Hockey Dreams (4 page)

“The Harlem Globetrotters,” he laughed. “Don’t you guys know anything up here? Hockey is not as great a sport as baseball — it doesn’t have the statistics,” my cousin said sniffing. “Baseball is what everyone watches on television down home. Mickey Mantle, he earns more money than all the hockey players put together probably.”

I’d heard of Mickey Mantle. I did not know what a statistic was.

And then he said, “Hockey will never be on TV.”

I was in Toronto years later — about the same time I first saw Doug Gilmour live — having dinner with good friends of mine, an American and a Canadian. When they asked if I watched sports I told them that I loved to watch hockey.

My American friend said that she could not follow hockey because she never knew where the puck was. I didn’t mind her saying this, for she had never watched a game in her life.

“No one does,” the Canadian quipped. “It’s poor TV
because no one can follow what’s going on. That’s why Canadians now love baseball.”

Of course, that is about as untrue a statement as ever was made about
our
game. Anyone who knows hockey can tell instinctively what is happening on the ice — even away from the camera. You can tell an offside, or a two-line pass in the remotest blink of an eye — just as you can tell a real penalty from a make believe one. Even when Stafford Foley was almost blind, he could tell this.

But talking to my cousin in 1961, my eyes were being opened to the limits of our game once away from us, to the position of the game as related to spheres other than our own. My eyes were being opened not by light so much as by shiners.

I did not realize at the time that being Canadian was part of the reason why
our game
didn’t exist on American networks. It seemed strange to me even then that so few people recognized this oddity or spoke about it as a major problem in Canadian identity.

However I was a Maritimer — and though I thought of hockey as our nation’s great sport from the time I was ten — we were as ignored by Canada in the Maritimes, as we ever were by the United States. And it had been a long time since Halifax travelled west to Montreal to challenge for the Stanley Cup in the late 1890s.

Except for one show I can think of, “Don Messer’s Jubilee,” there was nothing on television in 1961 that had anything
remotely to do with us, except hockey on Saturday nights. (Not that Don and the boys did either — except that my grandmother swore she saw her stolen fiddle being played by Don Messer in the early sixties. “There’s my damn FIDDLE. It’s Don — he stole my fiddle,” she screamed one night. Also a fanatical wrestling fan, my grandmother loved sports in general and hockey in particular. When her husband, my step-grandfather, remarried after her death, he married a woman who loved baseball.)

But to be a Maritimer was, in hockey as well as in accounts receivable, to feel somehow outside the marketplace. Just as Canada must feel now. From Hamilton to Quebec, Canadians are feeling now what we felt in New Brunswick all along.

In the Maritimes all our chances with hockey seemed elliptical and remote. Three-quarters of the people I knew who had even a slight chance of making the NHL, never got that chance. Today the personification of this is, I think, Andrew McKim skating his guts out against the Russians in the World Championships in Sweden. I’m glad we have him there — but I know where he would wish to be.

In the Maritimes there is a province called New Brunswick where I and McKim come from. When I was young it was hardly ever recognized anywhere else, even by other Maritimers.

As a matter of fact, when I once explained to a person from Nova Scotia that my father owned a business, he burst out laughing. How in the world could anyone
own
a business in New Brunswick?

It left us in a rather odd place in the Canadian experience. For instance, on CBC celebrations of Canada Day in 1967, the last year the Leafs won the Cup, we were the only province not mentioned. Honest to God, we waited all night to be mentioned. “For God’s sake boys — mention that we exist — Ma did her hair.”

What does this have to do with hockey? In a way, for my nation, everything. For how my nation views itself, and how it is viewed, is how
our
sport is viewed. Those of us who ignore how our nation is viewed are the ones who ignore how our sport is viewed. Those who ignore how
our
sport is viewed trivialize what is tragic about our nation.

A recent American documentary about the war in Holland in 1944 forgot that it was the Canadian First Army that the German Fifteenth surrendered to. When
Life
magazine did their 40th anniversary of World War II they forgot to mention that Canada even played a part.

Canadians on the CBC were upset. I understand the feeling.

As Canada is sometimes neglected by the States so the Maritimes are neglected by Canada, and New Brunswick is neglected by the Maritimes — and guess what is neglected by New Brunswick? The strange river, the Miramichi.

Well, that is where my brothers and friends played hockey and lost their teeth, and boys for generations went off to play for the Hardy or Allen or Alexander Cup. With nicknames like the Spitfire, Trapper, and the Mouse.

The Miramichi had some good hockey players. It even had a few great hockey players. My brother was eventually drafted by the Oakland Seals. (I was proud at the time, even though I felt it was kind of cheating to be drafted by an expansion team.)

I knew people from my generation who had tryouts for Montreal and Toronto — who “went up” as they said. I knew a few who actually made it; Greg Malone being one. I knew a lot more who didn’t.

There is a story of a coach from the Gaspé telephoning a coach from the Miramichi and telling him that he had “just the player you need.”

“He’s great,” the coach from the Gaspé said. “He’d have made it to the NHL by now, if it wasn’t for his drinking problem.”

“Hell,” the coach from the Miramichi said, “I have twenty players who would have made it to the NHL if it wasn’t for their drinking problem.”

Stafford Foley used to sleepwalk. More than once my father, coming home from the theatre, would see him sitting on a stump down at the end of our street where we played road hockey, at eleven at night with his hockey stick. He would be staring out at the river sound asleep.

This was when he was playing in the Peewee League on the Snapdragons with me. We were on the third line, on defence, and he was better then I was. His sweater
came down to the bumps his kneepads made. He was number 8.

