Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  But fist fighting is hard work. Amateurs tire quickly. In short order, it was just a bunch of exhausted people lying on top of each other in the middle of the ice.

  They pulled my father up. He wasn’t a big man, but he lacked fear. He was still very much up for it. What I recall most was that he didn’t say anything. Everyone else had resumed shouting. The guy who’d been punched was being ushered away by his own friends, jabbing out a finger and yelling threats. A few of them tugged at him without conviction, saying things like, “Forget it.”

  My father was taken back to the boards without an angry word. Though he strained at the arms of the people holding him, his face was impassive. You wouldn’t know he was angry to look at him. That was his trick.

  I also suspected that if the other guy’s friends had let him go, he would most likely have stood there continuing to threaten. And if they’d let go of my father, he would’ve gone back in with a stick until one of them was dead.

  I went over to take a hold of his arm. Once the rest of them saw him with a little kid, the emotional temperature dropped. The situation suddenly seemed quite sad. My father said something about the borrowed gloves and someone else said not to worry, they’d find them. He looked back at his opponent with more hurt than rage. He walked awkwardly to a bench to take off his skates. I tried to help steady him, but he shrugged me off.

  “What did you think?” he said to me. He was bent over, working at his laces. He hadn’t looked at me yet. I wasn’t sure what part of it he meant—the hockey or the fight—so I opted for brightness.

  “It was really good.”

  That was the only time I ever saw him play.

  We continued to watch hockey together, usually in total silence. He wasn’t interested in my thoughts on the matter (he’d seen me play). I suppose he thought it was something a father should do with a son and, unlike most other activities, this one put him in proximity to the liquor cabinet. It was a reasonable compromise.

  There are two types of father—son sports relationships—one in which son adopts father’s team and the pair of them grow closer together through a shared obsession; and the kind my dad and I had.

  At that time, the Leafs were a flaming wreck of a team whose only purpose seemed to be embarrassing the city. There was one player my father admired above all others—Börje Salming.

  Whereas most of the Leafs looked like baboons who’d had skates stapled to the soles of their feet, Salming was a silky craftsman. In close-ups during breaks in play, he often looked pained to be sharing the ice with this gaggle of louts and nitwits. I liked that about him—the man who could do better for himself but chose to suffer nonetheless.

  I assumed it had something to do with being Swedish, that they must be better than us. After visiting Stockholm, I’ve decided I was right.

  One day, Salming showed up at my baseball game, causing pandemonium amongst the rubes of the High Park Little League.

  Few things stick with you more than your first brush with celebrity. Just last night, this person was on your television, no more real to you than Wile E. Coyote. And now here he is, in life. Your life. Breathing the same air and being in the same space. It’s disorienting and wonderful.

  He was bigger than I’d expected and remarkably fit. His arms were ropey and his hands wide as shovels. I’d never seen so manly a man. I felt a powerful need to touch him.

  He signed a hat for me and gave me the sort of serious nod men give to other men but not children. I would’ve preferred that he’d said something, but maybe this was what respect looked like. My father didn’t come to my games, and there was a wicked joy in knowing he’d missed this.

  Salming was there because he’d just enrolled his son on our team. I don’t remember that kid’s name. I do remember two things about him—that, even at that age, he was preposterously handsome—white-blond hair, limpid blue eyes, a precursor to a Gap Kids print ad—and that he was a truly awful baseball player. Salming’s kid played so poorly, you began to wonder if the local mafia had taken an interest in point shaving little league games.

  We played once a week. Salming came every time. He arrived alone, always wearing a t-shirt and a fleece vest (he was the first person I’d ever seen wear one and that also seemed exotic). He’d take a seat at the edge of the small bleachers so that the constant stream of people approaching him for autographs wouldn’t disturb the other parents. He was Buddha-esque in his stillness.

  Salming never spoke that I saw. People would try to engage him in conversation and he’d nod at them benevolently until they stopped. He didn’t yell encouragement at the players like everyone else or clap when his own kid came to bat. He just watched.

  Eventually, I started to resent that. Why wasn’t he being more helpful? Why wasn’t he taking his kid—who couldn’t catch a beachball if he’d had flypaper glued to his palms—out in the backyard to practise? And why hadn’t he telepathically figured out how much I wanted him to talk to me?

  His whole mien seemed selfish. He’d done okay in sports life, but now his son was being left out there to dangle. People assumed Salming’s kid would be as good at baseball as his father was at hockey, and it wasn’t working out. Nobody judged him out loud, but we were all thinking it. Wasn’t Salming ashamed? Didn’t he care? Why wouldn’t he come over after the game like the other fathers and high-five the players? Did he think he was better than us?

  After a short while, Salming’s son left the team and Salming stopped coming. I held that against him, too. There had been a lot of reflected glory from playing on the same team as Börje Salming’s kid. Now he’d robbed us of that.

  I’d been ambivalent about the Leafs, but this general souring on Börje Salming turned into a genuine dislike of the team. Here was the best of them, and he wasn’t much use in actual life.

