[ Second ]

I’m telling you boys / This game is so fuckin simple.

STEPHEN SCRIVER (1981)

THIS IS NOT the book I was planning to write. That book was going to be called Ear to the Ice, and it was meant to focus on what happened in 1972, complete with bold conclusions to the effect that rather than glorify our game and ennoble us as a nation, what the Canada-Soviet experience did was tarnish and taint and shame us, exposing us as blowhards and bullies and — I had a whole indictment scaffolded up. Sticking with the internal medicine/hockey model, I was prepared to conclude that, really, the only way to think about the Summit was (and is) as a virulent national stomach virus from which we’ve never fully recovered. I wanted to understand why, for as long as it’s been our passion, hockey has never really reflected so well on our national reason and probity. For the title, I had in mind the cowboy trick of listening to railway tracks for distant reverberations. If you think about laying your actual ear down on the ice, though, that’s where the title begins to fail, especially if there’s any kind of actual hockey going on nearby. If you don’t get a skate in the head, it’ll be a puck. That scotched Ear to the Ice.

There was a Walter Gretzky book I never wrote, too. When Wayne’s dad was planning an autobiography, I auditioned for the job of ghosting it. The hockey, obviously, was to be a big part of it, but mostly it was a survival story, Walter having suffered a stroke and recovered. This was explained to me, first by the publisher, next by the man from the Heart & Stroke Foundation who met me in a murmurous underlit restaurant in Brantford, near the salad bar, on a gleaming bright spring day. This was the first of my vettings. It was like descending into a cave, that restaurant, and we sat there looking at one another by the reflected light of carrots and whittled radishes. When I’d passed the restaurant test, I moved on to the house that Wayne built. The family home, anyway: a perfectly regular house on a perfectly pleasant small-town street with three black and lustrous Lincoln Continentals parked in the driveway.

Walter wasn’t home, and neither was Phyllis. The next of my vettings was conducted by Wayne’s brother Glen, whose career statistics you won’t find anywhere online. We chatted. It made sense that he was expecting me to come with readymade notions of what kind of book Walter and I would be writing, a prepared vision. It made sense, yes, but no one had told me. I had ideas, but not as many as I would have had if I’d prepared, plus it was hard to concentrate. Glen had to move the Continentals from time to time, there was some kind of a parking situation that only Glen was authorized to resolve, and I’d chat for a minute to Glen’s girlfriend, then back again to the book, until another Gretzky walked in. I met sister Kim as she passed through, and brother Keith, too. Gretzkys kept appearing from doorways, down staircases, it was like a play we were in, a dress rehearsal of Beckett’s lesser-known Waiting for Brent. (Spoiler alert: he never shows.) And after a while of not really having very good answers for Glen, more and more my mind roamed towards the basement stairs. I could see them from the couch: they were right there. Maybe could we pop down and look at the memorabilia? Walter Gretzky’s basement is second in fame only to his backyard rink, which we did see, or at least the physical space the famous ice had once occupied. It’s dedicated now to a swimming pool. Looking at the pool, not far from the top of the stairs, was as close as I got to seeing Wayne’s trophies in Walter’s basement.

Later, when the publisher called to say they were going with another writer, I think I may have regretted the burst I didn’t make down those stairs more than the book I didn’t get to write with the man I never met. They thought you were maybe too interested in the hockey, is what the publisher told me. Nothing wrong with that, she said, perhaps they just wanted someone who could balance it more with the heart and the stroke.

And the 1972 book? Well, 1972 wasn’t the problem. Yes, it did kind of leave me cold and prone to wincing once I started catching up on what had happened, watching all the games in real time, reading all the books already published on the subject. The truth is, I missed 1972, the original one, so I have none of the foundational memories of those who were there, school cancelled for the afternoon, everybody in the gym watching the TV they wheeled in, Henderson scores for Canada! Nothing. Remember, says my friend Evan, the rumour about Tretiak? What rumour? “The reason he was so good was that the Russians had all his ligaments removed.” I have to shake my head. Evan knows it’s just the kind of the thing I’d love to be remembering. “The great part is,” he says, “we had no idea what ligaments were.”

Abroad was where I was, taken on sabbatical with my parents, both academics. I was six years old, so I had to go along, my brother and sister, too. We lived in an English village, across the bridge, turn right at the pub, down the long pebbly drive. The pub had a name, the Greyhound, and so did the house, as houses abroad sometimes do when you’re six years old: Tanglewood. There was a brick well in the big garden and a wood and a roaming tortoise named Ferdinand. Back near the bridge was the riverbank from The Wind in the Willows, and beyond that, the house where Kenneth Grahame wrote about it, including winter scenes, though no hockey. We watched the river that year, same as Ratty and Mole, but it wouldn’t freeze.

I had no idea what I was missing, being abroad, nobody having taken the trouble to tell me about the hockey history that was about to be made in Canada and the USSR. This may have been part of the plan. What I didn’t know I didn’t worry about. And it’s not as though I didn’t have new interests in England — for instance, tracking down roving tortoises and epic games of kick-the-can at the vicarage. I also took a furious interest in Lord Nelson and what he’d done at the Battle of Trafalgar with just one arm and a single eye and not very much of his life left to live.

In E.M. Forster’s novels, anxious mothers whisk their young daughters out of the country at the slightest hint that they might be in danger of falling in love with the wrong young men. Later, briefly, I wondered if that sort of thing might have happened to me. Maybe my parents had somehow foreseen the way it was going to unfold, all the ugliness of 1972 that no parent could hope to explain, the jingoism and the slashing, chairs thrown onto the ice, throat-cutting gestures. They knew they couldn’t fight with my blood, teeming as it was with hockey. Had they decided to leave the country to prevent their six-year-old from seeing the Soviets toy with our Canadian professionals and — worse still — how the professionals would respond?

I phoned my mother, gave her the conspiracy pitch. She laughed. “No,” she said.

I asked my father, “Were we keeping up with the hockey while we were over there?” He thought about this. “Keeping up how?” I don’t know. Radio Canada International. Taking the train to London to read day-old Globe and Mails at Canada House. “No. Could be. Possibly.”

It’s not as if it would have been easy for him, with his hockey past, captain of the team, Smoothy Smith of yore. He would have had to have been fighting the hockey in his blood in 1972 to exile himself like that.

By the time we left for England, hockey was everything to me. In 1972, other than going to school, hockey was all I was doing. When I wasn’t lining up on the ice for All Saints, I was playing road hockey in Dave Bodrug’s driveway or knee hockey in Peter Wearing’s basement. I studied The Hockey Encyclopedia with a young monk’s devotion. Ian Lamont and I, serious stockpilers of hockey cards, would fill entire weekends with endless bonspiels of leansies, topsies, and farthies. We played pretty much continuously from 1971 through 1975, when I gave all my cards away — a huge mistake, I realized almost at once, triggered by the false impression that nine was the age at which you outgrow both hockey cards and the foresight to hang onto them long enough to sell them on eBay, whenever it might be invented. I hadn’t yet learned any of the aphorisms about the place hockey colonizes in Canadian society, our hearth and our heartbeat, our national conversation, our theatre, our daily bread, the church where we worship, our very faith and creed — I didn’t need to know any of that, because my blood knew.

The sheer broadside brutality of the Royal Navy’s fighting fleet circa 1805 served me well during that year in England, fulfilling my need for obsession, and for that I’m grateful. When we got back home to Canada in the spring, though, it was all hockey again. I don’t have much of a memory of the summer of 1973, but I’m assuming some of it was spent absorbing the free-floating atmospheric national joy left over from when we’d beaten the Soviets. Friends must have told me what happened, if only so I could play my part in the road-hockey reconstructions. Without knowing much about it, I was pleased and proud. We’d won, hadn’t we?

That’s the thing about hockey-blood, it updates automatically, like the operating system on my Mac.

THERE WERE FOUR games in four Canadian cities in September of 1972, you’ll remember, four more in the enemy capital. At home, we lost two, won one, tied another. We lost again in Moscow, then won the final three games. No need to worry about the three European exhibition games. Final score: yay us!

I came to fret about how it had all played out: the shock of that opening loss, the nation’s agitation, distraught Phil Esposito, bad Bobby Clarke, overwrought Paul Henderson. No sooner had I consoled myself by recalling the skill with which Pete Mahovlich scored short-handed in Game 2 than I’d happen on some ugly reminder of how messy the whole enterprise was: Canadian allegations, for instance, from Game 7 that Vladimir Vikulov kicked Yvan Cournoyer (once) and Gary Bergman (five times). I was irked at first when I read about a Polish reporter in Moscow who told his readers that because the Canadians, so much older than their Soviet opponents, were still somehow faster and stronger and more spirited, it probably meant they were on drugs. Later, though, I wondered whether this wasn’t a kind of a compliment: to some, our healthy, free-range hockey looks hopped-up.

I loved the stories about how the devilish Soviets schemed to steal the three hundred steaks and eight thousand beers Team Canada brought to Moscow. (We also imported two hundred litres of Finnish milk.) And I continue to revere the sweaty rawness of Esposito’s Vancouver speech — “To the people across Canada: we tried, we gave it our best” — after the home crowd booed the Canadian loss. The desperate wheedling heartfelt passion of his plea was like the voice of the country giving itself a talking-to.

Icy niceties: Alexander Ragulin (left) discusses the situation with Canada’s voluble Phil Esposito during Moscow’s Game 7, September 26, 1972.

