Hockey Dreams (22 page)

He lived in a room surrounded by his past without seeing it much anymore. Daily, he made his trips to the library and liquor store. He was gentle enough and kind enough to follow my career, because he felt it would matter to me. He tried to teach the woman about hockey — from the Stafford Foley perspective. And finally after a few weeks of instruction, he touched his breast with his hand and whispered, “It’s all in here.” And he smiled.

I had been out of the country (that trip to Australia), and when I got back home I packed up my truck and went into the woods for a few days, with a friend.

On the way out we stopped at a garage to telephone his wife. He spoke for a few moments and came back to the truck. He was silent for quite a while.

“It’s a very warm night for November,” he said finally.

“Yes.”

He paused, cleared his throat, looked out the window at something. “Stafford is dead.”

Stafford’s lady friend had found him sitting in his chair one morning. He had died in his sleep. On his radio was that song by Leonard Cohen, the one that says there are rocket ships in the sky, and doctors but that there is no cure for love.

It kept playing, and playing like a Leonard Cohen song usually does, for a long time.

Stafford would have been proud. The next year we Canadians won back
our
World Championship after 30 bloody years of waiting.

And then
his
Detroit finally got to the finals of the Stanley Cup again. Even though they lost, they had a shot. So he certainly would have had something more to cheer about and bother everyone he knew about. And bet his shirt, and Speedball his turtle too I suppose. He was forever a man like that. He came to it honestly, like we all did.

I came back from Spain in time to see the playoffs of the shortened season — Detroit against the New Jersey Devils. New Jersey was supposed to have this wonderfully new defensive system, called “the trap.”

The idea of a secret weapon in hockey is always the way to catch an audience. The idea that the game can be reduced to a foolproof system, which no mortal can get around, and which will make everyone an instant expert. The notion that
we can corral the game, trap it by saying so-and-so or such-and-such is using
the trap
.

New Jersey played hockey, similar to Montreal. They won the Cup, and are now preparing to go to Nashville. Although the New Jersey coaching staff is Canadian, they have more American players than any other team — I believe. Detroit has Canadians, Americans, and Russians. In a way this made it a truly American NHL final. Stafford and I could no longer say, as we did when Chicago played Detroit in 1961, that all of the players were Canadian anyway.

During the first games of this season, the referees’ emphasis on enforcing new interference rules made the game unbearable to watch. No-one seemed to know much about what they were doing. A play would just get started and the whistle would blow for some infraction, from some player trying to clear the front of his net. It reminded me of old Tuff, in our home town game against Boston.

In Saint John I took my son to an AHL Flames game. We watched as the players skated out of a smoking, air-filled dragon, and Flea Burn, the Flames mascot, did hand-stands during a light show. He did them well.

When the Flames scored the place erupted into the old familiar bedlam however.

Recently I had to attend a dinner in Toronto. As I stood in the large room, surrounded by many important people, I suddenly thought of Tobias.

A feeling of loss washed over me.

It was a strange feeling to have that moment. Men in black tie, and women in long dresses seemed to float by. I turned, and there standing three feet away was Gordie Howe.

I am not a man to impose and yet suddenly, for all our sakes — for Michael and Ginette, and for Paul and Stafford and Tobias — I was blurting out things to him. I was telling him the story about when he telephoned me, so long, long ago. I told him we all played on the rinks on the river. We too had our games. And he, Gordie Howe, smiled and acknowledged this kindly. He, Gordie Howe, spoke to me again, after 35 years, when all my past life seemed a ghost. He nodded and we shook hands.

I never betrayed Stafford. I never mentioned the poem.