Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  Serge’s death also left the Béliveaus with a tough decision to make about the governor general’s post. “Under normal circumstances,” Jean says, “we probably would have accepted. It would have been a great honour.” Instead, he could not sleep when he returned from Ottawa. He found himself sitting up Saturday morning at six o’clock, still pondering.

  “What are we going to do with this?” he asked Elise when she came downstairs. She didn’t know. If he wanted it, she told him, she would go. If she wanted it, he told her, he would make it happen. They did want it, but they wanted more to be there for the girls.

  “You don’t replace a father or a mother,” Jean says. “But there are a lot of things grandparents can do. I couldn’t leave them behind.”

  They decided they would just say they were retiring and leave it at that. If he made too much of the grandchildren and word got out, he worried it would draw attention to them they did not need. So he placed the call to say no. “He would have been fantastic,” says Chrétien, who then offered the prestigious appointment to Roméo LeBlanc.

  “He’s always been there for us,” says granddaughter Mylène Roy, now twenty-three and finishing up her fine arts degree at the University of Quebec. “He’s always the same with us, no matter if we were six or seven or twenty-one, twenty-two. Always the same. Never changed. He’s always so attentive in his own way. Always so patient. He’s always asking this, even now: ‘Is everything fine? Is there anything we can do?’ ”

  They lived nearby, close enough that the older Béliveaus could visit regularly, be there for sports, special school events and the invariable crises of the teenage years. They established rituals such as daily telephone checks, birthdays, anniversaries and Sunday get-togethers, usually swimming in the Béliveaus’ pool in good weather.

  Even on the day I meet the couple, Elise Béliveau had risen early to pick up Mylène’s younger sister, twenty-one-year-old Magalie, as she came off her night shift as a nurse at a Montreal hospital. Both Mylène and Magalie are deeply appreciative for what their grandparents did. In many ways, Jean Béliveau became both father and grandfather, a rock to hold on to in a time of turbulent waters.

  “He’s not so much of a talker,” Mylène says. “He’s always there, but more in a silent way. The way people see him in public is just the way he is with his family. It’s more of a … a presence …”

  Whatever Jean Béliveau became in life, it began in little Victoriaville. “My childhood was in no ways remarkable,” he wrote in his 1994 memoirs. “It was a typical French-Canadian Catholic upbringing, one hinged on family values, strict religious observance, hard work, conservatism, and self-discipline.”

  Laurette Béliveau, who died young at forty-nine, installed industrial-strength linoleum on the kitchen floor so Jean and his younger brother, Guy, could leave their skates on when they came in from the backyard rink for lunch. He still lists vegetable soup with a slice of crusty bread as a favourite meal. Arthur Béliveau drove for Shawinigan Water and Power. “A wonderful man,” Elise says of him. And one with his own ideas. When scouts came calling on his talented son, he turned them away. When teams tried to sign him to contracts covering more than a season, he would tell them, “In the spring, he belongs to me.”

  When the budding young hockey star left for Quebec City at seventeen, Arthur drove him to the bus stop in the company truck and said, simply, “Do your best, Jean—it will be enough.” It is but one of many Arthur Béliveau maxims that Jean carries to this day. Loyalty is important. You and only you will know when you have paid a debt. Your name is your greatest asset.

  It was in Quebec City that young Jean developed a love for children. He was such a star, even in junior, that he was given a 1951 Nash and a $60-a-week summer job driving about as the Laval Ice Cream Man handing out ice cream bars. Elise, whom he had met on a blind date, had to drive at first and, for months after he finally got his licence, had to do the backing up for him.

  Montreal was desperate for the tall youngster to come to the Canadiens, but he was not keen to leave Quebec City and Elise. When he graduated from junior hockey, he said he would thank the fans of the city by staying around another year to play for the semi-professional Aces, but ended up staying on a second season as well.

  Montreal finally signed him in 1953 for the unheard-of sum of $110,000 over five years. He was twenty-two and knew it was time to move on. In retrospect, however, he believes that delaying his National Hockey League career so long is what gave him a “maturity” other young stars may have lacked. “You’re eighteen years old,” he says, “and you come from a small town, from a quiet but strong family. For me, Quebec was the foundation. If I was ever to build on something, it would serve me.”

