Hockey Dreams

by David Adams Richards

  She looked at me, as if I really was such a country bumpkin. And I suppose when considering it, I have been looked at like this almost all my life over something or other.

  “But we were going for the Russians,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  I had the same tone as a man might who had just learned that the Titanic had sunk or Passchendaele had cost us thousands of men for 50 yards of mud.

  Hearing my tone, the tone of a person bleeding, maybe she felt as if she had won a moral victory.

  “Well, we both hate Gretzky you see.” Her accent now turned slightly British.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, he’s just such a Canadian.” She smiled.

  “You hate greatness or just Canadian greatness?” I asked.

  In a way, Canadians have been asking this question all of their lives. And while asking this question they have been running to outsiders for the answer.

  In a way my learned friend’s stance embodies the notion of the intelligentsia that hockey is a part of what is wrong with our country.

  Of course I know this about my country. I have known it since Stafford Foley used to debate the merits of Alex Delvecchio in a room at the tavern, as if he could turn back the clock and make, with the original six, everything right with the world again and with himself.

  It was, by some rascals, rather smart-alecky to cheer for the Russians. I remember this all too well.

  It was December 31, 1975 — all day I waited. Red Army was playing Montreal. I was in Victoria with an acquaintance. He was extremely adept (or he thought he was) at taking the opposite position — the educated, therefore contrived, outrageous part. And so he “wished” to cheer for the Russians. He felt no one else would be doing this. (He would only have to listen to one CBC commentary to realize how Canadians bent over backwards to kiss the Russian behinds in order to be fair.)

  I shouted at him, told him if he had only known the dozens of minutes of unrecognizable penalties that were given to our amateurs in Sweden and Czechoslovakia over the years he’d feel different. Or if he had only known the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Hockey Canada had given to the Russians to help their sport, he may change his mind.

  He stared at me, as if I had not just said something wrong. It went well beyond this. It was as if I had demonstrated the kind of unfair sportsmanship he was ridiculing. “My Good God man — get a hold of yourself; it’s only a game — you’re frightening the house guests.”

  What was under attack was simply fear of a lack of Canadian identity. And he, a learned man whose father was a poet, connected to a university, did not wish to have anything to do with the sport that could make us feel — even manhandle us into feeling — Canadian. It was supposed to be done another way; I suppose a more civilized way. (Also it was the elitist idea that the ideal of Soviet life was one that hinged on working-class fairness.)

  For most people who talk this polemic against hockey as a point of identity there is a certain degree of cant, of wrong-headedness. Besides, part of this kind of conceit hinges on the identity crisis itself. Because some of us continue to believe that Canadians are famous for nothing except hockey. Therefore they argue that Canadians must be greater than what they are famous for.

  My answer to that has always been yes and no. And hockey, when you know what it says about us as a people, proves it.

  So we sat in silence, he and I, in a little room on that long ago New Year’s Eve. Montreal did not win that game as we all know. They tied Red Army 3–3, after outplaying them and outshooting them by a margin of 4–1 Tretiak, who the Czechs always seemed mystified by our inability to score against, saved them — and Dryden was in net for us.

  Dryden never played that well against the Soviets, but all in all, well enough.

  I remember at one point during that game Guy Lafleur stickhandling at centre ice, and mystifying three Russian players. It comes back to me time and again when I am lectured, usually by university professors, on how the Europeans taught us finesse, and how shameful I am not to record that. I will and do record the Russians’ greatness. But, my son, they did not teach us finesse.

  Finesse in the age of Orr and Lafleur?

  Finesse in the age of Lemieux and Gretzky? In the age of Savard (Denis) or a hundred others?

  I was in Australia in 1993, at a literary festival. It is a wonderful country and has a rugby league and Australian rules. In some way (this is exaggerated) the difference between these two kinds of rugby is the same as the difference between ice hockey and hockey.

  I was sitting with a writer from the Czech Republic and a woman who worked for Penguin Books. The writer from the Czech Republic and I had an interesting conversation about Australia and how it compared to our countries. All of a sudden he gave a start, and he said, “Oh — you are Canadian — I thought you were an American — so mister Canadianman tell me — who is the greatest hockey player in the world today?”

  “Gretzky or Lemieux — I’m not sure which,” I replied.

  “Gretzky or Lemieux — Gretzky or Lemieux — bahhh! What about Jagr —?”

  “Who?” the young woman from Penguin asked.

  “Jagr — Jagr — the greatest to ever exist.”

  “Great, no doubt,” I said. “Definitely a great asset to the Penguins — but not the greatest who ever lived — he isn’t even the greatest of his era — he isn’t even the greatest for the Penguins.”

  “Pardon me?” the woman from Penguin said.

  “The Penguins would be nothing without him,” my Czech acquaintance said.

  “I agree — he is great — but Lemieux is far greater — anyway the Penguins might get rid of them both within the next few years. I am very cynical about it.”

  “Who are they?” the woman from Penguin said.

  She made a stab. “So what do you think of Kundera?” she said to the Czech gentleman after a moment’s silence.

  “Kundera — what team does he play for?” the Czech writer asked, and winked my way.

