Hockey Dreams

by David Adams Richards

  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 p
layed 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.

  We had to pick up the entire toboggan and carry him home. “That was pretty good —” he kept saying. “That was pretty darn good. Don’t you think that was good — I think that’s like the Olympics — that was pretty darn good.”

  Today a safety campaign might be headed: “Do you know where your children are?” and have us thinking somewhat dreadful thoughts about what might happen to our kids. Dreadful things do and did happen.

  Back then, in that bygone age, when the super six played, when during the playoffs every year some new star came out of nowhere from a farm team to dazzle us all, we were all running along the tracks jumping the boxcars of a slow-moving freight.

  In the middle of a road hockey game we could leave our sticks and gloves on the street, and begin to run after it, catching up to it as it slowed down for a turn. Out of breath, with Tobias behind us, or behind everyone, except Stafford Foley and I, our boots half untied, our two goalies watching us, as goalies sometimes watch a brawl from their nets, we would jump the boxcar’s ladders and be carried along a mile.

  Then just as the freight was picking up steam we would jump and roll down the hill laughing, with snow in our mouths and noses.

  It would be strange for a mother to be asked if she knew where her little boy was, and say, “Yes, jumping boxcars — that crazy little kid — I told him if he falls he’ll be cut in two, but will a ten year old listen?”

  All winter we went to the Sinclair Rink. Or played at the Foleys’. Often Stafford Foley’s mother would have to come out and break up our fights, or turn off the outside lights so we would finally wander home.

  In the spring, on those warm days in mid-April, a stranger walking down one of our side streets might suddenly spy fifteen kids wandering about on the Miramichi River, on ice floes, with hockey sticks, looking like trapped penguins. Penguins wearing toques and mittens with chameleon-like grins on their faces, shooting snowballs off one another’s backs, with sticks that curved like Stan Mikita’s. The ice was breaking up; our rinks were melting and floating out to sea.

  One Saturday we spent most of the afternoon trying to keep our rink intact. Of course, we weren’t that far from shore, but still and all it was a good feat.

  “Take your hockey sticks and everyone — PUSH the RINK TOGETHER — one, two, three — heave. Bring the centre line up here.”

  “Look at all them little fish under our rink.”

  “It’s those fish — look at all those fish.”

  Unlike Penguins, we never did win the Stanley Cup. Unlike Penguins if we slipped, there was a better than average chance we would drown.

  And then one day every year, about the time the playoffs were ending, we would stop playing hockey, turn our sticks into spears and begin to spear the tommycod under our ice. The breeze would be warming, our mittens would get soaked and we would not care. The sticks would be splinters, the pucks lost and chewed and hockey be done for another year.

  Most of us would not eat the tommycod, but Michael and Tobias would take them home, ten tommycod tails sticking out of Tobias’ pockets, with the sun warming the stones along the bank.

  This was our other place to play hockey in the winter. We played hockey on the river. Mangled trees and alders grew along its side in the summer, and by fall, the trees stood stark against the greying snow.

  Fires would be lit near the riverbank, and Michael, who considered the rink his, would be out every day after school sweeping it clean, the ice clear and blue beneath his boots.

  After Christmas of 1960, the year Tobias got his new boots and his new coat, I began to help Michael with this rink, along with Ginette and Stafford.

  FIVE

  OUR RIVER IS LARGE. IT has a long history. When we lit a fire to warm ourselves, we were doing something that had been done for generations. When Michael talked about getting fish net for backing for the nets he was making, that was exactly how nets were first made in Nova Scotia about 30 or 40 years after that little boy died in 1825.

  We were just specks on the river. Once Michael went skating on the skates he had gotten from the Foleys’ basement and Stafford followed him. They were dots out in the middle of the river.

  When they turned to come back the wind changed, and the fire got farther away. Stafford started to get sluggish, and said that it was a good time to sit down and have a rest.

  “You can’t have a rest here Staffy — you’ll never wake up,” Michael told him. Michael was wearing his jean jacket, with his shirt opened.

