Hockey Dreams (3 page)

I was in New Orleans for a reading tour when the lady asked me this. I stated, “They come from the States or Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic I believe.”

She burst out laughing.

The laugh was insulting. And I countered it. I told her that most NHL players were from Canada.

But she did not respond to this. For hockey had no meaning for her. She stared at me as if I was being flippant. I suppose I was. It has always been a part of my nature. Half pathologically shy, and half flippant. Even when I was little.

W
E WERE ALL GOING TO
make the NHL when I was ten or eleven.

In those years — long ago, the weather was always
more
than it is now. There was more of it — more snow, more ice, more sky — more wind.

More hockey.

We played from just after football season until cricket started sometime after Easter. We played cricket in our little town in the Maritimes or “kick the can” as we alluded to it. After we put away our waterlogged and mud-soaked hockey sticks. Behind us and down over the bank, the Miramichi River was breaking its ice and freeing itself from another winter. In the piles of disappearing snow, fragments of sticks and tape could be found.

The sun was warm and smoke rested on the fields and grasses.

At Easter, in my mind there always seemed to be a funeral. One year, 1961, just after Easter, there was the funeral of
a man who was shot in Foley’s Tire Garage, and everyone was excited about it. We were all friends of the Foley boys — there were seven of them. The oldest of them was Paul.

He was the boy who told me that when bigger boys go into the corner after the puck — or after the ball if it was road hockey — always watch and wait patiently just on the outside.

“You’re too little,” he said. And in a characteristically protective way that other children had with me, he added. “You’re also lame. You
can’t
use your left arm — so if you just wait, the puck will dribble out to you and you’ll have a chance at a goal.”

A goal
. To score one goal was the height of my ambition.

But looking back, half of us playing, half of us who wanted nothing more than to play in the NHL — which was always to Maritimers somewhere else — were going to have at least as much problem as me. Being a Maritimer certainly had a little to do with it.

One of our goalies was a girl.

Another was a huge boy with fresh-pressed pants and the smell of holy water, who believed in Santa Claus until he was thirteen. He carried his books like a girl and was in school plays with my sister. “I am of the thespian family,” he would say, because his mother had once played Catherine of Aragon.

The brother of my friend who cautioned me about going into the corner was a diabetic — Stafford Foley.

Stafford wore a Detroit sweater and in his entire life he never got outside Newcastle. He was a fanatical sports fan all his life.

Another boy, Michael, had all the talent in the world but did not own a pair of skates until he was twelve. And then only a broken-up, second-hand pair with the blades chipped that he got from a pile in the Foleys’ basement.

That was the year Michael also became a rink rat and swept and shovelled snow from the nets during the big games.

There were others who could play fairly well — one I know had a tryout with Montreal and came home because his girlfriend phoned to tell him she couldn’t stand to be without him. After a month she left him for someone else.

Another — Phillip Luff could skate like the wind and had the brain of a salamander, and ended up playing the bongos. Another, my brother, could think hockey as well as Don Cherry, but couldn’t skate well enough to make the pros.

As we grew older we all went our various ways with hockey. It was strange to see boys who were on the ice in high school one year giving it all up to grow their hair long and smoke dope the next, saying, “Hey man — what’s happenin’? Get on down, baby.”

Of course some of them took up the puck later to play in the gentlemen leagues. (Sometimes the gentleman league on our river was enough to give you cardiac arrest.)

I know at least five people who might have made it to the NHL if they had disciplined themselves. Perhaps, too, and I say this without bitterness, if there had been proper scouts from the big teams here, or more credit was given to the
Maritimers themselves. There was the OHL and the Quebec Major Junior — in the Maritimes the boys graduated to Senior hockey and played to sell-out crowds for their home towns.