  The sales representive from Penguin excused herself and did not come back to the table. Her meal got cold. This is true, and I feel badly about this now (a little).

  Earlier that day in Melbourne, I needed a pair of shoes for this particular dinner. I went with my wife and son to a shoe store near our hotel. In this store one of the salesmen was a young Russian immigrant. He was fairly new to his job, and new to Australia.

  He told me that the one thing he missed was hockey. He mentioned Larionov and Fetisov — he asked me if Fetisov had retired. I was never a big fan of Fetisov (except when he got punched in the head by Clarke) but I understood that his hockey talk was more than a sales pitch. And even if it were only a sales pitch it worked. For how many customers could he have used it on in Melbourne?

  Years before, in my home town I got drunk one night with a boxer off a Russian ship. We liked each other very much. We talked two things — hockey and boxing. The only thing I can say is that all through the evening this partisan Russian who lived fifteen miles from Leningrad never once mentioned hockey as “ice hockey.”

  Ah but the game is lost boys, the game is lost. To go on about it, at times, is like a farm boy kicking a dead horse to get up out of a puddle.

  But still, some horses are worth a kick or two. And if it is good and even noble to have sport, and if hockey is our sport, and if we can make the claim that we play hockey better than any other country — if we can make that claim, without having to listen to apologies about why we made it — then who speaks for us, as a HOCKEY nation, when three-quarters of our NHL teams are in the states, and 324 of our players as well?

  It is not America’s fault, maybe not even ours. Perhaps it is just the nature of the economic beast. And a few years back — in the dark age of Mulroney, when we spoke about selling out our culture, what great ballet were we thinking of — what great ballet had we already let go?

  I remember an American friend laughing when she asked where Canada got its baseball
players. It was the year Toronto lost to Kansas City and it had put a scare into many Americans. In fact, this lady’s hair stood on end the entire time I spoke to her.

  I was in New Orleans for a reading tour when the lady asked me this. I stated, “They come from the States or Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic I believe.”

  She burst out laughing.

  The laugh was insulting. And I countered it. I told her that most NHL players were from Canada.

  But she did not respond to this. For hockey had no meaning for her. She stared at me as if I was being flippant. I suppose I was. It has always been a part of my nature. Half pathologically shy, and half flippant. Even when I was little.

  TWO

  WE WERE ALL GOING TO make the NHL when I was ten or eleven.

  In those years — long ago, the weather was always more than it is now. There was more of it — more snow, more ice, more sky — more wind.

  More hockey.

  We played from just after football season until cricket started sometime after Easter. We played cricket in our little town in the Maritimes or “kick the can” as we alluded to it. After we put away our waterlogged and mud-soaked hockey sticks. Behind us and down over the bank, the Miramichi River was breaking its ice and freeing itself from another winter. In the piles of disappearing snow, fragments of sticks and tape could be found.

  The sun was warm and smoke rested on the fields and grasses.

  At Easter, in my mind there always seemed to be a funeral. One year, 1961, just after Easter, there was the funeral of a man who was shot in Foley’s Tire Garage, and everyone was excited about it. We were all friends of the Foley boys — there were seven of them. The oldest of them was Paul.

  He was the boy who told me that when bigger boys go into the corner after the puck — or after the ball if it was road hockey — always watch and wait patiently just on the outside.

  “You’re too little,” he said. And in a characteristically protective way that other children had with me, he added. “You’re also lame. You can’t use your left arm — so if you just wait, the puck will dribble out to you and you’ll have a chance at a goal.”

  A goal. To score one goal was the height of my ambition.

  But looking back, half of us playing, half of us who wanted nothing more than to play in the NHL — which was always to Maritimers somewhere else — were going to have at least as much problem as me. Being a Maritimer certainly had a little to do with it.

  One of our goalies was a girl.

  Another was a huge boy with fresh-pressed pants and the smell of holy water, who believed in Santa Claus until he was thirteen. He carried his books like a girl and was in school plays with my sister. “I am of the thespian family,” he would say, because his mother had once played Catherine of Aragon.

  The brother of my friend who cautioned me about going into the corner was a diabetic — Stafford Foley.

  Stafford wore a Detroit sweater and in his entire life he never got outside Newcastle. He was a fanatical sports fan all his life.

  Another boy, Michael, had all the talent in the world but did not own a pair of skates until he was twelve. And then only a broken-up, second-hand pair with the blades chipped that he got from a pile in the Foleys’ basement.

  That was the year Michael also became a rink rat and swept and shovelled snow from the nets during the big games.

  There were others who could play fairly well — one I know had a tryout with Montreal and came home because his girlfriend phoned to tell him she couldn’t stand to be without him. After a month she left him for someone else.

  Another — Phillip Luff could skate like the wind and had the brain of a salamander, and ended up playing the bongos. Another, my brother, could think hockey as well as Don Cherry, but couldn’t skate well enough to make the pros.

  As we grew older we all went our various ways with hockey. It was strange to see boys who were on the ice in high school one year giving it all up to grow their hair long and smoke dope the next, saying, “Hey man — what’s happenin’? Get on down, baby.”