I was thoroughly chuffed to read, without entirely believing, that on the day of the final game, not only did Canada’s federal election freeze in its tracks, but crime and punishment, too, as courts were adjourned and the crime rate dropped to nothing. I lapped up new Summit Series books as fast as they appeared, from Dave Bidini’s tiny radiant A Wild Stab for It (2012) to the no-stat-left-behind immensity of Richard Bendell’s 1972: The Summit Series, published that same year.

I finally watched the games, loading in the DVDs over the course of a weekend up north. My wife, Sarah, checked in on the score now and again, and so did the friends who were staying. Mostly it was just me and my friends’ eight-year-old son glued to the thirty-six-year-old TV feed from Finland. It was all new to him, too, though he knew things I didn’t. “Bobby Orr is playing for the Russians,” he mentioned halfway through the first period of Game 5. Nothing I could say would convince him otherwise. Before I brought in the books to contradict him, he’d identified Orr on the ice and — fine, have it your way, he looks good, doesn’t he? We were both disappointed when Paul Henderson scored, but I told him not to worry, there was still another game to go. “The Russians win,” I said. I later felt terrible about that.

In truth, Orr hadn’t been healthy enough to play. Dave Keon’s absence concerned me too; he should have been on the team, shouldn’t he? Not to mention Bobby Hull and, on the Soviet side, Anatoli Firsov. I wished Anatoli Tarasov was still coaching the Soviets instead of having been dismissed for murky reasons earlier that year.

These contributed to my disaffection, as did the mayhem of the two Swedish games we played in between Vancouver and Moscow. And also:

• The brazen blinkered Canadian arrogance beforehand where everybody confidently predicted that we’d win every game (Alan Eagleson expected an eight-game sweep).
• Clarke’s slash on Kharlamov’s ankle in the sixth game, cruel, calculated, witless, along with all the post-slash justifying and remorselessness and general lack of Canadian outrage.
• Harry Sinden, in his book Hockey Showdown (1972), dissing anybody who doubted, deplored, or second-guessed Team Canada: “I feel sorry for these people. I know many of them, and they all have one thing in common — they’re losers. And they’ll be losers all their lives.”
• Paul Henderson, in his book, reporting how he ran into the Soviet goalie, Tretiak, in a hallway after the final game and told Tretiak to go to hell. That seemed unnecessary.
• The suggestion in Canada Russia ’72, the dramatized mini-series that retold the Summit on CBC in 2006, that our team was 75 per cent boors and jerks. What if that were non-fiction?

And the Canadian team left the ice after the devastating opening game in Montreal without shaking hands. Everybody thought we were soreheads, admitted coach Harry Sinden later, but, hey, who knew you were supposed to shake? Other than Ken Dryden: he shook hands. You learn only when you lose, Dryden said. He couldn’t believe it, but not a single NHL team sent scouts to the games in Toronto and Montreal. “Setbacks can be very useful in sport, since they help analyze correctly your flops and excite the striving for revenge,” said Tarasov. “For some unknown reason, defeats do not worry the Canadian hockey leaders.”

I was left queasy by the idea that in winning, Canada had planted a secret seed in Russian hockey, the noxious weed that grew inside their game and choked it. Bobby Clarke has suggested as much:

It used to be that when two national teams would get out on the ice, you could see the difference in styles immediately. Now everybody plays the same type of hockey. And it’s the North American type. In our time Soviet players never dumped the puck into the zone. They would rather turn around at the blue line and pass backwards to start a play all over again. Now they do it our way more often. I think that after 1972 the Russians learned that it’s more effective to get the puck into the opposite end and play physical hockey there.

After the Montreal game, Ken Dryden questioned whether he would ever be able to cope with Russians. Wandering the city, he ate terrible hamburgers in an awful restaurant. He wondered whether it was all a bad dream. He ran into the Montreal sportswriter Red Fisher, who was as bereft as he was. They both felt as though something had been taken away from them.

They needn’t have worried, of course, because twenty-six days later, Canada was crime-free and triumphant. Bobby Orr said that it proved we were the best hockey players in the world. For the games in Canada, he opined, the only real problem had been conditioning. Asked about Canada’s many Moscow penalties, he said, “Players like Paul Henderson, Gary Bergman, and Bobby Clarke never look for trouble in the NHL. If they’re losing their tempers here there must be some reason for it.”

I CONFESS THAT I didn’t read a single hockey book either on the nine-and-half-hour flight from Toronto to Moscow or during the week I spent in Russia in the summer of 1997, following the hockey players. There were three of them: Viacheslav Fetisov, Vyacheslav Kozlov, and Igor Larionov. They were Detroit Red Wings at this point, and having won the Stanley Cup that spring, they were exercising the champions’ right to take the trophy home to meet the family. As big a deal as it was for the NHL and Moscow, it was a much bigger one for Larionov and Fetisov, legends of Soviet hockey who’d also railed against the strictures of its systems. After a long struggle they’d escaped — soon enough that their giant talents weren’t exhausted when they came to play in North America. Both had written autobiographies, and I was looking forward to sitting down in Moscow to talk to them about the journeys they’d taken and the hockey they’d played.

And one day, maybe, that will happen. In Moscow, only once did I see the hockey players seated; the rest of the time they were on the move, enclosed by crowds of family, friends, NHL officials, owners of the Detroit Red Wings, journalists and photographers, fans, startled tourists who wondered what the fuss was about, and a few of the young army recruits you used to see loitering all over Moscow at that time (often by car windows asking for money when the traffic lights turned red). When I wasn’t grumbling at the hangers-on who were blocking my view of the hockey players, I did my best to get out of the way of those people whose view I was obscuring. The night I did manage to shake Igor Larionov’s hand, we were in a Canadian bar, the Hungry Duck, where the beer was Labatt’s. “Congratulations,” I said, just before he sat down at a table with no place at it for me.

WHATEVER ELSE RUSSIAN blood contains, hockey wasn’t in the mix originally: it had to be introduced. There’s a song they sing sometimes at Russian hockey games — you can find it on YouTube — that includes the verse:

The most fitting game for our Russian guys

Was accidentally born in Canada

The story of how Russians came to hockey is altogether clearer than ours, but it does come with a bit of a tangled-up provenance, some mist, and a Chekhovian touch of men arguing offstage. Here’s how I understand it. Before 1946, Russians mostly played soccer in the summer and bandy — russki hokkei — when winter came. They’d been doing it, in one form or another, since Peter the Great’s time. Canatsky hokkei (ours) wasn’t unknown, especially in the Baltics, but mostly they bandied, chasing a ball, with eleven-man teams skating on a rink the size of a soccer field. Sticks were short and curled and wrapped in cord.

What happened in 1946? Possibly it was a case of Moscow Dynamo, the famous soccer club, touring Britain in 1945 and in their spare time attending a game in which visiting (probably military) Canadians were playing hockey. Like so many others before and later, they were captivated. Clarence Campbell, still a soldier, was in England at this time, prosecuting Nazi war criminals, and that’s what he thought happened.

Ah, the Soviets. They had such a hockey plan, a big one, which was more or less the same as their foreign policy: they wanted to rule the world as soon as possible. Hockey-wise (if not geopolitically), we thought they were adorable, trying so hard with their funny helmets and their aluminum shin pads. At first the notice we paid was none. The next stage was when they started to look pretty good and we thought, Not bad. They got better and better. They started beating the teams we sent over to Europe, which was kind of rude, especially since we’re talking here about the East York Lyndhursts. It wasn’t as if they were beating our best teams. Not that we’d even bother to play them with our best teams. What would be the point?

When the first league started up in December of 1946, some of the players had never seen a puck before. The plan was to run a season lasting two months. Boris Kulagin was one of the draftees. “We did not have big crowds,” the coach of the 1972 Soviet team said, “and we were seen as some kind of fools for playing a completely alien game.” Vsevolod Bobrov was one of the stars of the Moscow Dynamo soccer team when it travelled to London in 1945. When he took up hockey, he was bewildered, helpless. However, he floundered but briefly; soon “he made the puck obey him.”

An American writer named Drew Middleton went to see an early Moscow game in January of 1947: Red Army versus Dynamo. He reported that they might give a New Jersey high school team a good match “on an off-day for the latter.” A player shouted “please!” to a teammate when he wanted a pass. In the intermission, a song called “Let Mother Discover We Are in Love” gusted from the loudspeakers. In his opinion, neither Red Army nor Dynamo would be going anywhere fast until they dispensed with the long woollen underwear they wore in favour of proper hockey togs. “The drawers,” Middleton wrote, “seemed to get in the way.”

At the rink at the Moscow Physical Training Institute, the boards were just six inches high. Local journalists who watched couldn’t get a grasp on the game. Players struggled to lift the puck off the ice. The new stick was a puzzle. The blade was absurd. Bandy goalies go stickless, so to have one thrust on them was irritating. They couldn’t get used to it. They flung it away.

“We learned the game out of a void,” Anatoli Tarasov wrote.

Kulagin tells of an early Canadian offer to send coaches, but the hockey authorities agreed that the best way to learn the game was by themselves, organically, free of foreign additives. Although another version of this is that when the Soviets proposed to Canadian officials an exchange of coaches after the 1954 World Championships, they were snubbed. No one would come to watch Russians play in Canada, they said they were told.

