Hockey Dreams (18 page)

This was a constant of our hockey trips all over the Maritimes in the winter. The kids would invariably say that the trip was nice but that my father was strange. Sometimes kids would say, “Jeez your father’s funny when he’s drunk.”

And I would nod.

He had tried to be a fighter pilot in the Second World War.

Down in Boston, the first thing I noticed on the old brown garage door of the old house on a street in one of the vast suburbs, was what I
didn’t
see. That is the brown garage door was clean. It had no ball or puck marks on it from slapshots. It had no nub marks from hockey sticks leaning against the garage. It had a basketball hoop over it, with a torn-out net.

And Boston was so large. And everywhere I went with my all-knowing uncle I was introduced as “a hockey player from Canada” and every time my uncle said this I was immediately hugged.

“God bless you — a hockey player from Canada.”

Some men actually had tears in their eyes. My uncle was often filling up and wiping his face. So was Mel who was on the hockey committee for the local Rotary.

The idea seemed to be that we hockey players had made it down by some great resources known only to us — we had traversed an abyss. The team had not been invited down by the Rotary Club, we had swam — pulled out of the icy water by the American Coast Guard.

So of course we all went along with this. We were heroes — hockey players from Canada.

We went to the tallest building in Boston and looked out over the largest city I had up until that time been in. A building that had as many people in it as my home town.

And then we were taken to see an aircraft carrier.

The young American sailors showed us about, and one asked me where I was from.

“I come from New Brunswick.”

“Where is New Brunswick?”

“North of Maine —”

“Hell, boy — there ain’t nothin in the world north of Maine.”

I told him that was not true. That the town I was in had just about almost, counting everyone up, going door to door, five thousand people.

He informed me that the carrier I was on, had about, going berth to berth, and counting everyone up — five thousand people.

“Well, see — we’re even on that,” I said, and coughed.

Everything was bigger than life. And I got the impression that that was why my uncle was trying to be bigger than life himself. He sat in a large chair, smoked large cigars and had my cousin run back and forth with highballs.

“Get me ’nother hah — ball,” he would say.

The hot dogs were about two feet long. If you ordered a hamburger in a restaurant it came with enough meat to feed a family of four.

Of course, not only did they not know that the Stanley Cup was happening, they had heard nothing at all about the Trail Smoke Eaters winning the World Championship. I tried to pick my time to tell my uncle this. There were people from the Rotary committee, who had been invited over to his house.
And my father and I sat with them (my brother, as a player, was billeted in another home). They were all drinking highballs. My father who was almost a total teetotaller, held a highball in his hand, his head slumped to one side, as if he had gone into alcoholic shock. I’ve never remembered my father in any other position, except with his head slumped to the other side.

I tried to pick my shot — like Marciano did against Jersey Joe Walcott. Take your time — get beaten about — and then, one right hand, and down he goes in a heap at your feet.

“Uncle Ralph.”

He looked over at me — a smile on his face, his face flushed from highballing it all day.

“Guess what?”

“What son?”

“Do you know what happened a few weeks ago?”

“No son — what happened a few weeks ago?”

It was on the tip of my tongue — everyone had turned politely to listen to me — and I was going to tell them. When, suddenly Treasurer Mel spoke up: so both his sentence and mine came out at the same instant, colliding objects in the same moment in space and time.

“Canada won the World Championship”… was instantly sucked into the black hole of … “Boys, we can’t get any ice time for the games.”

Everyone turned to Mel. Even I turned to Mel. The little simplistic and saucy smile on my face had disappeared.

Mel didn’t know that when he asked to rent the rink for these exhibition games against “some fine Canadian boys,” that he reserved it on the day after the Ice Follies. Which meant that the ice was out of the arena. Something he, as an unwitting new member to the ice-hockey Challenge Cup hadn’t a clue about, nor taken the time to find out.

“The Ice Follies are pretty well the last thing going,” Mel said, in a tone that made us want to apologize for not knowing this. “I went over to the rink last night — the ice has been taken out —” His tone suggested that since he was new to the Challenge Cup he would blame
us
for not informing him about this. He had a brief laugh and finished his drink.

We all sat there stupefied. I was numb from the toes up, and the ears down.

“Hells bells — phone around and try to get another rink,” my uncle said, high on highballs.

Mel went to the phone. Though it was March, a false spring day had warmed to 75°F and Mel was wearing khaki shorts and a top, showing his huge whitish biceps.

In an hour he came back.

We all were silent. He had a slip of paper, with names and dates, and times on it. He looked nervous and agitated. The idea of hosting something had taken a peculiar turn.

There was a rink in Connecticut he said, looking at the paper, but the Canadian boys would have to cough up some money for air travel. Connecticut was certainly a long way away — to have a game of hockey.

“There is a place in Maine — they told me to phone — but I thought I’d come back and ask you guys first.”

Everyone was silent. A desperate nervous silence entered the room and held us there.

Mel said it wasn’t his fault. And I looked at this man, who just yesterday was kissing me and hugging me and slobbering all over me as a Canadian hockey player. Now, his eyes glassy, he looked something like a natural born killer.

Mel started to take offence at something. He spoke about being treasurer of the Rotary, and how everything was left on his shoulders. That everything was going to be blamed on him. Then he laughed, looked acutely at me.

“So you’re a hockey player,” he said. Still looking at me, with his brooding eyes, he said he felt certain that hockey was now out of the question. He dared me to deny.

“Well I planned to have a game,” I said.

“Plans change,” Mel said. I stared at my father.

My father asked if there was another rink within a radius of 40 or 50 miles. That was all he was prepared to travel.

Already the news had spread and the phone was ringing.

The air, the drinks, the clinking of glasses, my uncle’s white sock feet became excruciating. The whole dimension of the trip had changed.

