Such comparison requires a bit of a stretch. The country did not go into a state of apoplexy when it was half over, as they did in 1972; here at the half they lined up for the washrooms. There was no Phil Esposito rant to rally the home side as there was in ’72. There were no-last minute dramatics by Paul Henderson. In fact, few dramatics at all apart from the introductions, as is usually the case in old-timers’ games. Neither Gretzky nor Messier got a shot on net. Guy Lafleur got one shot, but didn’t score. The winning goal was scored by Ken Linseman, a hall-of-fame pest, the insurance goal by Marty McSorley, a hall-of-fame enforcer.
And yet, just as strong emotion was the overriding memory of ’72, it was here, as well, even if the feelings were quite, quite different. There was a remarkable charm to the Heritage Classic—“good, warm, fuzzy memories,” said former Edmonton star Paul Coffey—and it could not have come at a better time for the league that pulled off this risky extravaganza.
It has not been a good season for the NHL. When the story isn’t labour gloom, it has been product gloom, professional hockey caught in a dual crisis of finance and entertainment. Star players who have not been dumping on the game (Joe Thornton, Brett Hull) have been so down in the dumps themselves (Jaromir Jagr) that it has become a game without star quality. What the old-timers—who most assuredly have kept much of their star quality—and the Heritage Classic reminded people of is that the original purpose of the Canadian game was always fun, something that Thornton, for example, feels is rather sadly absent from today’s trapping and dumping, clutching and holding.
The old players may have lacked speed, but they carried pucks rather than dumped them. They tried plays rather than avoid them. They played real shifts that left them tired rather than miniature shifts that, in today’s hockey, are intended only to leave them blameless. “Guys who played the game,” said Montreal coach Jacques Demers, “the way it’s supposed to be played.”
They also smiled and laughed on the ice the way youngsters have for as long as there has been ice and a way to slide on it faster than even an intrepid streaker. “We really felt like we were ten years old,” laughed Lafleur, “with the legs of a fifty-year-old!”
There were a few lovely moments in the game—a flashing glove save by Edmonton goaltender Grant Fuhr, a lovely rush by the still smooth skating Coffey—but the moments to treasure were the Aurèle Joliat toques on the heads, the introductions and the undeniable first star of the game: the 57,167 fans with their puffed-out coats and their hot chocolate and Baileys.
Whether it was the bitter cold or the inspiration of the old-timers, the players in the second game, the real game, played increasingly more efficiently than usual. The colder it got, the quicker it got and the better it got—until a game broke out that has rarely been seen indoors this year, including a winning goal in Montreal’s 4–3 victory by Richard Zednik of a type we had come to believe was played out only in children’s imaginations and outdoor rinks.
The NHL should consider not heating its northern rinks if this is the result. But since that isn’t likely to happen, let us hope that the lesson learned here is that the time has come to invite the fun back indoors.
What began in Edmonton is now a fixture in the NHL, with New Year’s Day Winter Classic games having been held in Buffalo, Chicago, Boston and Pittsburgh and a second Heritage Classic game held in 2011 in Calgary. The Winter Classic has been a marketing and publicity bonanza for the league, though it is also the event at which Sidney Crosby suffered the concussion that led to hockey’s great debate of the 2010–11 season.
JOY OF ROAD HOCKEY
(Today’s Parent, September 2003)
I have heard all the arguments.
I have listened to the claims that the Greeks were playing something much like it as far back as 500 BC. I have stood on an upper floor of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches art museum and stared hard at Hunters in the Snow, which Pieter Bruegel painted in 1565, and I have seen, beyond any doubt, that there are two youngsters in the background playing a game any Canadian would instantly recognize. I have seen the literary evidence that Thomas Chandler Haliburton was writing as far back as 1810 about kids “hollerin’ and whoopin’ like mad with pleasure” as they cuffed something back and forth with sticks on a frozen pond near Windsor, Nova Scotia, and I have even argued with a farmer and a doctor who live there over precisely which pond it was. I have listened to the claims of Montreal that the first game was played there in on March 3, 1875, listened as well to the claims that the game originated in the small Ontario city of Kingston sometime in 1886—and I have only one response to all of these claims on the Cradle of Hockey.