At home, there were those who said that Canadian hockey was folly. Boris Arkadyev, the national soccer coach, for one. Writing in the newspaper Sovsport, he reproved those who, he said, wished to “bury alive” the Russian form of the game, which he recommended as a more practical winter pastime for soccer players.

Tarasov was one of the Russian hockey pioneers, players “of the first call-up” is his phrase. Later, North Americans came to hear about his dominion over the Soviet game, to size him up as the Plato of Russian hockey, and maybe also its Dalai Lama. The first defencemen of Soviet hockey never hit. There was no ramming, Tarasov writes. “They played quite a soft game, almost gentle.” Sometimes they felt awkward, embarrassed, playing rough teams. They stayed calm. There was no retaliation. They were considerate. Patience would win. “Victory, we thought, is good compensation for injustice.”

Thisdidn’t necessarily last.

The first real test came in the third February of Russian (Canadian) hockey in 1948, when LTC Prague arrived in Moscow to play a series of exhibitions. Too soon, some said. Tarasov was one of the organizing coaches. His brother Yuri played, and so did Bobrov. Elbow pads and knee pads were “cotton wads,” and players wore soccer shin pads. “Helmets and cups were non-existent in our country in those days,” Tarasov notes. The only skates they had were long-bladed. But from bandy they brought speed and pinpoint passing. Tarasov says they won that first game — 6–3 — on desire alone. Collectivism and valour perplexed the Czechs.

The first indoor rink in the Soviet Union didn’t open until 1956. No worries. “The players,” said Tarasov, “felt much better on outdoor rinks with a slight wind and frost.” If you read the Russian hockey books in translation, there’s plenty of lusty ideology: Ice hockey is the display of a man’s best qualities: kindness and courage, fidelity to one’s comrades and moral stamina. There’s no mention of violence. A lot of tough talk, yes, but it’s mostly in a theoretical vein, so that when Alfred Kuchevsky says “ice hockey is a fight,” he doesn’t mean a punching-fight so much as “an opportunity to prove that you’re stronger than your opponent. To prove you’re a real man.” When the other fighting does come up, it’s a perplexity — “sometimes the spectators are puzzled: isn’t there too much rudeness in the game?” — or a disgrace to the game. “Respect towards one’s rival does not allow a player to behave dishonestly, to attack, for instance, a player who falls down.”

“Personally, I seek happiness in ice hockey,” confides Alexander Ragulin, Merited Master of Sports.

Eventually, reading the Russian hockey books you can without a translator’s help, you get to the secret. It’s a wonder they give it up so readily.

[E]ven when the boys leave hockey they will take into life with them the most valuable human qualities acquired in the game: a readiness to help your team-mate, friendship.

Hockey helps a young man enter adult life strong and courageous.

There is also a feed-back in this sport, however — most significant success comes to kind-hearted and good people, to those who honestly and faithfully serve the interest of their team, their teammates.

ON THE MORNING of the day I followed the hockey players to Vosk­re­sensk, I walked along the Moscow River down below the Kremlin and tried to take a photograph of the man with the small brown bear on a leash. The man nodded when I gestured with my camera and I was all ready to go until he spoke what may have been his only English words: fifty bucks. I probably would have paid if this were a hockey-playing bear; as it was, I kept going, on to the Metropole Hotel. With a reporter from the Detroit Free Press, I spent my money on hiring a driver instead. In his big mustard-coloured Mercedes with no seatbelts, the three of us headed out of the city, downriver, following Larionov and Kozlov as they carried the Cup to see their hometown, an hour or so to the southeast. (Fetisov is a Muscovite.) On the road, the North Americans in the car discussed everything from anxiety and fear to the possible cultural reasons why we had to drive so fast and pass every last slow-moving beet truck on the highway when oncoming traffic was equally fast-speeding and constant.

In addition to the beets, we outran the minivan carrying the Stanley Cup. We came into Voskresensk through the concrete district, slowing down briefly in the dusty-car quarter. On the far side of town the sky was filled with fuming clouds so thick that smokestacks had formed underneath, dangling like stalactites. A crowd was already gathered at the rink when we got there. As we pulled up, they gave us a cheer that died of disappointment as soon as they realized we had no hockey players with us and no silverware to show off.

Over and beyond Larionov and Kozlov, the list of local hockey talent is long, and lush with surnames like Ragulin, Kamensky, Markov, Zelepukin. You can’t really help but echo the question that’s at the front, if not the centre, of Larionov’s autobiography: Why is Voskresensk the hockey capital of the world? It is remarkably Peterboronov when it comes to size and proximity to a larger city. Rivers help define both cities (Otonabee v. Moscow), as do industries (Quaker Oats and General Electric in Peterborough v. chemical works for Voskresensk — the hockey team is called Khimik, or Chemists). With several dozen other people, I climbed up to the roof of the Sports Palace for a better view. It wasn’t much: trees and drifting dust, rooftops, cloves of church steeples. Larionov refers to the city as out of the way and God forsaken (sic). According to him, the reason he and others found and thrived at hockey here comes down to one man, a famous coach with a passion: Nikolai Epshtein. That’s it; that’s all. Nothing in the water here but heavy metals.

Cheering greeted the Cup in its minivan, along with swarming and reaching and rubbing. If it’s true that you’ll never win the Cup if you touch it without having played for it properly in the NHL, then I watched a whole generation of Russian children and their mothers curse themselves below me. Inside, the rink was modest, smaller than the Memorial Centre at home. I may have been hoping for a big Lenin portrait down at the far end; there was none. It was as dim and as close as the inside of a dryer, and it took a moment, coming in from the rooftop, to see that there was second crowd waiting in here in the stands. On the ice, Minor-leaguers in yellow Khimik uniforms stood beside stooped bemedalled veterans and, over by the penalty boxes, a battalion of drum majorettes.

I don’t know that the speeches touched on the history of Russia going back to the first tsars, but they did go on for a long time. If they included any jokes, no one was laughing. I walked around the ice taking pictures of old soldiers and young goalies, at the risk of offending the majorettes.

Later I read that Larionov’s grandfather spent fourteen years in a labour camp for something unflattering he said about Stalin. His family paid, too. They were banned from Moscow and exiled south to the chemical city.

BECAUSE IT WAS written in my notebook that Valeri Kharlamov was born “near the Sokol subway stop,” I went there to take a look, once we got back to the capital. In 1948, his mother was in an ambulance on her way to Maternity Hospital Number 16 when he was born. For me, it was a fifty-minute round-trip from the hotel, and while there was nothing really to see when I surfaced from underground, just more low sandy-coloured blocks of apartments and many grim uncrossable lanes of traffic, I felt like it was worth the journey.

I’ve read as much as I can about Kharlamov, and if I end up learning Russian it will be to start on his autobiography, Хоккей — моя стихия (1977). A measure of his importance that’s greater than any paltry pilgrimage of mine is the minor planet that’s named after him. Proper Canadian procedure for honouring hockey players is insistently terrestrial: we raise monuments, sometimes we brand rinks or roads. As Wayne Gretzky, you get it all: statues in Los Angeles and Edmonton, a Drive in Edmonton and a Way in Toronto, and in hometown Brantford, a Parkway and a Sports Centre. Kharlamov’s eponymous Ice Palace is in Klin, northwest of the capital. I didn’t get there, and I can’t say where in the cosmos his planet is, or what its atmosphere might be like, though I do know its number: 10675. If I wanted to guess, I’d say that it looks not unlike the geographer’s planet in The Little Prince.

Late as I was in acquiring them, lots of my best 1972 memories are of Kharlamov, who introduced himself that first game in September by scoring a pair of sublime goals. Canadian coach Harry Sinden says that the only emotion the Russians showed that night came when Phil Esposito punched one of them in the face — and the guy grinned. Sinden doesn’t say who it was, but I can’t help casting Kharlamov in the role, smiling with sincere unruly happiness rather than mockery or sarcasm. Kharlamov’s first goal stunned our team with its magnificence, though they didn’t want to let on at the time. “He’s a helluva hockey player,” Sinden was finally able to concede.

Once we discovered him, Canadians liked how tough Kharlamov was. He had sand, he had sinew, he was as resilient as he was imaginative. This Chagall of hockey, wrote Lawrence Martin; the deadly little scorer, Frank Orr called him. “He had more moves than Nureyev,” Ken Dryden said. Harold Ballard wanted to pay CSKA Moscow a million dollars to bring him to Toronto. Kharlamov’s was the wrong generation, though: it was the next one that managed to leave the Soviet Union behind.

If he couldn’t come to play for Western cash or Stanley Cups, we in Canada nonetheless showed our appreciation with our sticks and our hips and our elbows. I’m sure it didn’t feel like it at the time, but in Game 6, when Bobby Clarke axed at Kharlamov’s already injured ankle, he delivered on our behalf the highest hockey honour we could bestow: a Sher-Wood Order of Merit to go with his Soviet Medal of Labour Valour. In film and fable, Clarke was under orders, though he’s denied it. Either way, it wasn’t a random hobbling. Clarke’s chop was specific and heartfelt, guaranteeing the honouree a lifetime’s supply of admiring Canadian abuse, renewable any time his team came to North America.

Descriptions of Kharlamov’s goals often have the word dancing in them, and sometimes the phrase he loved to stickhandle. Against the Toronto Marlboros in 1975 he scored a goal that because you weren’t there to see it, you just would not believe, unless you watch a lot of Star Trek. “It was as if he had disintegrated on his way over the blue line,” Jim Proudfoot wrote, “only to reassemble his molecules on Palmateer’s doorstep. Better plays are just not made.”

