis that ever came to your door in Canada?" And we don't really have a lot of them, man. I talked to this guy who was a 90-year-old former doctor about what it was like in World War II, and I said, "Well, how did that affect your life? World War II, that's a big one." And he said, "Well, they took the lampposts on one of the highways downtown, and they melted them down and turned them into tanks."

• 6:01Speaker 03

  And I was like, "That's it?" He's like, "That's it. That's the only way World War II impacted my life."

• 6:05Pablo Torre?

  Man.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  So, but we've been just really lucky as a country, and all of a sudden, we're not.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  President Trump plans to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting tomorrow.

• 6:15Speaker 05

  Canada has been a very nasty negotiator against the United States, took advantage of the United States for a long time.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  I want to speak first, directly, to the American people.

• 6:28Speaker 06

  We don't want this. We want to work with you as a friend and ally. And we don't want to see you hurt either. But your government has chosen to do this to you.

• 6:44Speaker 05

  What I'd like to see, Canada become our 51st state. Some people say that would be a long shot.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  If people wanted to play the game right, it would be 100% certain that they'd become a state.

• 7:00Pablo Torre?

  So, yes, things have changed very radically between America and our upstairs neighbor, whose sovereignty President Trump keeps talking about taking essentially as his own. Which is a concept that is so ridiculous on its face that when I first heard Trump say this, I thought the whole thing was very obviously a joke. You know, kind of like how people call Canada America's hat. And I think my Canadian friends, at least at first, felt similarly. But as the temperature on this story keeps ramping up,

• 7:34Pablo Torre?

  it's pretty safe to say that they don't feel that way anymore.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  The boiling of the frog in the pot is us, it really is, in all these different ways. What I've been trying to do, partly for me, is just hold on to what is real, what values matter, what principles matter.

• 7:51Pablo Torre?

  I cannot help but think of that very thought and sensation when I'm turning on a hockey game, a very important hockey game, in which I am anticipating that Alex Ovechkin is going to do the thing that once seemed unfathomable.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Impossible.

• 8:13Speaker 07

  With Wayne Gretzky looking on and the players from both teams saluting the greatest to ever lace them up in National Hockey League history, it just adds to the anticipation and the excitement in this building.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  The Friday night that was really close, and it was in Washington, and it was electric, right? That was awesome.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  He comes this close to doing it at home in a hat-trick performance, and then it's Long Island, and you go, oh, man, okay, we're gonna do it in Long Island. And the anticipation is great.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  It's one of those moments that you can immediately picture as part of a documentary 15 years from now, you know what I mean? Like, it's gonna be something that will resonate through time.

• 9:13Speaker 08

  Like I always said, all the time, it's a team sport. Without my boys, the whole organization, the fans, the trainers, coaches, I would never stand there and obviously I would never pass a great one.

• 9:26Speaker 09

  Happy for Alex. My grandfather was Russian. He'd be really happy that a Russian broke my record. So, good for Alex.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Of course Gretzky was gonna be there. Because when Wayne Gretzky broke Gordie Howe's record, Gordie Howe was there. And there is in hockey, a value on tradition in this way. A value on paying homage to the game and what it means. And so, of course Gretzky was there.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  It's Gary Bettman, the Commissioner of the NHL, Wayne Gretzky, this all makes sense so far, and then also Kash Patel was there. Both games. Kash Patel, the Director of the FBI and at the time the ATF, and a bug-eyed conspiracy theorist.

• 10:13Pablo Torre?

  And that's when I said, "Hold the [bleep] on." I didn't know there was an entourage in which there was noted, as you say, bug-eyed conspiracist, Kash Patel, longtime intimate of Steve Bannon, now just in the box with the great one. What was your reaction when you saw him there?

• 10:35Speaker 03

  I mean, the first one was the same as everyone else, right? What the [bleep]? I don't know, like, who would be the worst member of the cabinet to be in the box with Wayne Gretzky and the Commissioner of the NHL? And, and, let's just zoom out for one second. If this had happened in almost, in any administration before 2016...

• 10:55Speaker 03

  And it's a member of cabinet or someone like in the box with an NHL, especially for a Washington player, nobody blinks twice, right?

• 11:03Pablo Torre?

  Yep.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Nobody does. But times have changed. Things are different. And so I just didn't understand why him. We had seen Gretzky hanging out with Trump because he's known Trump forever. But he's always said, I'm not interested in politics. So how are you hanging out with the other guys as well now? And how's the NHL saying yes to that?

