Hockey Dreams (14 page)

My uncle had been to Alaska to sell Cotts. He told me that Alaska was the coldest place on earth. He told me that whenever they wanted to sing about a cold climate, they didn’t sing about Canada — they sang about Alaska. Whenever they wanted to talk about a gold rush — they talked about Alaska. Whenever they wanted to show you a polar bear in a movie it was almost always an Alaskan polar bear. Very few Canadian polar bears got their snout into a movie, he told me.

“North — to Alaska — we’re goin’ North — the rush is on — way up NORTH — Way UP NORTH,” he began to sing.

“Canada is bigger than Alaska,” I said sheepishly.

“Alaska,” my uncle said, puffing on a cigar, “is even bigger than
Texas.”

“NO,” my father said, because he was surprised, “Is IT?”

“ ’Fraid so,” my uncle said, “ ’FRAIDD SOOO.”

My father looked at me, and I said nothing.

Not only had they beaten us at Squaw Valley, we were not even the coldest country. And if we were the coldest country we wouldn’t be able to brag about it, only apologize for it.

March 12, 1961, about one o’clock in the afternoon Maritime time.

Canada was penalized against Russia at the 40-second mark. Canada was penalized again at about the three-minute mark
.

No one listening to that broadcast would have realized that not only were they listening to history — that this would be the last time a Canadian amateur team from the boonies, from the dark, smoky backwoods of Canada, would go over and win a World Championship, but that they were witnesses to the profound psychology of Canada and Canadian teams who personified this.

Canada would have to hold off a Russian power play for about five minutes at the very start of the game. When entire games could be decided. Canada managed, with Russians all about their net, to hold them off.

Canada scored at about the ten-minute mark
.

Canada scored twice more in the second period
.

Canada scored twice more in the third. The Soviets scored once
.

And that was the game — and the World, and the Czechs were crying. The Canadians too.

For hockey was always more than a game, a scrap of ice, a puck shot at a net.
The Trail Smoke Eaters
. No one had given them much of a chance.

I went outside and it was starting to snow gently. A puff of white smoke came from the creamery far off. A train was moving slowly, the day was darkening. Some kids playing hockey shouted out to me as I walked.

I did not know I would be in my 40s before the World Championship became ours again.

I did not know that the most exciting hockey ever played since the game came into being, was still over eleven years away.

T
HE
T
RAIL
S
MOKE
E
ATERS
were mentioned in the House of Commons. In those days Ottawa seemed as far away from me as Prague.

Hockey was mentioned in the House of Commons again in ’72. It was mentioned in 1987 when our World Juniors were involved in the fight with the Russians.

However the most famous occasion it was mentioned in our House of Commons — in recent times — was when Gretzky was going to L.A.

That Mr. Gretzky’s going to L.A. was mentioned in the House of Commons was picked up by American television. It was also big news in the Soviet Union. The idea that Canadians were concerned that a great Canadian hockey player was going to play in the States was newsworthy.

“Why should he go there if he is a Canadian?” one Russian hockey fan asked on a CBC news program.

Such interest was a very strange thing to me. It was as if
we suddenly decided to stop a grain of sand in an hourglass. It was a great grain to try to stop — perhaps the greatest. But my God — Orr, Hull, Howe, Savard, Izerman, Coffey, Messier — one can conceivably go on for hours.

To mention Gretzky was, in fact, an insult to Canadians. Nothing more. For if no one thought about the great Bobby Orr going to Boston, no one thought of Canadian hockey as heritage we were content to piss away.

Christ, who was the greater player — Orr or Gretzky?

But it also allowed a misconception to be reinforced — that we, in Canada, were actually concerned about our hockey players, and that Gretzky was somehow the exception rather than the rule. That our players played for Edmonton — and
their
players played for L.A.

Perhaps it should have been mentioned in the House of Commons, but it goes to show that sometimes in Canada, even when you win, you are bound to lose.

