Hockey Dreams (17 page)

I suppose it is hard to give hockey a mythology the way people do with baseball. The great game — a full count with two out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. The echoes fall flat on the metal scrapers and shovels that litter our dooryards, the ice that pans and riddles our streets. The wind and snow over windows covered in plastic and the smell of wood smoke on bright frozen evenings down on the river.

Our great games are so
fast
there is no
singular
moment of reflection. Yet Lemieux takes a pass from Gretzky and buries a wrist shot to beat the Soviets. There is a secret in its heart that baseball cannot know.

I told my Spanish friend that our game was no longer ours, and was being changed, slowly each and every year.

And I told her that you cannot change the game continually to suit the fans — who are not fans. You cannot dress it up to suit people south of the border. To take one degree centigrade of temperature away from those snowy nights to make people who don’t
like
snow, enjoy the game, is to lie about why it is important to you, in some profound and fundamental way.

And with my country disappearing, hockey seems to be the only thing, plaything that it is, that binds us together. Bright yellow pucks and four fifteen-minute quarters is what is being
discussed in those boardrooms south of us. All of a sudden you have the feeling that our Northern boys are like ancient gladiators brought in for a spectacle. They keep changing the rules to try to draw the best crowd.

Seven thousand fans turn out for a game at the Meadow-lands. Yet it is, and Hamilton is not, considered a hockey market. The Winnipeg Jets are going to Phoenix, Arizona. The Quebec Nordiques — become some kind of avalanche. The names will get cuter as time goes on. Edmonton will go within a year or so. Perhaps Calgary.

The Fox network lost money showing the NHL playoffs. So you can imagine what kind of state Mr. Bettman is in. The design of the net might change — to make it look more like a basketball net — or the centre line might go again, as the old Colonel wanted. And then slowly, perhaps maybe, the ice itself will go. Rollerblades will take over. Hoola girls will dance. Or maybe disco music will play during the game itself.

Yet after all of this, the kids in my old home town will still be paying their dues out on the roads, and on the river. And we will see a heritage commercial on a movie screen to remind us that it once was ours.

I will tell you where we were going that afternoon in 1989 when Paul told me about his uncle. We were going to visit his brother Stafford who had not been home in months. Stafford did not need to be hoodwinked into believing he was going to be okay.

By 1989 everything to Stafford was a shadow. He still
managed to read with a magnifying glass. That afternoon he was reading about chess. He was going to become a great chess player — the Bobby Fischer of Newcastle.

The room he lived in was piled with books. His tiny little body was sitting in a housecoat over near the window. His beard was blond and scraggly, and behind this beard was still the same childlike smile. He had a miniature chessboard set up and was playing himself. He said he was winning but that part of him was cheating because he knew what it was he was going to do.

He knew me instantly because of my walk. On his wall was an autographed picture of Bobby Orr scoring that leaping goal against St. Louis. And of course, there was a picture of Gordie Howe.

There was a picture of kids on the rink taken in 1961. I was not in the picture, but far in the background a blurred figure stood alone. It was Michael. He looked so tiny to me now. I was at an age where he could have been my son. And in a petrified way, in my mind, whenever I thought of him, he would remain that way, a still-life in a blurred winter picture, forever. At times I would wish he had been my son, to take some of the pain away.

“That’s when Michael was getting the big game going against the Bantam As,” Stafford reminded me.

I had forgotten all about that. The years drifted back. In the picture there were houses that are no longer, that have been swept away. Tobias with his crinkly hair and smile. Little
Ginette with her black woollen pants and a pair of huge woollen mittens hanging onto a goalie’s broom. Michael in the background. One of the nets Michael had made, which seemed so wonderfully professional to us back then, and the endless stretches of grey desolate windswept river and snow.

“Pile it on Miramichi,” Stafford said, glancing over blindly at that picture and lighting a cigarette.

There was also a broomball trophy near that picture. It came from that broomball league he had joined. Everyone who ever played in the broomball league got a trophy.

