Hockey Dreams

by David Adams Richards

  I love Orr really. If I were to pick the three greatest players who ever lived I would be hard pressed not to include Orr, and I cannot help but think of and long for his brilliance. The rush where he picked up his glove, went around the net. His goal in St. Louis. I think he is the greatest defenceman who ever lived, perhaps the best player.

  In 1961 Bobby Orr was still in the future playing somewhere in Ontario with a brushcut, but already the powers that be were looking at him.

  Stafford and I were still thinking that they might be looking at us.

  Michael was going to have his rink, one way or the other, but I didn’t know why he went to such trouble. He was often fighting now, in school. Some of the boys were calling Tobias: “Nigger baby.” And so Michael had to fight.

  His cold was constant, his shirt was opened. Half the winter he wore shoes. He had the gentlest smile.

  I sometimes forget how small we all were in baggy pants and frayed sweaters smelling of weather and wood smoke, and how he was as small as most of us, for he seemed to be grown up.

  HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA

  Hockey was synonymous with the Esso man, and the “Untouchables.”

  The Esso man came on during the commercial breaks, and his mild-mannered, enthusiastic pitch was either lauded or hated, depending if your team was winning or not. I just pretended, since we got our oil from the Irving man, that this was an Irving guy.

  After the game — the three-star selection and the final Esso commercial — came the “Untouchables,” with Elliot Ness.

  It always seemed fitting that it took place in Chicago. Where Bobby Hull was. And it is still strange to think that during those 1930s Elliot Ness times, hockey took place there as well, with boys from the wheat fields of Manitoba playing.

  So Saturday was our night. Even if you were beaten up out on the road during the day. Even if you had a puck in the side of the face, or were slashed, or disowned. After supper, the traffic would diminish, the streets become quiet, the sound of snow scuttling across them.

  Michael and Tobias didn’t have a television. They would leave their house after supper and make their way to different houses. Tobias would always go out first and Michael would follow about five minutes later.

  Michael would stand outside, letting Tobias knock at our door, and then he would wait a moment and follow him inside. He would never sit down until he was asked, but would stand by the door.

  They roamed not only our neighbourhood but others for this privilege. Sometimes seen as far away as the neighbourhoods of Skytown, or Skunk Ridge.

  Stafford thought he was a big wig travelling with the Bantam A team, like some kind of club reporter. People said he had bribed the coach, had his father give him new white-wall tires at half price. Stafford never denied this, so maybe it was true.

  But it was in that month of January, 1961, that another rumour started. And Stafford Foley knew something. He knew something that Michael knew.

  With his half-blind eyes, he had seen the lie invested in closer to home than I thought. He was like Max Schmelling, who noticed when Louis dropped his left — he had seen something. He had seen a half a dozen players who couldn’t even come close to Michael.

  And what he had seen was this. The reason Michael was not on the Bantam All-Star team was not because his skates were no good, but because of his family. Five of the mothers complained about who he was and had a private meeting with the coach.

  And it was this secret complaint that caused him to be cut, and caused the coach a certain leniency with Stafford’s travelling plans. And Michael pretended for Tobias’ sake that he did not know this.

  Years later when people were doing a play of mine in Sackville, when everyone was working together and when there was a great sense of camaraderie with everyone, I realized that this was how my brother, and Stafford’s brothers, felt most of their young life, and what Stafford and I had missed.

  And I knew why Michael was making his rink, down over the bank, by himself.

  SEVEN

  THE OLD COLONEL LIVED next door to us. At night the balls were always being whacked into his door or against his window, and he would run to get them and toss them back to us.

  He had Michael shovel his driveway, and always came out to speak to us. Some nights he would stand in the cold for an hour in his T-shirt, his false teeth chattering a mile a minute.

  He told us that the Europeans were playing hockey better and better. The Norwegians now had a Canadian coach, and the Swedes were big. That, during the war when the Canadians put on exhibitions in England, like Mr. Foley and the North Shore Regiment, we were pretty much top drawer. But he said, not any more. In fact he was reiterating what my uncle had said, but thankfully he wasn’t as happy about it as my uncle was. The Russians were good — not as good as the pros yet, but soon would be — the Swedes were becoming stronger — the Czechs too.

  Of course we had all heard of this, and were immediately suspicious.

  “Well if we send our pros over, “I told the old Colonel, “That would put a surprise into them. We’d do them in.”

  I was just saying what I had heard, just repeating it for hope sake. Feeling like a kid trying to save the whole world. It can’t be done.

  The old Colonel smiled at me. “They are very good,” he said to me and there was a twinge of regret in his voice. “I think our pros can and will beat them — and maybe always will be able to — if only our pros remain ours.”

  The Colonel had lived his life alone for a number of years. In the late twenties he had taken over the local militia — what was left of the regiment after it disbanded in 1919, saying that there would be another world war. He managed to be laughed at by everyone. He kept trying to recruit, and published small articles on European and German military readiness. He had his boys marching about town in 1937, and took them into the woods to learn how to cut pulp and climb trees, in places like Neguac and Tracadie. He did this for strength training for his soldiers; to strengthen their legs and upper bodies. All his boys cursed him privately, in the middle of those bog-fouled places.

