Hockey Dreams (6 page)

And that was it. Not only were Stafford and I not able to skate well enough to play hockey, we were too stupid to act.

“We could act better than any of them,” said Stafford, who didn’t care if he ever acted. And then he said something else. He said that on the day of the play, December 21st, he was going to
boo
. He would boo them off stage.

He also told me that the girls would be naked in the play. (They did wear pyjamas, and it was the first time I had ever seen a girl, other than my sister, in pyjamas.)

December 21st came. We filed into the auditorium class after class of boys and girls. I was sitting somewhere in the middle. From the sets and design of the costumes, the play might have taken place in 1930. Or perhaps 1960.

It was a play about a poor boy, played by John Sullivan who we all called John L. Sullivan, who would not join his friends or go out to play baseball. No one knew why. They teased and tormented him until a fatherly, moustached, philanthropist, played by Garth, rescued this poor boy at Christmas.

Garth made a moral speech to the small group sitting by the Christmas tree and called the boy forward. The speech was about the goodness of this child. The sacrifices this child made for his family — working to support his mother — that this child was the living, unrehearsed embodiment of Christmas day.

“It’s all in here,” Garth said sternly, to the audience, touching his breast with his hand. He then handed the boy a baseball glove, bat and ball, and said that from now on he would take care of this boy’s poor sick mother. Then Garth turned to the audience and thrust his arms out wide — and the lights
went down and a star shone, all proclaiming the spirit of Christmas.

When the lights went up, Garth was still standing there — all the children on stage with their heads bowed, John L. Sullivan wearing his glove and holding his bat against his shoulder, as if he knew what to do with it.

“Boooooo,” came a voice from the back of the audience, “Boooooooooooooooo.”

I bit down on a hard candy and broke a tooth filling. From December until mid-March of 1961 that tooth would plague me. My face would swell up like a bun, and on occasion I could only see out of one eye.

There was only one boo. Everyone else kept applauding, and Garth bowed, and finally the audience stood.

There is a mythology to the American sports person that we have long embraced — just as Mrs Grey’s crème de la crème did in that play. Of course it is the sports person in general; they fire our imagination, even heighten our personality. Soccer is one example.

Yet the Americans have taken this concept of sports hero and have manifested it in a way in which it has never been done before. Sports is somehow synonomous with the grandeur of the concept of America as a whole.

I have thought of that play many times. The reflections I have about it are many and varied. I have seen many movies like it. It is about generosity. It is also about American generosity
and baseball as a symbol of bravery, goodness and innocence. It was the present Mrs. Grey gave to us for Christmas.

This was something that Stafford and I knew, but couldn’t quite put our finger on — their heroes are so often our heroes, their movies and plays so often performed here, that we sometimes get confused when shown the American flag on their sweaters or hockey helmets — or worse the Canadian flag on ours.

But, regarding hockey, it gives us a strange ultra schizophrenia that, like most schizophrenics, goes a long way to hide its sickness from others and itself.

The Canadian psyche is not wrong, it is just different. Some of our greatest moments have been in defeat rather than in victory (sometimes we do blush when we win).

For example, George Chuvalo loses to Mohammed Ali and is considered by Ali to be the toughest man he ever fought. He was pummelled and never knocked off his feet. He fought back in every round.

To fight back like this a man must love as much as he ever hated. That’s one of the clues for my respect for boxers.

He never won the title himself, but might have won it against Terrell, except something happened — the judges. They awarded Terrell the decision.

A man I know, Yvon Durelle, knocked down Archie Moore three times in round one of their first fight. He lost in the eleventh round. If only the title fight had been held in New York, where the three-knockdown rule was in effect, instead
of Montreal, he would have won the Light Heavyweight Championship of the World.

Archie Moore, who was knocked out by Rocky Marciano, says that no one ever hit him harder than Yvon Durelle. For all his trouble, Durelle carried us with him into that ring and held us spellbound, staring into the face of one of the greatest boxers who ever lived without batting an eye.

