Hockey Dreams

by David Adams Richards

  The rink was becoming filled again for the Bantam As. Suddenly there was the idea that the town had a team again — kids who were giving everything they had, wearing ancient hockey sweaters and mismatched socks.

  In the house league that Stafford and I still played in, we too had spectators — small children who had figure skating before us, the few rink rats who were obligated to be there, the woman who ran the concession stand, and a few mothers and fathers. Also the coach, who was the coach of the Bantam All-Stars also, and who Stafford was a terrible suck-up to. I suppose he knew I knew, and only wanted me to realize that he couldn’t help it.

  Now and then, playing his heart out he would be castigated by the mother of one of the other players for allowing the team to fall behind. “Are you blind?” Sharon would yell at him. Stafford would wipe his eyes, would look over, smile and keep on going.

  “Ah get off the ice and go sit down — who are you — the coach’s pet — hang around the coach — don’t worry now boys you can just waa — Ik in and score — walllk in and sc-OORE. Idiot arse is on the ice again. Ole Idiot Arse Piss the Bed is on the ice.”

  And so it spread, and Stafford was known, secretly as Piss the Bed and Idiot Arse. If you went over and told people he was a sleepwalking, fall-down diabetic with a maniacal desire to participate in events normal children around the country did, it might have made a difference. But he did not do this. Nor would he want anyone else to.

  Of all the people who ever yelled and screamed at the coach or children, or bullied, I found mothers to be by far the worst. The most vicious. Every moment on the ice must have been agony for some children. And Stafford was one of those children. Those who made it with ease, like his brothers, or those who refused to let it destroy them like Michael would not have much idea what Stafford went through.

  Sometimes we would stand there, as the play just carried on about us, nodding now and again to the other players as they skated by. Once or twice when Stafford touched the puck, usually having it hit his stick — he would yell out to the coach, his face gone mad with glee, “I touched the puck — I touched it.”

  “Ya, good — great,” the coach would say. “Keep up the good work.”

  Worse, was when Stafford’s sisters would arrive and yell out to us, “There’s Rocket and Pocket — there’s Rocket and Pocket.”

  And we would skate a few blades, like grilse moving out of their position, nodding toward the bleachers, then try to skate backwards to our lay again.

  But there were a few things I learned from those days. One was the viciousness certain adults have toward those who do not measure up. You are most often ridiculed by lesser men.

  We played from eight o’clock until about ten minutes to nine on Saturday morning; then the Bantams would take over and then the Juveniles. The later in the day it was, the older the teams got, the more serious the players looked, until just before three o’clock you had players skating about with five o’clock shadows.

  One morning we were playing the first place house-league team — the Bruins. Stafford and I were at our blueline, watching the play develop up at the other end of the rink. It looked like we were going to score, but we didn’t. The puck tricked out and one of the Bruins grabbed it. Emmett, who looked like a small pitbull.

  Away he came towards us. And we stood there watching him. Quite politely we felt he would just wisshh by us. We would nod to him like we usually did. And that would be it. This had nothing to do with our not wanting to stop him. We wanted to stop him — we just weren’t sure how.

  But this morning as he came down the ice towards us, he noticed me as I stood on the blueline, and putting his head down made a quick turn to his left — right in Stafford’s direction.

  “Get out of the way,” I yelled at Stafford. “Get out of the way.”

  Emmett did not see Stafford of course. Most people did not see Stafford. Nor did Stafford move. Perhaps he did not have time. Perhaps he just said the hell with it.

  Everyone on both benches was yelling at him to get out of the way. Our coach, their coach. Sharon. But Stafford was frozen.

  At the very last second Emmett looked up. I saw Stafford close his eyes.

  WAMP.

  Stafford went about fifteen feet in the air, bent in at the stomach like a rag doll before he hit the ice, and then slid, round and round like a top, his head wagging one way and then the other. He had saved a goal. He was knocked out cold. That was perhaps the high crest mark of our friendship.

  But the next Wednesday evening, something put a strain on Stafford’s and my relationship. That was the day the puck touched my stick, was picked up by Earl McIntosh and Earl McIntosh flipped it into the net.

  “I got an assist,” I said. I could not believe my luck. I was on the score sheet, in the House league’s scoring RACE.

  The evening was quiet when we left the rink. Cars moved off as frozen and grinding as fingers down a chalkboard. I walked with my coat half-opened, and breathed the air, insensitive to the cold.

  “It wasn’t really an assist,” Stafford whispered, when we got to George Street.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I have seen many assists in my time, and that was about as phony an assist and everything like that — that I have ever seen.”

  “Don’t care.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Do.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Do.”

  And we went our separate ways, at my street, not to speak again for awhile.

  TEN

  I REMEMBER HOW STAFFORD stuck to those tiny yellow handbooks written by Lloyd Percival. He tried to exercise everyday in the open air — which meant he left his bedroom window open and froze the upstairs out. Because this is what Lloyd told him to do.

  There was a greyness to the snow, the earth itself. All winter long, lights from across our windswept river flicked out like beacons on faraway islands. For months there seemed to be nothing but small paths along the sidewalks, and snowbanks as high or higher than our houses.