• 11:44Pablo Torre?

  So I want to do a couple of things here today. I want to actually try and help both of us answer the question of why the is Kash Patel in this box? Why is he in the entourage? But in exchange, I need you to help me understand how we got here when it came to Wayne Gretzky. And yes, broadly speaking, Canada and the United States as a relationship unto itself.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  You don't have a Wayne Gretzky.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  There is no Wayne Gretzky in America. You have the Wayne Gretzky in America. You don't have a Wayne Gretzky in America. It's not Tom Brady. It's not LeBron James or Michael Jordan. It's not Muhammad Ali. It's none of these people. It's there's no direct analog to what Wayne Gretzky means to Canada. What hockey is beyond the sport that we care the most about, beyond the, the kind of lingua franca in big and small towns across the country, is it is a song we sing ourselves that pertains to who we are in terms of our national character.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  When Wayne Gretzky was young, he was magic.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  If you go back and look at 19 of these hockey games, a lot of the goalies, it's like they didn't know how to bend their legs, right? Goal tending wasn't good. There was a lot of guys out there who were out of breath on every shift. It was not as difficult a game. And yet, even in that context, Wayne Gretzky made hockey look so easy.

• 13:20Speaker 10

  Wayne Gretzky in on goal. He scores in overtime. Gretzky gets the winner. Edmonton wins 5-4, a shorthanded goal.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  He toyed with the game. That's the highest compliment I can give any athlete, right? He could do anything.

• 13:37Speaker 10

  Cuts in front of his teammate, Gretzky scores.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  That idea of skate to where the puck will be.

• 13:42Speaker 10

  The hat-trick for Wayne Gretzky in the first period.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  It's like he was playing on a different plane of existence than anybody else. You can make arguments for Mario Lemieux and Bobby Orr and maybe eventually Connor McDavid, whatever you want. Wayne Gretzky has more assists than anyone else has points. He has 1,000 more points than anyone else who's ever played the game. He is so much better than anybody else. When you say the great one, that is our highest compliment as a nation, right? Like, Wayne Gretzky is myth in this country.

• 14:16Speaker 11

  And it's with mixed emotions, a heavy heart for our community and our hockey club. But I guess with delight and sincere best wishes

• 14:30Speaker 11

  for Wayne Gretzky,

• 14:33Speaker 11

  that I announce and I guess more important confirm that the Edmonton Oilers have agreed

• 14:42Speaker 11

  to trade Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles.

• 14:46Pablo Torre?

  So when it comes to the summer of 88 and Wayne is technically still Canada's, but geographically now coming to America, your reaction, the country's reaction, you would characterize how?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  I remember the press conference. I like still remember the press. Everyone remembers the press conference because it's one of those moments that gets played in documentaries over and over because Wayne cries. Wayne dabs at his eyes with a Kleenex. Promised Mess I wouldn't do this. I promised Mess I wouldn't cry, talking about Marc Messier. There's a book by my friend Stephen Brent called Gretzky's Tears about the trade. And with Gretzky, when you find out Gretzky's traded, you remember where you are. And then he goes to LA. Hollywood marriage to an actress. And like, he never moves back. He is fundamentally American, raises his family in America. He always talks about how his kids and his grandkids are American. He is fundamentally an American man. Still has Canadian citizenship and says he does not have American citizenship, though.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Because he promised his dad.

• 15:50Pablo Torre?

  That tension, though, of like, him recognizing on some geopolitical level, some higher level, that it still matters what he technically is, while behaving in a way that contradicts that technicality? I wonder when it was the first time he realized, oh, this guy's spending a lot of time with Donald Trump.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  He met Trump in the mid 90s in New York, right? Because he ends his career in New York. And at that time, I think he actually sought Trump out. Like, he was looking for a smart real estate guy and someone gave him Trump's name and they become friends because Trump likes celebrity. And probably the first presidential term is when it starts to come up on the radar, right? Golf tournaments, that kind of thing.

• 16:32Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, the thing I found when it came to the golf stuff, because Wayne loves golf and Trump loves golf, is that there was a 2017 round. It was Tiger Woods. It was Dustin Johnson. And Dustin Johnson, for those not initiated, this is Wayne Gretzky's son-in-law. And it's one of those rounds, reportedly, according to a golf analyst, Brad Faxon, who was working for Fox Sports, where Trump, you know, is putting down a score that didn't quite account for the two balls he hit into the water. And then, in 2021, it's Paulina Gretzky. It's Dustin Johnson. It's Donald Trump. It's Halloween. The families are hanging out. Now they're just together, quite a bit, it seems.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  They're friends. And one of the kind of startling parts of all this. Who's friends with Donald Trump? Think about that, just on a fundamental level. You can ask the same question of Elon Musk. Do they have friends? Are they capable? How are they capable of friendship? If you're hanging around Donald Trump, you're doing it, I would think, because there is a transactional element, or because you like his politics. That's the two categories, more or less. Except that Wayne has said over and over, he has no interest in politics. He says it publicly, he says it privately.

