Hockey Dreams

by David Adams Richards

  When the Russians scored off those funny backboards — twice that I saw, but especially Shadrin’s goal in the eighth game — I remembered Stafford’s advice.

  I believe that the ’72 hockey series, as great and as nation-building as it was, broke up more than one relationship in this country of ours. It polarized people. Friends of mine, a few of them well-known Canadians, I have never had the same respect for.

  Stafford was an emotional wreck. He knew when every game started and ended. He almost knew by osmosis who had won.

  Melanie would send him on errands all over the property. Tell him to go down to the brook for water, or into the shed and slop the pig.

  “Someone has to go out and muck out the barn,” Malcolm would say, and he would look about the kitchen, his eyes resting on all their childlike faces. “And someone has to come with me in to town, get the groceries and stop off at the Black Horse for a draft.” Malcolm would take a drink of tea and honey, and clear his throat. “Stafford — you go and muck out the stall — Melanie — you come with me into town.”

  Hockey was imperialism run riot for Malcolm, who came from the mid-western United States, and had belonged at one time to a writer’s group.

  So during the fifth game, Stafford had to go sit in the barn with the horse. He was allergic to horses. His eyes watered, and he could barely breathe. He would try to lead the huge workhorse about, and the horse would simply drag him all over the lawn. If he had not loved Melanie he would never have done this.

  This sounds exaggerated, but it is not. As a matter of fact I have toned it down. I could not mention all the things Stafford went through for this thin and nervous young woman who always dropped acid when she and Malcolm went out to watch the fireflies, because you certainly would not believe me.

  As Yeats has said, poor Stafford only managed “to flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.”

  It didn’t matter to her then. I remembered this all when I saw her picture in his little room in 1989, the day he was having the chess game against himself. Perhaps in later years, somewhere — on some rainy sidewalk in some city — she looked at her reflection and remembered him also.

  This happened right at the moment of a Super Series. It happened in the dazzling brilliance of some of the greatest hockey games that were ever played. It happened when the only player on Team Canada to wear a helmet was number 19.

  During the entire fifth game Stafford stayed in the barn and watched his pocket watch. He would think about how the line changes were going, who was on the ice at that moment. He said terrible things to the horse, abusive things. He called the horse Vic Hadfield.

  Stafford’s naivety was enhanced by bravery. One would never have worked so well without the other. I supposed he embodied the best our nation has to offer in this regard. And it was during the sixth game where his naivety gave way, and his bravery took over.

  He decided to leave Melanie for a hockey game.

  She accused him of not understanding her, or caring about her finer feelings — that unlike himself, she and Malcolm were feelinged individuals. This crisis in Stafford’s life was just a blip on the radar screen back then.

  It had nothing very much to do with me, for I had lost track of Stafford at that time, as I had lost track of so many.

  The Russians were brilliant. If they were not so, it would not have been a Summit Series. If they were not so, there never would have been any argument over who was better.

  Some of the greatest players I have ever seen have been Russian — Yakushev, Kharlamov, Maltsev, Shadrin, Petrov — from the ’72 series. The list is substantial. But let me tell you something. We threw a team together in three or four weeks as always — in between our regular season as always. The Russians practised for a year, as always, to get ready for this.

  My friends, we were, and are better. We were and we are better, as long as we wish to be. The Soviets had two hundred million souls, we had twenty million.

  Nor did we just do this on our will though our players embodied our country’s will at that time. Nor did we just do it on our guts though our players exhibited plenty of that.

  We had finesse, balance and brilliance to match anything the Russians, or the Russian referees did. Yakushev was absolutely great in front of the net, Esposito was better. Our defence playing, often two men short, was nothing less than spectacular.

  So in this way I am answering what Stafford asked me years ago to answer. I am answering the Sports Illustrated article on Team Canada of 1987. I am answering the Miracle on Ice movie of 1981. I am answering the Knight Ryder article on Fetisov printed in our sports section of the paper in September of 1995.