Mel then began to calculate money, air travel, bus tickets and then of course a three-hundred-dollar rental fee for the rink. He looked more and more and more exasperated, and he kept trying half-heartedly to convince us that this could
happen to anyone. Then he said there was a very good chance — an 80 per cent chance — to have a basketball game.

“You like basketball, son?” he said.

By this time I was nervous. Even my uncle was nervous. Mel looked at me.

“You like basketball?” he said again.

I could hear the ice clink in his highball glass.

“Basketball is just about as fine a sport as there is,” Mel said.

We all then began to agree that this wasn’t Mel’s fault. The more we said this, and the more highballs Mel drank, the more he wanted people to apologize to him.

They gave us our friendship Challenge Trophy, that they had won from us in Newcastle, back. But it wasn’t the same. Losing the Canada Cup for the only time in 1981 to the Soviets, and not allowing them to take the Cup out of our country, reminded me of that day in 1961 — and how disheartened I was. I was disheartened on that occasion in 1981 also, for exactly the opposite reasoning I suppose.

We had a game of basketball. The boys tried their damndest, and played their guts out. Phillip Luff got fouled and broke a finger.

Mel was frantically cheering his boys on. He didn’t want to give any quarter. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had.

The final score was 87–19.

I told my uncle that we had invented the game. He said he knew.

T
HEIR UNIFORMS LOOK RATHER
strange, kind of psychedelic. Like a jagged maple leaf or a crack of lightning cutting the sky in two.

We forget how wonderful some of the
other
players played. Brad Park, Rateille, Gilbert, Bill White, Ellis, Stapleton. Some of us back then may have wondered why Henderson was on the team. It is strange to think this now.

It is strange to think also of how cocky I was when the series started. How after the boos in Vancouver by our own fans during the fourth game, I felt ill.

Esposito, who spoke to us that night after the loss in Vancouver did as much as anyone to win the series for us. Oh, there were others all right and he could not have ever done it alone. But
he
was the one who rose to the occasion and who never gave in.

This is the one comment Tretiak made about Team Canada back in 1972. That the one great lesson the Russians
learned from the series is that Team Canada would not give up.

They did everything to try and make us give up. Phone calls in the middle of the night to our players, and kids all over the ice when we went to practise. They wanted us to give up — psychologically — emotionally.

We couldn’t, you see. Not then. It was more than just a game to us. We existed with it, and if it was forgotten then we could not exist without it. Without hockey the country would not
exist
. Not in the way it
should
. We would not have been able to win without French Canadian boys like Cournoyer or Savard. Or English boys like Clarke or White or Henderson.

That was the secret.

We were, on those September afternoons years ago, playing thousands of miles from home in a hostile arena with hostile fans and officials, with all the dignitaries of the Russian Politburo watching, and with many of our intellectuals scoffing, proving in both French and English, our country to each other.

This is what the great Russian players — and they were great, Kharlamov, Yakushev, Petrov, Shadrin — make no mistake — they were the greatest players the Canadians had ever faced with the greatest goalie — this is what they didn’t see, and did not understand.

Perhaps we did not understand it quite as well back then either. Perhaps we lost it again over the years.

Cournoyer passing to Henderson was proving Canada to themselves.

If you think that you are a Canadian then my boy I will show you I am a Canadian too — if they check me from behind I will get up, if they kick and slash I will get up. If we play three against five for fifteen minutes I will get up. I too am a Canadian. They will not take this away from me. Nor, can I see, will they ever take it away from you. At the moment they think we are defeated we will have just begun. I will prove forever my years on the river on the back rinks, on the buses, on the farm teams. I will prove forever that this is what has shaped me. No one will then ever take this away. This is our country. This is our country!

The Russians scored two goals within a minute to defeat us in the fifth game — to put us behind 1–3–1 in the tournament. At home it may as well have been September of 1939. We had to win the last three games on Soviet ice, to win the series. My uncle was in town from Boston that month, and he looked at me, I believe with a good amount of sadness.

He had to leave soon after the fifth game, and the games weren’t shown in United States. It was
their
NHL —
their
greatest players. But what did it matter to them?

“We will win,” I said, shaking his hand at the driveway.

“Why do you think you will win?” he asked. He must have thought I was crazy.

“Because we
have
to,” I said. And I turned and walked back to the house.

Most people (except some of the Canadians themselves) had given up on us.

My uncle worked in Canada off and on. He could speak French and so his area was Quebec and the Maritimes. He was older now, haggard. The years had not been so good to him. His son had been killed in Vietnam; the cousin of mine. This was part of the reason for his sad disbelief in my certainty that we had to win. After the fifth game we were behind 1–3–1, with three games left. All of these games to be played in Moscow, where the quota of penalties was in the ratio of 4 to 1 against us.

There was no reason for such certainty in
his
life anymore, and there never had been before in
mine
. So he was bemused by this. I thought, looking at him, of that night long ago in Boston. I wondered what had happened to Mel, to the old arena where the Ice Follies had taken place. I remembered his son playing with his team. How he had looked over at me once and smiled.

My uncle shook my hand and wished me luck. I turned and walked back to the house.

It was the last time I was to see him.

I travelled back and forth from Fredericton to Newcastle during that Summit Series. And I saw both sides of my country’s reaction.

It was not that Fredericton was so different in its level of patriotism, it was that I knew very few Canadians in Fredericton in 1972 — and those few I did know were not great sports fans. Some did not even know a series was going on. The others I
knew were sure that if we lost it would be a great lesson
taught us
. They did not understand that there was no lesson in this except the ones that we had to teach ourselves.

But my problems were minimal compared to Stafford Foley’s. After the fourth game, the one we lost in Vancouver, I got a phone call. It was a low, tiny voice, born out of fear. “Hi Davy — who you think’s going to win?”