  The air was dazzling cold and far away the sun was lighting the tree line at twilight. Stafford’s small bony legs got weak and he took out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes.

  “Hey Mike —” he said.

  “What?” Michael asked.

  “I want to go to sleep.”

  Michael got behind Stafford and pushed him, but couldn’t make it. Then he tried to pick him up. And by then Stafford looked as if he was play-acting. Whenever anything happened that made you realize how fragile and wonderous life was, Stafford looked like he was play-acting.

  He sat down, and looked about, and Michael kept skating about him on his old broken skates wondering what to do. And then suddenly something happened that would not happen in too many other places in the world. A car came along.

  “Need a lift?” Neddy Brown said, his old 1954 Chevy filled with children and a wife and a drunken grandpa. There they all were in the middle of the Miramichi River, Neddy out for a drive across the frozen ice.

  So everyone made it back by nightfall. Ginette wouldn’t leave the rink until she saw them coming, and ran to get more sticks for the fire. She couldn’t leave anyone, Ginette, in her life.

  On this river fires were always lit and kept burning by loved ones for loved ones. And that fire near our rink seemed to be like this. It burned when Michael was there alone shovelling the snow from it, after supper when the air was so splintered and cold that each breath pained.

  It burned near us at night when the wind howled and there were only a few of us left flipping pucks or chunks of snow across a windswept, deserted rink. It was all so primitive I suppose — hockey, frozen hands, ice in your lungs and the fires burning here and there about the river.

  Fires had burned when Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo — when the house I mentioned where the child was waked was just being built — and fires had burned all along the river when Savastapol fell in the Crimean War in 1857.

  In both those wars boys from the Miramichi had fought. By the time of the Crimean War my great great-uncle was a boy on the river, and his son was the first in my family to play hockey.

  To try to explain this to my uncle, the father of my cousin from Boston, was a rather difficult feat. To explain hockey as being part of the natural world of my youth, and therefore essential to understanding a love of my country, seemed slightly pretentious. Still does.

  I have travelled the world and have tried to explain that hockey is more than a game. That it is more than baseball. That it is the non-intellectual impulse for life. But my uncle didn’t buy this. Why should he? At any rate when he came
up to visit us that year just after New Year, I wasn’t talking like this. I wasn’t going about the house saying, “Hockey is the non-intellectual impulse for life.”

  Even then I suppose I wasn’t that crazy. I didn’t even know how to answer them about Mickey Mantle. And like a Canadian to my American cousin I said that hockey was almost as good as baseball.

  “Well, hockey is almost pretty near as good as baseball, maybe —” I said. “I mean, if it just wasn’t so funny and cold — perhaps —” I queried.

  And they both smiled indulgently at me, as if I really wanted to tell the truth but because of some misplaced national pride I couldn’t.

  My uncle from Boston was my first foil. He worked for Cotts beverages and travelled the Maritimes and Quebec, because he was bilingual.

  I had been bragging a bit to his son. I finally confronted my cousin, after three days of listening to him brag about baseball. I told him about the NHL, and that when they played hockey in the States they had to come to Canada to get hockey players. “Like me,” I added, sheepishly one night.

  Of course my cousin didn’t keep this conversation between boys, he went to tell the men. He needed and wanted some quick clarification.

  My uncle told me that they played hockey everywhere. “Not just Canada,” he said a little sadly at my xenophobia. I’ve heard this statement since, saturated with the same kind of sadness.

  My uncle was the first who doled out information to me about the Russians and the Americans. “You should go see the Russians,” my uncle told me, “and we Americans too.”

  “The Russians —” I said, fear welling up in my heart. I didn’t want to hear from him what I was afraid he was about to say.

  “They are the real champions,” my uncle said. “And we Americans have good strong clubs as well. In fact, my son didn’t want to tell you that we won the Gold at the Olympics last year. So I believe Canada is somewhere in third place now.”