Vladislav Tretiak said his effort, the way he strove to be the best, should be taught in every hockey school. In personality, said Tretiak, he was like the great cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: “similarly unaffected, bright, and modest. Fame did not influence his character — he remained benevolent, open to all, cheerful, and always smiling.” His favourite food was pancakes. In Montreal in 1972, Dryden noticed that he drank six or seven Cokes for breakfast, same again at lunch and supper. When he came to lunch, the mood of the team changed: everyone laughed.

Later Jim Proudfoot reported that the Canadian players were calling him “the Derek Sanderson of Moscow” for all the “punishment” he dealt out to everybody who approached him. In return, the Canadians accorded him “a thorough going over.” This subtle narrative, that Kharlamov got what he deserved, is picked up in Canada Russia ’72. Movie-Bobby Clarke hates him from the start. “Eat shit, you little prick,” is Clarke’s first — only? — line in the whole epic. Later, we watch assistant coach John Ferguson whispering in Clarke’s ear. Movie-Paul Henderson looks horrified.

In 1974, when the WHA took a team to Moscow for the less-famous follow-up with the Soviets, Canadian defenceman Rick Ley felt he’d suffered insult and indignity from Kharlamov after the sixth game’s final whistle. Canada had lost 5–2 and Kharlamov had “jostled” and grinned at Ley. So Ley didn’t hesitate to punch him to the ice. Actually, the newspaper reports say he flew at him, punching with both hands, continuing the onslaught when Kharlamov was down. If Soviet coach Boris Kulagin didn’t understand the nuances of our Kharlamovian rituals — “Under Soviet law, he should be jailed for fifteen days for attacking and injuring our player,” he said — the man himself knew what was going on. The next day, Ley was waiting for him after practice. Sorry, he said, for punching you in the face, nothing personal, just got frustrated. Kharlamov said he understood. The two men shook hands.

Ed Van Impe was the last Canadian to remind him of our national respect, I think. This was in the game in Philadelphia in January of 1976, just after CSKA played its famous New Year’s Eve game against the Canadiens in Montreal. Van Impe dropped Kharlamov to the ice with a nasty blindside check. When no penalty was called, the Russians refused to play on. They came back, under protest, to lose. Another Flyer defenceman, Moose Dupont, said he thought Kharlamov was playing Hamlet when he went down. “They’re not so great,” he said. “They looked like fools today.” That February in Innsbruck, Kharlamov scored the goal that won the Soviets the Olympic gold medal.

He got married in the spring. Two weeks later, Kharlamov and his wife were in their car on the Leningradskoye, the road of his birth. The car swerved off the road and hit a pole. Kharlamov’s legs were broken just above the ankles, his ribs were fractured, his brain concussed. All that summer he lay in a hospital bed. As soon as he could walk he was at practice. “I was good at first, not so good later,” he said. In 1981, still active with CSKA, he and his wife were involved in another highway collision; this one killed them both. Kharlamov was thirty-three.

The back of a Russian DVD I watched bears this frail found poem of an English translation:

We should be proud,

that in our country of veins

such person

and hockey player

Valeri Kharlamov.

Twice Olympic champion,

the eightfold world champion and

the sevenfold champion of the Europe.

Its game amazed imagination.

In its life was a lot of fatal and mystical.

Valeri was born in the machine

and has died too in the machine,

in the age of 33th years.

It was the unique person. It all loved.

The Stanley Cup and I met up again a few more times before we had to head home to Toronto. There was a press conference at the Ministry of Sport and a big buffet lunch (with caviar and vodka) at the CSKA Hockey School. We attended a hockey game together, too, which is where I bought my white CCCP sweater that I still wear for shinny, number 8, with Larionov’s name across the shoulders.

On the Monday, we took a walk on Red Square, just me and the Cup and dozens of its admirers. I’d been in to see Lenin a few days earlier on my own, and I had no real desire to gaze at his slumbering raw-potato face again or to be hurried along by the guards in the big hats who refused to answer questions asked in English about how often he changed his spotted tie. Still, I would have been glad to go back with Fetisov if he’d invited me to join his wife and kids when they took the Stanley Cup in for their private visit with the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union. In life, the last thing Lenin would have known about it, assuming he was paying attention before he died in January of 1924, was that Frank Nighbor’s Ottawa Senators were looking like a good bet to repeat as champions.

EIGHT YEARS IT took the Russians to catch up on the ice. Back in Canada we’d developed a cruel model for Europeans embracing hockey. First we welcomed the acolytes, arms open, big hug for loving our game. We gave them as much support as possible, sticks and pucks and skates, coaches, mentors, all on the condition that they never rose as a hockey-playing nation to anything above mediocrity. As with the pesky North Koreans and their nuclear program, we insisted on being allowed to send inspectors every once in a while to beat them 22–0 and thereby verify that they weren’t producing weapons-grade hockey that would one day devastate our pride and dignity.

This worked well, year after year. Until the spring of 1954. Hockey Pictorial framed the health crisis that was developing thousands of miles way:

Hockey’s Biggest Headache:

What Will Canada Do

About Moscow?

The East York Lyndhursts had travelled to Stockholm to represent Canada in the World Championships. The Lyndhursts were a Senior B team from Toronto and they did fine right up until the final, when they met Moscow Dynamo. Hockey Pictorial’s Bob Hesketh described the distress that resulted back home:

Startled Canadians choked on their breakfast cereal as they split their morning papers at the sport page and read that Russia had defeated Canada in a game of hockey. Smugness fell inert to the floor as though it had been struck by a poison dart.

The score was 7–2. When the second-place Lyndhursts straggled back home, the men from the morning papers were waiting. First to touch down in the terminal was centreman Eric Unger. Reporters discovered him in the bathroom at the Malton airport, where they squeezed a confession out of him. “I don’t know whether I should say this or not, but they outplayed us by more than five goals in that one game.” The Soviets weren’t good stickhandlers, but they could skate and they sure knew how to pass. On their bench during the game, they had twelve guys in black coats and black fedoras. At the hotel, the players wore track shoes with no laces — Unger didn’t know whether maybe that was part of their training.

The Swedish fans had been pro-Russian, as was the press. When Lyndhursts goalie Don Lockhart disembarked, he revealed that all the Soviet shots he’d faced had no fakery in them, they shot straight on. “If they played our rules, we could knock them flying.” They were so weak, another player said, that even the Czechs could have beaten them, if they hadn’t laid back. Right winger Bill Shill was covered in Russian bruises from Russian sticks. “They have plenty of speed but no actual hockey ability,” he said. Their equipment was pretty poor, and too much — they even wore a belly pad. “I would have liked to have taken them on in a four-of-seven series,” Eric Unger said before the reporters let him go home.

Conn Smythe had a better idea: the Toronto Maple Leafs would go to Moscow that very May to take on all comers as long as one of them was Moscow Dynamo. It wouldn’t cost the Soviet Union a ruble, this generous offer of international hockey goodwill. The chairman of the board of Maple Leaf Gardens fired off a cable to the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa to seek permission. This was “a national blot,” he said, and it needed to be cleansed. Smythe’s assistant, Hap Day, wasn’t so sure. He was going on holidays after the season ended, not to Russia. And the coach, King Clancy, had to work. He could only go, he said, if Russia was within seven miles of Ottawa, where his construction business needed him. Clarence Campbell worried that the team would end up trapped behind the Iron Curtain. In the meantime, a fan could dream, and so could a capitalist. Watch out, Red Square, for Ted Kennedy! Hey, Nevsky Prospekt! Ever met Tim Horton? All our vengeful behemoths, over there, unblotting the nation. Rudy Migay! Fern Flaman!

It just wasn’t to be, though, and almost as soon as it was proposed, the plan had to be stowed. Not that the Leafs weren’t welcome, the Russians politely said, it was just that by the time they got there in May, all the rinks in Moscow would be melted.

SWEDEN HAD THE words for hockey before it got the actual game: I picture them drifting like catkins over snow, waiting for their future to arrive, smäll (whack), klampa (clump), sus (swish), slagsmål (rough house), slagsmål (scuffle), and slagsmål (fisticuffs).

The Swedes didn’t need hockey. They were doing fine, in 1920, with none. I don’t know what it is about their national blood that resisted it, but for years of Swedish history, the people did extremely well with football and skiing, and also bandy. The bandy microbe was coursing strongly in the national bloodstream for a long time before the men with hockey in mind met at a Stockholm restaurant in 1919.

They were three: a sportswriter, the guy in charge of Swedish soccer, and an American former speedskater who worked for MGM. With the first Winter Olympics coming up in less than a year, you’d think maybe they’d elect to take it slowly, go to Belgium to observe, aim for the 1924 Olympics. No. They couldn’t wait. Hockey — ishockey — was too good to resist. They wanted in. I just wonder, if they’d known the pain that lay ahead, the abuse Swedish hockey was in for, would that have squashed their enthusiasm?

There was lots of good stuff to come as well, though — and glory. There would be Sven Tumba and Ulf Sterner, not to mention Peter Forsberg, and what about Olympic gold medals and the Sedin twins and Henrik Zetterberg? Tumba’s hockey books include the not-so-definitive Tumba säger allt (Tumba Says It All) from 1958 and 1995’s Mitt rika liv eller den nakna sanningen (My Rich Life or The Naked Truth), for neither one of which have I, to date, collected enough Swedish to read. Tumba was the first European-trained player to be invited to an NHL training camp, in 1957, but when he didn’t make the team, he decided not to sign a contract with the Minor-league Quebec Aces, which would mean losing his amateur status. He went home.