I don’t know how many of us could have made it, but there were some of us who could but didn’t. Perhaps they didn’t have the breaks; perhaps they didn’t have the heart. The real thing the OHL and Quebec Major Junior is, is a journey through hell, at seventeen years old, a thousand miles from home on a snowy road. One only has to talk to anybody who
has
played in those leagues; billeted in houses, travelling all night by bus or car, suffering the scorn of the coach, if he was just not quite good enough to know.

One time a friend told me of his hockey days over beer. He told me who he played against when he was voted most valuable player in the OHL.

“Why, all those lads are in the NHL,” I said.

He nodded.

“You — you could have made it too.”

He shrugged.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” he said. “I could’ve played up there —”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, why the hell aren’t you up there?”

He looked at me very seriously, as if being a writer, I
would understand. “I fell in love with a woman — and I discovered Shakespeare.”

“A plague upon both your houses,” I said. “You owed it to us.”

“What?”

“You owed it to us — to us — WE WHO COULD NEVER EVER DO IT.”

We never called hockey “shinney” where I came from. I suppose there are a million things to call hockey and none of them right. But I don’t remember ever hearing the word
shinney
. When, now and then, I hear up-to-the-moment CBC reporters talking about shinney — as if this is the name that will reduce hockey to its embryonic, to its pleasant and nostalgic centre — it leaves me cold.

And of course we NEVER EVER called it “ice hockey”— or “NORTH AMERICAN hockey.” Let the Europeans and some Upper Canadians do so. All of these things are blasphemous to me.

And since I am writing this for Paul who told me to wait on the fringe of the boards (which, like others, I never did) and Stafford who wore his big Detroit sweater three times too large and went blind and had the kindest eyes of any child I have ever remembered. Since I am writing this for Michael, one more time, and for Ginette, who went off to a number of bad evenings and sad marriages, but played the nets for us because no one else would, I will not call it shinney or ice hockey either.

I will still say that in those days the NHL was ours too, even if we were in the Maritimes.

And even if none of us had a hope in blue hell of making it, there was a moment when we all — even Ginette Malefont — thought we would.

Our houses were a mixed bag. You took what you got. It was a neighbourhood half white collar and half industrial and at least a good part poor.

I grew up beside boys who never had a decent meal and whose mothers were last seen somewhere else. And next door our MP was grooming his sons for law and politics.

Our houses, whether they were large or almost falling down, were our houses as kids. We noticed differences, that was all.

I was reminded of Paul and Stafford Foley’s house when I was in England. I read in a paper in London, about a football-mad family, who were kicked out of their flat. It was the seventh flat for this family in two years. Every one of the four children went for a different team, and every game there were chairs heaved and dishes broken. The neighbours constantly complained.

Only the mother, God bless her, tried to remain neutral. Pa was as bad as the kids, almost worse. He had his team’s colours tattooed on his chest. They had a picture, standing beside the flat they’d just been evicted from, all smiles and furniture with their arms around one another, ready to go someplace else.

I mention this because playoffs in the Maritimes, and at the Foley house especially, were like that. Boots and coats and hats lying in the centre of the floor, TV trays all over the living room. Hockey games in the kitchen, with donuts for pucks.

Outside it was pitch dark and cold; for it was still cold back then, when our playoffs came. And seven Foley kids on the couch with a huge, naked, picture window looking out on the snowy street.

A wild schmozzle on the ice between Detroit and Montreal, and suddenly little Stafford jumping on top of his twin brother — a twin brother who towered over him — to strangle him. “This is from Gordie Howe, you bastard.”

His brother, Darren, was the only boy who took a hockey stick to my head over a game of marbles. It was the biggest game I ever won — 16zees.

The rink we most played on was the Foleys’ — a large, lumpy, whitish-coloured rink in their backyard, strung with lights from the small sprag pole at the side of their brick porch. I remember nights when twenty kids would be playing.

Some, like Stafford, would always be wearing their hockey colours, others would have their equipment on: kneepads and stockings, skating about, or walking over the ice like wobbly calves. Most of us would be wearing boots. Our nets were most often snow chunks at four feet wide and twenty feet apart — our goalies played the net with old brooms.

