Stan Fischler: Do you read books by ex-hockey players?
Mike Palmateer: I’ve been there; I’ve played the game.
I don’t care what John and Joe did ten years ago.
I often wonder how much is real and how much is bullshit they’re writing to make the story sound good. I stay away from that.
GOALIES (1995)
THIS IS A book about what I found out when I read all the hockey books.
I started this project in 1970 or so, though in those early years it’s fair to say that I was mainly looking at the pictures, some of which I may or may not have been colouring. The first book was likely Chip Young’s The Wild Canadians, in which rats, otters, bears, and bobcats skate and score in the winter woods of Tennessee. Another early and beloved title, complete with murky photographs, was The Hockey Encyclopedia by Gary Ronberg. That’s where I learned about Aurèle Joliat, Busher Jackson, and Gump Worsley, names that were as everyday to me as those of the kids in my class at school. I read Scott Young’s stories of boy hockey players, hockey biographies, coaching manuals, the backs of hockey cards, all the good and all the bad, and always the runic rhymes of newspaper scores: Who got the second assist on Pierre Larouche’s goal? How many shots did Ken Dryden stop in the second period? At hockey-reading, I was a natural.
Five or six years ago, I became more systematic in my reading, seeking answers to specific questions, many of them to do with why I remain so consumed and excited by this game that also so regularly puzzles and exasperates me. Why were hockey players still punching each other in the head, and why hadn’t I stopped watching in protest? The longer I watch hockey, the less plausible it seems. This game that takes the place of reason in a man’s brain — as the poet Al Purdy wrote — it used to make more sense, didn’t it? I expected to ache more, playing the game on Friday mornings as I continue to do, and I’ve known for years that my backhand, never mighty, is a lost cause. But I never really doubted my faith in hockey until recently.
Disclaimer: I didn’t read all the hockey books, because there are just too many, and more appear every year. Hundreds, though, did figure into this project, and they piled up at home in Toronto to such an extent that the moon began to shift them like tides. They flooded a weekend place, too, two hours to the north, not far from the pond where I’d eventually conjure up a rink. I carried Dave Bidini’s Tropic of Hockey to Dingle in Ireland, and through Asturias in Spain the puckish novel Amazons, which Don DeLillo pretends he didn’t write. (He did.)
I read Hockey Town and Hockey Towns, Hockey in My Blood and All Roads Lead to Hockey. I read the book where eight-year-old Stanislas Gvoth got on a train in Prague and ended up in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he turned into Stan Mikita. I read about Camille Henry’s skate when it cut up through Bobby Baun’s throat and missed his jugular but reached the underside of his tongue. The doctor who stitched him up wore a handgun in a belt-holster, and then Baun went out and played the third period of the game, and afterwards he nearly died from hemorrhaging and not being able to breathe, and then a week later he played for the Leafs in Detroit.
Some books I read on a sailboat, many others on trains. A few of those I left behind on purpose, to continue the journey without me.
Discovering that a man called Dick Smith may have been (probably) one of the first to write down formal hockey rules in 1878, I may have allowed my unearned pride to justify a tendency to be easily and righteously miffed when I see the game straying into havoc.
I read that the puck is a metaphoric penis, and while the resemblance of the back of the net to a woman’s buttocks may be unintentional, are you seriously trying to tell me that out in front, with the crease, it isn’t plainly labial in form? This I learned from Scoring: The Art of Hockey, the remarkable 1979 collaboration between the novelist Hugh Hood and the artist Seymour Segal. Hood, who also wrote a memorable biography of Jean Béliveau, said elsewhere that making love is better than skating, but skating is a close second.
Although I didn’t make it through all the hockey Harlequins available, I can recite titles (Her Man Advantage, The Penalty Box) and do recall the exact moment that Marissa knew that she loved Kyle: right after she watched a big Pittsburgh defenceman plant a fist in his nose. One of the scientific studies I pondered used hockey to consider the relationship between face shape and aggression. The truth about How Hockey Saved the World is that I skipped right to the final page to see if everything turned out okay. Parts of From Rattlesnake Hunt to Hockey I read, other parts I left alone.
From the chapter titles of hockey books, I assembled a poem:
Born to Play Hockey
The Five Truths of Shovelling
Techniques of Mayhem
Woodchopping Galore
Hospitals and Hockey Can Mix
Greatest Thing Since Penicillin
Facing Four Hundred Saracens on His Own
When Hull Shoots, I Must Not Blink
A Piece of Rubber Unites an Entire People
with this coda just from Soviet-era books:
Hockey and Astronauts
Think Up and Try
Gretzky Is Really Powerful!