It was going to be great. Except for, somehow, the Swedes would have years of Canadian derision to navigate, invective, slurs, punching. We called them “Chicken Swedes” and our crowds chanted: “Kill the Swede!” We didn’t like them. It’s better now, but it’s only fairly recently that we decided to forgive the Swedes for whatever it was we felt they did to us in the course of embracing hockey. Was it something they said in 1920? Did they look at the Winnipeg Falcons the wrong way as they succumbed 12–1 in Antwerp?

Is there solace in the fact that we looked down our noses for so long at the Americans, too, even as we played in their cities in front of their paying customers? Playing for Boston in 1926, Duke Keats said that 99 per cent of American fans had not the foggiest idea what was going on in front of them. Steering the Rangers in 1928, Lester Patrick pointed out that American players didn’t start out skating early enough, which was why they couldn’t develop a proper full-leg stride, so you could always tell what they were going to do on the ice.

If anything, the Swedes played as Canadianly as we did right from the start. The Russians might have refused our coaches, insisted on going it alone, but the Swedes were all too willing to follow in our tracks. Before they arrived in Belgium, they only ever practised with bandy sticks and a rubber ball. They wore no shin pads. What they lacked in finesse, they made up for in ardour. “They didn’t spare one another in practice,” reported a Canadian observer, “but smashed and crashed each other into the boards without the slightest hesitation.”

The very first game they played in 1920 — it was actually the first game ever in Olympic hockey history — they swamped the poor Belgians 8–0. The home crowd didn’t like their tactics, which were described as rough and ready: they knocked down any Belgian as soon as he got the puck and the Canadian referee had to ask them not to carry their sticks so high. When the Falcons got home, they said the Swedes would be hard to beat in a year’s time. They’d joined the Czechs in buying all the Americans’ equipment and tried to buy the Canadians’, too.

So that was encouraging. It had to make us proud. Why then, after that, is the rink of our dealings with the Swedes so littered with kiv (squabble) and ruskighet (nastiness)? I’m not talking here about the early rudeness of wallopings — 22–0 in 1924; 11–0 in 1928 — but of the increasingly hostile attitude we took to the Swedes.

They were always whining, said the president of the Ontario Hockey Association in 1961 when the Trail Smoke Eaters toured Sweden and defenceman Darryl Sly was charged by police for assaulting a Swede on the ice. You never heard a peep out of the Czechs or the Russians; maybe the answer was to avoid Sweden altogether. Sly, for his part, said the reason that Swedes got hurt was that they were soft.

“This is not hockey,” Swedish papers said. Next time, maybe, they’d have to bring in Sweden’s national boxing squad.

The Swedes buckled down, studied harder. While the Soviets and Czechs went to war at the 1969 World Championships, the undercard featured Sweden undoing Canada 5–1. Afterwards, the Swedes bemoaned Canada’s rough play. Swedish coach Arne Stromberg complained about the refereeing and catalogued his wounded: “This was not one of our best games. Our team was trying to avoid being slaughtered by these boys.”

Ulf Sterner was speared under the arm “and the blood flowed constantly.” Lars-Erik Sjoberg had “a broken lip.” Sterner returned to knee Canadian goalie Wayne Stephenson, who left the game with a bad charley horse.

It’s hard to say when the counterattack had begun in earnest. As early as 1949, when the Sudbury Wolves travelled to Stockholm for the World Championships, the local press called them “dangerous men.” When it was time to play the home team, thousands of fans tried to prevent the Canadians from entering the rink. (Maybe. The fans may simply have been trying to get in themselves.) The game, a 2–2 tie, was “bitter.” On the second Swedish goal, a spectator reached over the boards and held Joe Tergesen’s stick. Police had to escort the Canadians in and out of their dressing room.

“We in Europe are trying to make ice hockey a little more human,” said a Swedish official. “We do not like the North American tendency to brutalize the game.”

They were crafty, those Swedes. In 1965, they tried to outflank us psychologically, with the announcement from their national hockey federation that money was being set aside to provide financial assistance to Canadian amateur hockey, essential as it was to the well-being of world hockey, if sadly underfunded. Fuck you very much, Canada said.

In 1969, a Canadian ex-pat living in Stockholm explained the attitude of the Swedish press: “Canadian hockey ranks probably somewhere below the slaughter of baby seals.” He kept a scrapbook that he’d filled with local newspaper clippings devoted to Canadian visits over the years. In 1968, the newspaper Aftonbladet sent a lawyer to the rink to watch the Canadian Nationals. He cited nine instances where players would be charged if they’d done what they did off the ice instead of on.

In 1973, the Toronto Maple Leafs signed two stars of Swedish hockey, Inge Hammarstrom and Borje Salming. For their first road game of the season, the Swedes got to visit Philadelphia. Dave Schultz punched Salming whenever he got the chance. “I don’t think they like Swedish boys,” Salming said. “They don’t play hard, they play dirty. But it’s no problem.” Flyers defenceman Ed Van Impe, who took a five-minute penalty for spearing Salming, said it was accidental — he was falling at the time.

Here’s what Anatoli Tarasov had to say about Ulf Sterner:

Can anyone else in world hockey, including the professionals, pass the puck with such skilled faking, with such precisely judged force? His passes are not only mathematically precise, timed just right, but they are very easy to receive; it comes to the blade of a teammate’s stick almost as if carried by hand.

The Rangers signed Sterner in 1964, then sent him down to the Minors, beckoning him back when he started to score. The Washington Post reported: “The rugged Canadians who dominate professional hockey consider it a matter of routine to give any rookie the test — a physical pounding, both legal and illegal.”

It was said he couldn’t get used to the hitting. The Rangers played harder against him in practice, he said, than they did against the opposition in games. Down with the farm team in Omaha, he put the puck in his own net on a delayed penalty, and oh, how the North Americans laughed.

“I like rough hockey,” he would say, and then, waving his stick: “But this I don’t like.”

Eventually he gave up. “I suspect that Ulfie has never recovered from his NHL experience,” said Ken Dryden. And that seems to have been the case. In 1963, he clobbered a Swedish fan with his stick, which he also later used to attack a Finnish opponent. In both cases the talk that he’d end up in jail came to nothing. He was suspended for two months in 1970 for punching a referee. In 1972, it was Sterner who cut Wayne Cashman’s tongue in two with his stick.

THE REVEREND MR. Wood wasn’t attacking the game itself. We should be clear about that. His complaint was precision itself, a finger pointing out a specific transgression, a matter of timing, rather than a general indictment. Just a strong opinion, judging from the report in the Canadian Independent in 1890.

It was a winter’s Sunday in Ottawa, and at the Congregational Church at the corner of Elgin and Albert, Reverend Wood gave a Bible reading on the law of God in regard to the Sabbath and the example of the Saviour and His apostles to its observance. Word had come from the governor general’s residence, Rideau Hall, that people were playing Sunday hockey on the vice-regal grounds. Wood didn’t like to believe it, but how could he ignore the letter in the paper from someone who’d taken part and “gloried in his shame”? It was unbelievable. Set aside God for a moment: What would Queen Victoria think? “He was sure Her Majesty would not allow such a thing in the grounds of Windsor Castle.” On he railed. Wealth, he reminded the congregation, was no excuse: the divine laws apply to rich as to poor.

It’s good for hockey, healthy even, to sit in the pews and listen to the naysayers. Because there are, no doubt, plenty of people who have problems with the game, and not just in terms of Sabbath-breaking. It helps to look the doubters in the eye, and to hear their concerns. Maybe we can help them. The thing, I think, is to distinguish the veins of complaint, to separate the merely indifferent from the mildly irked, the fatally bored from the outright haters.

Roger Angell says that “bad hockey is the worst of all spectator sports.” The fact that Angell, venerable, veteran New Yorker writer and editor, has chosen to illuminate baseball more than hockey in his career is disappointing, but at least he’s a fan. More worrying are those who’ve looked to the ice and felt nothing. Maybe they just haven’t seen enough hockey or haven’t seen the right kind. For all those, like Faulkner, who’ve seen the game and misconstrued, misunderstood, or malspoken it, how many innocents are there who just need a bit of tutoring, as opposed to those we should outright ignore?

Take Pierre de Coubertin, the French founder of the modern Olympics, for instance. This is more of a slight than an outright insult, and a slight slight at that. De Coubertin believed — there’s an entire article he wrote about this in 1909 — that hockey was no more than a means to an end. Hockey had no mental or moral qualities, or if it did, they didn’t matter. The only reason to play hockey was to improve your skating. You know how fencing on horseback makes you a better rider? No, I hadn’t heard that one, either. Same sort of thing, though. Hockey teaches the skater how to start, stop, pirouette, jump. Also boosts your mettle: “The hockey player fears no obstacle and willingly launches himself into the unknown.”

There are those who only see hockey as a scourge to skating. An article in an 1863 edition of a British magazine waxed this way, starting with this ode: “I do believe that skating is the nearest approach to flying of which the human being is as yet capable.” So why ruin it? The hockey here is the massed antique version, fifty or a hundred people chasing a ball over frozen glens and ponds — and wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s unworthy of the true skater’s attention, an illegitimate use of the skate, and worse, the writer says cricket is degraded when it’s played on ice. “I should be truly glad,” he finishes, with a flourish, “to see the police interfere whenever hockey is commenced.”