  And Stafford exercised in his small sleeveless T-shirt, staring into the dark. Lloyd had told him to do it. His stretches and his toe touching and his limbering up for the big game that never came.

  He kept a progress chart on his wall, and did practice shooting outside at a tin can. Night after night just after supper he would go outside with his tin can and his hockey stick, and try to flick a puck and hit it, like the man in the movie Liberty Valance, a string of lights over his head, and half the lights burnt out. Stafford Foley’s rink had disappeared by this time and was a trough of water and ruts covered with new, white snow.

  He tried to jump over a broom handle. He practised stopping and starting quickly, but only in his rubber boots, and of course he tried to stickhandle and deek a board.

  From my window I would often see him running about this board, like a squirrel in a cage. I never quite knew what it was he was doing.

  I suppose he was a Lloyd Percival addict. He was the first person I remember who insisted his mother get wholewheat bread. His father would take a bite of it, spit it back on his plate and say, “What in Christ is this?”

  He ate fruit and vegetables, and walked about with a chunk of cheese in his pocket. He almost never ate the cheese — he just had it in his pocket. He started a regimen of weightlifting. I have often considered the wounded as being the ones obligated to do this. By the end of March he was lifting 30 to 40 pounds.

  At school he stayed away from me. During the whole time the Trail Smoke Eaters were over in Europe he never spoke about hockey to me. I think half of the reason Stafford stayed away from me is because I was so fanatical about Trail. I was a psychological menace to everyone in Canada when Canada was playing international hockey.

  All during this time, my relatives in Boston made no calls, and we heard nothing from them. We were supposed to go down to Boston at the end of March — of course I was going as a tagalong; and I knew
that if Trail did not win the World Championship, I would have nothing to say. In fact, I would want to say nothing. I wouldn’t even want to go.

  The Colonel told me that no one had given Trail much of a chance but that he thought they could win, and then he put, “At least the silver.” Silver was no good, and never has been any good for Canada — there is not a team who ever played for Canada who has won a silver and actually wanted it. This is one thing about hockey. No Canadian ever felt great about a silver medal. It shows you where the game stands in our psyche.

  When Trail was overseas, I began to get the first solid impressions of our opposition. I still thought of them on outside arenas far away, but I was essentially beginning to differentiate one team from the other. To know them as chunks of their country’s personalities.

  For instance, no matter how much I admired Mats Naslun later on, I disrespected the Swedes then, and now, and forever. I felt they were bogus world champions whenever they claimed to be. I have always felt that at our best the Swedes would never be a match for us.

  I feared, hated, respected and admired the Russians.

  I didn’t feel it then, but over the years I felt that they were the one other country which could make a legitimate claim to the World Championship. That is often why, when in those contests in which some other country wins the World Championship or the Gold medal, it is more important to us how we fared against the Russians. I know the Russians feel that way about us.

  “There is one team Canada has always had to watch — the back-door team — the Czechs,” the Colonel told me in early March of 1961.

  The Czechs I also knew. I liked them more than either the Swedes or the Russians. I didn’t know them well, but I assumed at times that they liked us. The Swedes would never give us a wink. Definitely not the Russians, the Czechs might. At least I thought this way for a while.

  Canada. Well God knows what I thought. Canada was always the team to beat at these affairs even when they weren’t seeded number one. That is, every other team got up to play Canada.

  Stafford decided that I was no longer his friend. He would come over to my side of the street and call for Garth instead of me. He would often leave when I showed up to play on Michael’s rink.

  I was no longer his friend because I had gotten an assist. I finally brought this up to him.

  “Oh ho ho ho — you think that’s what it is,” he said. But he didn’t elaborate. He was betting money on Detroit. Detroit was this and Detroit was that, and there was nothing anyone could say. He was a Lloyd Percival, Detroit-loving fool. I knew Detroit would make the playoffs, but I was hoping for Montreal — who actually had the most points that year.

  Everything was Lloyd Percival. The reason I didn’t make the Peewee All-Star team was because I hadn’t read Lloyd Percival. The reason he was now very strong and was going to make it, was because of Lloyd.

  One night I went out alone — using my hockey stick as a spear more than as a stick, playing Eskimo and throwing the stick at the huge snow bears the grader had made, walking towards the river.

  On the rink was one person. Stafford. The wind was blowing across the river and cut right through my coat. It lashed at my face and my eyes watered. It was probably −30°F. It seemed to be even colder on the windswept river. Far across the ice, lights from the other shore twinkled numbly and as remote as stars. Far away too, there were the lights of the other towns. We seemed to be the only inhabitants of the planet.

  Stafford had set up his Lloyd Percival obstacle course and was going through the motions. But it was as if his heart was no longer in it. Tin cans that he skated around at so many feet apart. He was so light, that the wind blew him backwards when he stopped to take a breath and wipe his eyes.

  And then he went over to the corner and took off his skates. He was in terrible pain. I sometimes forget that he was often in pain. He had a hard time lifting his feet into his boots, and when he did, he hobbled up the path towards me. I simply stayed where I was and he walked right by.