• 17:50Pablo Torre?

  Well, also, if you're not, you know, politically inclined, which is, of course, his, his, his right. It's a weird thing to be at Mar-a-Lago the night of the election, at a table, with who, Bruce?

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the two men who are actively destroying America as it was. It's hard to explain to Americans how [bleep] pissed we are right now at America, how [bleep] unbelievably outraged. We are not just about how you're treating us, but how you're treating yourselves.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  I call them Governor Trudeau, because they should be the 51st state, really. It would make a great state. And the people of Canada, Canada like it. They pay lower taxes, they have virtually no military, they have a very small military, they, they pay less than 1%. They're about the lowest payer in NATO, they're supposed to pay much more, they haven't been paying.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  We are so incandescently angry, because everything about how this country has existed since its founding has been predicated on the fact that we are next to our friend.

• 19:04Speaker 05

  I was with Wayne Gretzky, I said, Wayne, would you like to be the governor of Canada? I can't imagine, I can't imagine anybody doing any better than Wayne. Wayne was not too interested, but, but I think he probably would have liked statehood.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  We live next to our friend. Sometimes our friend makes bad decisions, man, but he's still our friend, right? No one's messing with us because of him. Everything about our country is predicated on America and where we are geographically. And now? We're so mad, we're so angry. And there's Wayne.

• 19:51Pablo Torre?

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• 23:23Pablo Torre?

  When you zoom out again and you take in like the larger context of what is happening in hockey itself, to continue to make a metaphor reality, at the Four Nations Cup, and you have Canada in February in the final.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  And it's geopolitical in a way that a US-Canada hockey game has never been.

• 23:41Speaker 13

  As a tariff dispute with Canada heats up, relations with the US are increasingly on ice.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  We have never booed the American anthem, man. We don't do that. America's our favorite TV show. It is. Like, it just is, it's... As much as, like, we sit, we make the jokes about it, "No one wants to live above a meth lab", and all that kind of thing, but like, we have great affection towards America, and we have respect, especially respect, growing respect for American hockey, and we have never booed the anthem until this year. And there were people in this country who said, "We're better than that. We shouldn't boo the anthem." That, guys, no.

• 24:20Speaker 14

  Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretzky has come under fire following his appearance as the honorary team captain for Canada.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  And I will say, the people who were doing the television broadcast that night did not do Wayne any favors, and the people who were in charge of the event that night did not do Wayne any favors, because he could have walked out two different tunnels. There's one by the American bench, there's one by the Canadian bench. Obviously Wayne should walk out by the Canadian bench, right? No, whoever, and this isn't Wayne's decision, he walks out by the American bench. Okay, we're still fine. He walks by the American bench and he gives them thumbs up.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Okay, this isn't ideal for the moment. Right. Wayne has fundamentally misread the moment, but he has done so, I believe, because Wayne, I do believe Wayne sees hockey players, and he admires them and he respects them, as we should as Canadians. Those guys are awesome hockey players. Fine. And then the camera on the Canadian broadcast cuts away, and Wayne, I presume, gave thumbs up to the Canadian players. I have to believe he did that. We never saw it in this country. And so there's a whole bunch of Canadians who think Wayne just gave thumbs up to the American players. And, by the way, his counterpart is wearing the, the American jersey. That's right. Wayne is wearing not a stitch of red.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  He's wearing the bluest blue. Like, just, there's so many fundamental misreadings in that moment. Like they fight to start an international hockey game three times in nine seconds? I'm not a fighting guy. That was unbelievable.

• 25:55Pablo Torre?

  You having to surrender your pacifism at the altar of what was the best theater of violence [BLEEP] I've seen in sports in the last couple decades? Yes, it was must see TV. It was amazing.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  It was amazing.

• 26:25Pablo Torre?

  It is exactly, exactly what you dream of if you're the NHL. And spoiler alert, you guys win in overtime.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  We sure do, buddy.

• 26:35Pablo Torre?