Put-downs by smart people we thought of as friends stab at the chests of those of us who love the game, if I may speak for the group. Maybe because he himself likes Canadians, the American novelist Richard Ford leaves it to his character Frank Bascombe to call hockey an uninteresting game played by Canadians that’s only redeemed because a sportswriter friend of his can sometimes make it seem more than uninteresting. That stings, especially the fine-tuned implication that Canadians is a sufficient insult all on its own.

It’s not as if we can’t take a joke. We love jokes. We’d just like to be sure that a joke is a joke and not just the kind of slur American writer Roy Blount Jr. perpetrates when he says, “Personally, I love NASCAR about as much as I do hockey. The only thing that would get me to watch a car race on TV would be if they ran over a hockey player every couple of laps.”

Bunny Ahearne always did hate us, so much so that he masterminded the robbery (by confusing rules) of Olympic gold in 1936, plus here was (another) foreigner who never played the game and (also) unless your last name is Larocque, Bunny just isn’t going to fly as a first name. For all those reasons, we can ignore what the vitriolic president of the International Ice Hockey Federation said when we’d beaten the Soviets in 1972. “I don’t think the Canadians will wake up. They’re too small-minded. Now they’ll start to think up alibis.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn isn’t so easily shrugged off. In The Gulag Archipelago, he poses this question: If you are arrested by the KGB, interrogated in the Lubyanka, pressed to incriminate your friend, what do you talk about instead? Not the latest arrests. Not collective farms.

It is fine if you talked about hockey — that, friends, is in all cases the least troublesome! Or about women, or even about science. Then you can repeat what was said. (Science is not too far removed from hockey, but in our time everything to do with science is classified information and they may get you for a violation of the Decree on Revealing State Secrets.)

In all cases the least troublesome. To have it suggested that hockey doesn’t matter, even if it’s a help to someone under KGB interrogation? That hurts.

Once again comes the fear that there just isn’t enough grist in hockey for writers to mill. We worry that the emperor has no clothes. Or is it what the game reveals about us — its votaries, its guardians, its apologists — that we fear? It’s in our sensitive national nature that when someone criticizes the game that’s ours, we suspect — we fear — that somehow our own tacit decree on revealing state secrets has been violated. It doesn’t even have to be criticism. Sometimes just getting a glimpse of how others size us up can be demoralizing. One short paragraph in German can be enough, if it’s like the one in Karl Adolf Scherer’s history of the International Ice Hockey Federation. It’s in the chapter called “Eishockey Mutterland Kanada,” a seductive phrase in its own right, and one that I defy you not to bark at the next person who walks into the room. Towards the end of the chapter, Scherer confides,

Die Kanadier sind die Erfinder des Körpereinsatzes (Bodycheck), der Strafbank und der allgemeinen Zuchschauer-Auffassassung, daß körperlos spielende Athleten “Drückeberger” sind.

O, Kanadier. This is us?

The Canadians were the inventors of the bodycheck, the penalty bench (the “sin bin” or “cooler”) and the widespread view of fans that athletes who shirk bodily contact are “pansies.”

ULF STERNER ENDED up suing hockey. Not hockey, directly. Hockey would not be putting up a defence or paying any damages. In 2008, at the age of sixty-seven, he launched a lawsuit in Sweden against his insurance fund in order to win damages for injuries he’d suffered during his playing career. He said, “I will go all the way to the European Court of Justice, if necessary.” What sounds better is to say that he sued hockey for hurting him so much, which it did; specifically, his spine, ankles, hips, and elbows. At one point he could barely get out of bed in the morning. These were occupational injuries, he told the court when the time came. And the court agreed, awarding him an annuity as compensation.

So hockey hurts. This is easy to say, and it’s even easier to feel. In today’s NHL, you don’t talk about injuries, not out of delicacy but as a matter of operational security. Is it going to aid and abet the New York Rangers if you let on that Carey Price torqued his medial collateral ligament? Maybe not, but safer to call it a Lower Body Injury anyway.

In Finland, hockey used to hurt less. In a study comparing the incidence, type, and mechanisms of hockey injuries in that country from the 1970s through to the 1990s, it was discovered that due to a rise in the rate of “checking and unintentional collision,” contusions and sprains were increasing significantly decade after decade.

Ted Green’s wife noted an odd thing: players seem to be tickled pink when they get injured. “It’s the nature of the beast, I suppose.”

How do you know, in hockey, when you’re hurt? This is a tricky problem. In regular life, the blood and the pain flag it for you, letting you know to stop what you’re doing and summon a doctor. In hockey, not so much: you see blood, you keep going. Feeling fine? That’s when you have to worry. Philadelphia Flyers coach Bill Barber at the start of the 2002 playoffs: “If you’re healthy, if you’re totally bruise-free, maybe you shouldn’t be in the lineup.”

The least of hockey aches would have to be a puck in the skate, bees in the boot. Lace bite sounds benign, but it’s awful, an affliction of dorsal tendons that makes tying your skates extremely painful. Don’t underestimate the hip pointer (höften pekkare in Swedish). Back spasms, I have no doubt, feel worse than they sound.

An unredacted register of injured NHLers from January of 2000 catalogues bruised Dave Reids, fractured Jere Lehtinens, and wonky-kneed Grant Fuhrs. Hamstrung, sore, lacerated, sprained, partially torn, contused, herniated, and compressed, Bob Essensa, Mark Janssens, Derian Hatcher, Antti Aalto, Brian Skrudland, Kirk Maltby, Sean Burke, and Frank Musil waited for their respective hamstrings, backs, calf muscles, ankles, left elbows, chests, thumb ligaments, abdomens, and vertebrae to heal up. Meanwhile, a groin epidemic was sweeping the continent, a contagion linking Dominik Hasek, Jamie Allison, Joe Hulbig, Steve Staios, Jean-Yves Leroux, Peter Popovic, Sean Hill, Grant Marshall, Craig Rivet, and Darren Langdon in a belt-range band of discomfort that they’d probably prefer not to have us dwell on in too much detail.

I DON’T THINK goalposts hated Howie Morenz — there’s no good proof of that. From time to time they hurt him, but you could reasonably argue that in those cases he was as much to blame as they were. Did they go out of their way to attack him? I don’t believe it. What could the goalposts possibly have had against poor old Howie?

Morenz was speedy and didn’t back down and, well, he was Morenz, so other teams paid him a lot of what still gets called attention, the hockey version of which differs from the regular real-life stuff in that it can often be elbow-shaped and/or crafted out of second-growth ash, graphite, or titanium. But whether your name is Morenz or something plainer and hardly adjectived at all, doesn’t matter, the story’s the same: the game is out to get you.

In 1924, his first season as a professional, Morenz developed stiffness against Ottawa, before badly bruising a hip just before he won his first Stanley Cup. In February of 1926, he hurt an ankle in a goalpost crash. A month later, playing Pittsburgh, he had to be carted from the ice after bruising the same ankle in a collision with the Big Train himself, Lionel Conacher.

Morenz went into another post in late 1927. Opening night, Madison Square Garden: fans in fur and finery, the West Point Army Band, New York’s mayor was there to drop the puck between Morenz and the Amerks’ Billy Burch. Early on, Burch banged up a knee in what looked like a serious way while Morenz stayed around long enough to score a pair of goals. The smash-up in the second period does sound like a highway disaster: six players went down in the Canadiens’ net. “Driven against the stout iron support,” Morenz suffered “a severe bruise on his left side and possible kidney injury.”

Hec Kilrea slashed him over the head in Ottawa in 1928, not really but maybe sort of on purpose. Three years later, Boston’s Eddie Shore smote him on the forehead, though it was Shore’s teammate, George Owen, who got the blame and the penalty. With Kilrea, he and Morenz were “exchanging compliments.” Then (from the Ottawa Citizen):

Morenz turned Kilrea around completely with a jab in the mouth, and as the blonde left winger was whirling, his stick caught Morenz over the right temple, inflicting a gash of about two inches.

Four stitches bound the wound; Morenz returned in the third period. Kilrea said he was very sorry; Morenz told reporters Kilrea wasn’t the type to injure a man deliberately. “Bright particular star of the Canadien sextet,” the New York Times was saying a few days later, Morenz was still sporting plasters, “although his brain is said to be functioning fairly well.”

How did he keep going?

• November, 1930: nursing severely strained back.
• January, 1931: hurt an ankle playing the Rangers and — cautious — checked into Sir Henry Gray’s Hospital in Montreal. Suffering from a sore wrist at this time, too, as well as a charley horse.
• April, 1931: Chicago’s Taffy Abel caught him heavily on the shoulder; “in fairly bad shape.”
• In 1934, he damaged his left ankle in a Maroons-related incident then, next game, there was a tangle in the Rangers’ goalmouth and maybe the post dunnit, maybe not, Morenz’s ankle was twisted, badly, again. Back at St. Henry Gray’s again, doctors applied a cast he kept for a month. In February, he skated, carefully, and started on his way back to finding his old form.

Sew there: Chicago’s Howie Morenz takes stitches in a Boston dressing room in the mid-1930s.