Not even close.
You want to see where hockey was invented, let me take you to Huntsville, Ontario, on a late February afternoon in the deep winter of 1957–58, and let us head for Dufferin Street high on the reservoir hill where the town ploughs have left a wide, flattened surface and high banks, where the light from the single street lamp at the corner of Dufferin and Mary is enough, and let us listen to the one call that is as much a part of Canadian winter as the call of the loon is to summer: “Caaaarrr!”
With luck, it will be Mulhern—or, as we all know him, “Uncle Danny,” though he has no known relatives—and he will guide his brown Buick so the tires straddle the goalposts that we have chopped out of the hard snow and carefully placed in the centre of the road, two at one end, two at the other, each pair separated by the measure of a handy Hespeler Green Flash.
“Caaaarrr!”
The teams endlessly vary, the sides made up by various techniques including tossing all the sticks in the centre and having one kid, eyes shut, disperse them one at a time in opposite directions, or merely letting two big guys, or two of the little guys, stand as captains and let them choose up—everyone perfectly aware of who will be chosen first, and who, unfortunately, will go last. It is, more often than not, big guys versus little guys, the big guys—older brother Jim, Eric Wilston, Stew Wieler, Don Cockram—more skilled but fewer in number than the troop that makes up the little guys: me, Don Wilston, Brent and Ron Munroe, Ted Harman and, of course, Eric Ruby, the only person on reservoir hill who actually wants to play net. The road is on a slight decline, so ends are switched when the first team reaches five goals. Games are over at ten goals, with new teams instantly reassembled with the shout “Game on!” starting the match that will carry on until mothers grow cranky calling us in for supper.
There are few rules to this game. No slashing. No crosschecking. No “golf” shots. No sticks so worn down—“toothpicks,” we call them—that they become a danger to the eyes. Wilston’s big German shepherd, Rick, can watch but not play. And whoever shoots the ball down past Mary Street, chases it.
There is one other rule particular only to Dufferin Street and not likely found on any of the thousands of similar road hockey shrines across this country: No chasing the tennis balls into Mrs. Wieler’s raspberry patch. In return for this sacred regulation, she agrees to tap an extra sugar maple each March and grants the road hockey player exclusive rights to the sap—God’s Gatorade—as spring brings a sad end to one more glorious season of Dufferin Street glory.
I am in my fifties now and will still play at the drop of a snowflake. For decades, our large extended family would gather each year back in that same Central Canadian small town and play the Christmas Classic—a road hockey game featuring as many cousins as there were sticks to go around. There is no record of the scores, but an annual documentation by photograph: new players growing, several of them young women, old players’ hairlines receding and bellies widening. Some players eventually retired and a couple, sadly, were lost forever. A few years ago, the Christmas Classic came to an unwanted end when the wonderful old woman who put on the Christmas dinner passed away; but both classics, grandmother and game, will live forever in the hearts of those who were privileged to know them.
A back street in Huntsville in the 1950s, a side street in Brandon in the 1930s, a dead-end street i
n Dartmouth in the 1960s—all have an equal claim to the game that has likely meant more to young Canadians than any other, in any form. I remember one spring day in New York when Wayne Gretzky, watching the Zamboni flood the ice before a Rangers practice, idly chatted with a couple of long-time sportswriters about the curse of over-organized hockey. He did not become a player, he told us, through highly structured fifty-minute ice times, but “in my own backyard, in the driveway—even in the basement” of the Gretzky home on Varadi Avenue in Brantford, Ontario.
He was speaking of the unrecognized beauty of the many variations on pickup hockey: the opportunity to dream, to seek magic, to fail and fail again until, one time, the impossible works. “Every time we teach a child something,” the renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget once said, “we keep him from inventing it himself.”
