Vancouver Canucks at the Westin Hotel, Calgary (1990 or so)

It's not that all my Calgary hotel memories are this old (like my story of seeing the Queen at the Palliser), it's just that I think of them when certain hotels come to mind.

So here's a story that happened at the Westin, one of Calgary's top-end downtown business hotels.

Not being a hockey groupie, I'm not sure whether all the NHL teams stay at the Westin when they come to Calgary, but I suspect a lot of them do.

Sometime long ago, around 1990, I was a speaker at a business conference at the Westin. There was a dinner and I must have ducked out early, because I remember being almost alone in the lobby except for two other people. One was the bellman. The other was carrying a stuffed armadillo.

We don't see many armadillos this far north. None, in fact.

So, while I was trying to see the armadillo without staring, I completely missed noticing the guy carrying it. It was Igor Larionov, a Russian superstar centre who came to Canada in 1989 and played for the Vancouver Canucks for three years. Like I said, I'm not a hockey groupie. The bellman filled me in later. The Canucks had just played an exhibition game in Texas and had obligingly stopped over in Calgary for a beating by the Flames on the way home.

That is probably the most interesting thing I've seen at the Westin. And that's no small claim. For several years, my office faced the hotel and I was regularly treated to Calgary's own version of Ugly Naked Guy on the Road.