  He came out of Quebec City a hockey star, but also committed to children’s charity. His popularity had allowed the city to build a new, larger Colisée—jokingly referred to as “Chateau Béliveau”—but it also showed him another power. He had been helping a local priest, Father Bernier, by coming to an old stone shed the priest had set up as a sort of club for young people and was there the morning the floor partly caved in.

  “We better do something about this,” the young hockey player told the priest. And he has never looked back.

  It has been a life in the spotlight, one that is usually spoken of in terms of Stanley Cups and the Hall of Fame and the many awards he won for his skill on the ice. But that is only part of it. Jean Béliveau has also served as a father figure for his granddaughters. And for young players—Guy Lafleur first and foremost among them.

  There were times when he needed his own rock. Nearly seven years ago, he discovered an odd lump on his neck while shaving and underwent a gruelling radiation round that has, fortunately, left him cancer-free today. But it was tough. “If you don’t have faith,” Elise says, “you don’t have much.”

  On the verge of celebrating their fifty-third wedding anniversary this June, the Béliveaus are moving out of the house in Longueuil they purchased in 1955 for $18,000. In May, they will move “down the street” to a condominium with a “fabulous” night view of Montreal—the city where, for more than half a century, his own light has shone brightest.

  There are no regrets, he says. When the chance to be governor general came up, he says, they did what any grandparents would do under similar circumstances.

  “But it would have been great,” he says, smiling shyly. “From that little ice surface behind the house in Victoriaville to make it all the way to governor general, it would have made my life full.”

  “You’ve had a full life,” Elise corrects.

  “Yes,” he says. “I know.”

  Jean Béliveau was named a Companion in the Order of Canada as well as honorary captain of the 2010 men’s Olympic hockey team that went on to win the gold medal in the Vancouver Winter Games. He has had further health issues, including a small stroke in 2010 that briefly hospitalized him, but early 2011 found the Béliveaus happily living in their new apartment and enjoying his eightieth year.

  PLAYING AGAINST BOBBY ORR

  (Fiction: excerpted from The Last Season, 1983)

  In hockey it is called a “rep,” short, of course, for “reputation.” Mine grew out of North Bay: one game, one moment, the clock stopped, the game in suspension—and yet it was this, nothing to do with what took place while clocks ran in sixty-eight other games, that put me on the all-star team with more votes than Torchy. Half as many, however, as Bobby Orr. But still, it was Orr and Batterinski, the two defensemen, whom they talked most about in Ontario junior.

  Bobby Orr would get the cover of Maclean’s. I almost got the cover of Police Gazette after the Billings incident. My rep was made. The North Bay Nugget’s nickname for me, Frankenstein, spread throughout the league. I had my own posters in Kitchener; there were threats in Kingston and spray-paint messages on our bus in Sault Ste. Marie; late, frantic calls at the Demers house from squeaky young things wanting to speak to the “monster!”

  They did
n’t know me. I didn’t know myself. But I loved being talked about in the same conversations as the white brushcut from Parry Sound. Orr they spoke of as if he was the Second Coming—they sounded like Poppa praising the Madonna on the church in Warsaw; for me it was the same feeling for both Orr and the Madonna—I couldn’t personally see it.

  Orr had grown since I’d seen him first in Vernon, but he was still only sixteen in 1964 and seemed much too short to be compared to Harvey and Howe, as everyone was doing. He’d gone straight from bantam to junior, but Gus Demers still said he was just another in a long list of junior hockey’s flashes-in-the-pan. Another Nesterenko, another Cullen.

  We met Oshawa Generals in that year’s playoffs, and the papers in Oshawa and Sudbury played up the Batterinski–Orr side of it. “Beauty and the Beast,” the Oshawa Times had it. The Star countered with “Batterinski’s Blockade,” pointing out that the Hardrocks’ strategy was to have Batterinski make sure Orr never got near the net, though no one ever spoke to me about it. I presume it was understood.

