Joe Borovich holds an original Vancouver Canucks logo at his home in West Vancouver. Borovich created the logo in 1970 while living near Pacific Coliseum. His design beat out dozens sent in from around the globe. Photograph by: Arlen Redekop , Vancouver Sun

Sometimes it’s easier to pinpoint the precise moment love ended than when it began. Joe Borovich remembers the day: Oct. 11, 1978.

“I loved hockey all my life,” Borovich explains. “I’d never played except for road hockey, but I was born in the East End near the Forum. And all of a sudden, I hated hockey. I couldn’t believe it. You look at Detroit, Toronto and Montreal, and those colours are there forever. Then you looked at this.”

Borovich was staring, slack-jawed, at the mustard-yellow jerseys the Vancouver Canucks unleashed for their season-opener at home against the Colorado Rockies in 1978. Where the Canucks’ stick-in-the-rink crest used to be — the one designed by Borovich for lovely blue, white and green uniforms when the team entered the National Hockey League in 1970 — players instead were accessorized by a traffic-cone orange flying-V that ran from shoulders to crotch. There were Vs on their pants, Vs on their socks.

They looked like Oh Henry! chocolate bars, although the Canucks’ new yellow, orange and black uniforms came to be known around the NHL as Halloween suits.

A future Vancouver general manager, Brian Burke, later described the home uniform’s base colour as “puke yellow.”

Greg Douglas, the Canucks’ original communications director, saw the new uniforms and “wanted to slash my wrists.”

Art, of course, is subjective. Stan Smyl, the Canucks’ director of player development, made his NHL debut in the Halloween suit and played his entire career in black.

“I loved that jersey,” he says. “It was my first year in the NHL. That was my jersey and I was going to do everything to wear it proudly. To this day, that’s how I feel about it.”

The flying-V was replaced in 1985 by an actual, marketable crest — a flying skate that tilted downward on a circle of red and yellow streaks that looked like a plate of spaghetti.

But when the Canucks finally ditched the puke yellow in 1989 and wore white at home, trimmed in yellow, red and black, both the logo and the uniform looked pretty good.

Trevor Linden, Pavel Bure and Kirk McLean wore it in 1994 when the team made it to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final (Version 1.0), and the Canucks will wear the retro black road version of that uniform today against the Toronto Maple Leafs to help mark the 20th anniversary of Rogers Arena.

“I know a lot of our guys have requested a jersey for themselves,” Linden, now the Canucks’ president, says. “A lot of them were born too recently to remember it or have seen it. It’s special to me because it’s special to fans. That 1994 playoff run was really impactful for hockey fans here.

“There is value to continuity. Having said that, we have an interesting (uniform) history. Changes happened for different reasons. But I think we’re proud of our history.”

Unable to win the Stanley Cup in 45 years, one of the defining characteristics of the Canucks’ organization is their ever-changing uniform, which when fully collected looks more like a wardrobe for Siegfried and Roy than for an NHL team.

Some of Vancouver’s “third jerseys” have been truly ghastly. A black and flaming red version, bisected diagonally, was hideous. Another alternate jersey bled from dark blue to dusty rose, as if there had been a tragedy in the laundry room.

More recently, the Canucks went 0-3 in the Vancouver Millionaires’ maroon jersey, which was pretty cool except it was accompanied by cream pants so transparent that former Canuck Roberto Luongo tweeted a photo of Eddie Lack’s skid mark.

The yellow-to-white-plus-black base uniforms survived 19 years before the team, under new owner John McCaw, switched in 1997 to navy, maroon, silver and light blue, fronted by a new logo that featured a C giving birth to a killer whale. A decade later, under Vancouver-based owner Francesco Aquilini, the Canucks finally restored their first colours — royal blue, white and green — retained an updated version of the Orca crest and brought back the stick-in-rink logo as a shoulder patch.

“Whenever anybody starts talking about doing something dramatic, we say, ‘OK, let’s go online and look up the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, the Green Bay Packers, the Original Six (NHL teams) and see what they’re doing,’” Canucks chief operating officer Victor de Bonis says. “They may tinker a little bit because you do evolve and you do adjust to the market to create some energy. But long-term, they’re not changing their (colours) and their branding and how they portray themselves to the fan base.

“I was there when the yellow jersey came out of the dressing room. I was at that game. I was very surprised. I didn’t understand it — and I still don’t understand it very well, either.

“Over the years, we’ve tried to get back to what feels right, given the history of the team and where it has come from. That’s where we think we are with our current primary jersey.”

The Canucks’ colours are outstanding, especially at Rogers Arena since the NHL decided home teams must wear their dark jerseys (thus ensuring virtually every visiting team wears white and fans in each city see the same two colours night after night after night). Vancouver’s blue jerseys pop under television lights.

All these years later, it is still difficult to believe the organization under local owner Frank Griffiths banished these Pacific Northwest colours for yellow V-necks after paying a San Francisco marketing firm $100,000 to re-design the uniforms.

The rationalization from the company, Beyl and Boyd, was amusing then and is downright riotous now.

Here was design partner Bill Boyd’s explanation to famed Vancouver sports columnist Jim Taylor in 1978: “Colours are read by rods and cones in the eyes and the input travels along different sets of nerves. With the Canuck uniforms, we are going from the coolest of colours, blue-green, to the hottest, red-orange. The cool colour is passive, the hot one aggressive. Plus the black. It’s the contrast of colours that creates emotion. White produces no response at all, so we went with yellow, which is warm, pleasant, happy. What we are attempting to create is an atmosphere that will help create the happy, upbeat, aggressive player.”

Sounds like 100 grand.

“Coming from the New Westminster Bruins, I don’t think I needed a black uniform to be tougher,” Smyl says. “Usually when (opposing) players were talking to me it was because they weren’t happy the way I was playing against them. But … you’d hear things like, ‘Hey, it’s not Halloween.’

“As much as I was proud of that V, I knew it wasn’t an NHL crest you could hang your hat on. So, I knew they would come out with something else. Because I went to a lot of Canucks games when I was playing (junior hockey) in New Westminster, I’m a big fan of the blue, white and green.”

So is Borovich, the retired graphic artist who could see the Pacific Coliseum from his house when he won a contest to design the Canucks’ first uniform.

“There were applications from all over Europe, the United States and Canada,” Douglas recalls. “And the guy we chose lived in a basement suite across the street from the Coliseum. He came up with blue for the Pacific Ocean, green for the B.C. forests and white for the snow-capped mountains. It was perfect. He was a big star. People would congratulate him on the street.”

“I had other colour combinations as well, but that was my primary design and they liked those colours right away,” Borovich says from his home in West Vancouver. “I got work because of it. I’d show my portfolio (to clients) and then get to the page on the Canucks design, and people said: ‘You did this?’”

Borovich loves hockey again and loves the Canucks, who invited him to the ceremony nearly a decade ago to announce the repatriation of the original colours.

“One day I hope before I drop dead, they’ll win the Stanley Cup in that uniform,” he said.

Borovich turns 77 next week.

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