I scoured Alice Munro, because although she doesn’t write hockey novels per se, the glances she gives the game in her stories make the point, again, that her perception is rarely anything but lucent. In the story “Train,” for instance, she writes about the people in a small Munro-country town:
They did not have much to do with each other, unless it was for games run off in the ballpark or the hockey arena, where all was a fervent made-up sort of hostility.
On my list of hockey odours was
I copied out appalling sentences:
Maybe you’ve noticed, as I did, the unsettlingly jocular and even jolly tone with which a lot of the worst of hockey horror is depicted. I thought a lot about the language we use — or don’t use — to talk about the game. I collected words that should have long since gone into the hockey dictionary, including:
I grew fond of the frank talk some older hockey books offer about conditioning (shun liquor, says Rocket Richard, but a beer after the game is okay), smoking (not harmful if you stick to cigarettes, according to Sid Abel), and pies and pickles (turn your back on both, Black Jack Stewart mandates).
I confess I didn’t expect so many books by fathers of hockey players, all the Murray Drydens and Réjean Lafleurs, Walter Gretzkys, Viacheslav Kovalevs, and Michel Roys who felt the need to explain their sons.
Sometimes it seemed like the books were talking among themselves: not long after I finished If They Played Hockey in Heaven, I came across They Don’t Play Hockey in Heaven. And is it just me, or is Bobby Orr: My Game spoiling for a fight with Bobby Hull’s Hockey Is My Game?
I read the libretto of what may be the sole hockey opera, which Jaroslav Dušek wrote with composer Martin Smolka. As you may recall, the Czechs won the gold medal at the 1998 Olympics in Japan, beating Canada and Russia in succession. The operatic version is called Nagano. It premiered in 2004 in Prague, where it’s possible that in song, in the original Czech, it didn’t sound as stilted as it reads on the English page. For example, when Ice Rink, performed by a women’s chorus, serenades tenor-Jaromir Jagr:
ICE RINK: You’re mine, I’m yours, mine, yours.
JAGR: You can be treacherous, treacherous, oh plain of ice!
I will reveal that my nominee for best hockey image from a hockey poem is in John B. Lee’s “Lucky Life”:
they quarrel with a skatelace
that sets porridged in an eyelet
too snug for moving either way.
I read Borje Salming’s memoir in English, though I continue to favour the Swedish title, Blod, svett och hockey. Old Russian books I wish I had the Cyrillic to navigate in their original editions would have to include The Hot Ice, I Am the Same as Each, The Real Men of Hockey, and Get Ready to Offence, Get Ready to Defence.
If there was a work of hockey art I kept going back to, it was Hockey Fights/Fruit Bowls by Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg because really, what better, more beautiful sense is there to be made of hockey fighters than to inundate them with fresh grapefruits and oranges and lemons?
Historian Bill Fitsell lent me one of the three remaining original copies of the first proper hockey book, Hockey: Canada’s Royal Winter Game, and I read it gently (it’s very frail), with the particular pleasure of knowing that its author, Arthur Farrell, was elevated to hockey’s Hall of Fame mainly on the strength of this literary achievement. That’s not to say he wasn’t a magician of pucks when he played for the Montreal Shamrocks and won three Stanley Cups, it’s just that the record suggests his case wouldn’t have been as strong without his landmark 1899 book to support it.
Farrell was the first one to cite hockey’s rules in a book, along with lots of solid practical guidance, such as if you intend to play, get your heart checked. I thought he was talking about taking stock of your own mettle, a gut check, but no, he literally means you should go for an actual medical examination. As for violence, Farrell didn’t think at that early date that it was a concern. The fans, he wrote, would keep the game clean — anything else they’d be sure to jeer out of existence.
I WATCHED MANY hockey movies that weren’t very good. Compared to hockey’s books, not to mention hockey itself, the movies have more barrel-jumping, bribery, and helicopters crashing down at centre ice. The movies aren’t all terrible all of the time, but movie-hockey is consistently, unrelievedly awful. That started me on a search for a hockey movie where the hockey was authentic-looking, without a well-lit Rob Lowe bursting past congealed defencemen to score on a goalie who waves his glove at the puck as if to say, So long. Idol of the Crowds, from 1937, tries to smudge it the way hockey movies sometimes do, by laying in actual NHL footage, which is great to see, even if it is enlivened by a very unNHL-like but nonetheless jaunty flight of jazzy clarinet. The problem is the movie’s hero, Johnny Hanson, portrayed as the best player ever in New York Crusher history. He’s played by John Wayne who, when he steps onto the ice, can barely stand up. Other than an ankle-turning Wayne, Idol of the Crowds is notable for its examination of the question of whether a responsible adult should in good conscience pursue a hockey career when he could be running a chicken farm north of the city. “I’d feel kind of foolish going clear down there just to play hockey,” Wayne’s character drawls at one point. “Seems like a man ought to have a regular job. I want to build something and see it grow.”
