Dispatches From the Sporting Life

by Mordecai Richler

  Other players, nourished by the Expos but now on the threshold of stardom—say, young Tim Wallach—may elect to shine under a large media sun. To keep him, come contract-renewal time, the Expos would be required to pay more than any other team could offer, because of intangibles it is simply not within their power to provide. Danny Menendez, director of Expos scouting, told me, “A player, if he becomes a star here, can get maybe $15,000 to $20,000 for an endorsement, but in the States he can earn from $50,000 to a $100,000 for the same thing. It adds up.”

  So though we have ostensibly leaped from Triple A to the biggies, it could yet prove an illusion. Possibly we are doomed to be a farm club forever. Developing talent for California and New York. Meanwhile, there is hope. Hope of a kind. Next year, or maybe five years from now, the Big Owe will be completed. A retractable roof will be set in place. And in this city of endless winter and short hot summers, it will become possible to watch baseball played under a roof, on artificial turf, in an air-conditioned, maybe even centrally heated, concrete tomb.

  Progress.

  19

  The Fall of the Montreal Canadiens

  Nineteen eighty, certainly, was the winter of Montreal’s discontent. During the last week of February, our sidewalks were still bare of snow. Unheard of here, bizarre beyond belief. In fact, only a piddling twelve inches of snow (in other years, one blizzard’s good blow) had fallen on our stricken city by February 24, the least amount since 1875, when the McGill Observatory first began to monitor the weather here. Knowledgeable Montrealers were shaking their heads. Incredulous, apprehensive. Something was wrong somewhere.

  That freaky winter our city had endured good news and bad news—all of it mind-boggling.

  The unpredictable Montrealer we leased to the country as prime minister for eleven bumpy years, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, had risen again like Lazarus, having announced his retirement the previous November, only to reconsider and lead the Liberal Party back into power in Ottawa in February. Meanwhile, in Quebec City, where the separatist Parti Québécois was rooted in provincial office, another Montrealer, that party’s cultural ayatollah, Dr. Camille Laurin, had pronounced again, urging French-only announcements at the Forum, hockey’s undisputed shrine. Moved to outrage, Montreal Gazette sports columnist Tim Burke wrote, “Only minds filled with mischief and vindictiveness could lean on the Forum to strike the language of 25 percent of its fans from its program. It is the kind of mentality dedicated to converting Montreal from a once-great metropolis into a sickly, swollen Trois-Rivières.”

  Within a couple of days another columnist, Jerry Trudel, countered with equal heat in the pages of Dimanche-Matin: “Aujourd’hui, Tim Burke me fait rire: il demeure, lui, l’un des nombreux bastions du bigotisme anglo-saxon dans cette mosaique balkanisée qu’on appelle le Canada.” Furthermore, a seething Trudel pointed out that when “ces bons Canadiens” were playing in Vancouver, and a stanza of the national anthem was sung in French, the team was greeted by a “crescendo des poumons.” Resounding boos from the yahoos in the stands.

  “Politics and sports don’t mix,” a slippery Guy Lafleur has insisted more than once, but that embarrassing night many of ces bons Canadiens were deeply offended. “Some of the players were so angry,” Serge Savard said, “they didn’t even want to go out on the ice.”

  Other nights, other yahoos. At a game in Toronto a separatist-inclined columnist who travels with the team remained resolutely seated in the press gallery when “O Canada” was sung, this time en anglais. A security guard, fulminating behind him, promptly jerked him upright by the scruff of the neck. “In this city,” he advised him, “we stand up for that song.”

  But it was not the eerie absence of snow, Trudeau’s second coming, or the continued squabbling between English and French Canadians that profoundly perplexed Montrealers that season, making it a winter of infamy. It was something far more incredible, infinitely more unsettling. In the longest November we could recall, the Montreal Canadiens, our fabled Canadiens, actually managed to lose six games in a row, something that hadn’t happened for forty years, not since the season of 1939–40, a year uninformed out-of-towners may remember for other reasons.

  A few days after the fall, I ran into Tim Burke in a favoured downtown bar. “The Canadiens,” he said, fuming, “are now on a two-game win streak.” And then, contemplating his rum and Coke, he added, “Can you imagine even thinking such a thing? A two-game win streak! The Canadiens!”

