As long as we play at our best, we are going to get penalties. This will be as true in 1998, as it was in 1958. There are always horror stories about refereeing from players who played in Europe. The first eleven penalties called would go to Canada.
This idea that you can make hay by blasting Canada, has been around for years. No team ever complained about Canadian backchecking on sensitive virtue alone. Virtue has nothing to do with it.
And it was always there. It followed the Penticton Vees and the Trail Smoke Eaters — just small town Canadian boys going over to play for the world, when all of Canada, like the old Colonel by his radio, knew what was really at stake.
Part Three
EIGHT
I WOULD LIKE TO MENTION THIS: I heard a song once by an old black man, from the south. And I said to myself: that does sound familiar — those guitar riffs, that old refrain; ah, yes — I remembered it was sung by a white rockabilly boy that winter of 1961
It was not made famous by this old blues man — this sad old blues singer from Mississippi; it was made famous by the be bop a loo bop rockabilly boy with the white complexion, who could introduce the song to mainstream America — package it in a comfortable way to the girls who would not swing their dresses so high, wiggle too, too much.
It was a great song. At first, I liked the rockabilly version. The old man’s version seemed so strange — so foreign to me, that I did not accept it.
The record company wanted the old blues song that came from blood and sweat in that Mississippi delta. They wanted the guitar riffs, the lyrics. But they wanted it not so troubling, not so rough. They wanted to hide it away, and tuck it in. And they didn’t want the black voice husking out into the microphone.
But yes, they could profit from it. They wanted the song. They did not feel they had to tell you where this song came from. They did not feel a need to tell you that it came out of a person’s love of country and gift of life and tragedy when both have been taken away. They didn’t want those young college girls and boys — who so desperately needed a song such as this — to know quite what it all was about.
And those record moguls knew that they didn’t need people to know the song’s history in order to sell the song. Nor did they consider that if people did not know the song’s history they might never know the song well.
But, as I say, I listened to it. I listened to the rockabilly version of this song in 1961 when I was a child playing hockey in the street. It was the rockabilly version under the cold sky that everyone tapped their toes to. It was the version that everyone heard which to them represented all the authenticity and spontaneity they believed the song had to offer.
Years later I heard the black man from the delta singing, in his gravelly voice this same song, in a house on a dark and solitary back street in Saint John, NB.
The rockabilly version is still out there. But now, nothing about it is so remarkable. It is a version with a mask, a front. It is still in its own way, something you might dance to, buy, or send as a gift, as memorabilia of that long ago lost age.
But the song, written and sung by the black man from the delta, goes beyond all of this. It is now, just as it was then. It has not lost itself in nostalgia. It has not changed. It is not dated, because it comes as it was written, in sacrifice and courage and love.
Those who invent the world for us, do this often. They legitimize by delegitimizing. For so many songs, ideas, books, opinions, etc., are best sanitized just a bit for the broader marketplace. The place where the glossy edition comes out.
The world is invented for us. It is made palatable. The old black man did not understand this. Some of the greatest songs of all time were written by black men who got fifty bucks for them.
The honour supposedly came when they listened to the radio and heard the be bop a loo bop, party-pack version on some rockabilly show, from somewhere in Tennessee. They were never mentioned as the inventors of those wonderful songs. Their names never spilled out onto the airwaves.
What does this have to do with my hockey book? I don’t know. It’s just something I thought I’d mention.
Back then from 1961 through to 1967, when we walked out in the snow after school the long shadows of evening were against the slanted frozen buildings, and the hockey game in Europe was almost over. We would always try to catch just a bit of it. Running home — I remember running home — we would pick up the CBC broadcast from Europe, amid the static, and when it finally came in, the sound of whistles and jeers from the fans. Sometimes there would be interference, and silence for whole minutes.
Then it would break out again. The sickening sound of whistles and jeers. I can never think of a game in Europe where the jeers and whistles did not fulfil some prophetic sense of doom, no matter which of those years we happened to catch it.
“What are they whistling and jeering at?” Darren would ask.
“Shhh — we got — two more minutes.”
“Ohhh —” Darren would answer. And he would look in the kind of startled way children have. Stafford would fumble with the dial, his pants drooping, the back of his shirt untucked.
“Shhh.”
Out of the corner and now up along the boards — here come the Canadians — now Dewsbury — here, now just a minute here we go again, Dewsbury is called — another penalty to Canada and the Czechs are up 4–2.
I remember hearing something very much like this when I came home from school in 1959. That was the year Bellville was wearing the Canadian colours.
I remember sitting with Stafford and Darren, shaking just a little. Darren sat in a chair staring at the wall. Stafford stood near the radio, as if moving the dial one fraction of a millimetre would bring in a better score and a different announcement. But it never did. Sometimes I would lay down on the couch and put a pillow over my head, listening, rocking back and forth, and hoping that my rocking would drown out the drone of whistles, the static, the idea that time was passing and we were behind.
Far away in Europe on those cold, shadow-filled arenas Canadians were playing for us. No one here could help them.
I don’t know now — you get the feeling that Canada might not be able to make this up — that missing that breakaway — might have demoralized them a little.