  Of course some of them took up the puck later to play in the gentlemen leagues. (Sometimes the gentleman league on our river was enough to give you cardiac arrest.)

  I know at least five people who might have made it to the NHL if they had disciplined themselves. Perhaps, too, and I say this without bitterness, if there had been proper scouts from the big teams here, or more credit was given to the Maritimers themselves. There was the OHL and the Quebec Major Junior — in the Maritimes the boys graduated to Senior hockey and played to sell-out crowds for their home towns.

  I don’t know how many of us could have made it, but there were some of us who could but didn’t. Perhaps they didn’t have the breaks; perhaps they didn’t have the heart. The real thing the OHL and Quebec Major Junior is, is a journey through hell, at seventeen years old, a thousand miles from home on a snowy road. One only has to talk to anybody who has played in those leagues; billeted in houses, travelling all night by bus or car, suffering the scorn of the coach, if he was just not quite good enough to know.

  One time a friend told me of his hockey days over beer. He told me who he played against when he was voted most valuable player in the OHL.

  “Why, all those lads are in the NHL,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “You — you could have made it too.”

  He shrugged.

  “There is no doubt in my mind,” he said. “I could’ve played up there —”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, why the hell aren’t you up there?”

  He looked at me very seriously, as if being a writer, I would understand. “I fell in love with a woman — and I discovered Shakespeare.”

  “A plague upon both your houses,” I said. “You owed it to us.”

  “What?”

  “You owed it to us — to us — WE WHO COULD NEVER EVER DO IT.”

  We never called hockey “shinney” where I came from. I suppose there are a million things to call hockey and none of them right. But I don’t remember ever hearing the word shinney. When, now and then, I hear up-to-the-moment CBC reporters talking about shinney — as if this is the name that will reduce hockey to its embryonic, to its pleasant and nostalgic centre — it leaves me cold.

  And of course we NEVER EVER called it “ice hockey”— or “NORTH AMERICAN hockey.” Let the Europeans and some Upper Canadians do so. All of these things are blasphemous to me.

  And since I am writing this for Paul who told me to wait on the fringe of the boards (which, like others, I never did) and Stafford who wore his big Detroit sweater three times too large and went blind and had the kindest eyes of any child I have ever remembered. Since I am writing this for Michael, one more time, and for Ginette, who went off to a number of bad evenings and sad marriages, but played the nets for us because no one else would, I will not call it shinney or ice hockey either.

  I will still say that in those days the NHL was ours too, even if we were in the Maritimes.

  And even if none of us had a hope in blue hell of making it, there was a moment when we all — even Ginette Malefont — thought we would.

  Our houses were a mixed bag. You took what you got. It was a neighbourhood half white collar and half industrial and at least a good part poor.

  I grew up beside boys who never had a decent meal and whose mothers were last seen somewhere else. And next door our MP was grooming his sons for law and politics.

  Our houses, whether they were large or almost falling down, were our houses as kids. We noticed differences, that was all.

  I was reminded of Paul and Stafford Foley’s house when I was in England. I read in a paper in London, about a football-mad family, who were kicked out of their flat. It was the seventh flat for this family in two years. Every one of the four children went for a different team, and every game there were chairs heaved and dishes broken. The neighbours constantly complained.

 
Only the mother, God bless her, tried to remain neutral. Pa was as bad as the kids, almost worse. He had his team’s colours tattooed on his chest. They had a picture, standing beside the flat they’d just been evicted from, all smiles and furniture with their arms around one another, ready to go someplace else.

  I mention this because playoffs in the Maritimes, and at the Foley house especially, were like that. Boots and coats and hats lying in the centre of the floor, TV trays all over the living room. Hockey games in the kitchen, with donuts for pucks.

  Outside it was pitch dark and cold; for it was still cold back then, when our playoffs came. And seven Foley kids on the couch with a huge, naked, picture window looking out on the snowy street.

  A wild schmozzle on the ice between Detroit and Montreal, and suddenly little Stafford jumping on top of his twin brother — a twin brother who towered over him — to strangle him. “This is from Gordie Howe, you bastard.”

  His brother, Darren, was the only boy who took a hockey stick to my head over a game of marbles. It was the biggest game I ever won — 16zees.

  The rink we most played on was the Foleys’ — a large, lumpy, whitish-coloured rink in their backyard, strung with lights from the small sprag pole at the side of their brick porch. I remember nights when twenty kids would be playing.

  Some, like Stafford, would always be wearing their hockey colours, others would have their equipment on: kneepads and stockings, skating about, or walking over the ice like wobbly calves. Most of us would be wearing boots. Our nets were most often snow chunks at four feet wide and twenty feet apart — our goalies played the net with old brooms.

  Somebody would always wind up for a slapshot with the new puck he had just gotten, with six kids standing in front of him.

  “Watch it — ya just clocked Lippy in the side of the head,” someone else would say.

  However, the outside rinks we played on were always uncertain; the weather could change three times a day leaving us with no rink at all and eventually, if we were not playing in the Sinclair Rink on our Peewee or Bantam teams, we would end up on the road.