  Of course, none of this makes any sense. I suppose Salming, through no fault of his own, became a stand-in for my father, and that in failing to notice me for the special little person I hoped I was, he’d failed me. It’s ridiculous, but there it is.

  I learned to hate the Leafs because my father liked them, and because his favourite player didn’t know I wanted a hug.

  So, like many other Toronto-born front runners my age, I became a New York Islanders fan. They were easy to love—far and away the best team in the NHL and very unlikely to be run into at the grocery store or in gym class. Bryan Trottier wasn’t going to ruin it by brushing past me after I’d extended my hand for a shake.

  I was a Mike Bossy man. My brother, who had very little to do with my father, became a Wayne Gretzky guy in opposition. It was in the midst of explaining to him why 215 points in a season wasn’t quite as impressive as it sounded that I first realized that I was totally full of shit. I wouldn’t become a newspaper sports columnist for another quarter-century, but that may have been where the instinct was discovered. Twelve years old and loudly arguing the inarguable.

  In the end, my brother was proven right and that also chipped away at hockey for me. By then, I’d moved on to baseball. That had the numbers. You could order it in your mind from a distance, on the page. It didn’t require in-person involvement. When I watch hockey now, I do it like my father did—severely, muttering to myself.

  Decades later, I saw Salming in the tunnel of the Air Canada Centre before a Leafs game. He was there to be honoured for something or other.

  He still looked good. But he was different than I remembered—bright, smiley and plainly delighted to be surrounded by people who wanted to talk. Pros get like that once it’s over. Though being loved was an annoyance, they miss it.

  I could’ve gone up to him then and had the talk I’d always wanted. It wouldn’t have amounted to much. Just a few blandishments, maybe remind him about the Little League days. Share a laugh. He wouldn’t remember, but maybe he’d do me the favour of pretending. It’d be cathartic.

  But I couldn’t do it. It seemed too much like begging. So I watched him for a while and then left it alone.


  In the course of my job, I’ve met a few genuine legends. Pelé once surprised me with a hug and I nearly sobbed. But Salming remains the only athlete whose autograph I have ever asked for. I may still have that ball cap somewhere. I’m not sure where, and I don’t think I want to know.

  FIGHTS

  NO ONE TEACHES you how to fight. You don’t realize how important that is until you’re in the midst of one.

  Whatever most of us do know about fighting we’ve learned from TV. Square up. Fists held in front of the face. Short jabs. Bob and weave.

  Starsky and Hutch made it look easy.

  It doesn’t work like that. Most fights are wrestling matches from the off. The other guy’s on top of you. He’s moving frantically, clutching at your clothes, trying to get you off your feet. Lacking any feeling for the way this works, you may try throwing a couple of times. You know your punches should be short, controlled snaps.

  They aren’t. They’re long, looping tosses that a blind man could see coming from across the street. You can’t connect. If you can, you’re hitting a shoulder or the top of a head—more likely to break a bone in your own hand than hurt the other guy. You don’t even know how to clench your fists correctly (thumb tucked protectively under your fingers). If you keep punching, your hands are going to be a mess.

  You need to keep your feet moving, but you’re tired. An hour of jumping jacks cannot exhaust you more completely than sixty seconds of a fist fight. Half a minute in, you can barely stand. At that point, it becomes dirty. If he gets on top of you, it will get very bad.

  You know instinctively what you should be doing—going for the eyes or the crotch, sticking a thumb in his mouth and pulling as hard as you can. But some basic revulsion at causing pain—real, ugly pain—stops you.

  In nature, even the most vicious animals are unlikely to badly harm their own kind. Most soldiers in war are unwilling to shoot at the enemy. They have to be trained to do so, their internal barriers broken down until their fear response is to kill. It’s called operant conditioning. It’s not on the grade-school curriculum.

  None of these problems can be course-corrected mid-brawl. You’re too amped up on adrenaline. Your brain has ceded control to some Neanderthal remnant of your nervous system. You’re not thinking. You’re also not feeling anything.

  You want to run. That’d be the smart thing to do. But your fear of humiliation is stronger than your aversion to pain. So you stay and take your chances. You’re waiting for someone to break it up and save you. Not your body, your pride.

  The only way you learn any of this is by taking a beating. A good many of them were handed around at my school at recess.

  I had one advantage in the schoolyard—I’d been hit before.

  My father was not a disciplinarian. He was a reactionary. You did or said something he didn’t like, and he’d reach out and slap you. Not a tap or a warning. Full force.

  He had an old yellow Ford pickup. It was rusted out. The paint was flaking off. One day, he came out and found me mindlessly picking away at it, peeling off strips. He didn’t say anything. He walked up behind me and hit me so hard in the back of the head that I left my feet and slammed into the bumper.

  The next day, he tried making it up to me by letting me sit on his lap and turn the steering wheel as he pulled into the driveway. I lost control and mowed down a section of the neighbour’s hedge. He threw me off his lap and into the passenger side door. I was about six.

  These weren’t beatings. They didn’t last past a single blow and didn’t happen very often. It would depend on his mood and how much he’d had to drink. I wouldn’t have said I was afraid of him. Only wary. I tried to keep him happy and in front of me.