  Then war came. The boys became men. They went overseas. Men all about them were killed, but the core of those soldiers he had trained in Neguac and Tracadie, like Mr. Foley, went through D-Day and beyond, with few casualties. He was proud of this. He should be.

  He was growing old even when I knew him; a tiny fellow with red lines in his face. His biggest love besides his vegetable garden was hockey. He loved baseball as well, and would travel about in the summer with a Dodgers’ cap on, go to the baseball games in Chatham, and at times get down to Fenway.

  “Baseball has my respect,” he said. “I love it. The Chatham Ironmen are a great baseball team. And Loggieville is wonderful in softball. It is a game that has the smell of soil — and is alive and wonderful.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Hockey has the smell of darkness, sweat, and ice — fire and ice,” he said. “That is eternal.”

  His wife had died years before. He read military books and, like Montgomery, loved to instruct young men on what to do and how to act. But only if they came to him. He was trying to take Michael under his wing, but Michael had already learned to fly.

  Now that the way of the world had changed, the war long over, the way the world viewed him had changed. Though he had not. He lived a Spartan existence, which meant during the summer inviting us into his house for vegetables out of his garden. I did this once a summer for six years.

  I’ll let you in on a secret. The vegetables in his garden were weeds. He ate weeds, and packed weeds away in his freezer for the winter.

  Not a potato, turnip or cabbage grew in his garden. Just weeds. And he would invite us over at the end of August every summer, for a big bowl of weeds. Tobias would sit at the table, with a napkin tucked under his chin, shaking his head. It was as if the good Lord had played a number of tricks upon him — eating worms, and now, a bowlful of weeds.

  “This is a new variety of creepi
ng scalia,” he would say. “It grows better in an arid climate than here — but is still tasty.”

  He would always give us some to take home. Pots of weeds. Tobias would take his weeds and head down over the bank, go into the house and set them on the table. Worse. For, as I say, it always gets worse. Bert always thought the old Colonel was making fun of her poverty, giving them five pounds of weeds. “He’s one damn big-feeling man now, ain’t he?”

  The Colonel thought the greatest goalie who ever lived was Jacques Plante. He felt Plante knew everything — and this is what you needed to know — everything. And the Colonel was a stickler for knowing everything. He believed the greatest player in the last twenty years was a toss up between Richard or Howe. But they weren’t Howie Morenz.

  He thought hockey had gone to the dogs when they put in a centre line, but I knew little about this, or why he was upset about it. If there was no centre line we would have much faster games, he declared and be able to move the puck much better. And we would have to learn to move the puck. The terrible truth he told us, and it was instilled like dry snow on our souls. Instilled forever and ever.

  He had witnessed it at Squaw Valley, the winter before when the Americans beat Canada 1–0 after being outshot perhaps 45–11, and won the Gold Medal. As he spoke he would sit in the kitchen chair puffing on his pipe and watching us eat our weeds.

  “When we lose they are the first to notice it — when we win, they simply shrug — but we will be winning less and less if we don’t fund our own league. The whole world is out to beat us and take our game. You can’t say it any differently than that. You cannot be polite about it. Our best players are tied up in the States and we travel this year, to play in Europe. If we get beaten we will be laughed at — if we win, they will call us barbarians. There is no justice so we should only rely on ourselves.”

  He was the first to tell me about the European rinks being bigger than ours. He was the first to tell us that when expansion came it would go to the south. Even as far away as Florida. I didn’t — couldn’t believe this. And to me he had coined the phrase: “Hockey is life.”

  So, he said, as he puffed on his pipe, “If it goes south — which it will — we will sooner or later be left out of the decisions that matter in hockey.”

  It was sad to hear this from him. It might be all right to go toe to toe with my uncle and my cousin, but to go toe to toe with a man who knew more about the sport than I ever would, who loved his country, and yet still felt his country was damned as far as their national sport went, was another matter. It was sadder because I believed him.

  He realized before anyone else realized it that no matter if we had bragging rights in the NHL — it was a moot point to those, who never knew who we were, and moot also in Europe where they were beating our teams for the World Championships.

  I couldn’t disagree with him. Especially when he was feeding me a nice bowl of weeds.

  By January of 1961 the old Colonel was listening to his radio. Of course he had been for years. The idea that the Americans had won the Olympics in 1960, rankled him. The Americans for God’s sake.

  The Americans were laughing at us, “laughing up their holes” was the expression we used on starry winter nights here. The Russians too, and we still did not have anything approaching a national team. We had teams from small towns going over to play for the World Championship. And it was back in 1960–611 was first becoming aware of the disaster of it. I loved them, but it was getting more and more evident that they could no longer keep up. I was also beginning to hear the name which would become synonymous with every foul trick perpetrated against Canada by the Europeans for the next ten years — Bunny Ahearne, the persistent, diabolical, president of the IIHL. When Brendan Behan the Irish writer mentioned that Canada should stick to its league, ice hockey, we should have taken his advice. What Mr. Behan wouldn’t have been aware of, is that an Irishman named Ahearne was trying to keep us from this as much as he could.