  I am answering it for Canadians in a country that doesn’t even seem to exist anymore.

  I am answering the article that said hockey was born on the lakes and rivers to the North, in Canada, and perfected in the far off Soviet Union. And Fetisov was the greatest defenceman who ever lived. That my friends is a lie. It is a lie born out of misinformation and unobservance. It is a lie manufactured for the times we live in. Orr was far greater.

  On any given day, I would put my money on Coffey. The rest is simply blather.

  I am answering these things for Ginette and Tobias and Michael. During the ’72 series we began to get to know the Russians. And we gave them credit for doing things we supposedly did not know how to do. Like pass and stickhandle. But it is useless to measure these things, because I do not want to nor should I take anything away from the greatness of the Soviet players. Certain people will always make more excuses about why we won that series, than they would have if we lost. But I will tell you — we were and are better, then and now. It is everyone’s game — yet it is ours.

  If that’s nationalism in sport, don’t ever forgive me.

  SIXTEEN

  I CAME BACK HOME, from Boston, in early April of 1961. I would not see Boston again until I went down to a conference on writing in 1989.

  It was snowing when we got home and let the other boys off at their houses. Big, droopy, wet flakes fell over our dark little streets. My father had made it back — which was always a celebratory affair for us.

  Because of my name (not anglicized but actually English) I had sometimes considered myself a long distant cousin of Rocket and Henri Richard — and told people that perhaps in the fourteenth or fifteenth century we had the same mother or father.

  But Montreal and Toronto were gone from these playoffs. It would be a Detroit and Blackhawks final. It was an American final. There was a picture of the Golden Jet in our paper the morning of the first game. He looked a bit like Tab Hunter.

  I did not know who to go for. It didn’t matter much to me, nor to most of us who were either Toronto or Montreal fans. But it mattered to Stafford.

  It was a Detroit final and Stafford was back wearing his shoulder pads and Detroit sweater to school. He was, of course, insufferable. He would look over at me, his nose in the air and say, “Montreal? Was it Montreal you were cheering for — Les Habitants?” He would shake his head at my lack of insight.

  “It takes time to build a real team,” he would say to me on the way home, “You can’t expect Montreal to be good overnight.”

  In reality in Canada, there are two kinds of hockey fans — Montreal fans, and everyone else. The Montreal fan is, by and large, gracious, kind and magnanimous in victory. There is no real dispute about this. The other fan, everyone else, is a peculiar kind of individual — vindictive, mean and spiteful. They are generally vindictive, mean and spiteful against the Montreal fans, who they envy continually, who they see in a kind of glowing light, who they cannot approach without trepidation. Yet the Montreal fans have no need, no desire to really be worshipped. They have never demanded this.

  This is what Stafford was going through with me. It was payback time, and he could not help but gloat. He wondered why no-one could see Montreal’s failure coming.

  Whenever Montreal lost it was as if a plague had been put upon my house. It was as if I ha
d boils, or locusts. The whole house seemed doomed. That April my youngest brother had an entire snout full of chicken pox, and wore black mittens taped to his wrists so he wouldn’t scratch himself silly. He lay in his crib looking up at us, chicken pox sticking out of his hair and his ears, and in his throat, patting at his cheeks with his big mittens and crying, “Mitt — ttreeealllll.”Or so it seemed.

  My father almost always dressed in a blackish kind of suit. My sister wore a dark blue convent uniform, and a Inquisitorial cross as she walked silently about the house, passing in the hallway without speaking.

  We sat in the dark — of course, this will seem exaggerated to some — but this was Stafford’s hour. Stafford’s moment to shine. And he did such an exacerbating job of it that he made enemies everywhere. He was like the grasshopper who teased the little industrious ant in summer. He did not know that the wind would ever blow again.