  Speaking of how America's hat reacted in this great moment of celebration, in comes Wayne Gretzky. And he has a gift that is appropriate, given that, that term of affection. He hands out these red caps. I, I wanna believe that Wayne Gretzky is just political Mr. Magoo and has no [BLEEP] idea what's happening at any given moment. But given how he led to this moment, the payoff of here are some red caps that say, be great on them, which is, I don't know, a half inch away from the thing that Trump has as his actual slogan.

• 27:18Pablo Torre?

  It's just like, what is, am I, am I taking crazy pills? Is, is how I was feeling.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  So you've arrived at one of the central questions, which is how much of this is Wayne truly existing in this sweet summer child kind of existence, right? Where, where politics is truly something that he sees from across the street and keeps walking? How much does he understand the implications here? And in that moment, you probably should ask yourself, do I need to do this?

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Do I need to give the gibbs at all would be the question? And if I do, do I give them red hats? No, Wayne, you just Wayne, you don't. You don't do that. Because again, the thing that I, the thing that I can't square here is that Wayne Gretzky understands what it means to be Wayne Gretzky.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  He has understood that because to be a great hockey player in this country is also to be a politician to a degree. And he understands what it means when Wayne Gretzky stands next to somebody. And he still doesn't seem to understand this. Even if he is a political Mr. Magoo. That's the part I don't get. And then the second part I don't get is this. If you care. If you are a patriotic Canadian, which I believe you are. If you care about how you are viewed in the country, which I believe you do.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Just come out and say it. Say that we will never be the 51st state. Say that I may not have power over this, but goddammit, I'm a proud Canadian and Canada will always exist. Say that I disagree with my friend Donald. And we do not talk politics, but in this regard, I believe in Canada more than I believe in him. Say any of that. Say it.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Let's not say it.

• 29:15Pablo Torre?

  And so the citizens of Canada have been filling this rhetorical void. They have rebranded the great one as the great once. Which I think is a pretty good nickname. And they've also launched petitions to rename the various Wayne Gretzky drives and parkways and arenas all across the country. But the most telling thing, I think, was how people reimagined his statue.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  People smeared feces on the statue in Edmonton of Wayne Gretzky.

• 29:45Speaker 15

  A statue of Canadian hockey icon Wayne Gretzky has been vandalized in Edmonton. It appears to be the latest show of displeasure with Gretzky in recent months for his friendship with US President Donald Trump amid his trade war with Canada.

• 29:59Speaker 16

  They saw what appeared to be and strongly smelled like feces all over that statue. Think about what you have to do to do that.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  You ever try to get a poop sample and have to give it to the doctor? Like, this is like, this is worse.

• 30:14Pablo Torre?

  Which now brings us to the [bleep] slinging involving Janet Gretzky. Because Janet, who is Wayne's American wife, as we said, who Wayne lives with in America, posted this on Instagram. Quote, "I have never met anyone who is more proud to be a Canadian, and it has broken his heart to read and see the mean comments." End quote. And the comments, in case you were wondering, in response to this claim of unparalleled Canadian pride, were also mean. They were so mean that Janet then deleted this post, apparently, which led a friend to come to Wayne's defense.

• 30:58Speaker 17

  Donald Trump is defending Wayne Gretzky and rebuking criticism the great one is facing over their close ties. Trump posted on social media saying, "Wayne is my friend and he wants to make me happy," adding, "He's the greatest Canadian of them all, and I'm therefore making him a free agent, because I don't want anyone in Canada to say anything bad about him." Trump goes on to say Gretzky supports Canada the way it is, as he should, even though it's not nearly as good as it should be as part of the greatest and most powerful country in the world.

• 31:31Pablo Torre?

  And it will not surprise you to learn that he goes on, on and on about Wayne and Janet, and it's just him taking the greatest Canadian of all time, which he calls him, and taking him as his own.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  And trying to defend him. One of the astonishing things to me in this is when Trump says that, obviously Wayne's gone to him and gone, "Get him off my back, Donald." Right? Which shows such a fundamental misreading of this, if that's what happened. If he asked Donald to say something, defending him.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  That is such an unbelievable misreading of the mood in this country right now. That you wonder what planet he's on.

• 32:25Pablo Torre?

