Hockey Dreams (10 page)

“Where would you rather play — in Skunk Ridge like Phillip Luff or Chicago like Denis Savard? But still the players always know there are tradeoffs.

“But you see what has been done lately — and our media plays at least its part — during the amateur draft is to create a great dazzling world of the
auction block
. The principle
idea invested in is this: that we as Proud Canadians are overwhelmed that a certain boy from Brandon or Sault Ste. Marie, is picked over someone from Sweden to go to Los Angeles. No longer do we even have a pretence of claiming it as ours. Nor should we. That is the shame of it.”

He continued, “I will tell you how an uncle died, and you might relate it to Canadian hockey. He went into the hospital, and the doctors and nurses joked with him and told him that he was doing fine. He believed the doctors. So he did not worry, until the pain got too severe.

“He went back to the hospital. The doctors re-evaluated and found that they had made a mistake with the first diagnosis. In a strange way this was blamed on him. Hadn’t he known the pain was severe?

“They told him that if he followed the proper precautions he would get better. So he entered the second stage of his illness. But things had advanced by neglect, so that no matter what precautions he deteriorated and the illness advanced to the third stage. And it was in this third stage where his relatives, as the
audience
, began to see that no one was trying to cure him anymore. And once it was realized that nothing could be done, it was hoped that he would die as quickly as possible for his and everyone else’s relief. This is what Canada is rushing towards now.”

But how can you comprehend, in 1961, when you are trying to buy a puck, that they are talking about franchises in Los
Angeles? And that people, adults you looked up to, would be gulled into thinking that those franchises would be worth something to Canadians. That, to us, was where the real self-delusion lay; we only existed, with Michael skipping school two days a week to put his rink together, in the realm of the possible.

I would never say the game was greater back then, but no matter how much bigger and stronger the players are now, there was a harder edge to the game in 1961, along with an innocence. The Trail Smoke Eaters seemed to personify this, in a strange way that year.

Stafford was hoping and praying that Detroit would win the Stanley Cup in 1961 He was too young to remember when they won it in 1955. Most of the people on my side of the street were going for the Habs, although Rocket had just retired, and their dynasty was limping into the future.

There was Chicago. And the Leafs were on the horizon. They had people from the Toronto Marlboroughs who were coming into their own like Mahovlich. I hated the Million Dollar Baby until he went to Montreal.

I had strong dislikes. I hated Toronto. They were anti-Hab people. I never warmed to Chicago — I never warmed to Bobby Hull. But I went for any team playing Toronto. Just as today I go for any team that is playing against Boston. It is irrational, I know. My dislike for Boston started when they got their people — Espo, Orr, Sanderson, McKenzie and others — and my cousin in Boston finally started to claim them.
As if suddenly hockey had become
acceptable
. My uncle would telephone and you’d hear, “Heh heh heh heh heh.”

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.

T
HE OLD
C
OLONEL 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 creeping 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.