  Everyone in my family treated him that way—like a beast that’s been uncaged and put on a leash. You’re not going to stop it from biting. All you can do is try to keep out of its way.

  So I knew from experience that you are unlikely to be badly hurt by being hit. That was useful because I found myself getting hit a lot.

  One of my frequent daydreams is putting my adult mind in my childhood body and reliving a day of that life. I wouldn’t change anything. I’d only observe. Would the other kids notice? Would I be different? Speak strangely? Carry myself in a more confident way? Because clearly I did it wrong at the time. Around that same age—six or seven—it had dawned on me that I was not a leader. I followed. When you follow, you are a victim-in-training.

  I became the particular target of one yard bully, Dino. Dino was a cartoonish version of the type—big, galumphing, buck-toothed, stupid. But also feline in the way he could convince you, if only briefly, that you were friends.

  He’d sidle up after he’d given you a good trashing in front of a crowd and say he was sorry, smiling slyly to see how you reacted. You’d think it was over. Then the next day, he’d come over and trash you again. Or the day after. Or a week later. I suppose it was the push—pull that excited him.

  After a few months of this, I complained at home. Bizarrely, this prompted my father to launch into a long speech about how fighting was wrong and that I should not do it.

  “Well, what should I do then?”

  He went back to “fighting is wrong.” I should tell a teacher. (Whenever I hear someone say this to a child now, I think, “Would you give that same advice to yourself if someone walked up to you at work and punched you in the mouth? Do you believe your colleagues would think more of you if, instead of throwing back, you ran off to tell human resources?”)

  Dino continued pummelling me. He would often chase me and my buddy David all the way home. My cardio has never been better. Dino understood that fear of violence is much worse than violence itself. That’s another thing you have to learn for yourself.

  Complaining at school made it worse.

  “Did he hit you?”

  “Well, not that time. No.”

  “Did it happen at school?”

  “No.”

  “Then we can’t do anything about it.”

  Soon, you’re labelled a whiner and a malingerer and now you’re stuck.

  My mother and father split up when I was seven. Freed of my father’s erratic presence, my mother began a long process of becoming herself again. She had up to that point been so quiet that she was functionally mute. She had never given me any advice, but now she started.

  “When someone hits you, hit them back.”

  “But I’ll get in trouble”—though it didn’t occur to me that Dino rarely did.

  “If he hits you, hit him.”

  So I did. One day as he came sauntering up for a little light teasing, I rounded on him. I was as big as he was. Gifted the element of surprise (another fight lesson—the guy who throws first usually wins), I took him to the ground and began slamming his head into the asphalt. It was ungainly and effective. He bled, which pleased me.

  I got into trouble. My mother was summoned. She reminded the principal—Sister Charlotte—that I’d been the one on the receiving end many times and nothing had come of that.

  Sister Charlotte had a way explaining fights that I have never forgotten—“It takes two to tango.”

  Every time I’d been sent up to the office with a split lip or a torn jacket, that had been her judgment on the matter—“two to tango.”

  Often you ended up getting the strap—a strip of leather brought down across the open palm of your hand—alongside the guy who’d been rubbing your face in the dirt a few minutes before. That’s what she called fairness.

  Like those parents who tell their kids not to fight back, it’s the perspective of someone who has never taken a kicking. It’s the winner’s point of view.

  But now I was the one getting away with it. It was put down to a “boys will be boys” scenario, despite the copious blood. My mother had steered me right. If it can be said that you are friends with your parents, that’s the moment it happened for me.

  In the usual way of these things, Dino and I became pals after that. Not go
od pals. I didn’t trust him, but I now understood how to handle him. You had to keep him where you could see him. Like my father. And if he came at you, you had to go back twice as hard.

  Once my parents split up, my father stopped hitting me. Maybe he thought it would get him in trouble now, that there would be consequences. I was at his house most weekends. When he got angry, he’d sulk instead, or send me back to my mother. For the most part, he ignored me.

  He hit me one more time, over something I can’t remember. I was older then—eleven or twelve. Bigger. Already nearly as tall as him. He slapped me and I punched him in the face and time stopped.

  We stood there panting in his living room, staring at each other. There was no question of me winning. He was a hard man. He’d have taken me apart easily.

  But he could see that if he came at me, I was not going to stop. He’d have to put me in hospital. So he demurred.

  There’s another fight lesson—the person who is willing to go the furthest and do the most unthinkable things wins. It doesn’t matter how big, skilled or overmatched he is. Toughness will out. The hardest guys I’ve ever known were little, wiry people. They won because they put their finish line at a distance the other guy could not conceive of reaching. They had mastered themselves.

  Mike Tyson once said, “Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can’t control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you.”

  That’s the core mantra of fighting, from someone who would know.

  My mother had been right. My father never hit me again after that.

  Like I had once been, my brother was systematically bullied in his grade seven year. He got it worse, from a gang of older kids who went to the public grade school adjacent to our Catholic one. There were many long-running feuds between those schools. They had the salutary effect of redirecting our animus away from our classmates and onto an “Other” as we got older.