I read the novel Slap Shot, I confess, without (somehow) ever getting around to watching the movie. Many hockey movies I could only read about, the older ones especially, because they’re almost impossible to find. Many of these are from the 1930s, when Hollywood was crazy for hockey and its awfully interesting gambling problem. No, I didn’t know about that either, but it seems hockey games rigged by dastardly bad guys were a big draw for a while. I didn’t watch Hell’s Kitchen, Times Square Lady, King of Hockey, Gay Blades, or Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable. The bankrobber John Dillinger went to see that one in 1934. When he strolled out of the cinema after the movie, a policeman shot him dead. The Game That Kills I also didn’t find, though I’m hoping someone gets around to resurrecting that one.
I’m sorry that none of us will ever see The Great Canadian, with Gable and Mae West. Even before you know the plot, it sounds like a movie that would be brimming with insights into national character and how the game we claim as our own is played. The first time it showed up in the industry papers, it was all about wheat farming on the wide-open prairies. By 1937, though, mgm had switched natural resources and wheat was replaced by hockey in a script by Anita Loos. The studio had Phil Watson from the New York Rangers lined up to grow his moustache and double for Gable on the ice, but then West backed out and Gable needed a break and the movie was never made. “I can’t see myself horsing around with hockey players in a business way,” West said. “It would make me feel unappealing.”
I READ CRUNCH and Grapes and also Shootin’ and Smilin’. There was Blood on the Ice, Fire on Ice, Power on Ice, Cowboy on Ice, Heaven on Ice, Level Ice, and Steel on Ice. I confess to browsing Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Power manifesto Soul on Ice, just in case.
I was unprepared to discover how much baking there is in hockey books. And not just in the NHL cookbooks, of which there are piles. May I recommend Favorite Recipes of the St. Louis Blues? That’s the one with Brendan Shanahan’s Surprise Spread. Goalie Gump Worsley boldly includes his straightforward recipe for Pineapple Squares in his autobiography. Separated eggs, baking powder, shredded coconut, it’s all there. “Bake at 350° about 30 minutes,” he concludes. “Cool and cut into squares.”
I read about teams called Imperoyals and Sudbury Frood Miners and Atlantic City Boardwalk Bullies. There were Buckaroos, Sabercats, Jackalopes, Salmonbellies, and Silverbacks. I came across Saskatoon Hoo-Hoos and Sheiks, and Winnipeg Vimys and Sommes. Zephyrs skate in the pages of hockey history with Pests and Porkies, Estacades and Saugueneens. The Toronto Research Colonels may be my favourite team name, unless it’s the Toronto Dentals. I don’t think the Whitehorse Men of the Apocalypse is an actual team; I believe somebody made that one up. I know that if I had a team of my own in north-central Maine I’d call it the Bangor Bebanged.
Like everybody, I had my favourite players when I was younger, many of whom played centre for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s, and I read about them eagerly. That leads me to a further disclaimer: there’s more looking back here than ahead, lots of historical hockey, not so much of the present day.
The names of baseball players, Don DeLillo has said, make a poetry all their own. Hockey’s stanzas include Fido Purpur and Sprague Cleghorn, Flat Walsh and Mud Bruneteau, Radek Bonk and Per Djoos, Steve Smith and Zarley Zalapski, names I couldn’t have made up if I’d tried. Hockey fiction’s Hurry Bertons and Felix Batterinskis, Rupe McMasters and Bucky Crydermans can’t really match them.
Hockey, of course, has many instructional volumes offering five-point plans for prospective players, the second of which is sometimes Take man first, puck second and also Keep yourself in condition or Maintain your concentration or No touch football or skiing in the pre-season in case of ankle injuries. Another golden rule, courtesy of Johnny Bucyk: Don’t get disgusted with your performance.
With Blue Line Murder I got as far as page 15, which is where Cowboy Brandt winds up to take a shot in the warm-up and ptchoo! a sniper in the stands puts a bullet through his head. Hockey players often get murdered in the middle of big games in the hockey mysteries. Either they take a cold tablet that turns out to be cyanide (Billy Siragusa in Emma Lathen’s Murder Without Icing) or like poor Gaston Lemaire in Crimson Ice, they’re both stabbed and poisoned while sitting in the penalty box. When the ante’s been upped that high, is it any wonder that a murder that takes place on the way out of the rink — I’m thinking here of G.B. Joyce’s The Code — feels like a letdown?