Since we couldn’t skate we were called “two stay-at-home defencemen” and I realized that my coach — who would someday own a bar where Stafford and I would ruin what little health we had — actually wanted us to stay at home.

That is: go home and stay there.

“Come on now — you’re guys that stay at home — stay at home — really you don’t have to do anything.”

Even at that age Stafford was beginning to have trouble with his eyes. They watered and he continued to wipe them with a handkerchief he had gotten from his grandmother.

When kids were coming down the ice on a breakaway, Stafford would haul out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes, stuff his handkerchief in his hockey pants and rush bravely towards them.

He would forget to take his insulin, or get upset with his brother and refuse to take it — because his twin brother, Darren, didn’t have to.

“Don’t touch him he’ll go into a COMA,” was a line shouted in unison by his older sisters, as they stood about the edges of the rink, dressed in their convent uniforms, all wearing button-up blouses and huge crosses.

Once Stafford began skating about the blueline like a wounded pigeon, quite oblivious to everyone else. And then he just fell flat on his face, and began to crawl towards the bench. As the years went by this became more noticeable.
That is, his drifting away from the real world, into the world of lack-of-insulin-induced dreams.

And I am positive Stafford once played road hockey with us sound asleep.

One February night, a year before the time of this book, the kids had gone home, and Tobias and Michael and I needed another player. And there he was, standing on the snowbank with his hockey stick, in his overcoat and slippers, watching us, as huge flakes of snow fell under the spots the streetlights made.

“There’s Staff — he’ll play,” I said.

And out he came without a word.

After about fifteen minutes of going up and down the side of the road, chasing the ball over the rivulets of ice, shooting it better than I ever saw, he was rapped over the knuckles by Tobias.

He looked down at his hands. There was a strange pause. He looked at us as if we were alien to him. He looked at his hands again. “Jeepers,” he said. “Why did you do that?”

He looked at his muddy bedroom slippers, and turning, he walked silently towards his house.

Hands and feet. Those are the two extremities that always seemed to get it. Every one of us almost always had our fingers falling off.

I came to Stafford’s house one day. His snowy mittens were on the step, still frozen to his stick, like the mittens of the invisible man, and his small boots were sticking out the door as he crawled on his hands and knees towards the kitchen.

“My hands —” he whispered. “My hands — I can’t move MY HANDS.”

“Get to the water,” his mother was saying. “Come in and close the door, darling, and get to the BUCKET OF WATER.”

“MY FEET I can no longer feel — MY FEET.”

Hockey is played in the cold, and a generation of movies from Hollywood that have influenced our outlook about ourselves has shown us that cold weather is something
abnormal
.

However we are the coldest country on earth. And everyone except the children want to deny it. Thousands of us froze our hands, our feet and our ears every day just walking to school. And where we went after school was to a cold rink to put on frozen skates to play hockey on ice.

So our hockey is evidence, to outsiders, of our coldness, and with our coldness, our abnormal lack of sophistication, etiquette and probably humour. As I say, a thousand movies have been made to reinforce the stereotypes we use against ourselves.

Hockey becomes a kind of verification for outsiders and for ourselves, of how Canadians hate to be labelled in the first place. “Ottawa: colder than Moscow and without the night life,” the joke goes.

Contempt for ourselves is the axiom upon which so many of our country’s asses sit. Except the children. Except the children like Stafford Foley.

The children frolic in the cold like little white bears. Know what the game means. There is a time in every child’s life
when he or she wants us to regain the game, to be recognized by everyone as the greatest hockey nation in the world.

But somehow as we grow older we’re cynical, allowed to be talked out of it. Certainly we don’t have the media — certainly not the film or magazine people — to let the world really know who the players in the NHL are.

In one article by United Press International published on April 28, 1995, both the Canadian and American teams going to the world hockey tournament were discussed. The Canadians were mentioned as a team awaiting reinforcements from the AHL. The Americans were said to be a team who this year were handcuffed because they didn’t have the help of “their NHL Players.”

Canadian children, sooner or later, learn to live with this prevarication. And this kind of misrepresentation has gotten broader, deeper-seated and more complex. It is not recognized as a lie. Or if it is, it is a lie recognized as madness to contest. A lie that relies on omission of pertinent information.

Of course, I am talking about the exercising of social control over our sport in the States, to cater to people other than ourselves. To make sure we as a nation don’t speak too loud.

Numb fools that we were so long ago in the drizzle of a Thursday afternoon, with the pavement bearing and the rivulets of water washing down Buckley Avenue. Young numb fools we were, who knew all the players on all the teams, and knew them all to be Canadian — just as we knew George
Armstrong to be Indian — thought the expansion was coming East. But not that far east — not to London, England. Somewhere around Halifax, where the “baby Habs” were — maybe Moncton, the Hub city.

We knew the expansion was coming because of hints, from our grey television antennae that tilted above our roofs. Hints that there was something going on.

There were new architects of the game who distrusted other leagues, and wanted to consolidate their business interests. To the weak-brained like myself, that meant a franchise in Newcastle.

There were some 50,000 people on the Miramichi — if we took in all its outer reaches — from the last bell buoy near Esquiminac to the headwaters above Stanley. It was perfectly obvious to me that of the 50,000 people, 47,000 of them should be hockey lovers.

Of these 47,000 at least 30,000 would support a franchise, 25,000 could buy tickets. We could easily fill a rink with 18,000 every game — especially when we made the playoffs and were taking on Montreal. So it was settled.