And again we would wait and listen. And then usually clearer than anything else, the long ago beeping buzzer that would end the game. Rushing home from school to hear these games we would never really know what period we were getting, and so Stafford would always say hopefully: “Well there is probably another period.” Only to find out that they were signing off, and there suddenly was string quartet music of some sort.
There was, in those long ago dark afternoons of 1961 some terrible hypersensitivity in me.
I knew something was strange in how others viewed Canadians — I knew the old Colonel was right in this, but I didn’t quite know how it was happening, only that it was. I did not quite know how to explain it. We were the best and yet it seemed, after Squaw Valley, after Bellville losing to the Czechs and after the 4–0 loss to the Swedish team by the Trail Smoke Eaters that something very fundamental in our nature was missing.
We were cocky hockey players, but we were indentured. As I sat there in that office I was flooded with memoried pain of my uncle and his son, coming to our house, and telling us about how great the Russians were, and then having the audacity to go out and beat us.
The name Bunny Ahearne still drives me nuts. I did not know why then. How could I know? I only knew that every-time a decision about hockey was made it was made (with the backing of hockey powers like Saudi Arabia) to the detriment of Canada. The Canadians knew this — Bunny Ahearne knew this. Everyone, in Canada who gave a fiddler’s fart about hockey, no matter how blind they were, knew there was an unfair, intrinsic mean-spiritedness about the IIHL treatment of Canada — that would not stop until 1972.
But the secret Bunny Ahearne, Irishman, had when brokering deals that would freeze Canada in International hockey was to
play upon the Canadian ego and the Russian self-interest in keeping Canada as far on the outside as possible.
We felt we were the best and the toughest and the most talented. What could unfairness do to us? Or mean-spiritedness? Ignore it and get on with the game. I’m sure that this was the posture Ahearne hoped for in his dealings with us.
Ahearne had a peculiar antipathy for our nation that came with smiles one day and angry arm-twisting the next. Why he made us a scapegoat was a particular strain of angry envy, mean-spiritedness — and that peculiar idea that he had to be fair to the others. The IIHL was also a money-making venture for his own travel agency, (Net Worth, Cruise, David and Griffiths, Alison: Penguin, 1992).
But it was also the idea that their game, the European game, the game of ice hockey, was more moral than the game of hockey.
Well I know our hockey could be rough, uncompromising in the corners, hard-driven, knock your head off. But it could not, our game of hockey, be mean-spirited. And this is what we faced from 1959 until Paul Henderson’s goal somehow delivered us in 1972. It was not so much that Paul Henderson’s goal won the series (in the Russian Sports Hall of Fame they never tell you who won that series — they only tell you that the Russians scored more goals overall) but that his goal somehow delivered us. It proved to all of my generation for once what we thought and felt and believed about our country was essentially true.
That the Russians, could be mean-spirited — that they could flood the penalty box with our players, not give us meals before the game, try to keep us awake all hours of the night on the conviction that the world would understand that their game and their life was more MORAL. But finally on the ice — on the ice — hockey was greater than ice hockey.
I think of those times, cramped boots and coats, dark, dark afternoons, when the Trail Smoke Eaters were our hope in Europe, on a forty thousand dollar budget.
Michael and Ginette over the bank together shovelling the snow from the rink, and then the nets made, and suddenly great railway ties coming from somewhere, for the boards.
Tobias thought he had a father somewhere. Suddenly Tobias believed his father was somewhere in Napan — and he knew who he was, because one of his relatives told him. He was excited about this. And Michael told him not to be.
At this time too, Stafford began to rebel — he began to reduce his insulin intake, believing he could eat candy if he did. We had left his house, and had gone down over the bank to help with the railroad ties Michael had collected. It was a clear night in February, the stars were dazzling, and suddenly, there was a sound. It was Stafford and his brothers fighting.
“Get some sugar into him — get some sugar.”
He kicked, screamed and roared, and threw Darren off him as if he was nothing at all. Out of Stafford’s back pocket fell two pamphlets that he had sent away for. They lay in the snow as a symbol of Stafford’s hopeless hope.
He had collected twelve labels from Corn Syrup for these pamphlets. And for those Corn Syrup labels he had received: How to train for hockey and How to play better hockey, written by Lloyd Percival in the 1940s and adopted by the Russian program in the fifties. And still around in 1961.
He carried those pamphlets about with him like the two tablets of The Ten Commandments. He would read them and reread them with his half-blind eyes. Each pamphlet had a place for your name: property of Stafford Foley, 609 King George Highway, Newcastle, NB, Canada, North America, Western Hemisphere, Planet Earth.
The pamphlets lay in the snow and were almost washed under a drift until Darren, who had a bloody lip, saw them and picked them up. Then we went back up the hill together, through the drifts, in the frigid air.
The secret was, he had drunk the corn syrup, sitting in his basement hidden behind the furnace. After this episode, he walked in a daze many days. Sadly it became known by us that he still wet the bed. Often at night the lights would snap on, and he would be wandering the house, soaked to the skin. A smelly bucket of pee sat under his bed.