Is it worth noting here that he gave as good as he got? Or, another way of looking at it: playing hockey, you’re at risk not only of getting hurt but of hurting others. For Morenz, this meant:

• March, 1930: clashed with Chicago’s Ty Arbour behind the net. Arbour went off with torn ligament, Morenz to the penalty bench .
• April, 1931: Chicago again. Skating with Tom Cook at centre ice. “Morenz flung the light Hawk player to the ice, hurting his face. Both were penalized and Chuck Gardiner skated up to protest.”
• March, 1934: Morenz would surely have incurred another of his goalpost injuries if he hadn’t crashed into Detroit goalie Normie Smith while scoring on him. Wounded “about the head,” Smith left the game to spend four months in hospital to heal his fractures.

It was Morenz, too, who broke Clint Benedict’s nose with a shot in 1930, forcing the Maroons goalie out of the game and, a little while later, out of his career. I’m not saying that was Morenz’s fault: the evidence seems to show that Benedict’s nerves were already well crushed. A month later, when he returned, he was wearing the nose-guard that may or may not have been the NHL’s first goalie mask. It looked strange and vexed Benedict’s vision so much that he’s supposed to have discarded it before the game against Ottawa, that March, when someone fell on him. He decided to retire. Possibly another shot of Morenz’s might have caught him in the throat at some point in here, too.

Can we agree, also, that Morenz didn’t necessarily need hockey to hurt himself?

In 1932, he had his mother-in-law staying over at his house in Montreal, 4420 Coolbrook Avenue. Streetview it on Google and you can imagine him standing there on the porch surveying — actually, no, not really. Too many silver Hondas and Kias parked in front, now, all those twenty-first-century strewn garbage bins. It looks like a pleasant street, calm and leafy.

Morenz drove Mrs. Stewart home to her house on Jeanne-Mance, not far, a grey street on the day Google scoped by, with its trees looking spindly. Turn the view around and you can admire the big cross up on Mont-Royal.

Possibly Mrs. Stewart was giving Morenz hockey advice all the way home, stuff he wasn’t hearing anywhere else, and he took it, too, and prospered, and no one ever knew but them. You don’t know. Without a photograph at hand, you’re free to assign her a prim, tweedy, bespectacled look, but is that fair? The door of her house was unlocked when they got there. In they walked. Mrs. Stewart turned on the light and that’s when the tall man stepped out from behind the door with a revolver in hand. He said either “Give me money” or “Give me money before I shoot you.” Accounts vary.

Morenz stayed cool. The season had been over for a month, but he still had his hockey wits about him. He told the guy, careful with that gun. He said, “If you shoot Mrs. S. you’ll be in the hoosegow a long time.” Not those exact words, but close. Did the guy know who it was, threatening him with hypothetical jail sentences? Was he a tall Habs fan? Impossible to say. We do know that Morenz jumped him. Think of that! Little Morenz! He pulled down the guy’s overcoat — smart — partially trussing him. This all has to have been fast and frenzied; newspaper accounts slow it to sludge. The thug, they said. He got an arm free and slashed Morenz “several times over the head and temple.” With a hockey stick no one previously noticed? No: the gun. He added another bash as he shed his coat, then he was gone, running south on Jeanne-Mance, disappearing down Fairmont.

Mrs. Stewart telephoned the police. Special constables Geraldeau and Laroche came immediately. From reading too many Tintin books, I see Morenz sitting on the floor, legs splayed, hand to head, stars and punctuation and musical notes orbiting. He gave the policemen a good description of the suspect: thirty-fiveish, dark suit, grey fedora. They couldn’t figure out how the guy got in. In his abandoned coat they found a flashlight. The cut on Morenz’s head looked bad, but he said he was okay with some first aid. He didn’t go to the hospital.

Also, back in 1928, while Morenz was golfing at Montreal’s Forest Hill course, lightning just missed him. There was a sharp crackle, a flash; the club he’d been about to swing was left twisted and split. Morenz and his caddy both said they felt a jolt.

A SCRAP IS what happens when, in 1973, Norm Dube of the Kansas City Scouts tries to clear Minnesota’s Dennis O’Brien from the front of the net and they tangle, resulting in five-minute majors. Except that O’Brien doesn’t want to let the matter drop, forcing the referee to send him to the dressing room, but instead of going there, O’Brien goes after Dube again. Hockey has lots of different words for fights: fireworks and bouts, spats and imbroglios. It used to have shindigs and tong wars and schemozzles, great words all.

Hockey likes to drape the spectacle of its millionaires wailing fists into one another’s skulls with words that cloak the stupidity, smudge the inanity into harmlessness. Chucking the knuckles sounds kind of fun, like a game at a summer fair. Dropping the mittens. Tilt is a hockey-fight word, and so too are bout and set-to. An argy-bargy is a soccer hoo-ha, as much as it sounds like another name for the Falklands War. A Canadian version might be argle-bargle, which has a hockey air to it; in fact, it’s defined as the sound made by seabirds. We’ve already decided that donnybrook is foreign and obsolete. A scuffle, altercation, melee; or how about brouhaha? The extra-curricular, Craig Simpson sometimes says on Hockey Night in Canada, suggesting chess club or mathletics. Clarence Campbell preferred the respectable Marquis-of-Queensberry formality of fisticuffs. As in: “I have been in hockey forty years,” he said in 1971, “and I can think of only one incident in which a man has been seriously injured in a personal fisticuffs by a punch in the nose.”

In Chicago in 1953, during a disagreement between Black Hawks and Bruins, the attendant manning the door to one of the benches took fright and abandoned his post. The players fell into the Chicago bench area and were rolling about, among them my old History teacher, Mr. Armstrong. That was a rumpus.

A fracas is what happens in Paris, France, on a Sunday in 1933, when a visiting Toronto team loses the game, then gets into a kerfuffle at a restaurant with some locals that sends a defenceman to hospital and the coach, Harold Ballard, to police court.

Dropping the buckets is hockey terminology associated, usually, with an intention to chuck the knuckles.

They’re throwing them from Port Arthur is an admiring phrase you might have heard Don Cherry use to approve a particularly vivid fight. The five reasons to throw, according to one who threw: (1) an opponent ill-treats one of your stars or (2) they abuse your goalie; (3) you want to change the momentum of the game or (4) you’re trying goad the other team into a penalty; or (5) you don’t like someone.

Jokey terms for fighters: head-boppers, pot-stirrers, Bob Gainey’s new windup toy. Players not known for fighting who drop their gloves sometimes come in for gentle ribbing, as in: hey, did you catch the powder puff between Spezza and Markov?

Goon is another funny word, though not necessarily one that the goons themselves like to be called. It does carry big baggage, it’s true, a whole Samsonite’s worth of unflattering definitions: “stupid or oafish person,” for one, derived from gony (“simpleton,” 1850). Or the term applied by sailors to the albatross and similar large, clumsy birds (1839). Or in the sense of “hired thug,” first noted in 1938, probably with a nod to Alice the Goon, a muscle-bound dull-wit in E.C. Segar’s original Popeye comic strip.

You don’t call a goon a goon, because if you do, Bob Probert’s wife might tell you that you don’t know him and you don’t know hockey. Rent-a-goon is no better. Heavyweight? Tough guy? Badman used to be a popular term, in reference to Bad Joe Hall or Sprague Cleghorn, or (in 1956) Lou Fontinato, who was a blockbuster, giving a larruping Ted Lindsay a run for his money in riot-producing badman honours. The list of badmen carries on: Billy Coutu, Eddie Shore, Red Horner. The last of the breed may have been Detroit’s Howie Young. In the early 1960s, the Saturday Evening Post took the measure of the average badman as being “long on muscle and short on Freud.”

Enforcer seems to have entered hockey’s lexicon in or about 1939 without anyone really asking the question, what does the enforcer enforce? Not the rules, given that fighting lies beyond their limits. Policeman is an odd designation, too, though it’s one that Marty McSorley liked “in a romantic sense.” Vigilante is more appropriate given that any policing that’s done on the ice is the work of referees, linesmen, and actual uniformed police officers. Tough guy does have a bit of a musty, Damon Runyon ring to it. Pugilist is mock-archaic. Gladiator? The players who fill these roles are often provided with names that seem strangely appropriate to the job they perform. Does Domi not sound like a curt warning muttered at the boards behind the net? Grimson, Boogaard, Kordic, Kurtenbach, Kocur: they all have the ring of violent threats, of bad outcomes. (Although John Ferguson sounds harmless enough. And Fergie makes him sound as plush as a toy palomino pony.)

Because fighting is such a, quote, shitty job, fighters actually love the game more than anyone else. “They have to,” Kris King has said, “because they’re setting aside part of their dream to do it.”

Hockey-fighting is harder than boxing, said Rod Gilbert. Scoring a goal is easier, according to Rob Ray. You need a strong character to punch and be punched. Big hands are recommended. Ferguson was super-motivated, plus he despised the opposition, plus he studied other fighters to figure out who went for the legs, who backed off, who (looking at you, Carl Brewer) didn’t drop their stick. You can start a fight with a flick of a finger, rub a guy’s elbow, or say a word or two.

The main technical difficulty involves, according to Gilbert and Brad Park, keeping your balance. Nick Metz advised getting up on your toes. Gordie Howe said you hold on to your stick until the other guy drops his. Tie Domi didn’t have a fighting style. Just grab hold, said Tony Twist, throw your fists, see what happens. You have to get the first punch, Lou Fontinato, among others, felt. Although for Dave Schultz, the priority was to get a good grip on the guy’s collar, even if that meant allowing him a couple of first punches. Orland Kurtenbach stood back until you came at him, which is when he got you with his reach, which was tremendous. He stood back, cocked his arm, boomba.

