Hockey Dreams

by David Adams Richards

  Perhaps it came because in 1781 Washington and Adams decided they couldn’t commit their troops to help the colonists — many of who considered themselves American and were considered by the British as American — in the large tract of land called Nova Scotia, which then included my province.

  But perhaps it is something else. Perhaps there is an identifiable authenticity to us, just as there is to being an American, that precludes being anything else. It isn’t that we lack something, as is at times suggested, but that we have something. Not better nor worse, but something else — something different.

  William Faulkner noticed it, when he wrote in 1955 a column on hockey for Sports Illustrated. He noticed, as people sometimes notice about Faulkner’s work itself, that the confusion of hockey became grace, the seeming violence became wonderful poetic balance and movement quite unlike anything else. The contortions were really a dance, fast and beautiful, like great ballet. He commented about the number of women at the game, and seemed surprised.

  I would not be. Women have loved hockey as much as any other sport, and would know it as well too. One only has to watch our Women’s World Hockey champions to comment that they are undeniably Canadian — as Tolstoy once commented about Natasha’s dance at the hunting lodge being undeniably Russian in War and Peace.

  But there is another interesting note about Faulkner’s column. Why did he write it at all? I have thought about this. Of course Faulkner probably wrote it because he needed the money. And Sports Illustrated was interested that he do it because he was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. But the title on the article read: “An Innocent at Rinkside.”

  And the article is filled with the “ideas” of hockey that those who don’t know hockey have. Hockey is violent and a throwback to gladiatorial contests like boxing. The article is worth something because Faulkner’s perception about things makes him rise above the one dimensional view. But Faulkner’s article exhibits something that it was meant to hide.

  Articles on hockey in mainstream sports magazines in the States up until the late eighties were not so often done because of a love for the game, but were done to sell the game. Therefore they were all innocents at rinkside. It is a Northern game, a violent game, and (though they don’t know this really bothers them) a Canadian game. And in a way, the game is beneath them. They might be asked to understand it — as Faulkner tries to ask — but few are asked to love it. (Faulkner wrote this article the last year Detroit won the Stanley Cup.)

  Just as my cousin from Boston had never heard of the Boston Bruins, he could not understand my love of hockey. But, and more power to him, he did not understand my concern that he did not himself love it.

  He was a baseball fan, a basketball fan, for his country owned them. For me, my country’s sport was played somewhere else. I wanted them to understand that it was my sport.

  Yet it was, as Casey Stengel sniped, the only thing Canada was good for — and my cousin did not have to love anything about it. And as soon as my cousin loved it, which came for him with Bobby Orr, he could easily claim it as his.

  This is what Faulkner’s article actually says. We own it, so we should try to love it.

  In the late fall of long ago, of 1960 when we were all running up and down the outdoor rink, in huge boots, or pavement-dulled skates, in bare heads and kneepads, and a few with helmets that were pulled down over their toque, with ice on our sticks, the sport was Stafford Foley’s and mine.

  Stafford Foley actually believed we — he and I — would be elevated to the Peewee All-Star team, go on the road trips — one was to Boston like the Bantam As — and be normal, like the other kids. In my dreams Stafford Foley and I had already made it. Already had scored the winning goals in Boston — there had to be two winning goals; one for him and one for me.

  That he was growing blind, and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief in order to see who was on a breakaway, did not deter him. That I had only use of one arm and couldn’t skate — especially backwards — did not deter me either, in my dreams.

  Each day he and I waited for the coach to make the final cuts. But each day the coach looked at us, and said, “It’s still cloudy boys.”

  Cloudy was good. As long as it was cloudy that meant we still had a chance. It was when it was no longer cloudy — that’s when you got the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.

  “Well it’s still cloudy,” I said to Stafford. “That means we have a chance.”

  However my own father was hinting that I should retire from the sport. One day he took me out to the garage and said, “Lift that brick with your right hand.”

  I lifted it over my head.

  “Lift that brick with your left hand.”

  I could hardly get my fingers over it.

  My father then explained to me that I was like a great hockey player who had suffered an injury. I was on the disabled list.

  He said the “disabled list” because at that time I would fly into a fury — almost froth at the mouth — if anyone said I was disabled. But he knew that. And so, staring at me, he said, “You’re not at all disabled — it’s just a disabled LIST.”

  My father really didn’t care if I played hockey until I was 80 — or 90. Half the time he forgot that I was “disabled.” He would watch me doing something — like drowning — and he would say, “What the Christ is wrong with you?” and then he would add, “oh right — well stop floundering — I’ll come and get you.”

  But it was my mother. I played hockey so bad she wept. “We’ve got to make him stop —” she had told my father. “I hate to see it. I can’t bear to watch him any more. He can — curl.”

  Even curling was on television in Canada — hockey and curling. I suppose that’s like Australian Rules and Bowls in Australia.

  I remember the old Sinclair Rink and the effect it had upon me. Stepping onto the ice, once the door was opened, while the overhead windows showed snowcast skies, and car lights were on at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  There were great senior hockey games there, home of the old Miramichi Beavers. And let me tell you what I think the Sinclair Rink had — just as the Beaverbrook Rink had in Chatham and a dozen other rinks had and have across the Maritimes, as much as the new multimillion dollar arenas in St. Louis, or in Anaheim will ever have — tradition.