In recent years, Canada has been plagued with stories of adults seeking to outlaw this activity one court complainant in Hamilton called “totally uncivilized.” It has happened in Miramichi, New Brunswick, in Nepean, Ontario, in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, and will happen again, elsewhere, before this coming winter is out. Neighbours will complain, the police will be called and, all too often, the issue will be settled in court—usually, mercifully, tossed out by a judge with enough common sense to realize there are better uses for the law than putting a damper on modern-day children “hollerin’ and whoopin’ like mad with pleasure.”
“The way children are interrupted in their play by adults is brutal,” Margaret Flinsch, the great American pioneer in early childhood studies, said in an interview a few years ago. “Play is trying out—experimenting. It’s not a joke. Children don’t play for fun. They play for real, and adults don’t understand that; they laugh at what children do. To children, play is very serious.”
Many would agree. Some would even argue that there are hidden values in such games. “Road hockey is part of Canada,” says a man who successfully led a citizens’ revolt to strike down a bylaw in Listowel, Ontario. “If anything, I think it teaches the kids to be even more aware of traffic.”
“Like fishing or golf,” Globe and Mail sports columnist Stephen Brunt has written, “it is a game ordered not so much by officials enforcing a code of conduct, but by self-imposed etiquette. To keep playing, rather than taking your stick and going home at the first slight, requires learning how to function cooperatively with others and acknowledge a few simple rights and wrongs.”
And to acknowledge as well, this Dufferin Street alumnus would suggest, that there is something pure and sweet about road hockey that is worth preserving by action if not by law. A game that is forever being invented is one that should go on as long as there are players wanting to play.
Road hockey continues to survive, even to the point of serving as a photo opportunity during the 2011 federal election for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
WALLY’S COLISEUM: THE MELTING OF THE GRETZKY BACKYARD
(The Globe and Mail, December 22, 2007)
BRANTFORD, ONTARIO
Late fall, and tears are falling on the most famous backyard in all of Canada. Great, fat, warm raindrops plunk onto the cover of the swimming pool that sits where, in other Novembers in another century, a father would be laying down the first ice and a small, blond boy would be sitting, fully dressed in his hockey equipment, waiting for the signal to begin the season that once so defined this country.
Wally’s Coliseum is no more.
The backyard rink that Walter Gretzky so lovingly built here in Brantford—using a lawn sprinkler for the base ice, then painstakingly building the “glass” skating surface with a slow-flowing hose—is now a fenced-in swimming pool.
It was here where three-year-old Wayne Gretzky took his first turns and first falls. It was on Wally’s Coliseum that the ten-year-old who scored 378 goals for the Brantford Nadrofsky Steelers—who was a national figure by the age of eleven, who went on to hold or share sixty-one National Hockey League records—learned the game he would eventually transform.
Wayne Gretzky became that sensation not through structured fifty-minute practice sessions, but, as he has said, “right in my own backyard,” doing whatever he felt like doing. Out here, there was only one rule to the game: Get your homework done first. Walter Gretzky, standing in the light rain with a hand on the pool fence, shakes his head at the memory of his first son’s dedication. “He would be out here hour after hour,” Gretzky remembers, “twisting in and out between pylons we made from Javex bottles. He used to tie a can off a string and hang it in the net and see how many times he could hit it. He used to pay kids a nickel or a dime to play goalie for him.”
And he kept at it. Gretzky laughs his crinkly, eyes-closed chuckle as he recalls the night he got so caught up watching television that he forgot all about the little boy in the backyard. And how Phyllis Gretzky came storming downstairs in her nightgown screaming that it was five minutes to midnight on a school night and the boy was still out there twisting among the makeshift pylons: “What are the neighbours going to think?”
But things change. Gretzky is sixty-nine now, so remarkably recovered from a 1991 aneurysm that a movie, Waking Up Wally, was made of his story. The five Gretzky kids who learned to skate on this rink—Wayne, Keith, Glen, Brent and sister Kim—are all grown up now. And the “long, long seasons” of Roch Carrier’s childhood are all but gone. “You can’t make a rink like this anymore because the winters aren’t cold enough,” Gretzky says. “If you’re lucky, you might have two weeks, maybe three weeks. But you can’t get three or four weeks in a row of cold. You get one day cold, next day warm. You can’t get a rink going.”