  Who took advantage of this? Well I didn’t because I was too stupid. I became his only friend. (Because once I did, he stopped teasing me about Montreal. I became a hysterical Detroit fan as long as the playoffs were on.) Even his brothers turned against him. They were all going for Detroit when the series started and all cheering Chicago by the end.

  But it was not his twin brother Darren, his older brother Paul, his younger brothers Greg or Simon. It was not Michael, or Tobias, or myself who got him rattled. It was not even poor Ginette who still waited for us outside on the street because she was scared to come to the door. It was Garth who rattled him to his bones. Garth, the boy who carried his books like a girl and believed in Santa Claus until he was fifteen.

  Garth did not know hockey but he knew business. He had an instinct for an accident waiting to happen. In his later life he would earn hundreds of thousands of dollars because of this, selling fish and chips, and take big trips to Florida. The accident waiting to happen was Stafford. Stafford did not know he was an accident waiting to happen. He was too sure of himself. He bet his money, he bet his shoulder pads, he bet his Detroit sweater — he finally bet his skates.

  Garth had no passion for hockey at all. He knew nothing about hockey — that was what made it so entirely infuriating. He could pretend he did. Hockey fans seem to invite these neophytes into their camp. The neophytes are incorrigible at going along for the ride — being one with popular opinion. They never take a chance, but it is the very pedestrianness of their natures that makes them out to be winners. They have only the passion of the moment and the passion of the group. They will always be in the inner circle, because they are loath to stand on their own. They will never be great fans but they will be accurate fans. They will love Bobby Orr without knowing a thing about Boston. They will make money off of the Russians. They will bet on Sweden and Forsburg, against Canada and Cory Hirsh, without batting an eye, and think that all your torment and love of country is deliciously funny, because they are proper when it comes to the game.

  This is exactly what was played out that faraway April of 1961, between Stafford and Garth. Neither of them knew that they represented the two branches of hockey, that they would evolve through Stafford into one kind of fan and through Garth into another quite different kind. That Stafford’s branch would not be able to bend with the times. That Garth’s branch would be sickeningly accommodating to the moment. Stafford’s branch would invite disdain by both the intellectual and business, and it would die off when the country was no more. Garth’s branch would invent slogans like: “It’s good for the game.”

  Garth was very jolly this whole time. He took an actual cynical delight in torturing Stafford. After the first game he had Stafford’s pet snake. Worse for Stafford, Sawchuk was hurt. This was a diversionary problem for the entire series that played favourably into Garth’s hands, unknown to Garth himself, who never watched a game. He was always in bed at eight o’clock.

  Stafford’s big thing was to win the Stanley Cup, and like an obsessed gambler or, for a more proper correlation, like Hitler’s operation Barbarosa against Russia in 1941, he poured everything he could into it.

  Hockey took a great upturn on the road too, after a few weeks of sabbatical, and on the river, which still had its ice. There were games now after school every evening. Now we were Sawchuk, or Hank Bassen, or Glen Hall or Stan Mikita, Delvecchio or Howe.

  Though the nights were brightening up, the air was still cold and sharp; the wind from the river could still cut through you. And Michael, who had never gotten to play for the Bantam All-Star team, was planning a big game on his rink against those in our neighbourhood who had made it to those All-Stars — and who had gone on that trip to Boston — a city Michael would never see.

  It looked as if he had bitten off more than he could chew as well. For with Paul, Darren and my brother on one team, along with Ginette in the net, and Stafford, myself and Michael, with Tobias in the net, on the other, it didn’t look like much of a contest was going to happen.

  But this was the game that was going to be played — and like all games that are played with makeup teams, it happened by accident. It happened over an argument between Paul and Michael about who between them had the hardest slapshot. I thought they were both about equal.

  But Michael envied Paul. Paul was growing larger and stronger by the day — Paul’s life had so much potential. He was a Foley whose father owned a tire garage. Perhaps this was what underlined the quest for the rink and the game. Perhaps Michael realized that his life was doomed, and in this doom — he wanted to make a stand. Make a stand with nothing against everything.

