“We are — you did, they do,” I said, my voice a skeletal remnant of what it once was. “You did — you have?”
“Of course we have very powerful strong clubs in the States. We won the Gold.”
I had known it was all out there somewhere, beyond the woollen sweaters and the sweat, beyond the great moves of Jean Beliveau and Rocket Richard about the net, but I did not know they would bring it here to me. I was just a sad little boy. I tried to look even smaller than I was, and bowed my head a little to look melancholy.
But I was beginning to understand two things about hockey. One was this; that it was a far more political game than baseball, and that my love of it was national. That Cold War collaboration and national interests were at stake no one spoke about. And secondly that, because of this, even as children we were not, as childhood baseball lovers, safe in the delusion of the game.
“Oh I think if they played our pros — they would find out,” my father said. But his voice was like mine — it was a little humble, worried and apologetic that I had bragged about Canada.
My uncle wiggled his toes in his socks, lit a cigar and said nothing, smoothing some lint off his huge pair of corduroy pants, a deliberate smoke ring disappearing above his balding head.
Worse.
You and I know it is always worse. It always gets worse. In everything. For instance I never thought Michael’s cough could get any worse, and it did. I never thought some of those children I knew would be left alone to fend for themselves and that the very air would swallow them and their dreams together, and it did. I never knew fifteen of my friends would die before the age of twenty. I never in a million years thought we would lose against my cousin’s team from Boston.
I wasn’t on the team — I never was on any team. This was the bigger lads — the lads like my brother and Paul. They were Bantams for Christ sake. But when Boston skated out and did their warmup, they were huge. Lumbering skaters, but huge, well-padded boys with big bums, from another world.
Our gutless coach wanted to protest, saying they had sneaked some juveniles with them. But this was not the way it was done. The oldest, the Yanks said, was twelve — in American terms they were small — tiny really.
We would play the game.
Their centre men were about a foot taller than ours. Their hockey sweaters were fantastically gaudy — red and white and blue. They had huge American flags on their backs. They skated about as if they knew everyone was watching them, spoke little asides to each other, perhaps about democracy, I don’t know, and stood still and moved the blades of their skates back and forth like pros.
When our team skated on the ice to do its warmup, it was as if a balloon of exhilaration had been deflated. Paul accidently hip-checked one of their players near the centre line, and went flying through the air and into the corner.
“I’m sorry — excuse me,” their player said, helping him to his feet. Paul limped over to the bench trying to save face by looking like he had been hurt in the actual game.
In the stands all our mothers and fathers — ready to cheer our boys — looked at one another.
And our boys looked like they were about three feet tall. Some of our players were wearing different coloured stockings. And Darren Foley went over to the side to get a pin off of his sister. And of course at that time in our country we didn’t really have a flag. Well the British Ensign, or we could have gone with the New Brunswick boat. (Honest to God, I’ve never been really sure what kind of boat it is. It looks like a cross between a Spanish galleon and a Roman slave ship.)
Our goalie during warmup was flipping about, like a pancake, going down on every shot trying to make fantabulous saves to impress everyone.
He slipped, hit his head on the crossbar and rolled about the ice for five minutes, whining in a disgusting manner at the top of his voice.
The trainer (he wasn’t actually a trainer — just Mr. Comeau) went over to check the bump on his head. “It’s a long way from yer heart,” he kept saying.
Then they piped in the national anthems while everyone stood still. Everyone sang the American Anthem:
“OH SAY CAN YOU SEE —
THE BOMBS BUR-STING IN AIR
THAT OUR FLAG WAS STILL — THERE —”
Everyone cheered and roared and screamed.
Then came our Anthem.
“— oh Can-er-da — our home and natives in our land on guard we go and stand”
We didn’t play bad. We got around them now and again on the boards, and shot from the outside. But we often had to dump and when we dumped the puck or tried to muscle them on the boards we were in real trouble. A lot of times we outplayed them. But they would simply stand near the net and knock us down. Overall they didn’t skate as well but they didn’t have to.
They passed and then mowed us down at the blueline. If we tried to check them at the blueline boards they would simply hold us off.
My cousin was not a bad player and I began to notice him more as the game went along. Our families began to yell at their own kids to get out of the way when the Boston players started to come into our zone.
But our young lads stood there and took the hits for town pride. In those days it wasn’t like it is today. No-one was dressed like a spaceman. You could still tell who people were. You could still tell it was your cousin getting the hell knocked out of him. It wasn’t an exclusive sport then.
“Bobby, for Jesus sakes get out of the way.”
But our players COULDN’T get out of the way. It was not in their nature to do so. It was like telling Bobby Orr with banged up knees to get out of the way. It ain’t in his nature.
Our goalie actually started to play well. Instead of going down and flailing around he came out of the net to block the shots, as if posture didn’t matter anymore and playing the game well did.
But every shot he let in came from well back. And then something happened. Call it the X factor or the Canadian-consciousness syndrome. Everyone knows what I am talking about.
At the beginning of the third period they had tired, and we weren’t tired at all. They were sluggish. We began to get around their checks. And once we got shots on their net our side of the stands went wild.