But Chuvalo being the toughest and Durelle being the hardest puncher doesn’t translate into a world championship. Almost nothing in Canada does. But that’s okay.

The thing is, most of us never worry about this. It is a part of our nature not to worry about things such as this. Our dichotomy is so often the dichotomy of wanting to place rather than win. And that in so many ways is because of our association with the States.

Our nation is often at its best when it is fighting for others. Other people’s vision helps us tip the scales. Once Canadians have vision, a vision about what they have to do, they are a formidable force. On the ice, no one ever has to tell us why we are playing the Russians or the Swedes.

Hockey is where we’ve gotten it right.

Our country hosts the Olympics in 1976 in Montreal. We are the only country with the distinction of hosting the event and not winning a Gold Medal. Later in a movie starring Michael Douglas about the dreams of a long-distance runner who is looked upon as a loser until he finishes the race at Montreal,
we are given in the movie what we did not actually win in real life. The Gold Medal. For once a movie that lies about us works in our favour.

Things are like that in our country.

We come 22nd in cross-country skiing. Or maybe 23rd. Snow doesn’t seem to do us much good here. It just forces us into using anti-freeze.

Though we could beat the world at snowshoeing — even my mother-in-law at 70 could snowshoe rings around a rabbit — it is not an event in the Olympics. It won’t be an event until some European can beat some European rabbit at it also. That seems to be the way it goes with us. Toboggan racing would be just as exciting as the luge and not as explicit. Crunch five of us all together wearing toques and mittens. I could sit in the middle.

Even I can throw an axe, but axe throwing and fly casting and kettle boiling are out at the summer games.

Somehow we permit ourselves the luxury of being a country without a face and allow others to tell us what face we should wear. Somehow we want it that way.

Hockey’s where we finally got it right, but we’re not allowed to tell anyone that we have. So what do we do within the National Hockey League, and within the international hockey community — we tilt the mirror until we are out of focus again. The camera angle always slightly belittles us. For years we sent to the Olympics or World Championships those who could not do what those we couldn’t send could.

It is also strange that we have not made a movie about hockey where the camera angle gets us in focus. Perhaps it is the art form. Perhaps movies about sports like hockey and baseball, show them not to be childlike, but childish —
Slapshot
is a good example. And perhaps that is where the focus is turned. The TV movies made in Canada about hockey usually tend to want to show that hockey is a game without any fun; like our weather, it is dour. They seem to be written with an explanation that we too know the life here is horrible. That most find a hollow log as soon as we see a snowflake.

So most of us switch the channel. And watch movies about American sports heroes instead. American heroes, in whatever discipline, protest, demonstrate, and sign autographs for the world. They always, always go out to win. Their victories carry a moral authority. Their defeats, a lesson to us all.

Ali beats a Canadian on the road back into our hearts.

The old Mongoose defends the Light Heavyweight Championship by knocking out a boy from my river. If they are going to win, to be our heroes as well, they have to beat us in order to do it. They become the metaphor for what life can attain, and how the human spirit longs to attain it. To cheer against them is almost blasphemous at times.

In 1980 my first publisher phones to tell me that he is glad we received payment for my first novel from Russia before we beat them in hockey at the Olympics.

I tell him that we didn’t beat them, the Americans did.

He tells me it is the same thing.

I tell him that it isn’t and if he thinks for one second it is he should tell Mike Erusoni this.

He says that they did it for us.

Canada too shelters itself in the mythology.

At that same moment in Las Vegas a friend of mine is in a friendly argument with some sports fans who are telling him that America is the best hockey nation in the entire world. They have the Olympics to prove it. They have never heard of Lafleur. They have yet to hear of Gretzky. They yawn at the NHL. They have not heard a word about 1972, or the Canada Cup. In effect they do not know what a blueline is, or an offside. And they still will not by the 1992 Olympics.

Yet here is the mythology. The underdog, against the greatest team in the world — the Russian bear. The greatest team, the greatest players, the greatest passers and skaters who ever lived. The boys who have a system. The Americans need the Russians to be just that.