  He would throw himself at them headlong, and he would pick us as his partners. Partners who did not know how tragic his stand was, but who also knew instinctively the losing odds.

  That was the secret Michael saw in us. And this was the game he had planned. His battle involved forgetting who he was. Involved being a water boy for men who worked the boats, involved keeping a picture of his mother in a box, involved taking care of Tobias and knowing he could not take care of him anymore. Involved buying boots for Tobias and wearing shoes most of the winter.

  It was his battle.

  Stafford said later that it was Hank Bassen, the backup goalie for Detroit that cost him everything. Cost him his hockey sweater and his pet snake. Because he worried about Hank Bassen. It was as if his great hockey mind seemed to make a series of blunders in 1961 that would never happen to him again. As if he was like Napoleon with a cold, Hannibal who, after Cannae, could not take Rome.

  But the worst thing for Stafford was that in his jubilation, in his tirades against Chicago, and his side attacks against Montreal, he was both his only general and his enemy’s only mole. That is, Stafford would talk and Garth would listen. Before this series started Garth, I am convinced, had never heard of Pierre Pilote or Stan Mikita. Nor had he heard of Glen Hall, Hank Bassen, Ken Wharram or perhaps not even Howe or Hull. But you see that did not matter. For the spy in Stafford’s character spoon-fed Garth all of this.

  “I hope the defence can help old Hank Bassen and stop Hull and Mikita and Pilote or we’re in trouble.”

  “I bet they can’t,” Garth would say.

  “Pilote won’t score — he won’t score.”

  “Bet your lousy shoulder pads he will,” Garth would say.

  Then the general in Stafford would take over. He would try to stop the leaks in his knowledge that had been given away by his spy.

  “Well I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you mean — you see?”

  “I just see you’re frightened of Mikita and Hull and Pierre Pilote and are blaming poor Hank Bassen — a goalie of great stature probably. So really the faith in your team is bogus.”

  “Great stature — what does that mean?”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Garth would say, as disheartened at dishonesty and duplicity as, oh I don’t know — maybe Jacques Parizeau himself.

  This would go on, or at least a conversation much like this. Perhaps
not in its language but in its intention as sophisticated as some political strategist.

  And poor Stafford would be left wobbling in uncertainty.

  “Damn it all — Garth is a hockey genius,” he told us. “I can’t get by him, he keeps coming up with the answers — I don’t know how he has it figured out. I think he even predicted that Sawchuk would hurt his shoulder. The trick is — he’s quiet — he never says anything — he’s a sneaky, girlie, kind of guy — but what he knows is incredible.”

  A number of things worked against Stafford. One was his absolute openness with all his friends — a feeling that they would, because of friendship, share as much information with him as he did with them. Another was his ability to lie for these friends to himself, and always place them in the best possible light (similar to what he did with Jimmy J. and years later with Melanie). Third was his overall superstition. He was sure even years later that it was his bad luck, something in his nature, that caused the Red Wings to lose.

  He wore the same socks throughout the entire playoffs. Twice his mother sneaked them from his bedroom at night and washed them, but he had them back on his feet the next morning, as wet as rags.

  But the worst thing of all was how he was teased and tormented about the greatness of Chicago to and from school. He was all alone as they teased him. And so he bet his shoulder pads, his sweater, his skates, his bitten-up hockey puck, his snake.

  He, too, like Michael, was taking on all comers, because he knew, he knew, he knew — he would lose.

  Between games five and six — with the Hawks up 3–2 in games, Stafford was restless. I asked him to a movie with me the night before the sixth game and he babbled like an idiot about the referees, Chicago cheats, Garth. He hated Garth; Garth had become his nemesis. He had Garth figured out. Garth was not the hockey genius one might first think. “I asked him what he thought of Chicago and he told me he thought they were adorable. Adorable,” Stafford said. “How can a person even say that about a hockey team?”