  And now, in 1961, we were sending another team called the TRAIL SMOKE EATERS.

  I can only tell you what I remember about them from my vantage point on the Miramichi. I had heard about them. And in my mind they were dark forms moving across sections of large unfriendly, unpainted ice, far away in another world fighting for us, and ready to be dismissed by many of us at any given moment. And I felt sad and apprehensive. I don’t know whether I felt sad and apprehensive for them, for me, or for Canada. Perhaps it was for us all. And this apprehensiveness, or the memory of it, has never left me. I remember when they lost their first exhibition game against the Swedes, after travelling for days to get there.

  Trail hadn’t won the Allen Cup and were not the first to be asked. Chatham, Ontario, did and was, as Mr. Scott Young reports in his book War On Ice. But because of finances they couldn’t take up the challenge. And it was left to Trail. It was left to Trail — a place so far away from me, from my view of Canada, from where I was, it was strange that they were representing us. Except we both knew, that is the Miramichi and Trail, what hockey meant to us. We could still smell the hockey blades in the fall night air.

  I sometimes like to think that our attitude has gotten better since the Trail Smoke Eaters. Yet I think our international hockey has been like this: we have stuck our head in the sand and refused to really examine what we are doing and why we are doing it in our attitude toward our sport. It happened just as the old Colonel said it would, just as the Second World War did.

  For years, all during the terrible seventies and eighties, we thought we had to find a system to beat the Russians or the Czechs, or the Finns or Swedes, and we relied on defence. Can you imagine, thinking we needed a special system?

  For Canada to rely largely on defence is similar to having Joe Frazier decide that the best way to beat Mohammed Ali is not to throw his left hook.

  “A lapse in defence” or “a breakdown in our own end” was always what cost us this game or that and our national coach for a number of years was always there to tell us this, and to reassure us, that once our defence got better, or once we played our positions, and remembered what to do, we would raise our game to the level of the opposition.

  I am almost positive the Russians and Czechs and Finns and Swedes loved to hear this. This has nothing to do with me not liking defence — I remember Paul Coffey stopping a two-on-one against the Soviets in 1984 just before Canada scored the winning goal.

  I remember being amazed at our three players on the ice for seven — eight minutes in the eighth game against five rushing Soviets in 1972. In their rink with their referee; with their system. And I can also say that I don’t think it was a defensive system that made these moments so great for Canada. It was the absence of a system.

  The one thing a defensive system did for Canada in international hockey was inhibit what we could do instinctively. Taking the man, and hitting him. And actually shooting. A system relying on defence always made a nation who relied on intuition a nation of second guessers.

  Besides, the one thing we tried to curtail in our defensive systems of the seventies and eighties, was the one thing Canadian defence has always relied upon — hitting. We were frightened of hitting, because of our reputations. So we played defensively many times by doing anything but hit.

  Defensive play often worked. It made us lose by two goals instead of four. At a certain point it broke apart anyway. And it broke apart because no matter what kind of team we sent to Europe our gut instinct told us that this was not us. No matter what the philosophy behind the bench was. Yet for years we tried this.

  And we tried this defensive system for more than just hockey on the ice. We tried this system for public relations in Europe and at home. We tried this so the newspapers would be nice to us.

  “They played a nice — clean game, with good backchecking, and lost 4–2 — the one thing I can say is that they acquitted themselves like gentlemen. But don’t the Russians just dazzle —”

  The idea was that we couldn’t beat t
hem but we could stop them from beating us. Too badly. This was the philosophy, and it got us some bronze medals in international play. And made me sick at heart.

  For everyone was on pins and needles all through the late seventies and eighties when this philosophy was at its high water mark. We were on pins and needles because we were told — as we had been told for years and years and years — to stay out of the penalty box.

  With a defensive system, we might clear the puck a half a dozen times, but sooner or later we’re going to get caught in our own end. Sooner or later my friend we are going to take a penalty for holding or tripping the man. And then what else are we going to take, when trying, shorthanded, to clear the man screening the goalie in front of our net? A crosschecking penalty. So we are two men in the box for 3:22.

  If you have relied on defence and you have two men in the penalty box and you have the Russian sharpshooters buzzing about — that’s the game right there. Because the one thing we did when we relied on defence is for some peculiar reason not rely on offence. Even on a breakaway we would seem to be unsure of ourselves.

  Team Canada, of ’72 fame, two men short was still dangerous because they never had the man behind the bench telling them not to be. And they knew, like the Trail Smoke Eaters, that the last thing fair, in Europe, or in Russia would be a penalty call.

  I am not meaning to slight these National teams of the recent past. They worked their guts out playing against great Soviet teams. Only such a system caused them their second-guessing. I know they tried their damndest. But they were not only fighting the great Russians or Finns, they were fighting their natural instincts, to take the other team to task — take the body hard and push the puck forward.

  And sooner or later their natural instincts would bubble over and they would upend someone, or deek with perfect balance, and find themselves in the box. The game was lost anyway. If you are so terrified of penalties, that you mention it to everyone who ever wrote a line for a paper, you are almost bound to get more of them than you deserve.