We began to cheer because when first we were too sure of ourselves and thought we couldn’t lose, we now realized something much greater was happening, and we were cheering our players for their guts alone. The momentum by the five-minute mark of the third period was in our favour and we were only one goal behind.
And then came what usually comes to Canadian teams. It might have been worse. It was after all a home town referee. We got five unanswered penalties in the third period.
The first penalty was a roughing call because a Boston player had fallen down just in the corner of Tuff’s (our referee’s) peripheral vision. The Boston player when he went sprawling threw his legs high into the air, and rolled over as if he had been shot.
“OHHHHHHHH,” came the sound from the Boston crowd. “THAT’S NOT HOCKEYYYYYYYY.”
Tuff skated, as if morally shaken by what his town had done.
“Two minutes,” he yelled almost in panic.
My brother was given two minutes. The Boston player bent over, was helped to the bench by a crowd of his own players and then skated out to take the face-off, a look of suffering and noble determination on his face.
The play had not more than started when the whistle blew again. Players stood about wondering. Tuff skated backwards, pouting, and looking very grim. Then he went over and pointed to Darren Foley, who looked at him so incredulously you might have thought he had actually done something.
“What-what — what?”
The crowd began to boo. Yet this I think only increased the ref’s utter determination to prove that though he lived his life in a town of deceit and lawlessness he himself was smirkingly fair-minded.
It was an accidental call. He hadn’t meant to blow the whistle. I don’t think he meant to blow it at all. It just blew. To this day
I’m sure he never knew why. And so in his panic he took his own to task. And once started he couldn’t stop. Has anyone ever seen this in hockey in Canada?
“You,” he said, enraged at everyone, “in the box —”
“Me — what the hell did I do!”
“In the box,” he said and he began to skate rapidly in a circle as if he wanted everyone to notice him, shaking his head up and down and pouting not unlike Benito Mussolini.
On the double penalty we went down two goals, but managed when my brother came out after their two-man power play to score short-handed, when Tony LeBlanc — who was actually a Peewee like Darren Foley, and even smaller than our Bantams, squeezed by two defencemen, scored, and was lifted into the air in the same way Lemieux lifted Gretzky after scoring against the Russians in 1987 (although Tony appreciated it more than Gretzky).
But it was not done yet. We could not mount much of an offence after this because every time we did we would be put in the box. And it was all because Tuff had blown the whistle accidently.
Tuff was in the throes of whistle-hungry madness and like the great fourteenth century plagues it would have to run its course. All Canadians understand this.
With less than a minute left we were still down one goal. The play was in our end. Our goalie stops the puck, and cranks his neck on the crossbar again, and suddenly, Tuff, with an insane moral gesture, awards us a penalty shot.
He put the puck on centre ice and gave the nod to the fastest, largest player on our team, Phillip Luff.
Phillip had all the tools in the world to play a great game of hockey, but hadn’t the brain. He would end up becoming a bongo player, dress in a flowered shirt, wearing a headband to keep the brushcut out of his eyes.
Phillip started from behind his own goal without the puck and skated to centre ice where the puck was sitting. He had picked up an enormous amount of speed by this time. He was, in the parlance, a “skatin’ fool.”
At centre ice Phillip winds up and takes a slapshot.
It blisters by their goalie and hits the post.
“Damn,” Phillip’s father says, and begins to clap.
Phillip, grinning from ear to ear, skates off.
His father waves.
“Hi daddy,” Phillip says, waving back.
Everyone sits at the bench with their head down.
It took me a year to get over that game against my cousin’s team. When we lost the Canada Cup to the Russians in 1981 I refused to watch hockey (I cheated during the playoffs) until we won it back in 1984. This was somewhat how I felt back then in the early winter of 1961.
Or worse. I actually felt worse on both these occasions than I can ever describe. I felt like I was to feel after the first game in 1972. How can one describe it? How can one describe the feeling I had? Well I will tell you how it was.
Do you remember the battle of Cannae in 218 B.C.? Yes. It was just like that — 2,300 years can’t erase how the Romans must have felt after Hannibal crushed their army at Cannae. When the Romans sent scouts out of Rome to see how the army did, and stragglers met them saying, “There is no army now.”
It was a feeling just like that. There was an utter silence. The Yanks had beaten us. The Yanks who didn’t even consider hockey a sport had come into our home town where hockey was eveything in the world and had beaten us.
Worse I had bragged to my cousin about the NHL and that when the NHL needed hockey players they came to Canada and got hockey players like me (stupid, stupid, stupid).
My cousin had scored the winning goal. They had all cheered him and lifted him up and hugged him and he received a trophy. He came home and handed the trophy to me, to let me feel it, once, before he whisked it away, winking and smiling.
Suddenly it occurred to me that I had grown a beard as I sat in the den. I had become a southern rebel in April of 1865. We all had beards, my brother, mother, father and I sitting about listening to the yanks talk.