  One Hardy Cup in the Miramichi, with people screaming their guts out for boys who grew up next door, is better to me than a Stanley Cup in Tampa Bay.

  Tampa is where hockey is now. In 1960–61 it was still at the Sinclair Rink.

  In order to get into the rink free, Michael worked as a rink rat from the time he was twelve. His teeth were gone from the time he was fourteen. He had a James Dean kind of haircut, without ever having heard of James Dean. Michael was a rebel, simply because of his poverty — he didn’t have to not have a cause.

  In the end he would have thought the movie, Rebel Without a Cause, filled with weaklings. He grew up to have pulphooks put through his hand while working a boat at the age of seventeen. What need he talk about the angst of being a teenager?

  There was an incident that happened that year. The year Michael and Tobias had one stick between them. The year Michael was going to get his new skates.

  Michael rarely played organized hockey — organized anything. They didn’t have the money. He grew up in the truest sense alone. He never went to the Foleys’ to eat as Tobias did, but I’m certain he didn’t mind Tobias going. He would appear out of the shadows at the end of the lane after supper, with his jacket undone, and buttons missing off of his shirt, his overboots unzippered and flapping and torn, while sleet or snow hit his bared head. Poverty has a smell that has nothing to do with dirt. It has the smell of darkness, of evening, of leaves in the earth.

  There was probably, as far as just natural talent, no better athlete in our neighbourhood. He had a natural strength and gracefulness.

  He could pick up a stick and flick a ball twenty yards to hit a telephone pole in the distance
.

  My father and I gave a boy a drive home one night. He was a friend of mine. And as soon as we turned onto his road he asked to be let out of the car. We did not understand at the time, but of course now it is obvious — he didn’t want us to see his house.

  Michael’s house was like this. When he came up to our road, he came up to quite a different world. There were streetlights and patios and garages. There must have been a roar inside him to wonder why. In his house, rats ran along the walls and there was a cot behind the stove where he slept. There probably were feelings in him even at that time that there was no way out.

  But God he could play hockey. He would always make his own rink, down on the Miramichi River — make his own nets out of snow, and have his own hockey teams. Yet he never was on a trip, never made an All-Star team, though he was as good or better than any of the All-Stars.

  Just before Christmas of that winter — the Christmas before the man was shot in Paul and Stafford’s father’s tire garage — the last year Stafford and I believed we had a chance to make the NHL, the year we were beginning to hear of changes coming, Michael won a hundred dollars on bingo one school night downtown.

  A few days later it was cold. There was a slick of snow on the street, and the air had the feel of glazed icing and the smell of sulphur. I was walking along and met Ginette Malefont coming in my direction.

  “It’s great Michael won that money,” I said (and why I always tried to sound grown-up with Ginette I didn’t know at the time). “He can get his skates.”

  “Oh,” Ginette said, “he’s already run out and spent it.”

  “On what?”

  “He bought Tobias winter boots and a new coat, and his grandmother a dress — I saw it, some nice.”

  It was about that same time Stafford and I found out we were not going to make the All-Star team, and go to Boston, and be heroes. It was expected by me — I think — although hope is such a strange commodity in human desire that perhaps I actually believed I was going to make it — even though I was on defence and couldn’t skate backwards, nor forwards. And even though Stafford would have to have his sisters travel with the team, so they could yell out at certain moments, in unison, “Don’t check him, he’ll go into a coma.”

  One day we came into the rink, and saw that our names were missing from the shortened list — and that list, was our whole life, that afternoon. Stafford read the names over again, and again. But there was no mistaking it. There was nobody named Stafford on defence.

  “Jeepers,” Stafford said kicking his foot monotonously against the wall.

  I knew that that meant I would curl — for the rest of my life. A curler. The only other sport that Canadians were the best in the world at, my mother said.

  But for Stafford it meant something else.

  Part Two

  FOUR

  SUCH A LONG TIME AGO, 1960; I sometimes forget how many movies I did see in our theatre on the other side of town. Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Rory Calhoun, Clark Gable, William Holden, Dan Duryea and, of course, the most American of them all, Jimmy Stewart, who had that kind of New England rage that passed for morality.

  All of these actors played war heroes, cowboys or, as in the case of Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, sports heroes.

  The sport was baseball or football.

  I wanted to be an actor for a little while. The Newfoundland poet, Al Pittman, has a poem about leaving a theatre in a small village in Newfoundland and trying to find an urban setting so he can act out the drama he has just seen. We did that as well. Everyone in rural Canada must have done that at one time or another.

  The sets were always just slightly south of us. And, of course, we related. Canadians are very good at “relating.” That’s what the movies from America and Britain allowed us to do.

  As a matter of fact, I wanted to become an actor that Christmas. I think that this was the one time in my life that I wanted to participate in a school activity.

  They were putting on a play called The Hold Out. It was one of those one-act plays found by the drama teacher in an old musty book of one-act plays from the United States. I knew nothing about it.