One day just after this he began to question me about my grandfather. My grandfather was a diabetic and had graciously volunteered to be one of Banting and Best’s guinea pigs. He was one of the first diabetics to try insulin, and died of insulin related complications.
When I related this story to him Stafford turned to me and clutching my arm with his small brave hand said, “Thank your granddad for me,” and smiled.
Like Michael he had already seen the depths and was at times tired, very tired of swimming.
I remember the path Michael took to get those railway ties down to his rink. In 1961 there was one squad car in the town police force, driven by Sergeant Hood, and there was the paddy wagon. The paddy wagon had a stickshift and shifting between second and third caused the whole engine to shiver and the truck to knock. We could tell when the paddy wagon was coming at least a half a mile before it arrived.
Michael would go out after dark wearing his leather gloves, his jean jacket, and, hauling a sled, would walk to the tracks where he would steal two replacement ties at a time and haul them down past the creamery. Once on the creamery lane he would swing to his left over a snowbank and cross the dark field. He was in Skytown territory now, and ran the risk of getting his ties stolen by the Griffin boys who had their rink just beyond Morrison Lane.
He wore no hat though it might be -15°F — he always believed that exercise would keep him warm.
He would cross Old King George Highway, and through the apple orchard to King George Highway. Once on his lane he was safe. He would haul the ties around to the back of his house and hide them. Then waiting an hour or so he would bring them down to his rink.
Michael’s rink was beginning to look as fine and as accomplished as the Sinclair rink. And he knew this. We skated and played hockey on his rink now, with the bubbles of air trapped in the ice under the icy moonlight and a fire going. We all believed we had a great hand in it, but actually it was he and Ginette who had never given up on it.
Now they could not tell him he did not belong to a team. And no-one was going to tell him that he couldn’t play the game. That was the right, and the legacy, of every Canadian child.
He never invited you into his house, and almost always tried to refuse to go into yours. He never spoke about owning anything. He didn’t compete with the boy who showed him his new hockey pads and Tacklebury skates. He could never brag about his dad getting a car, or a truck. But once you were on the lane or street, or down at his rink you were on his territory and he knew he was on even ground.
There were a lot of tough boys in the neighbourhood, and he was as tough as any. I remember this now, again that in my small block of neighbourhood houses and garages I knew a cross-section of life that homogenized middle suburbia never has experienced.
Those times in the dark night air with his woollen sweater on, smelling of his house, flicking the pucks at us and smiling as he skated backwards, turning on a thin dime and breaking into strides that seemed to swallow the ice — at those times, the hurt wherever it came from, was all gone away, and he was free.
Where we had once lived seemed so little that day, in 1989, walking with Paul. Coming back to the town — everything seemed smaller, less important. The mill was now three times the size — and our river had lost its innocence. Where the gully once was, the new yuppiedom had built spectacular houses to overlook it, and no small boys and girls played on a rink. Now and then there was still the smell of smoke but it did not bite the sharp night air as it used to.
The house where Michael and Tobias lived had been torn down years before, and the lane near the creamery where Michael had dragged his railway ties looked very small and ordinary. The field too was gone.
My father’s theatre had disappeared and was replaced by videos. The young generation — mine, was hurrying along to middle age. Our children were as much interested in baseball and soccer as anything.
Hockey had become a sport dominated by a new ideal. Hardly a child I knew back in my day would
have been able to afford hockey now, the way its costs had skyrocketed.
All of this Paul and I talked about on the way to where we were going.
There were not as many fires in the winter either, in which people lost their lives, as there were in our town of grey wooden buildings when I was young.
The Sinclair Rink was gone also — it had been burned down by some boys in a hoot, and was replaced now by the Miramichi Civic Centre.
I thought back, to those foolish thoughts Stafford and I once entertained; that when hockey expanded it would expand to Newcastle — that we would have our own NHL team. (In the part of me that has never been able to grow up, I still think we could do this — that the Hartford Whalers do not deserve a team. Certain hopes you have as a child keep you one forever. That, to quote Robert Browning, is what a heaven is for.)
And looking down at the river it was as if I could see us all.
NINE
THE TEAM MICHAEL SHOULD have been on was doing well. They beat Bathurst 3–2, which was never supposed to happen. The little peewee they had brought up, Tony LeBlanc, who had scored against Boston, was scoring for them. He had scored on a breakaway against Bathurst with a minute and ten seconds left. He was no bigger than Stafford. Yet he could move about you as if you were standing cold; he slipped through checks all year long, and he came out of nowhere from behind the net, could always tuck the puck behind the goal tender, and then raise his stick with one hand as he glided into an embrace, his big Bantam A shirt down to his knees.
A dozen times in a game you thought he would be creamed, only to watch him slip through, and head towards the net. And the older boys seemed to be like big brothers to him.
I mentioned that they had brought Darren up from the Peewees as well and had put him on the wing. The team had jelled since its loss to Boston, and was waiting to go back to Boston in the spring to exact a terrible revenge. Even Phillip Luff knew enough to pass the puck so others could score.
Hockey Dreams Page 9