It was in mid-March of 1961 when Stafford gave up on Lloyd Percival. I remember passing him one night as he stood in a phone booth, talking, with his big, brown earmuffs sideways on his head. He turned and looked my way briefly and turned back. The sky was cold, the long King George Highway stretched forever. I was walking down to the store.

I had already been to the curling club four or five times and I had asked him to come with me. The curling club ice was pebbled; the stones looked too huge to lift. And I really
thought I was not going to be able to curl either — that I was doomed. I couldn’t follow the scoreboard. Besides this, it was a game that people older than my father played.

“Yes, yes — I remember your grandmother playing here a few years ago,” a man said to me.

“My grandmother — good, good.”

“And there’s old Mr. Bell who plays with one leg. So if you have a bad leg you should be able to fit right in here — we’ll fix you up with a sport.”

“Fine. Great,” I said.

I learned later on that, as with hockey, curling was our game, and we
hated
when we were beaten at it. I learned also that the same things about hockey applied to curling.

1. That it was part of our national consciousness and we couldn’t separate ourselves from it.
   
2. The Europeans and now and again the Americans, would become much better.
   
3. That we were abundantly generous with our time and our coaches and our clinics, to help other nations.
   
4. As long as we were the very best, we would never have it as an Olympic game. Only when the Europeans felt that they could match us in prestige would they allow us, and therefore themselves, this.
   
5. Once again, as in Bunny Ahearne’s day, countries such as Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, would get a vote on Canadian sport.
   

Curling was so closely linked to hockey in the winter in small towns that they became almost interchangeable. In our town, as in most, the rinks are next door to one another. But at this point in life Stafford did not think much about curling.

Often at nine at night his father would be driving about the neighbourhood looking for him. He began to hang about with a guy named Jimmy J. Jimmy J. was nineteen then. I think he still hangs about with boys and girls about puberty age.

Jimmy J. was married at this time. He had a step-son of seven or eight who he used to hang about with. His wife was a hair dresser. At this point in his life he drove a milk truck. He always had a dozen kids of puberty age or younger in his milk truck driving them somewhere. His marriage did not last that long — about a year.

He was very tall and thin, with cowboy boots, and a sandy coloured brushcut. Anything kids were interested in, he would get — he had his own go-cart.

I remember Stafford and Jimmy J. sitting in the milk truck. Jimmy J. had a cigarette behind each ear and one in his mouth. He had a rabbit paw on his keys. Stafford had a cigarette in his mouth too.

I saw them in at White’s Pharmacy as I walked home. “Trail won,” I said to Stafford, “Trail won — we won, we won — TRAIL — we won.”

Stafford looked at me as if he were bored, blinked and said nothing. He held a cigarette in his left hand, down near the stickshift so I wouldn’t see it. I was angered by this.

Jimmy J. laughed and Stafford too, half-heartedly. But the idea why they were laughing only became evident when I got home and looked into the mirror. There was my mouth, all wobbly and twisted sideways. I hated the dentist at that moment, even though I had won 50 cents.

It was the only time Stafford ever laughed at me. Yet for a time everything was Jimmy J. The Foley kids had a huge fort built near their rink — with windows and small tunnels leading under the snow towards the house. One night as I walked by I saw Jimmy J.’s head poking out a window.

“Go way, go way,” he said to me, and he ducked his head back in, and then out another window, and laughed.

The accepted idea — the idea that made Jimmy J.’s mental state agreeable was that he liked children. And there was nothing wrong with this. The years have been very hard on this idea. For a man who likes children now — as I do — treads dangerous waters. People have seen too much or heard too much or worried too much.

But back then, with his head poking out of a snow fort he was simply Jimmy J. And everyone knew him.

When we played hockey, Stafford would play if Jimmy J. did. And at times he played with us, he and his step-son. While his new wife started to go out with
friends
.

One night at the rink, I remember him bowling us over, a huge grin on his face, slashing everyone in his way. The idea of him being stronger or bigger than us did not give him any moral responsibility towards us. However Jimmy J. was
unconscious of any of this. He had a huge grin, a new hockey stick and he said his favourite team was Detroit. He would arrive in his milk truck. He considered himself a company man.