  Our school was a dark, aging, high-ceilinged place. Always I have tried to describe the peculiar aspect of oppression it fostered upon me. I have never managed it.

  It had heavy, grey hallways and linoleum floors. Lord Beaverbrook had gone to this school in the 1890s.

  And here I was, with Stafford, close to Christmas of 1960, standing at the door of Mrs. Grey asking if I could be in the school play.

  Mrs. Grey got her actors from the top — the crème de la crème of scholars. We weren’t the crème de la crème. We weren’t even close to the crème de la crème.

  She was writing in her attendance book when we went in on that grey afternoon in mid December. The remarkable thing about this is that I remember her as being as pleased with herself as any child of twelve when she said this: “Well well well well — are you two at the top?”

  And that was it. Not only were Stafford and I not able to skate well enough to play hockey, we were too stupid to act.

  “We could act better than any of them,” said Stafford, who didn’t care if he ever acted. And then he said something else. He said that on the day of the play, December 21st, he was going to boo. He would boo them off stage.

  He also told me that the girls would be naked in the play. (They did wear pyjamas, and it was the first time I had ever seen a girl, other than my sister, in pyjamas.)

  December 21st came. We filed into the auditorium class after class of boys and girls. I was sitting somewhere in the middle. From the sets and design of the costumes, the play might have taken place in 1930. Or perhaps 1960.

  It was a play about a poor boy, played by John Sullivan who we all called John L. Sullivan, who would not join his friends or go out to play baseball. No one knew why. They teased and tormented him until a fatherly, moustached, philanthropist, played by Garth, rescued this poor boy at Christmas.

  Garth made a moral speech to the small group sitting by the Christmas tree and called the boy forward. The speech was about the goodness of this child. The sacrifices this child made for his family — working to support his mother — that this child was the living, unrehearsed embodiment of Christmas day.

  “It’s all in here,” Garth said sternly, to the audience, touching his breast with his hand. He then handed the boy a baseball glove, bat and ball, and said that from now on he would take care of this boy’s poor sick mother. Then Garth turned to the audience and thrust his arms out wide — and the lights went down and a star shone, all proclaiming the spirit of Christmas.

  When the lights went up, Garth was still standing there — all the children on stage with their heads bowed, John L. Sullivan wearing his glove and holding his bat against his shoulder, as if he knew what to do with it.

  “Boooooo,” came a voice from the back of the audience, “Boooooooooooooooo.”

  I bit down on a hard candy and broke a tooth filling. From December until mid-March of 1961 that tooth would plague me. My face would swell up like a bun, and on occasion I could only see out of one eye.

  There was only one boo. Everyone else kept applauding, and Garth bowed, and finally the audience stood.

  There is a mythology to the American sports person that we have long embraced — just as Mrs Grey’s crème de la crème did in that play. Of course it is the sports person in general; they fire our imagination, even heighten our personality. Soccer is one example.

  Yet the Americans have taken this concept of sports hero and have manifested it in a way in which it has never been done before. Sports is somehow synonomous with the grandeur of the concept of America as a whole.

  I have thought of that play many times. The reflections I have about it are many and varied. I have seen many movies like it. It is about generosity. It is also about American generosity and baseball as a symbol of bravery, goodness and innocence. It was the present Mrs. Grey gave to us fo
r Christmas.

  This was something that Stafford and I knew, but couldn’t quite put our finger on — their heroes are so often our heroes, their movies and plays so often performed here, that we sometimes get confused when shown the American flag on their sweaters or hockey helmets — or worse the Canadian flag on ours.

  But, regarding hockey, it gives us a strange ultra schizophrenia that, like most schizophrenics, goes a long way to hide its sickness from others and itself.

  The Canadian psyche is not wrong, it is just different. Some of our greatest moments have been in defeat rather than in victory (sometimes we do blush when we win).

  For example, George Chuvalo loses to Mohammed Ali and is considered by Ali to be the toughest man he ever fought. He was pummelled and never knocked off his feet. He fought back in every round.

  To fight back like this a man must love as much as he ever hated. That’s one of the clues for my respect for boxers.

  He never won the title himself, but might have won it against Terrell, except something happened — the judges. They awarded Terrell the decision.

  A man I know, Yvon Durelle, knocked down Archie Moore three times in round one of their first fight. He lost in the eleventh round. If only the title fight had been held in New York, where the three-knockdown rule was in effect, instead of Montreal, he would have won the Light Heavyweight Championship of the World.

  Archie Moore, who was knocked out by Rocky Marciano, says that no one ever hit him harder than Yvon Durelle. For all his trouble, Durelle carried us with him into that ring and held us spellbound, staring into the face of one of the greatest boxers who ever lived without batting an eye.

  But Chuvalo being the toughest and Durelle being the hardest puncher doesn’t translate into a world championship. Almost nothing in Canada does. But that’s okay.

  The thing is, most of us never worry about this. It is a part of our nature not to worry about things such as this. Our dichotomy is so often the dichotomy of wanting to place rather than win. And that in so many ways is because of our association with the States.