HOCKEY IS FAMOUS for not having a literature. Lots of people who can’t name a single hockey novel can chat about this deficiency, often invoking comparisons to the towering achievements of baseball’s writers. I’m no ball fan, which is maybe why this kind of talk has always annoyed me, but it’s the fear that it might be true that nags me more. Tetchy dread can’t be the best fuel for a project like this, but I confess that at least some of my readerly determination came from the need to prove definitively that hockey’s prose was just shy, a fugitive who only needed chasing.
In light of the hard times that hockey has been in recently, a search for its literary soul may not seem like the most pressing priority facing the game. I don’t know if it’s the worst time in the sport’s hundred-and-thirtyish years of formal history, but let’s see how it looks on the page: There has been no worse time for hockey ever, than now.
It did go through a pretty terrible time in the 1970s, you may remember: right after Paul Henderson scored his famous goal in Moscow to win the 1972 Summit Series, and then on through the decade. It was as though, despite the glorious victory in the Soviet Union, hockey caught a bad cold that just kept getting worse. If you were willing to put a metaphorical slant on things, maybe this was a punishment for the way we’d won, a lesson to be learned. And actually, some of the Canadian players did come home with an ailment that dogged them for years afterwards. By all accounts, it was as unpleasant an affliction in the flesh as it was an elegantly useful analogy in print. Think of Montezuma’s Revenge, the sportswriter Jim Proudfoot wrote, or better yet, the Sovietsky Parasite. The blame was on Moscow’s sanitation, and the medical explanation was — well, Proudfoot didn’t travel too far into the technicalities, preferring the lay terms varmints, microscopic passengers, wee brutes. It was 1974 before doctors figured it out and put those who were suffering on pills and a strict diet and told them to hold up on the alcohol for a bit. Henderson’s was the worst case, and Pete Mahovlich was pretty bad, as were some of the players’ wives. It was part of the reason, Henderson said, that he went into a slump after the series: the virus made him mediocre.
But here’s the thing with the 1970s: hockey got through its bad bout. With the trouble hockey is in now, I wonder whether it has finally strayed beyond hope, too far for anyone to rescue. Is hockey worth it?
This is a serious question. We know what hockey means to us. The unique expression of our authentic selves, says Andrew Coyne, realer than queen or flag. “An outstanding agency of Canadianization,” a Montreal editorialist wrote in 1943 when NHL president Frank Calder died. Poet Richard Harrison says it’s our id. The truest Canadian currency according to — forgotten who. Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane: it’s the dance of life. Peter Gzowski: hockey is us.
Today, if you had to locate them in the body, hockey’s troubles wouldn’t be intestinal. You’d have to look to the head, perhaps between the ears of Boston Bruins centreman Marc Savard, who early in 2011, having suffered his second concussion in a year, was reported to be experiencing symptoms that exactly matched hockey’s own, including “headaches, irritability, and memory lapses.” Within a few months, at the age of thirty-four, Savard was out of the game for good.
It can seem some days as though hockey is an exercise designed expressly to daze and injure as many of its players as possible without quite killing them, though that also happens. Recently, much more of the talk around hockey has focused on the tolls of speed and contact, and on brain lesions resulting from men punching one another too much in the head. None of which is new, in fact: hockey long ago decleared war on the human head. The evidence has been piling up for years. When you sift through the history, it’s all there: having figured out that the biggest threat to its ongoing survival is rational thought, hockey has systematically laid siege to the enemy’s redoubt — the brain.
Several times, reading the many, many hockey books, I came to a standstill. My notes from these halted times ask why we revere a game that bleeds and breaks us and our children, interferes with their education, stokes everybody’s anger, sneers at Swedes, feeds our jingoism, distracts our Saturday nights all the way through to June, wrecks downtown Montreal in 1955 and again in 1986, makes a mess of Vancouver circa 2011, encourages Don Cherry, and expends so much of our energy on downplaying, not worrying too much about, making light of, and/or apologizing for the worst of its excesses and outrages.
Then I’d get reading again, and my enthusiasm for roaming hockey’s library would return. The game’s geography would work its power on me, and I’d begin to hope that it might just be possible to surprise some sense out of it, decode some of its ciphers.
It’s not just any story we want from hockey, of course; we want it to tell us our story, the one about what it means to be Canadian, and how we fit into the world we live in. I’ve never really been able to decide whether hockey knows any better than the rest of us, but I can declare how much I’ve enjoyed the journey, spreading out the map without worrying whether I’m going to be able to fold it up properly again.