  I then went down to the river and stepped onto the ice. Michael had made a fine rink, with backboards and a perimeter of railway ties. It was the finest rink Michael would ever make, with gill mesh nets frozen into the ice. And it would be his last. But I tell you being on it all alone at 9:30 at night gave you the strangest feeling. It was as if I was as far away from the world as any child who had ever existed.

  I looked at the Graves Beans cans Stafford had set up, which were now being scattered by the wind, making soft clinking sounds against the frozen pods of snow, and felt suddenly as lonely as hell.

  In March of 1961, the news came out of Europe — the Czechs had beaten the Russians, and were playing the Canadians. The Colonel was right. The Czechs were the back-door team. No-one paid much attention to them — but they had beaten Bellville two years before and now they had beaten the Russians.

  I was on my way to the dentist when I heard. I was happy the Russians lost. I’m always happy when the Russians lose.

  A thaw had come and the sidewalk in front of me was filled with a bloated fog, while water dripped from the buildings. I thought that if the Czechs had beaten the Russians that was good, only if we beat both the Russians and the Czechs.

  We tied the Czechs a few days later, on an open-air rink, and so had to beat the Russians by two goals or the Czechs would win the Gold.

  How many tournaments have the Canadians been in where their backs are not against the wall?

  Some of our moments on the ice are essentially as heroic as our moment at Dieppe. Certainly one must not take this as being disrespectful. It is a part of our national character I am talking about.

  Our backs were against the wall in the game against Russia in 1961 just as our backs were against the wall when we were 1–3–1 in Moscow in September of 1972.

  My dentist back in March of 1961 was a tiny drunken little dentist. He was so drunk the day we tied the Czechs that he forgot to freeze my teeth, and went to the legion for a drink. “I’ll be back when your teeth freeze,” he said.

  Then he came back, after an hour or so, and began to drill into the back tooth. It struck me as not being that painful, and I thought I might get away with it, when all of a sudden “Yoooulwl,” and I jumped straight up out of my seat.

  That is the only thing I remember about the day we tied the Czechs. For years and years the only thing I was to remember about the Trail Smoke Eaters is that I spent half that month in a dentist chair.

  He also lay a bet with me that the Trail Smoke Eaters would not win. He may have done this just as a joke or he may have actually believed it. It was not all that difficult a thing to believe. They had a game against the Soviets coming up, where they had to beat them by two goals. The bet was 50 cents — my weekly allowance.

  My dentist was working on one tooth. The filling kept falling out. I would wake up in the middle of the night howling in pain. And in the late foggy afternoon I would make my way back downtown. All the snow, all the dirt, fog and icicles in the town seemed to know my tooth was sore.

  Years later when I was to a dentist in Saint John, he looked at an ancient filling I had received and said, “I haven’t seen a filling done like that since I went to dental school with old such and such.”

  “That’s him,” I said.

  “He was very bright — a wonderful human being — used to drink a little — was a devoted socialist, loved children.”

  “I never knew he drank,” I said.

  “He was a wonderful hockey player — college player — all the girls loved him.”

  “He never told me,” I said.

  “He lost his wife and child in a fire — that caused a lot of grief in his life.”

  I never thought when I was so young of adults once having been young, of having hopes dashed, children lost, their lives tragic.

  It snowed again, and began to snow hard, and kept it up for days. For days, Michael went down to the rink and shovelled it off, only for it to be covered again that night
. Michael was hoping to have a big game, with someone.

  I had told my relatives from Boston that the reason we were such great hockey players — people like me — was because of being born in the ice-ridden and snow-driven North. Of never minding either ice or snow or wind. Of not caring if it drifted for days. Of being unmoved by temperatures of −60°F. Of laughing at it all.

  My uncle had been to Alaska to sell Cotts. He told me that Alaska was the coldest place on earth. He told me that whenever they wanted to sing about a cold climate, they didn’t sing about Canada — they sang about Alaska. Whenever they wanted to talk about a gold rush — they talked about Alaska. Whenever they wanted to show you a polar bear in a movie it was almost always an Alaskan polar bear. Very few Canadian polar bears got their snout into a movie, he told me.

  “North — to Alaska — we’re goin’ North — the rush is on — way up NORTH — Way UP NORTH,” he began to sing.

  “Canada is bigger than Alaska,” I said sheepishly.

  “Alaska,” my uncle said, puffing on a cigar, “is even bigger than Texas.”

  “NO,” my father said, because he was surprised, “Is IT?”

  “ ’Fraid so,” my uncle said, “ ’FRAIDD SOOO.”

  My father looked at me, and I said nothing.

  Not only had they beaten us at Squaw Valley, we were not even the coldest country. And if we were the coldest country we wouldn’t be able to brag about it, only apologize for it.

  March 12, 1961, about one o’clock in the afternoon Maritime time.

  Canada was penalized against Russia at the 40-second mark. Canada was penalized again at about the three-minute mark.

  No one listening to that broadcast would have realized that not only were they listening to history — that this would be the last time a Canadian amateur team from the boonies, from the dark, smoky backwoods of Canada, would go over and win a World Championship, but that they were witnesses to the profound psychology of Canada and Canadian teams who personified this.