  On March 28 we met on their home ice, the advantage going to them by virtue of a better record throughout the season. I said not a single word on the bus ride down, refusing to join Torchy in his dumb-ass Beatles songs, refusing even to get up and wade back to the can, though I’d had to go since Orillia. My purpose was to exhibit strength and I could not afford the slightest opening. I had to appear superhuman to the rest of the team: not needing words, nor food, nor bodily functions.

  If I could have ridden down in the equipment box I would have, letting the trainer unfold me and tighten my skates just before the warm-up, sitting silent as a puck, resilient as my shin pads, dangerous as the blades. The ultimate equipment: me.

  I maintained silence through the “Queen” and allowed myself but one chop at Frog Larocque’s goal pads, then set up. Orr and I were like reflections, he standing solid and staring up at the clock from one corner, me doing the same at the other, both looking at time, both thinking of each other. We were the only ones in the arena, the crowd’s noise simply the casing in which we would move, the other players simply the setting to force the crowd’s focus to us. Gus Demers had advised me to level Orr early, to establish myself. Coach Therrien wanted me to wait for Orr, keep him guessing. I ignored them all. They weren’t involved. Just Orr and me.

  His style had changed little since bantam. Where all the other players seemed bent over, concentrating on something taking place below them, Orr still seemed to be sitting at a table as he played, eyes as alert as a poker player, not interested in his own hands or feet or where the object of the game was. I was fascinated by him and studied him intently during the five minutes I sat in the penalty box for spearing some four-eyed whiner in the first period. What made Orr effective was that he had somehow shifted the main matter of the game from the puck to him. By anticipating, he had our centres looking for him, not their wingers, and passes were directed away from him, not to someone on our team. By doing this, and by knowing this himself, he had assumed control of the Hardrocks as well as the Generals.

  I stood at the penalty box door yanking while the timekeeper held for the final seconds. I had seen how to deal with Orr. If the object of the game had become him, not the puck, I would simply put Orr through his own net.

  We got a penalty advantage toward the end of the period and coach sent me out to set up the power play. I was to play centre point, ready to drop quickly in toward the net rather than remaining in the usual point position along the boards and waiting for a long shot and tip-in. Therrien had devised this play, I knew, from watching Orr, though he maintained it was his own invention. I never argued. I never even spoke. I was equipment, not player, and in that way I was dependable, predictable, certain.

  Torchy’s play, at centre, was to shoulder the Oshawa centre out of the faceoff circle while Chancey, playing drop-back left wing, fed the puck back to me, breaking in. A basketball play, really, with me fast-breaking and Torchy pic-ing. The crowd was screaming but I couldn’t hear. I was listening for Orr, hoping he might say something that would show me his flaw, hoping he might show involvement rather than disdain. But he said nothing. He stared up at the clock for escape, the numbers meaningless, the score irrelevant. He stood, stick over pads, parallel to the ice, back also parallel, eyes now staring through the scars of the ice for what might have been his own reflection. Just like me, once removed from the crowd’s game, lost in his own contest.

  The puck dropped and Torchy drove his shoulder so hard into the Generals’ centre I heard the grunt from the blueline. Chancey was tripped as he went for the puck, but swept it as he fell. I took it on my left skate blade, kicking it forward to my stick, slowing it, timing it, raising back for a low, hard slapper from just between the circles. I could sense Orr. Not see him. I was concentrating on the puck. But I could sense him the way you know when someone is staring at you from behind. I raised the stick higher, determined to put the shot right through the bastard if necessary. I heard him go down, saw the blond brushcut spinning just outside the puck as he slid toward me, turning his pads to catch the shot. His eyes were wide open as his head passed the puck; he stared straight at it, though it could, if I shot now, rip his face right off the skull. He did not flinch; he did not even blink. He stared the way a poker player might while saying he’ll hold. Orr knew precisely what my timing was before I myself knew. I saw him spin past, knew what he was doing, but could not stop; my shot crunched into his pads and away, harmlessly.