There was a picture of a girl who Stafford had dated for a year or so back in the early seventies, about the time of the Summit Series when Stafford became a hippie. She had gone from his life, drifted away.

There was also his archery set. Stafford had decided to become a great archer a few years before. Often he would stand in the field behind his house, shooting arrows blindly about. Missing the target the arrows would fly into a sundeck where his neighbours were barbecuing. Finally Paul talked him into giving it up, unless he had someone to supervise him.

Stafford’s day consisted of books, very few people in this rooming house, would know about: Tolstoy, Carlyle, Chekhov, Yeats. And cigarettes. And rum. He would trudge to the library for his books, and on the way back he would stop in at the liquor store, then make his way back through town to his room.

His brother’s prolonged lecture to him that afternoon — a
fatherly lecture, filled with a good deal of ribald joking, didn’t seem to matter. After the lecture was over Stafford offered us all a drink.

The grey afternoon filled the room. A few little house plants sat on a crooked table, along with his friend, Speedball, a little red-eared turtle.

He asked about the books I wrote and if I was ever going to do a book on him. I told him that if I did I would promise not to tell the truth.

He asked me one favour, to help expose — or do an exposé on — how magazines and newspapers in the States didn’t, and couldn’t, tell the truth about our sport, or what it meant to
our
hearts. Because their whole moral problem was based on hiding Canada, and its contribution.

He started to riffle through tons of papers that he had collected, clippings from the Associated Press,
Knight Ryder
, Reuter and
Sports Illustrated
. Articles any Canadian would know dismissed us. He had articles underlined and circles drawn about paragraphs. The words
liar liar pants on fire
written in some margins.

But then he took the heart out of his own request by adding, “What does it matter — I don’t think anything can ever be done about it now.”

And he smiled at us again, raised the glass to his lips and blinked.

On the way home Paul told me that Stafford had become a referee at broomball matches.

“A referee?” I said.

“We couldn’t talk him out of it. He became a referee.”

Paul was silent a second, and then he asked me if I remembered that game — the game so long ago against Boston when our home town referee, Tuff, went insane with power.

“Yes vaguely,” I said.

“Stafford became mad with power. He’d blow the whistle on a breakaway, give penalties to people who’d just stepped on the floor —”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“ ‘Are you blind?’ they’d yell at him. ‘Who told you —’ Stafford would yell back. My dad and my brother would go to the rec centre to protect him. One night a few of them beat him with their brooms — as he tried to crawl to the door. ‘I’m the ref,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s my job — it’s what I do.’ ”

Stafford finally retired from refereeing. But he still was in a hockey pool, with three town councillors, and the mayor, and had made himself captain of his team. He would trade players without his partner’s knowledge. Last year when they thought they had won the pool, he had to inform them that he had traded three-quarters of their players away, “on spur-of-the-moment deals” and they had lost seven hundred and sixty dollars.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

He had gotten in a fight in the town hall with a councillor over this.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

He was now going to start his own hockey pool — and make it nationwide. He would be at the centre of a vast wheel of hockey pools and would run them by computer from his room. Although he didn’t have the slightest idea about computers yet he was sure it would work.

“You know what the trouble was with
his hockey pool
don’t you?” Paul said, as we walked along a part of the King George Highway, where we could see our vast and sweeping river.

“What was the trouble?”

“Well of course it was this: He will have nothing to do with a Swede, or a Russian — he had one Czech player once, but got rid of him for Pat Flatly. Finally, he works his pool around so he will have nothing but Detroit Red Wings — with Mark or Marty Howe.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Now no one wants him in a pool — and so he has taken up chess.”

“Is he good at chess?”

“Not very. He has to continually cheat against himself to win.”

T
HE
B
ANTAM
A
S MADE IT
to the finals in our North Shore in 1961. They were to do better as time went on. They beat Campbellton by a goal, and just missed making it to the provincial championships. For the next five or six years we
who could never ever do it
would follow those players about the Maritimes. They would bring us some of the best high-school hockey — along with our arch-rival Chatham — that the river has ever seen. A few, as I said, would get a chance at the pros. A few like Phillip Luff, as I said, would struggle for years to attain what was impossible for them.