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the family skated in the backyard of the home where Walter Gretzky still lives—sadly, Phyllis lost her long battle against lung cancer two years ago—and skated, as well, at the old Gretzky family farm at nearby Canning, where Kim and her young family live today. It was at that farm, at a 1957 wiener roast, that eighteen-year-old Walter first met fifteen-year-old Phyllis. Gretzky recalls that, as a boy, he could skate for miles on the Nith River, which flows by that old farm—“skate until you hit rapids,” he laughs—but lately the river rarely freezes over. And even when it does, you wouldn’t dare risk stepping out on it.
“Winters are warmer now,” he says. “There’s no ice.”
There is, of course, still ice—and still backyard rinks in many regions of Canada—but winter is not what it once was, with rare exceptions. And most assuredly, in Southwestern Ontario, not what it was back in 1932 when not only was the ice thick on the Nith, but Niagara Falls froze solid. In many parts of this vast country these days, Quebec songwriter Gilles Vigneault’s famous line, “Mon pays … c’est l’hiver,” seems increasingly out of line. My country is not winter—at least not winter as it used to be.
The new Dominion that British prime minister William Gladstone once dismissed as the land “of perpetual ice and snow” was at one time so sensitive about its bitterly cold winters that the federal government banned the words “frost” and “cold” from brochures aimed at prospective immigrants—allowing only the word “buoyant” to be used when describing the Canadian off-season. Today, buoyant rather accurately describes the weather in many of the more populated parts of the country.
Besides Wally’s Coliseum, Canada has produced several backyard rinks that are frozen forever in the imagination: Roch Carrier’s churchyard rink from “The Hockey Sweater”; the little rink in Floral, Saskatchewan, where Gordie Howe took his first turns in an old pair of skates a neighbour had dropped off; the rink by the barn in Viking, Alberta, that turned six Sutter brothers into NHLers; the big rink on the sod farm in Thunder Bay that produced the four promising Staal brothers …
It is difficult to find a Canadian hockey player who does not wax nostalgically about what those little rinks meant to them as youngsters. “The rink was my getaway, my little bit of heaven,” Eric Lindros wrote in his autobiography of the backyard rink his father, Carl, built each wint
er in London, Ontario. “If ever I had a problem in school I would get out onto the rink and blow it off. Being on the rink was the best time of day.”
The most famous natural-ice surfaces in Canada produced NHL players. The most famous one in the United States produced a collection of essays—Jack Falla’s Home Ice: Reflections on Backyard Rinks and Frozen Ponds. Falla, who has written for Sports Illustrated, has kept a rink going behind his Natick, Massachusetts, home every winter since 1982. He put up plywood boards and lined the rink—about a third the size of an NHL ice surface—with clear plastic sheeting, then waited for the first cold front before heading out with the hose.
It was, he says, an education by trial and error—too much water created ice that wasn’t strong enough to support an adult skater—but eventually he became a local ice master. The Falla rink, which he calls the Bacon Street Omni, became a fixture in Natick and in an increasing number of publications where Falla would wax poetic about its glories. When he put those essays into a collection, Bobby Orr offered to write the foreword, saying the backyard rink was, in his opinion, “the heart and soul of hockey.”
Now, Falla, at sixty-four, finds himself at the cusp of his twenty-fifth consecutive season as icemaker and Omni manager. The kids have grown up and started their own families. He has debated “retirement,” but each fall some bug grabs him, the way a spring bug grabs golfers the moment they first see grass. “For me,” he says, “it really is part of the rhythm of the year.”
He knows, however, that it is not the same. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, the rink was in place by the third week of December and ran, with slight thaw setbacks, through the rest of winter. Since the turn of the century, he has had ice before Christmas only twice. Last year, the first skate of the season, the latest ever, was January 21. He shut things down on February 10, his earliest closing date ever.
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