Hockey Dreams (16 page)

He got home after dark, his paper-bag torn and his face bleeding. He sat on the cot for a moment catching his breath, and then he asked his old Gram where Tobias was.

“Ain’t he with you?” she asked.

The room was dark. Across the lonely river the snow fell.

Michael went back out. He walked past the Foleys’ and turned again towards Skytown, past the old Shell garage and Hawkenbury’s friendless barn.

Tobias was leaning against the pole, sound asleep, waiting for his brother. The five cents he clutched in his small hand, like a pint of gold.

I
HAVE TRAVELLED THE WORLD
, after a fashion. I have looked for hockey scores amid the pictures of football heroes in
U.S.A. Today
, have read the thoughts on hockey by
Sports Illustrated
, and have watched hockey players in England do their skating sprints, from blueline to centre line and back again.

In the universities where a certain love of sports is often suspect, I have listened to the love of basketball and baseball replace my love over the years. Where the idea of an American basketball dream team of 1992 sent Canadian professors into a state of ecstacy — those same professors who often did not want to hear my complaints about the failure to promote our own dream team in Hockey.

We did not have it. And for years we could not manage it, and now our players are part of the melting pot. So Darryl Sittler’s son plays for Team U.S.A. Bobby Hull’s son, Brett, is an American. The melting pot has stirred us in.

The training grounds have shifted. There is something
more collegiate about the players today — and those colleges are in the States. The state university programs have promoted their own hockey with a vengeance.

Most of the players I knew never got to university.

I travelled to Virginia and, at night listening to the sports broadcast, I hear, after the talk about football, baseball, basketball and tennis — I hear a Canadian voice, and I glance at the screen. Some youngster from way up in Canada who cannot give his dream away — holds onto it as you would a pint of gold, and has driven down in his second-hand car, with his hockey equipment in the back seat for a tryout, in this small unassuming city near the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“I’m just glad the coach has faith in me and is giving me a try.” He talks about being on the injured list, with a torn ligament all last year. That he got waylaid, failed to make the grade in some IHL team — but now he feels better. He has been skating with the team. He is about 25, and you know that everyone has given up on him, except himself. And I think again of Phillip Luff. Or perhaps Sean O’Sullivan. I don’t know.

There is always a place where Canadians go when they fail. It is to another place — somewhere. In Virginia maybe, or in the U.S. Midwest. I have seen them.

In 1977 they laced up their skates in an arena in Barcelona. My wife and I watched them on television in a bar in Denia.

The European clubs. The Scottish hockey league. For some the dreams refuse to go away.

They are damned — not unlike Sisyphus — to do what the gods have condemned them to. The boulder is heavy and like Sisyphus their only relief is, as Camus says, that their fate can be overcome by scorn. Scorn for all the tricks the world has played upon them.

The “What ifs?” might someday stop. Like they did finally for Phillip Luff and dozens of others. Somewhere in an arena in Europe, a friend of my youth, playing in a small league in Northern Italy, suddenly thinks that the “What ifs?” did not only pertain to himself. They pertained as well to all of those other children, hopeless in youth, who sometimes hung about the bakery for a piece of bread on those long ago winter days before they went to school. The “What ifs?” pertained to the Michaels as well.

And in a way, in perhaps the best way, the “What ifs?” can never end. For something you have lived for will die if they do.

Phillip Luff could not let them end. For their ending would destroy his father, and his father could not allow them to end, for their ending would make his son ordinary, like everyone else.

Phillip tried out for team after team to go to the World Championship, the Olympics. He was always the last one cut, or nearly the last one cut. Or perhaps someone else was called up, just after he had made the cut, and they had to let him go. The coach told him he was one of the best players he had seen in a long while. He would secretly hope that Bunny Ahearne blacklist any Canadian player who even sniffed a
National League bench, in order for him to have one more chance.

His father kept trying to figure things out, make contacts that were getting harder and harder to make. Until Phillip was playing somewhere in the Midwest, for two hundred dollars a week. And then he came home one day. Perhaps he can’t even bring himself to lace up a pair of skates anymore or watch a Canada Cup.

I’ve known other people like that. For years a man I knew said he could not watch a game because he knew too much about it. Not about what happened on the ice, but all the slow-burning acts of small betrayals that happened off that ice. He too had given it his all. He too had been cut, somewhere by someone.

The skates hang on the nails inside porch doors and are slowly forgotten. The children remember hearing that their father was once considered a good player — even better than good, no — he was a marvellous player. He could side-step a check in full stride, dish it out or take it — had a shot like a bullet, and most people were wary to mix it up with him.

And then something, somewhere along the line happened. Perhaps there was just nowhere else to go.

But don’t kid ourselves. Many of them went everywhere they could, did whatever they had to do with their dream. And somehow, even with doing all the right things, having the talent besides, some of them got left out of the lottery.

Like one of the players we watched in Barcelona. All of a
sudden there he was, back in 1977 on that February afternoon. He took the puck into his own end ragging it, and then turned, like a young shark, and moved, and with a flick, you saw power and grace, and wisdom. He passed one player and then another, and then not having a shot he turned and began to rag the puck again skating backwards into the corner drawing the defence to him, and then passing to the centre man in the slot — wham, in the net — Le But!

He gave me that moment in Spain. Where did he go? And what has hockey finally given to him?

I was in Spain with my wife and son in 1995. We spent the winter there and played hockey on our patio. We would walk the beaches to collect bamboo sticks — ones that had knots at the bottom shaped like the blades of hockey sticks.

