Monday, December 07, 2015

Mario Lemieux Street: time to rename Jogues in Ville Emard after local hockey great

Mario Lemieux lived here
  Isaac Jogues move over.
  It's time for Mario Lemieux to take over.
  We call on Montreal to rename the four-block Jogues Street to Mario Lemieux Street.
  Why?
   Not only because Mario Lemieux might have been the greatest player to ever play hockey, but also for another reason.
  Mario's parents Pierrette and Jean Guy Lemieux moved to 6700 Jogues in 1960 and stayed there well after Lemieux became a superstar hockey player.
   Jean-Guy and Pierrette could have lived anywhere thanks to their son's riches, but they chose to remain in their humble home.
  So clearly they liked living in humble Ville Emard.
  They only moved a few years ago, in fact.
  As for Mario Lemieux, he is a classy guy who showed great perseverance and played for his country many times and is surely the greatest hockey player ever to come from Montreal.
   Montreal Canadiens' General Manager Marc Bergevin is a lifelong friend of Lemieux's, as is Jean-Jacques Daigneault as the three played together as kids.  They, among others, could leverage their influence to get a name change done.
   If you're wondering who will lose their street name with such a switch, it appears to be a French missionary named Isaac Jogues, born in 1607 who tried to convert natives to Christianity and was tortured and maimed by Iroquois in 1642. He was massacred in 1646 and canonized in 1930.
    Consider that nothing is named after Lemieux in Montreal, whereas Laval has named an arena after a far more obscure character with much weaker ties to his area, we're talking about journeyman forward Hartland Monahan who left Montreal for good in 1970.  
   Lemieux meanwhile, scored 690 goals in in 915 games and is the eighth all time points scoring leader with 1723 NHL points and is behind only Wayne Gretzy for points-per-game.
   Coolopolis does not usually encourage street renamings. This one, however, is so obvious that it just needs to be done. 

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