  It is the opposite of skating to where the puck is going, actually.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, exactly right. You're skating as far away from the puck as you are sitting in the stand. You are in your car, driving away from the arena to the airport to get on a plane and go somewhere else. The puck's over there and you are over here. And we're so mad. We are so mad. But at this point of the story, who has defended Wayne? Donald Trump? And Janet Gretzky? Has Wayne said anything to this point? No. Has he spoken to people privately? Yes. Has he said anything publicly? No. He eventually does get there.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  I don't worry about those kind of things because you can't make everybody happy. But trust me, I have no political power with the Prime Minister or the President. That's between those two guys and that's why you hold elections. And that's why people get to do what they want to do and say what they want to say.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  No one expects Wayne Gretzky, I'm gonna say this now, on behalf of Canada. Nobody in this country, there's 40 million people in this country, nobody expects Wayne Gretzky to go to Donald Trump and say, "Knock it off, no more 51st state," and expect Donald Trump to listen. We do not expect that. You are not our ambassador. We understand. Even though you have access to him, we know you're not gonna influence him. That's not the point. It's not the point. You have to say

• 33:55Speaker 03

  what all the politicians in this country of every stripe have said. "We will never be the 51st state." "We will always be Canada." And for Canada, especially Canada though, and I need to emphasize this. We have been the safest nation in the world. We had the baddest big brother in the world next to us. The biggest economy in the world next to us. The American military, the American economy. We are part of NORAD. We are part of NATO. The whole idea of NATO is you attack one of us, you attack all of us. And what does that functionally mean in the world? The United States of America.

• 34:32Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Everyone who grew up in this country grew up safe on a national level.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  More than any country, I would say, in the world. And now we're not. It's destabilizing.

• 34:46Pablo Torre?

  Oh, it's destabilizing, it is disorienting. It is that page in the history book where you're like, "Did someone just Photoshop Kash Patel into the luxury box next to Wayne Gretzky?"

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Kash Patel.

• 35:00Pablo Torre?

  And it raised questions that we at Pablo Torre Finds Out have been spending a couple of weeks investigating.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Oh, you guys are good at that.

• 35:16Pablo Torre?

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• 36:44Pablo Torre?

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• 38:09Pablo Torre?

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• 38:40Pablo Torre?

  All right, so Cash Patel, the guy in the luxury box who is watching history right next to the great one, the guy Trump appointed the director of the FBI and also the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which is a statement, now that I say it aloud, which once seemed even more improbable than feces-smeared statue of Wayne Gretzky at Edmonton.

• 39:07Pablo Torre?

  Because before Cash Patel was appointed to oversee the FBI and ATF and their tens of thousands of employees, Cash Patel was most famous for vowing in a book he titled "Government Gangsters" that he was going to go after his enemies. His enemies in the deep state.

• 39:25Speaker 18

  I'd shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I'd take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You're cops. Go be cops.

• 39:42Pablo Torre?

  And more recently, in fact, you may also recall how FBI Director Patel handled being questioned by Congress about the infamous Signal group chat that his fellow members of the Trump administration used to plan airstrikes on Yemen.

• 39:57Speaker 18

  I'm not going to comment on that.

• 39:58Speaker 19

  Because you're the Director of the FBI, you don't believe it's appropriate to comment on that?

• 40:03Speaker 18

  Because there's a process in place, there's an ongoing litigation and the National Security Council is reviewing this matter. And I'm not going to discuss any open or closed investigation.

• 40:11Speaker 19

  That ongoing investigation, literally, the lawsuit happened today or yesterday afternoon. And the idea that you don't have an opinion on this at this point is frustrating to me.

• 40:19Speaker 18

  No, it's not. I'm not going to prejudge any matters. And the men and women of the FBI will call the balls and strike.

• 40:25Speaker 19

  Reclaiming my time, sir.

• 40:27Speaker 18

  Not you.

• 40:28Pablo Torre?

  But something you may not know is that as of last week, Kash Patel had been removed from his duties as acting ATF Director without any explanation from the Trump administration. Although, there was one note from Reuters which reported that Patel, quote, "had not been a presence at ATF headquarters since the day he was sworn in." And so, part of what I wanted to find out today was what Kash Patel had been doing all of this time instead. It turns out that for more than a decade, Kash Patel has been playing for a team called the Dons. Now, I don't know if you're familiar, Bruce, with the world of adult men's rec league hockey?

• 41:15Pablo Torre?

  But we're entering the world of adult men's rec league hockey in and around Washington DC now.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  The Dons.

• 41:25Pablo Torre?

  The Dons.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  You're kidding me.

• 41:28Pablo Torre?

  A dynasty, Bruce. A dynasty in the apparently thriving Sunday night rec league scene in DC. This, by the way, is taking place, to set the scene in this part of the documentary, in Northern Virginia, at the Washington Capitals' practice facility, which is where Kash Patel's Dons, at one point, win 76 games in a row.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 41:51Pablo Torre?