I was a pretty good hockey player by Spanish standards. I was able to flick a ball with my wrist shot over the villa and into our neighbour’s yard, until an old woman began to complain in German that I was hitting her windows. It felt like old times.

Sometimes in the afternoons Spanish kids, getting off the bus, would stop and watch us and we would dipsy-doodle for them, among the coloured stones and hedges and red blooming flowers, wind up for scintillating slapshots, try to speak like Danny Gallivan or Foster Hewitt out of the side of our mouths.

My five-year-old son was always Wayne “Grebsky.” I was everyone else. One time a Spanish kid sneaked into our yard
and picked up my bamboo stick and tried to hit the ball. He finally whacked it against our wall, threw down the stick as if it was some kind of forbidden magician’s wand and ran away.

My son wore his Montreal Canadien sweater into town even at the height of the Spanish-Canadian turbot war. He was proud of that sweater, and we weren’t going to tell him
not
to wear it.

One afternoon a young Spanish woman who we knew and travelled with, had her friend bring us a hockey stick from Switzerland, with TEAM CANADA written on it. Because of the turbot war she wanted to show us how she felt about us.

Sometimes in the bars or walking through the quiet mid-afternoon streets, I would meet my
country
. Someone would walk by wearing a San Jose Sharks’ cap, or a Los Angeles Kings’ sweater with number 99 on it, a Pittsburgh Penguin sweater with Number 66.

It was a strange feeling. I suppose those Spanish kids, wearing those caps and sweaters, would never understand my mixed feelings. They were wearing my country and I could never claim that they were. I suppose my son was beginning to realize this although I did try to hide these feelings. Certain feelings of betrayal, of loss.

In Spain I read about the
American
hockey strike. In European papers when they spoke about the NHL they never mentioned Canada. They showed pictures of Mr. Bettman in his dapper suits, striding along a hallway. They spoke of the game in terms of New York and L.A.

I am not ten anymore, Quebec is on the verge of separating and my country is no longer mine. In Spain for the first time, I was desperately, proudly Canadian and yet didn’t know if I would have a country in a year or two.

My country had become a strange place to me — a place where they felt the need to make 60-second mini-heritage commercials for our television and our theatres. These mini-heritage commercials showed who we are — that we invented things claimed by others — basketball, Standard Time, the Superman Comic hero, who fought for justice and the American way. Someday they might promote our involvement in hockey this way as well.

Yet you remember, that in the splendid and dazzling snowstorms, lying on a couch, watching a game with your girlfriend, you could still tell, with one eye half closed and thinking of other things, all that was brilliant about a pass or a deke.

I was asked in Virginia four years ago why I did not leave my country, go to the States to write. “Your country is going to break up,” a gentleman said, not unkindly. “Quebec is going to go — you people on the Atlantic seaboard will be left to hang and dry — why don’t you come to the States?”

“Hockey,” I said.

There was more sadness than juvenilia about that answer.

In Spain we went to the shops and fairs, watched kids playing soccer in the sandlots and on the beaches.

There were beggars on the streets and little shoeshine boys who cheered for Real Madrid, Valencia or
Barth-the-lona
. One with his little shiny eyes, and torn jeans, who kept admonishing me for wearing sneakers ran about all night in the cold air.

He had all the indictments already sworn out against him. His caginess, his false friendliness — the pretence that he always had something to do
for
me or to offer me. The idea that he would be
there for
me. All of this
is
part of the emotional signals of the artful dodger — the boy or girl left out.

And I thought, seeing him, that perhaps poverty is better served in warm climates than in cold. Although I am not the one to say. I was never nearly as poor as this shoeshine boy, or Michael or Tobias. They
knew
. Their eyes told me the same things as this child. His shoeshine box was essentially the same as Michael’s snow shovel, with its taped handle.

Thirty-four years and thousands of miles away from one another their dreams were dreamed for the same end. One was for soccer — and Real Madrid — the other was for Hockey and Toronto Maple Leafs. One had palm trees over his head and cobbled streets where he kicked a small soccer ball, the other had blizzards and mended hockey sticks.

Stafford was the one to first tell me that Tobias never cried. I hadn’t noticed it.

“No no,” Stafford said, his pant legs drooping beneath his boots one afternoon, his stomach bare and his earmuffs
askew, as he went about practising his wrist shot, and slipping and sliding across the small bumpy rink he had made.

“Tobias don’t cry — he never cries.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know —” Stafford said, “You can pinch him, and punch him, and yell at him and he won’t — even Jimmy J. never made him cry — when Jimmy J. took the water hose at him — and it was cold — he didn’t even cry.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Stafford said, looking at me in a mystified way. Stafford also said he had tried to get him to cry, but couldn’t manage it. He had sat on the bed and had pulled his ears. He had pulled his right ear until he hauled Tobias’ head sideways and then he had gone around and pulled the left ear.

“He must be some tough if he don’t cry,” I said, spitting to show how tough I was.

I remembered Michael in the great fight with the boy from Skunk Ridge, when he had his head cut open.

Cold, anger, fear, hunger, and neither of them cried.

Years later I was at a university luncheon. And a woman mentioned in passing conversation about a child, living in foster homes, and adopted by her when he was eight years old, who would never cry — because he had learned by the time he was three that crying never solved anything for him.

One night she went into his bedroom and saw him, sound asleep, tears running down his cheeks.

I was asked in Spain about the mythology of my sport by the woman who got us our stick. What attracted me to it? Wasn’t it a violent sport? I answered her this way: That it was more like soccer than baseball. And she seemed to accept this.