They need the Russians to be great, to be better than all the overpaid, overindulged pros. And they, a team of gutsy spirited boys from Boston and Minnesota, are about to take them on.

It is a wonderful, wondrous mythology. It is shown on television on Christmas day in 1982 in Bartibog, NB. Canadians join them with a booming voice. It’s as if Jacques Lemaire had never come over the blueline and let his shot go into the
top corner, as if Bobby Orr never skated end to end, dazzling the spectators. As if Esposito never mesmerized the Russians about their own net, turning about to score on that corner pass from Ellis.

To the United States, Canada is not considered enough of a foreign nation when they decide the outside world is a formidable opponent. So Canadian friends of mine sing the praise of the Russian system as well and long for the boys from Minnesota to beat them, and prove for
us
what freedom and grit can do.

When the movie about hockey is finally made, Canada plays no part. Truth here is always somehow beside the point.

During the Cold War, this setup between the Russians and Americans was where it was supposed to be. This was where the drama was in the American consciousness, whether it be swimming or basketball or hockey. Canadians as the greatest, as the best, as the most powerful, just got in the way of a good story line.

In that age — in the age of my youth — with all of those people I used to know, there was no campaign about childhood safety. No worry about going up the street alone. In that age Bobby Hull was still a kid, and just in the league. Or before him, when Rocket Richard was leading the Canadiens in their golden age, I went every day to get cookies from a woman five blocks away, like a mouse hooked on sugar water. Essentially my brother and I were out on our own at the
time we were six. I knew drunks and prostitutes from the age of nine.

And so too did a host of other children, some of them gone away for good now. When we played hockey we played it on a street, where drunks would stop to watch us, weaving back and forth, looking like the next snowflake to hit them would crumple them to the ground. They would offer us money to chase their hats, which tumbled end over end down an ice-slicked road. Earlier than that, I would watch from my bedroom window at night as kids played road hockey, and stopped to let not the car but the coal horse go by.

The fear others had of drunks and prostitutes and physical life in general surprised me when I went off to university. The distrust of physical life is in part a distrust at a certain level about hockey and about Canadian life.

But back to that earlier age. It’s not that mothers or fathers weren’t concerned. Perhaps it was a different concern then. Without mocking it, the accent put upon safety was not as politically correct.

Like all truths there is a severity to it. Children did get hurt and drowned and killed. Once that winter of 1960–61 chasing a hockeyball Tobias slipped on a crust of snow, went sliding on his bum and brand new coat, disappeared over the bank and fell — 32 feet. “I’ll get it,” was the last thing we heard him say. And then, “OHHH — Ohhhh.”

He was lucky enough not to fall over the embankment at its highest part — that would have put him right into the
chimney of one of the oldest houses on the river. A little Santa without bearing gifts. But he fell to the left of the house, and landed safely in a clump of burdocks and snow.

“Did you get it?” Stafford asked, who couldn’t see that he had fallen.

The house far below us, on the bank of the Miramichi River had escaped the great Miramichi fire. The night of the fire, in October 1825, they were waking a child about Tobias’ age on the kitchen table — that is, about 20 or 30 years before they played the first hockey in Nova Scotia.

They had six altar candles set about him, at his feet and head. He was dressed in a slightly pre-Dickensian coat and tails, attired in small boots. The great Miramichi fire had chased his parents to the river where they spent the night, up to their necks, leaving the child to rest where he was.

In the morning when the fire was over they walked back to the house. The candles had burned into the table, like little black smudges. The little child was still as solemn and as quietly dead, his hands folded about his wooden beads.

The child had fallen over that embankment like Tobias, chasing a ball. He had fallen. And in knowing those who fell 130 years later we saw his face.

Once a boy named Rory flew through the air on a toboggan and landed in the middle of the river. A fall of 100 feet. When we ran up to him he was clutching the toboggan straps so maniacally that we couldn’t pry him off.