I remembered this as people remember things, by association. Paul was talking to me that afternoon in 1989 about Stafford and his chess, his hockey pool and of his request to me that I write something about hockey, and how it pertains to us.

I suddenly thought of the dance. The dance that was given for the benefit of the Bantam As after their season, just before we went on our trip to Boston.

It was held in the church basement, and everyone went
to it. The Midgets and Juveniles and Bantams danced. There were records playing. Elvis and Fats Domino, Buddy Holly.

There were also records of Frank Sinatra and Hank Williams. Strange jiving dances we’ve mostly forgotten now.

“Little Darling” played all afternoon.

Kids like myself spent the afternoon and early evening — the dance got over at 8:30 — running about drinking Coke and eating cookies that were donated by the mothers.

Some of the older boys had girlfriends but most of us didn’t know what a girl was. The windows were blank, and the cold afternoon seemed to seep through. Most of the girls danced by themselves, their faces red, their hands sweaty, their dresses twirling about. They actually wore bobby socks.

And in the midst of this memory, a moment. Stafford, dressed in a white shirt and tie, his blue blazer buttoned, his brown shoes polished to a shine, dancing next to a crowd of girls jiving together.

He did everything they did — except he did it by himself.

And then he did other things too — crawled about on the ground, with his hands up in the air, showing them the bottom of his feet, and then trying to stand up like a cossack. He kept bumping into them and saying, “Excuse me.” And he kept trying to wave me over to dance with him, but I wouldn’t.

“Get out of here, squirt,” one of the girls finally said pushing him away.

“Peewee,” Stafford said innocently, “De-fen-ce — Snap Dragons.”

He danced in and about them as if he was stickhandling down the centre of the ice, passing the greatest players in the world, singing along to a song he knew and they didn’t seem to understand.

I left for Boston the next afternoon, a house league Peewee with a group of Bantam As — in my father’s Buick — heading down, past Fredericton into Maine. I lay most of the way in the space between the back seat and the back window, listening to songs, and chewing licorice.

We were giving up some of the playoffs, because we wouldn’t be able to get them on American television (really nothing much has changed in that regard in 35 years). I would miss the elimination of Montreal. Although they had finished first in 1960–61, they were a tired team. Montreal was like Bonaparte’s army. Over that season, though tops in the league, and Stanley Cup champions, Les Canadiens were much like the French army after the Battle of Borodino, outside of Moscow. Though they seemed victorious, they were mortally wounded, not only physically, but morally.

The one thing very interesting about the trip down to Boston was travelling with my dad. My dad has narcolepsy — the sleeping sickness — so he would often be sound asleep at various points in the trip while still behind the wheel, and still travelling at 60 miles an hour.

The others in the car wouldn’t know this. Nor would we divulge this information to them. That is, that the man driving them was dead to the world. They’d all be sitting
in the back seat singing hockey songs.

My brother and I
would
know. We’d continually watch for the sign; his head to drop, with his hat pushed forwards. My brother and I had lived with this so long we hardly worried about it. Every now and again we’d yell:

“Father —
run
! Father! Run run run!”

And by God that’s what would happen. He would pull over on the freeway — a 210-pound man. And he would jump out of the car, and start to run away — oblivious to where he was, until he became a spot on the horizon.

“Anything wrong?”

“What’s the trouble?”

“Where is your dad going?”

“Is he a criminal?”

My brother and I would be silent, as you usually are when keeping a family secret. And then the spot would grow bigger and bigger, and there he’d be, on his way back.

Dad would get back in the car, give one of his characteristic smiles, shake the sleep out of his head, put the car back into drive, and of course, pop a speed pill. (He had a prescription for them. He could take four of them and go to sleep. One of them would keep most men awake for thirty-two hours.)