  Soon, floating on too many drinks, we were reminiscing about what was by common consent the greatest Canadiens team ever, the club that in 1959–60 won its fifth Stanley Cup in a row. In those days, Tim recalled, glowing, we would quit the Forum after a game as emotionally drained as any of the players were. Such, such was once the quality of the action.

  In Montreal, easily the most prescient of hockey towns, everybody you meet these days is down on the game. “There was a time, not so long ago,” a sportswriter told me, “when if I walked into the Press Club with two tickets for a game, I was immediately surrounded, I was going to make enemies—everybody wanted them. Now I walk in with two tickets and I can’t even find a taker.”

  The players, they say, are fat, indolent, and overpaid. Frenetic expansion, obviously fed by avarice rather than regard for tradition, has all but ruined a fine institution. The season is horrendously long and the present playoff system an unacceptable joke. Come mid-May the Stanley Cup finals have usually yet to begin. And yet—and yet—Saturday night is still Hockey Night in Canada. Diminished or not, les Canadiens sont là. And so am I, my eyes fixed on the television set.

  The legendary Canadiens.

  For as long as I can remember, le Club de Hockey Canadiens has always been something unique. Never just another hockey club. To appreciate that properly, what’s called for, first of all, is some grasp of my Canadian generation’s dilemma.

  An earlier generation, not mine, was raised to manhood on a British standard. The Boy’s Own Annual. “Fear God, Honour the Crown, Shoot Straight, and Keep Clean.” But those of us who were kids during the Second World War (flipping the diddle as the battles raged elsewhere) and went on to become teenagers in the late forties were a thoroughly American bunch. We endured Montreal and blackheads, but New York, New York, was our heart’s desire. The real world, the big time. We tolerated our own CBC but couldn’t wait for Monday night when Cecil B. DeMille presented Hollywood on Lux Radio Theater. We accepted Montreal welterweight Johnny Greco because he actually got to fight Beau Jack and others in Madison Square Garden. He was rated in Ring. Later, we also took Morley Callaghan seriously, because we found out he had been to Montparnasse with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, real writers, who hadn’t spat on him. We rooted for Deanna Durbin because, after all, she was a Canadian like us, a born flunk; but the star we yearned for and wanted to go the limit with was Lana Turner.

  As late as the fifties, Pierre Berton reveals in Hollywood’s Canada, there was a government-sponsored film group in Ottawa, the Canadian Cooperation Project, composed of grown men who actually compiled an annual list of film mentions of Canada that they had pried out of obdurate Hollywood. Such dialogue gems as, from Red Skies of Montana, “We tie in with the authorities north of the border in Canada,” or, from The Tanks Are Coming, “The Canadians were on our left and although taking a terrific pounding were holding magnificently.” In fact, the CCP was so effective that it was even responsible for the occasional dialogue change. Originally a line in New York Confidential read: “They caught Louis Engelday in Detroit.” But a rare combination of Canadian imagination and muscle altered it to read: “They caught Louis Engelday on his way to Canada.”

  If, in larger terms, our indigenous culture had always been suspect, most of it not for export, our ball clubs traditionally minor league, and even our prime minister a what’s-his-name, we were at least armed with one certitude, and it was that when it came to playing the magnificent game of ice hockey we were, indeed, a people unsurpassed. At least until the nefa
rious Russians moseyed into town in 1972.

  I can remember exactly where I was on VE-Day, on the day John F. Kennedy was shot, and when the first man landed on the moon. If I can’t recall what I was doing on the day Stalin died, I do remember that a journalist I know was in the elevator of the Montreal Star building the morning after. Ascending, she turned to a neighbour and said, “Stalin died.”

  The elevator operator overheard. “Oh my God, that’s terrible,” he said. “Which floor did he work on?”