  The centre Torchy had hit dove toward the puck and it bounced back at me, off my toe and up along the ankle, rolling like a ball in a magician’s trick. I kicked but could not stop it. The puck trickled and suddenly was gone. I turned, practically falling. It was Orr! Somehow he’d regained his footing even faster than I and was racing off in that odd sitting motion toward our net.

  I gave chase, now suddenly aware of the crowd. Their noise seemed to break through an outer, protective eardrum. There were no words, but I was suddenly filled with insult as the screams tore through me, ridiculing. It seemed instant, this change from silently raising the stick for the certain goal, the sense that I was gliding on air, suspended, controlling even the breath of this ignorant crowd. Now there was no sense of gliding or silence or control. I was flailing, chopping at a short sixteen-year-old who seemed completely oblivious to the fact that Batterinski was coming for him.

  I felt my left blade slip and my legs stutter. I saw him slipping farther and farther out of reach, my strides choppy and ineffective, his brief, effortless and amazingly successful. I swung with my stick at his back, causing the noise to rise. I dug in but he was gone, a silent, blond brushcut out for a skate in an empty arena.

  I dove, but it was no use. My swinging stick rattled off his ankle guards and I turned in my spill in time to see the referee’s hand raise for a delayed penalty. I was already caught so I figured I might as well make it worthwhile. I regained my feet and rose just as Orr came in on Larocque, did something with his stick and shoulder that turned Frog into a life-size cardboard poster of a goaltender, and neatly tucked the puck into the corner of the net.

  The crowd roared, four thousand jack-in-the-boxes suddenly sprung, all of them laughing at me. Orr raised his hands in salute and turned, just as I hit him.

  It was quiet again, quiet as quickly as the noise had first burst through. I felt him against me, shorter but probably as solid. I smelled him, not skunky the way I got myself, but the smell of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. I gathered him in my arms, both of us motionless but for the soar of our skates, and I aimed him carefully and deliberately straight through the boards at the goal judge.

  Orr did not even bother to look at me. It was like the theory you read about car accidents, that the best thing you can do is relax. Orr rode in my arms contentedly, acceptingly, neither angry, nor afraid, nor surprised. We moved slowly, deliberately, together. I could see the goal judge leaping, open-mouthed, back from the boards, bouncing off his cage like a gorilla bei
ng attacked by another with a chain. I saw his coffee burst through the air as we hit, the grey-brown circles slowly rising up and away and straight into his khaki coat. The boards gave; they seemed to give forever, folding back toward the goal judge, then groaning, then snapping us out and down in a heap as the referee’s whistle shrieked in praise.

  I landed happy, my knee rising into his leg as hard as I could manage, the soft grunt of expelled air telling me I had finally made contact with the only person in the building who would truly understand.

  This excerpt from The Last Season, my 1983 novel on hockey, was based on several true incidents. I had played against Bobby Orr, so knew firsthand that experience on the ice—though at a younger age than junior hockey. And the “Billings” incident was drawn from an actual experience when I was playing juvenile hockey and a bench-clearing brawl broke out in Bracebridge, Ontario requiring an ambulance to deal with an injured player and a police escort to get our team out of town. As much of the book is set in Finland, I was fortunate enough to travel to that country in 1981 as a member of the Toronto Maple Leaves, a recreational team that played several exhibition matches against rec teams in various Finnish centres. The Last Season has had a curious life. It was published to wonderful reviews but did not sell well. It may be that the publisher, Macmillan, brought it out on the same day as their other big hockey book of the year, Ken Dryden’s The Game, which set an all-time bestselling record well in excess of 100,000 copies. The Last Season, which was paired with the Dryden book in Macmillan publicity, sold about 1 per cent that amount. It was republished in paperback several times and, in 1987, was made into a three-hour made-for-television movie by CBC. The film was directed by Alan King and starred Booth Savage as Felix Batterinski. Savage won the Gemini that year as the country’s best actor. Professional hockey players who have read it love it to a point where at least two have claimed that I modelled Felix on them, and several critics have called it the best novel ever written on the game. Whether it is or not will always be debatable, but it’s a great honour even to be considered.