Somebody would always wind up for a slapshot with the new puck he had just gotten, with six kids standing in front of him.

“Watch it — ya just clocked Lippy in the side of the head,” someone else would say.

However, the outside rinks we played on were always uncertain; the weather could change three times a day leaving us with no rink at all and eventually, if we were not playing in the Sinclair Rink on our Peewee or Bantam teams, we would end up on the road.

I have never partaken in a hockey game on the old road where there wasn’t some great dipsy-doodling that would put many people in mind of Denis Savard.

Some nights, especially when Michael was in nets, no one could score; some nights, when Garth was in nets, everyone got a goal, except Stafford Foley and me.

There were always fights. I mean knock ’em down fights that would turn your blood cold. The twins always fought. Michael often had a great fight with his half-brother Tobias — the only black boy we knew — the only boy I ever knew to eat worms on a dare. (The mothers always said “Poor Tobias” when they heard that he had eaten worms.)

Tobias was fed more often than not at the Foleys’ house. They always had room for one more. In fact, during all this time their mom was pregnant, and stopped bring pregnant one afternoon in 1968 and never got pregnant again. That seemed strangely a part of my hockey life as well.

Tobias and Michael would come to the hockey games with one taped-up stick and try to share it, which would erupt into a huge confrontation. There were always interruptions. Mothers called us in, or as soon as he got into the net Garth would get cold feet and say, “I’m going home my feet are fweezing.”

“Yer not going home yet ya big fruit — stay and play.”

“I don’t play with name callers.”

“Who called ya a name ya jessless big fruit.”

If only we could have seen each other then — I think we looked like we were on the end of the world on that small road, pressed between dark-shingled, wooden houses, with their dim lights. To many it would seem so lonely — kids from nowhere in rubber boots with runny noses, sliding along chasing a puck from snowbank to snowbank in the dark.

Even back then “Hockey Night in Canada” came from places that seemed another world, or on another planet — places like Chicago and Detroit and New York — places that most of these children I am writing about never ever got a chance to ever see.

I don’t remember ever
not
thinking something was a little wrong with us or with this: that is, the concept of six teams — four in the United States.

It did not matter to me, at least not much, that two of these American teams were lousy all through my childhood — that is, Boston and New York — which essentially left four teams,
two Canadian and two American. (Of course, I constantly reminded people that they were all Canadian players.)

Nor did any of this matter to my cousin from Boston who, in January 1961, came on a hockey tournament to Canada, and did
not know
that there was an NHL or a team called the Boston Bruins.

That was the first indication to me, that “Hockey Night in Canada,” was a night that wasn’t shown to him. He had no idea that they showed hockey on television. There was something stinkingly wrong with this. But the fact that he did not know there was an NHL threw me for a loop.

I stared at him in incredulity. How could you lace up your skates with nowhere to go? At least I was going to the NHL — with a few turns of good luck. (One of the ideas was that they wouldn’t see my left foot which was turned inward, and my left hand which was crippled.)

“Why are there four in the United States?” I asked Mr. Foley about that same time.

“Cause they got the money.”

I don’t remember why this struck me as not the absolute answer. My idea — and since my cousin did not know about the Boston Bruins or about the NHL, it seemed in a way to verify it for me — was that the LOVE of the game had to be everything.

In a way this has been the main pin of my hockey ideas ever since.

Also, there was something more subtle in my conversation
with my American cousin that winter day. It was the idea of two cultures sparring and emerging from this sparring with definitive national attitudes about themselves.

I
had not
told my American cousin that there
was
an NHL because I did not want to inflict
my
superior knowledge upon a visitor. I was too polite. I was a Canadian. It’s this national trait that has helped sideline our hockey history I’m sure.

Because ten minutes later he came at me with this: “What is the greatest basketball team?” And I said truthfully, that I didn’t know.