“Boys you played a good game,” my uncle said to my brother blowing smoke rings above his head. He couldn’t help but smile, and he was so patient and kind to me. It was as if I was talking to some Federal cavalry officer who was allowing me to keep my horse because I would have to go back home to plow my field.
“We put up a good fight didn’t we,” I said, trying once again for that old delightful bravado I could exhibit at times.
“You fought all the way,” he said.
You’ll find in situations like this when the defeated boys want to talk the victors always want to change the subject. So suddenly my uncle was talking to my cousin about going home. Getting back to their lives, to his wife and children, being just an ordinary person again.
“Oh you don’t have to go yet,” my mother said, scratching her beard. My father too, smoothed his beard with his hand. My brother, wounded, his cheek bandaged, hobbled about in an old rebel stovepipe hat, right in front of my eyes, as snow, delicious Canadian snow, fell in the damnable darkness outside.
But if you are already on the outside then things don’t matter. If you are never a part of the fraternity then what does it matter if the fraternity loses?
I don’t think Michael felt like this, just as the Maritimes never felt like this towards Canada, yet I think this was the way Michael wished me to think he felt.
He was there that night, helping with the ice, when the whole town suffered, when even the streetlights flicking on in the brutal darkness flicked a Morse code message of defeat.
Yet he told Stafford that the game didn’t matter to him, or the subsequent games the Bantam As won because he, as perhaps the best, wasn’t in on it.
We were going to have our own games, he said, and start our own league.
Long after we all were in bed for the night Michael was still out, downtown, walking about on slicked shoes, his hair already slicked back in the way he would keep it for the remainder of his life, cleaning up at the taxi stand for a dollar or, over at the rink sweeping the ice and under the benches. He would bring a senior’s broken stick home, to mend for a game the next afternoon.
Later when in my old stupid head I finally realized that hockey at some level or perhaps all levels was a fraternity, that there were insiders and outsiders, I thought of Michael taping up a busted stick down near the fire that he lit in the middle of a January night.
At that same time, back in 1961, Mr. Norris was thinking of hockey in England’s Wembley Stadium, and was thinking along with others in Detroit and New York, in Chicago and Boston, of hockey in the millions and millions of dollars. They had to get it out of and away from the hands of the Canadians first — and they knew this.
I suppose we all have different motives when it comes to hockey. As Michael worked at ten o’clock at night to get his hands on a busted stick, in what seemed to be the remotest corner of a remote country, others were thinking of multimillion dollar television syndication rights.
The only dream Michael had was to get enough hockey sticks for us to play. He would lie down at night thinking of how to smooth out a bump on our river.
Our river. My cousin didn’t believe me when I told him that we did not have a swimming pool in our town. I did not tell him that our river, miles long and a mile wide would suffice, without chlorine, to dip your toe in.
I think our river back then was somewhat like our Canadian hockey talent pool; it seemed deep and endless. It had farm teams in its tributaries. It was “unlike” other rivers. It was still non-generic. That is, hockey was not like football, or baseball. Now it is more like these sports, or at least the owners want to display hockey as such.
And now my river is like other rivers. It is still a mystic river, but it is no longer endless. Its great pools have been cut down, and overfished. It has changed with the times, and swimming pools dot our landscape too.
Michael’s hockey sticks, all collected over January of 1961, doled out to us all taped and glued, sawed down for small people by the master of improvisation, are as forgotten now in his generosity as
the water that passed under our boots.
Some of us never told him we didn’t need his kindness, we had our own sticks, for this kindness was all that he could afford.
I asked Paul years later about this. About the expansion, about hockey, about what hockey meant to him. Paul had become more philosophical. It no longer mattered to him as it once did. The fire burned not as bright. Like some of us he hardly watched a game any more. He was often out of the country. Yet he said hockey was now a media event. The game no longer had a mythology that the media knew. It had media that tried to exclude the mythology. And this had gone on since the late sixties.
Anything the owners did not want the game to say the game did not say. And the main thing the owners did not want the game to say was that it was Canadian.
They were trying to resuscitate it in the States and so media, or what the media said about it, mattered much more than mythology. The mythology of so much of the NHL, was a Canadian one foreign to both the owners and the media.
Any mythology was cheapened to accommodate the media. When hockey was mentioned on television programs like “Barney Miller,”“Colombo,” or “The Rockford Files,” it was almost always satirized. The boys never fought to get tickets to a game, but always had a comment about those who would go.
Paul had become cynical about it. He had watched the attitude of the media towards it. And the problem was always the same — the media we thought was our media, we cheered it, laughed at it, and glorified it. Yet it was not ours, and the game was not theirs.
He told me about the interview of Canadian players by the ABC network before the winter games in Sarajevo in 1984. ABC wanted to show their viewing audience that though Canadians still thought they were the best in the world they had not won a Gold in years. After they interviewed a Canadian player who said Canada was the greatest hockey nation, they mysteriously mentioned that Canada had not won Gold in years, and made no further comment or explanation. Then they spoke of how many Gold the Soviets had won.
It was as if nothing had to be explained to their audience about why, Paul said. It made us all seem like pathological delusionists, Paul said.
Hockey Dreams Page 6