  And so we here at Pablo Torre finds out, reached out to one of his teammates, one of Kash Patel's teammates on the Dons, Bruce, offering the condition of anonymity, because, you know, he's talking about the director of the FBI. And what this teammate told us about how Kash Patel spends his time is that FBI officials, quote, "know to leave him alone on Sundays. It's a well carved out thing," end quote. He's gonna be playing games for the Dons, and the FBI knows to let Kash Patel take the ice. And if it's not enough to just imagine that, we should also know that at one point in May of 2024, there was a fundraiser, and reportedly Kash Patel,

• 42:35Pablo Torre?

  whose arm was in a sort of brace at the time, was joking that he had injured that arm from, quote, "kicking the shit out of the deep state," end quote. But what really happened, we are informed, is that at the Dons championship game the year before, Kash Patel tore his bicep and didn't tell anybody. But because he is a hockey player, Bruce, because he is a genuine hockey guy, the Dons win, they take a team picture, he doesn't say anything to anybody, he, quote, "pounded beers in the parking lot," end quote, and then got surgery, and then presented this as a wound of kicking the shit out of the deep state.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Isn't it actually kind of relatable? There are very few things about this crowd that I find to be relatable. I find this to be relatable. That there are parts of your life that you are passionate about, that you believe in, that you carve out for yourself, which we all need, right? As the world goes in the direction it's going.

• 43:36Pablo Torre?

  Yes, we all need a third space, right? As they say.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:40Pablo Torre?

  And Kash Patel's third space is his Dons. It's this Sunday night game.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Is he any good?

• 43:47Pablo Torre?

  Well, Bruce, you should know that Kash Patel, scouting report on him as a hockey guy, we have that too. You know, he's not much of a scorer. Statistically speaking, last season, he had one goal, one assist in 14 games. According to the anonymous teammate, quote, "His slapshot from the point, sometimes they come head high and you gotta duck," end quote. Which, you know, targeting for the FBI director may be a little worrisome. But, and this is an earnest compliment, he's a hell of a defenseman.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, what position does Kash Patel play? So he's a defenseman. He's an undersized defenseman, I would say, based on the, on what I can tell from him.

• 44:28Pablo Torre?

  He's good at obstructing, as it were.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:31Pablo Torre?

  And in fact, on that note, we did reach out to the spokeswoman for Kash Patel, Bruce, and what she told us was that the story that his anonymous teammate had given us where Kash Patel was having those beers in that parking lot post-game was false. And she added, quote, "I don't doubt that there were some of these guys having beers. That's just not Cash," end quote. But, one of the things that brings us back to how we started the story is that the one game that Kash Patel was eager to miss for the Dons was in fact a couple Sundays ago, when, there he was on Long Island, as the Islanders were playing the Capitals in New York with Wayne Gretzky.

• 45:16Pablo Torre?

  And one other thing we learned, Bruce, is that the Dons group chat... Was electrified when they spotted their guy. And if you want to take a guess as to what platform they used to communicate, I will give you one chance.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  I gotta say Signal, Pablo.

• 45:36Pablo Torre?

  The Don's have a Signal group chat, Bruce.

• 45:41Pablo Torre?

  The Don's have a Signal group chat with Kash Patel and it was blowing up. And what Kash Patel's anonymous teammate did tell Pablo Torre finds out of seeing Kash Patel with Wayne Gretzky and Alex Ovechkin in this Make-A-Wish fever dream for the director of the FBI. He clarifies, quote, "About the chat, no battle plans on there, but we send a lot of memes and pictures and videos. That was the hot topic for the weekend. Everybody was very jealous and excited to see him on there. It wasn't in any of our bingo cards that he'd be with the great one for that," end quote.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  If you're a hockey guy and you get to meet Wayne Gretzky, you'll remember that the rest of your life.

• 46:25Pablo Torre?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  That's Wayne Gretzky, man.

• 46:28Pablo Torre?

  At no point in the chronicling here, am I saying that this is something that I am shocked to discover Kash Patel has been doing, but it's just funny that when it comes to here are my priorities, reportedly, as we understand it, number one, hockey. Number two, running the FBI. Number three, and a distant number three, the ATF to the point that he no longer is in fact running the ATF and has chosen number one and number two in some combination, depending on which day of the week that gets priority.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  I commend you for getting one of those guys to talk to you, actually, because I would imagine they'd be a little bit nervous about it.