Stafford was swearing, smoking and wearing his shoulder pads when they went anywhere; so he would look like “a pretty big chunk of a young lad.”

Jimmy J. also talked about doing people in. Although I also felt even then that he was as scared as a rabbit, he had this idea that he was the bad lad on the block.

He said that if anyone did anything to him, he would put his hand into that man’s chest and haul the still-beating heart out, and hold it up in front of the man’s astonished eyes.

People my age were often as not very polite to him. They went to Foley’s Tire Garage at night. In the old front office with its old desk, its brochures for lubricants and oil. The wind would howl and Jimmy J. would sit about and take stock of affairs.

He would sit at Stafford’s father’s desk and Stafford would be run off his feet doing errands for him.

“Get me a bag a those there chips Staffy,” he would say. Or, “What I’d really like right now is a slurp of pop.”

The pop was in one of those old machines that looked like an assembly line of pop. You fed one bottle along to a latch that would lift up if you put a dime in.

Jimmy J. would rarely pay a dime. He would tell Stafford to pay from his father’s register. The whole thing about Jimmy J. was his feeling that he would: “Do it for you, Staffy.”

And Stafford would break into the register and give him the dime. Then he would stand there smiling as Jimmy J. downed the bottle of Coke in one drink.

Stafford was all Jimmy J., just as he had been all Lloyd Percival. I didn’t get to go with the Bantam As when they went to Bathurst to play the Saturday after Trail won the World. But Stafford and Jimmy J. hitchhiked. Stafford tried to dress like Jimmy J., walk and talk like Jimmy J.

Until something happened that was just as strange.

Tobias thought he had a father. It was just an idea which no one minded. His father was going to do this and his father was going to do that. His father lived in a big house and was going to invite him there. If his father came home, you would see something. If you saw his father, you’d know.

He would sit on the edge of Stafford’s bed and talk about his father. His father had to go away, but he was going to come back. In the cold, dark room Stafford took his insulin shot and still checked his hockey report, and still listened to Tobias.

Stafford had no idea about Jimmy J. really. He told Tobias to go with him to the creamery one afternoon. They would see Jimmy J., and get a drive about in the milk truck, and find Tobias’ father. And up to the creamery they went. Ran really.

There was almost a visceral change in Jimmy J. He did not want Tobias in his milk truck. He didn’t want him near. And if Tobias came by again, he would beat up Tobias. Stafford was his friend, and not Tobias. And Stafford should have known better.

But Stafford didn’t know better. He only knew that Tobias was at their supper table five nights a week, that in actual fact there was something so mean about not protecting Tobias that it was unnatural.

Stafford simply smiled. He thought Jimmy J. was joking. But Jimmy J. took the hose used to wash the milk from the cement floor and hosed down Tobias, with a force that threw him back onto the ground.

“There,” he said, “that’ll teach ya. Go find your father now ya little bastard. I’m not looking for yer father I’ll tell ya — right Staffy — I’m not looking for
his
father.”

Tobias in the cold darkening March air, with the smell of sulphur from the mill so far away, turned and began to walk home, water dripping from every inch of him.

“That’ll teach him,” Jimmy J. said. “That’ll teach him.”

Stafford turned and caught up with Tobias. When they got to the bottom of the creamery lane they heard the milk truck behind them, with the door banging opened and closed.

“Get in this truck Stafford — get in this truck.”

But Stafford did not get into the truck. He took Tobias to his house, and using towels from the bathroom tried to dry the boy off. Later that night he heard the creamery truck going back and forth on his lane.

After this there was a campaign waged for Stafford by Jimmy J. He would come along and ask him to get into the truck.

“No, I won’t get into the truck.”

“Well then, you are no longer my
friend.”

Stafford wouldn’t answer.

“No longer my
friend
— no longer my
friend.”

Still Stafford would not answer.

Jimmy J. would go about the block. One day he picked up Garth and drove him about Stafford’s house a dozen times, playing music from his radio, talking as loudly as he could every time he passed Stafford.