  The point I’m trying to make is that on days that shook the world, or my world, at any rate, I was never on the spot until the night of September 2, 1972, when Team Canada tested our belief in God, the free-enterprise system, and the virility of the Canadian male by taking on the Russians at the Montreal Forum in the first of an eight-game series. A series, Tim Burke wrote in the Gazette, that the Canadian public viewed as something of a political Armageddon. Going into the contest we were more than overconfident—with pity our hearts were laden. The pathetic Russian players had to lug their own equipment. Their skates were shoddy. The players themselves had names appropriate to a plumbing firm working out of Winnipeg’s North End, but otherwise unpronounceable: Vasiliev, Liapkin, Maltsev, Mikhailov, Kharmalov, Yakushev, and, oh yes, Tretiak. Everybody but John Robertson, then with the Montreal Star, predicted that our champions would win all the games handily or, at worst, might drop a game in Russia. A matter of noblesse oblige. Robertson called for the U.S.S.R. to win the series six games to two. On the other hand, Alan Eagleson, one of the organizers of the series, ventured, “Anything less than an unblemished sweep of the Russians would bring shame down on the heads of the players and the national pride.”

  After Ypres, following Dieppe, Team Canada and our very own belated St. Crispin’s Day. Brad, Rod, Guy, Yvan, Frank, and Serge, once more unto the breach, once more for Canada and the NHL.

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remember’d;

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…

  We were only thirty seconds into the fray at the Forum when Phil Esposito scored. Some six minutes later, Paul Henderson, taking a pass from Bobby Clarke, scored again. But the final count, as we all know, was Communism 7, Free Enterprise 3. And our players were booed more than once in the Forum, ostensibly for taking cheap shots at the Russians as they flew past but actually for depriving us of one of our most cherished illusions. We already knew that our politicians lied and that our bodies would be betrayed by age, but we had not suspected that our hockey players were anything but the very best. If Team Canada finally won the series, Paul Henderson scoring one of hockey’s most dramatic goals at 19:26 of the third period in the last game in Moscow, the moral victory clearly belonged to Russia. After the series, nothing was ever the same again in Canada. Beer didn’t taste as good. The Rockies seemed smaller, the northern lights dimmer. Our last-minute win came more in the nature of a relief than a triumph.

  After the storm, a drizzle. Which is to say, the endless NHL season that followed was tainted, revealed as a parochial affair, and the Stanley Cup itself, once our Holy Grail, seemed suddenly a chalice of questionable distinction. So, alas, it remains. For the Russians continue to be the dominant force in real hockey, international hockey, with the Czechs and Swedes not far behind.

  But when I was a boy, and the Russians were still learning how to skate, the major league was right here. And furthermore, the most dashing and aesthetically pleasing team to watch, in the old vintage six-team league, was our own unrivalled Montreal Canadiens.

  Les Canadiens sont là!

  The legend began before my time, on the night of November 29, 1924, with Aurel Joliat, Howie Morenz, and Billy Boucher, the first of many fabled lines. On that night, their first night in the Montreal Forum, the line scored six goals, defeating the Toronto St. Pats, 7–1. “Of course,” wrote sports columnist Andy O’Brien, “the line had a lot of ice time because the Canadiens only carried three subs, while Georges Vezina (the Chicoutimi Cucumber) in the goal left back-checking superfluous.”

  Actually le Club de Hockey Canadiens even predates the NHL; it was founded in 1909, eight years before the NHL came along, and won its first Stanley Cup in 1915–16, with Vezina and Newsy Lalonde in the lineup. But the team didn’t enter into legend until 1923–24, when Howie Morenz arrived and the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup yet again.

  Morenz was our Babe Ruth. Alas, I never saw him play; neither was I present in what must be accounted the most tragic night in hockey, January 28, 1937, when Morenz, in a rush against the Chicago Black Hawks, crashed into the boards and suffered a quadruple leg fracture. He was still in the hospital early in March, complications set in, and the Stratford Streak was no more. His fans, French-Canadian factory workers and railroaders, had once filled the Forum’s cheap seats to the overflow, and to this day that part of the Forum is known as the “millionaires’ section.” “His body,” wrote Andy O’Brien, “was laid out at centre ice and the greats of hockey took turns as guards of honour around the bier day and night. Then a sportswriter with the old Standard, I arrived at the Forum to find the front doors jammed. I entered by the furnace room and, as I walked toward the Closse Street entry, the stillness made me wonder—was nobody else in the building? But there were fifteen thousand fans, quiet and motionless in a tribute to a man—and hockey—that has never been matched.”