• 47:07Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. I mean, we were, we are, I mean, eager to get on the record sources wherever possible. That one felt like a reasonable one to grant anonymity to. But luckily, that's not the only team that Kash Patel plays hockey on.

• 47:25Pablo Torre?

  So there is this thing, Bruce, called the Congressional Hockey Caucus in Washington DC. I don't know if you have an equivalent in Canada. Part of me suspects that the entirety of the Canadian governmental system is a version of this. But it's the guys who love hockey getting together and it turns out sponsoring last month, a bipartisan congressional hockey challenge. And this pits the lawmakers against the lobbyists. A very American ritual in that regard. And one anonymous teammate on this team told us that Kash Patel was in fact, one of the best players on the ice. That he did, of course, in true hockey guy fashion,

• 48:08Pablo Torre?

  hang around for beers in the locker room after that game as well. And so we were left wondering, like, can we get anybody on the record here? Just like any person in the DC American governmental hockey ecosystem to talk about Kash Patel. And so what we did was we reached out to the guy who formed the Congressional Hockey Caucus, a congressman named Mike Quigley from Illinois. And you just immediately realize, Bruce, in ways that I was, I was sort of, again, taken aback by, because it's been happening for so long, and I am not enough of a hockey guy to know about it. There's a real underground hockey scene in Washington. It's lawmakers, it's law enforcement. It's these house leagues and club hockey and beer leagues, all of that stuff,

• 48:53Pablo Torre?

  that does provide an escape. An escape at which you can bond with the people that you may otherwise be in great political tension with. But Kash Patel is somebody that Representative Quigley has been aware of for years. He's known him since he was a congressional staffer, Kash Patel was. Quigley sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They're going to be sitting in classified briefings together. And what he told us, in no uncertain terms, is that he's not quite afraid of Kash Patel's slapshot.

• 49:26Speaker 20

  I've skated with Hall of Famers, I can handle Kash Patel.

• 49:31Pablo Torre?

  He is, though, worried about actual retribution.

• 49:34Speaker 20

  You know, you try to have some common ground where you you realize there's more that there should be more that unites this country than divides us. I would say with the with respect, it's it's different with this administration. I honestly see it as a retribution tour. And it's not our imagination. Mr. Patel has said they are going to go after the people who are enemies of President Trump. He talked about journalists and a list of 60 people. And I'm not making it up. What I'm telling you is sport can be a great uniter, a great healer, and something you forget and remind yourself, you you know, you don't hate the person that you're that you're working with here in Congress.

• 50:18Speaker 20

  But I would tell you, even hockey has problems bridging the divide with with some folks.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  That's it, right? Is that

• 50:30Speaker 03

  when you argue about sports with people from other fanbases,

• 50:37Speaker 03

  you're still all

• 50:40Speaker 03

  in the same arena, if that makes sense, right?

• 50:43Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Like, you'll see, sometimes it goes up to the level of fights and like real animosity, but even even rivals are united in a love of something.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  And that's one of the great things about sports is that you can sit in a bar and watch a game and talk to someone you'd never talk to otherwise, right? You can you can bridge gaps with sports at its best.

• 51:07Pablo Torre?

  Absolutely.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  It can do that. And some of that world is gone. It used to be you could forgive Wayne Gretzky for being friends, whether he's a political Mr. Magoo, as you put it, or not, with Donald Trump. It used to be you could at least

• 51:26Speaker 03

  you could let it go. And now you can't let it go. Now the rules have changed. And I got to tell you, as someone who sits where I sit, it's not us that changed the rules, man. We didn't change how this game works. We didn't change the circumstances. We are reacting to the circumstances. And that's where I come back to Wayne, is that it was never unforgivable before.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  And now it is.

• 52:10Pablo Torre?

  There's a number of quotes we've been getting from these anonymous teammates and people who know Kash Patel, where they will all say, in the hockey context, "He's a normal guy. He's one of us. You think, based on the headlines, he's evil. You meet him and he is somebody who will play through a torn bicep, who will, you know, crush beers in the parking lot, who will just be one of the people that you want to win a game with." The point that I think you and Representative Quigley are both making, though, is that there is a danger to that takeaway.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:48Pablo Torre?