  Morenz played on three Canadiens Stanley Cup winning teams, but with his passing a drought set in. The Flying Frenchmen, or the Habitants, as they came to be known, a team that has won the Stanley Cup twenty-two times, more often than any other club, did not claim it again until 1943–44, with the lineup that became a golden part of my childhood: Toe Blake, Elmer Lach, Ray Getliffe, Murph Chamberlain, Phil Watson, Emile “Butch” Bouchard, Glen Harmon, Buddy O’Connor, Gerry Heffernan, Mike McMahon, Leo Lamoureux, Fernand Majeau, Bob Fillion, Bill Durnan, and, above all, Maurice

  “Rocket” Richard.

  To come clean, this was not the greatest of Canadiens teams—that came later—but it remains the one to which I owe the most allegiance.

  In 1943–44, cousins and older brothers were overseas, battling through Normandy or Italy, and each day’s Star brought a casualty list. Others, blessed with a nice little heart murmur, stayed home, making more money than they had ever dreamed of, moving into Outremont. But most of us still lingered on St. Urbain Street, and we seldom got to see a hockey game. Our parents were not disposed to treat us, for the very understandable reason that it wouldn’t help us to become doctors. Besides, looked at closely, come playoff time it was always our pea-soups, which is what we used to call French Canadians in those days, against their—that is to say, Toronto’s—English-speaking roughnecks. What did it have to do with us? Plenty, plenty. For, much to our parents’ dismay, we talked hockey incessantly and played whenever we could. Not on skates, which we also couldn’t afford, but out on the streets with proper sticks and a puck or, failing that, a piece of coal. Saturday nights we huddled around the radio, playing blackjack for dimes and nickels, our eyes on the cards, our ears on the score. And the man who scored most often was Maurice Richard, once, memorably, with an opposing defenceman riding his back, and another time, in a playoff game against Toronto, putting the puck in the net five times.

  I only got to see the great Richard twice. Saving money earned collecting bills for a neighbourhood butcher on Sunday mornings, my friends and I bought standing-room tickets for the millionaires’ section. And then, flinging our winter caps ahead of us, we vaulted barriers, eventually working our way down to ice level. Each time we jumped a barrier, hearts thumping, we tossed our caps ahead of us, because if an officious usher grabbed us by the scruff of the neck, as often happened, we could plead, teary-eyed, that some oaf had tossed our cap down and we were only descending to retrieve it.

  Among the younger players on ice with the Rocket during the last years was the consummate artist who would succeed him as the lead
er of les Canadiens: Jean Beliveau.

  I was, by this time, rooted in London, and used to make a daily noontime excursion to a Hampstead newspaper shop especially to pick up the International Herald Tribune, seeking news of big Jean and his illustrious teammates. Such was their prowess on the power play that they were responsible for a major change in the NHL rulebook. The Canadiens, with the man advantage, could score as many as three goals in their allotted two penalty minutes. Consequently, a new rule was introduced. It allowed the penalized team to return to full strength once a goal had been scored.

  I didn’t get to see Beliveau play until 1956 and was immediately enthralled. He was not only an elegant, seemingly effortless skater but an uncommonly intelligent playmaker, one of the last to actually carry the disc over the blue line rather than unload before crossing, dumping it mindlessly into a corner for the others to scramble after, leading with their elbows. “I not only worry about him when he’s carrying the puck,” said Punch Imlach, then coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, “but about where the fuck he’s going once he’s given it up.” Where he was going was usually the slot, and trying to budge him, as Toronto’s Bill Ezinicki once observed, “was like running into the side of an oak tree.”

  Ah, Beliveau. Soon, whenever I was to fly home from England, I would first contact that most literate of Montreal sportswriters, my friend Dink Carroll, so that my visit might coincide with a Canadiens game, affording me another opportunity to watch big Jean wheel on ice. I was not alone. Far from it. In those halcyon days knowledgeable Montrealers would flock to the Forum to see Beliveau on a Saturday night as others might anticipate the visit of a superb ballet company. Big, handsome Jean was a commanding presence, and as long as he was on the ice, the game couldn’t degenerate into Ping-Pong: it was hockey as it was meant to be played.