  When what it's enabling is the actual erasure of an entire country as a country and the freedoms of people when it comes to the basic expectations of what we're not supposed to do when you leave the locker room. That's the [bleep], Bruce, where I'm like, "I love sports as the lone monoculture we share. I say it all the time. I love being in the stands next to people who have none of the same beliefs, politically, musically, artistically, ideologically, whatever." But the very basic minimum threshold of respect, now it feels like sports has been

• 53:32Pablo Torre?

  perverted in order to be used to enable something that it would be irresponsible for us to not look into a little bit deeper.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  So what I wrote the day after I was named the coronavirus columnist is that Rudy Gobert might have saved the world. Because up until then, the virus was marching, but it wasn't real. It was ignorable. And then Rudy Gobert caught COVID, and by the end of the night, the NBA had stopped. By the next day, the NHL, Major League Baseball, every sport had stopped. Disneyland had closed its doors. The world had to pay attention, right? And I've thought about that in terms of what you just said. I've thought about that in terms of sports a little bit right now. And in terms of what's going on in terms of the United States. A lot of it is still ignorable. When the wires are being pulled out of the walls of the US government

• 54:26Speaker 03

  and it's going to kill a million and a half kids overseas, right? Because USAID was keeping those kids alive in all these different ways. That's monstrous. But it doesn't come to your door, right? Unless you read about it, even if you read about it, it doesn't touch you. When you talk about what's happening in terms of even the stock market, that's a harder one to ignore. Smarter people than me are looking at the global economy and going, "I don't like the looks of this."

• 54:55Pablo Torre?

  Oh, but it's already been spun. It's been spun, Bruce. We, this was always the plan. We, whatever was alleged to be the danger was never a danger at all, is what they are now plausibly saying.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  But the stuff that's happening, which is like the drumbeat of our world, the stuff that makes you feel normal. Sports is one of those things. And it hasn't been touched at all in all this, right? Like, it's just, it's just rolling along. And I think about that, and I don't know what the answer is. I'm not saying we should stop sports or anything like that. But I'm saying that like, the bread and circus thing becomes more and more acute. The closer, the closer you get as an empire falls apart, right?

• 55:34Pablo Torre?

  Bruce, I love circuses. I love bread. I love all of this. We both do. The question of the bread and the circus, though, is what are we being distracted from?

• 55:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:51Pablo Torre?

  And when the stakes of that distraction, when the very thinly veiled subtext of this box at this record-setting game is, here is Donald Trump's good friend. Here is his director of the FBI. Here is Canada's favorite son that doesn't want to acknowledge the basic thing that Canada has been begging him to do. We aren't so much distracting as we are daring, daring everybody to say what's obvious here. And using sports and it's, and it's... It's metaphorical potency to turn it into something that isn't as clearly

• 56:36Pablo Torre?

  fucked up as it is.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Last weekend, a bunch of people showed up in the streets in America, right? Big towns, small towns, all over.

• 56:44Speaker 21

  And good evening, I'm Kathy Warren.

• 56:46Speaker 22

  And I'm Jonathan Gonzalez. Now, from New York City to LA, demonstrations across the country have drawn thousands of people.

• 56:52Speaker 21

  Protesters are speaking out against President Trump's policies and Elon Musk's forced layoffs across government agencies.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  And there was a moment where I'm sitting there and I'm looking through like the footage from all this. When I was watching those people in the streets, I got emotional, man. It reminded me that it doesn't have to be this way. Right? It reminded me that people can fucking fight. And you don't have to go along with it. You don't have to pretend it's normal. That hockey game, they pretended it was normal. But I'll say this, like, when Canada, what's the slogan that Canada has adopted as its national rallying cry? It's hockey related, but it's not related to Wayne Gretzky in any way as a player.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  It is as far away from Wayne Gretzky as a hockey player as it can possibly be. It is related to the guy whose record Wayne Gretzky broke for the all-time goal record in the NHL. It's Gordie fucking Howe, elbows up. Because if you fucked with Gordie, Gordie would come find you in the corner. Gordie would do that in his 50s. Elbows up. Wayne Gretzky was the hockey player none of us could be. Gordie was the hockey player we told ourselves we were. Just a tough motherfucker. The baddest guy, right? That's who we're trying to tell ourselves we are right now. Canada wants to be Gordie Howe right now.

• 58:25Speaker 03

  That's the song we're singing to ourselves.

• 58:27Pablo Torre?

  Bruce, I just wanted you to know, I think there are a lot of Americans whose elbows you can count on.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  Uh, buddy, that's the other thing we all remind ourselves up here, by the way. And that's what I remind a lot of people in conversations that I have up here. There's a lot of good Americans, man. Millions. It's a lot of good Americans.

• 58:55Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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