It’s almost like shooting the puck, said Bobby Orr, you want to be getting as much power into your punch as you can. Being a lefty helps, too. Guys have real trouble with lefties.

Wait a minute. Bobby Orr?

Yes, true: he has a helpful section in his how-to book, from 1974, where he shares his secrets. “Some people think fighting is terrible,” he explained to Life in 1970, “but I think the odd scrap — without sticks — is part of the game.”

Don Cherry used to file his fingernails to prepare. He said he was never mad when he fought, ever. Mick Vukota was firmly in the face-plant camp: “You pick the guy up, get the elbow across the head, and slam him into the ice.” Kevin Lowe says that when Dave Semenko fought, he destroyed guys, traumatizing both teams. “Not only was the opposition devastated, we were devastated.”

Keith Magnuson never minded losing a fight. “I really mean this,” he said. Not that he didn’t work at his craft. After his rookie season, he took boxing lessons from former world bantamweight champion Johnny Coulon. That was the year he had a fight a game, serving 291 penalty minutes, or almost five hours in the box.

Bang your hands on the floor while you’re watching TV: Tony Twist learned from a kickboxer that’s how you condition your knuckles. The swelling makes your tendons stronger.

If you’re going to fight, fight. Stand there and give it, and take it — after you get rid of your gloves and stick and take off your helmet, of course. Then, punch. That’s what veteran sportswriter Stan Fischler’s 2008 formula for fixing hockey amounted to: more haymakers! Back to the days of pure and simple punching. If you wrestle or pull the guy’s shirt over his head, waltz around without punching, then sorry, pal, that’s extra penalties for you, because it’s boring.

Some say that the greatest fight ever in the NHL may have been the mutual wailing that Chicago’s Johnny Mariucci and Black Jack Stewart from Detroit laid on one another in the late 1940s. Twenty minutes it’s supposed to have lasted, on the ice and into the penalty box, the most brutal battle Gordie Howe ever saw.

Frightful hockey sounds:

• whop-whop-whop: sound of Gordie Howe’s punches in 1959 when he battered Lou Fontinato. A witness said they sounded “just like someone chopping wood.” Fischler described Howe’s fists as moving “like locomotive pistons,” though the sound was decidedly equestrian: “Clop! Clop! Clop!” Howe: “He was coming like a madman. It took me a while to get the gloves off and then things were busy.”
• like a .22 shot: goon’s head fictionally hitting the ice after Roy MacGregor’s Batterinski fells him in a fight.
• like a hollow wild cucumber we used to fire against trucks on Highway 60 so drivers would think they’d struck something big: sound of a fan’s head on the ice after one of Batterinski’s teammates hipchecks the guy for trespassing.
• crackling: sound reported in 1933 after Eddie Shore hit Ace Bailey and Bailey’s head struck the ice, sending shivers through “experienced spectators in the press section.”
• whack: Shore’s head meeting ice not too much later, not far away.

If you saw Todd Bertuzzi skate down Steve Moore in 2004 and punch him in the back of the head — with the result that Moore will never play another NHL game in his life — maybe you heard Ken Dryden say it was like watching a National Geographic special with the lion taking down the antelope.

Pierre Pilote’s dad was an amateur boxer nicknamed Kayo. “The first English words I ever learned were, ‘Do you want to fight?’” Pilote said. “I averaged a fight a week and won my share. I had that animal instinct, you might say.”

John Ferguson’s knuckles always bled. Sometimes, the day after a fight with Stu Grimson, hockey players who suited up again for the next game found that they couldn’t turn left or simply fell down. Defencemen have told doctors that once in every four or five fights, they’d get stung, the sky would change colours, and they’d find themselves in a daze.

The NHL got a new rule in 1977 whereby the “third man” into a fight would be ejected from the game and fined one hundred dollars. That would make the violence more sensible, some said. “You’ll always have fights as long as you have hockey,” Chicago coach Billy Reay reminded the pacifists. Clarence Campbell: “Hockey takes the position that if a man considers himself badly used he may want to punch the offender in the nose. This is certainly preferable to having him strike him with stick or skate.” After three decades at the NHL helm, Campbell gave way that year to John Ziegler. “We’re going to put some attention on fighting at our annual meeting,” the new president said at the beginning of his reign. “But with the cost of players, there just aren’t that many goons around any more.”

In 1999, when Scott Parker’s helmet fell off, Bob Probert threw the hardest punch Scotty Bowman ever saw in hockey, and when Parker went down, Probert told him, “Well, I guess I broke ya.”

That was six years into Gary Bettman’s tenure as NHL commissioner. Fourteen years after that, he was interviewed by the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, and cautioned, “Before you make a fundamental change and say, okay, we’re changing the rule on fighting — you know, you fight, you’re gone for two weeks — you have to be very careful. It needs to evolve. Because for every action there’s probably an unintended consequence that you weren’t aware of.”

WE KNOW THEIR names now, the doctors of hockey, they’re in the news as much as their patients. Dr. Micky Collins was the concussion specialist who spoke first at Sidney Crosby’s famous state-of-the-skull address in September of 2011. He talked about fog and Ferraris, herding cows back into the barn. He cited deficits and impacts, and introduced us to the word vestibular. Dr. Ted Carrick was there, too, explaining small perturbations and great perturbations. He stayed in the news, having loaded Crosby into a whole-body gyroscope and turned him all around as part of his treatment.

Dr. Joseph Maroon also tended Crosby, and both he and Dr. Collins were advising Philadelphia’s Chris Pronger that same week to park his shaken brain for the rest of the season. It was Toronto neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Cusimano who said (the same week) that the NHL wasn’t doing enough to protect its players. Earlier that fall, he and Dr. Paul Echlin from London, Ontario, had unveiled a study of two Junior teams that found that 25 per cent of the players had suffered concussions.

It was Dr. Ann McKee from Boston’s University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy who studied Derek Boogaard’s brain after his death in 2011. Dr. Charles Tator was the Toronto neurosurgeon who said, “We in science can dot the line between blows to the head, brain degeneration and all of these other issues. So in my view, it’s time for the leagues to acknowledge this serious issue and take steps to reduce blows to the brain.”

And then there’s Dr. Ruben Echemendia, director of the concussion working group that answers to the NHL and the NHLPA. He was the one who, like league commissioner Gary Bettman, wasn’t sure about the whole supposed connection between brain damage and hits to hockey heads. “I think it’s an opinion based on limited data,” he told the New York Times in 2011. “My perspective is, we should not make wholesale changes until we have more than opinion and speculation.”

Hockey has always had doctors, of course, it’s just that their names tend to fade once their patients are discharged, and if anyone’s thinking about installing a commemorative gurney in their honour at Toronto’s Hockey Hall of Fame, it hasn’t yet been announced.

Dr. Henry O. Clauss treated New York Americans left winger Shorty Green in 1927. Green was known as one of the lightest men in professional hockey, at just 136 pounds, or approximately one-half of Zdeno Chara. Also, it was said that Green was one of the game’s most aggressive players and also one of its gamest. He’d served with the Canadian Army at Vimy Ridge and was gassed at some point, but he survived the war. Then on this night in 1927, he got into a mix-up during a game against the cross-town Rangers and had his left kidney dislocated. Dr. B.A. Sinclair at New York’s Polyclinic Hospital removed it, after a priest had prepared the patient for the procedure by giving him the last rites. Green couldn’t play any more hockey after that, but he did go on to coach the Americans. Clauss remained the house doctor at Madison Square Garden for many years, and once remarked that the toughest sport he ever saw was six-day bicycle racing.

In 1930, Dr. Clauss told Rangers defenceman Ching Johnson that his broken jaw would keep him out of the playoffs. Johnson is supposed to have said, “My ankles and shoulders are all right, and they’re the important things in hockey. Your jaw doesn’t count. What if I can’t open my teeth? You’re not allowed to bite in this game.” Dr.  Clauss said, “I guess his brain is gone. He won’t be able to chew his meat until next August.” Johnson: “We’ll see.”

A long-time Leafs doctor named Dr. Jim Murray was the one who went with Team Canada in 1972. After the two exhibition games in Sweden, he asked coach Harry Sinden, “What the hell way are we playing hockey out there?” Sinden wasn’t happy: he had to, he said, straighten Dr. Murray out.

I don’t have an exact number on how many of Bobby Orr’s nineteen knee operations Dr. Carter Rowe performed but we’ll just assume, for now, a plurality.

Post-rumpus: On December 13, 1933, after Boston’s Eddie Shore (prostrate, right) felled Toronto’s Ace Bailey (his feet are visible, far left), Red Horner dropped Shore.

Hard to say whether Gordie Howe holds the mark for most career attending doctors, but it’s a good bet, given his longevity. Several of them:

• Dr. Frederic Schreiber, the neurosurgeon who bored an emergency hole in Howe’s head in 1950, two inches in front of his right ear, to drain fluid after the twenty-two-year-old star fell into the boards with or without the aid of Toronto’s Ted Kennedy.
• Dr. Charles Karibo, the Red Wings team doctor who examined Howe in 1961 at Osteopathic Hospital after he’d collided with Toronto’s Eddie Shack.
• Dr. John Finley, a long-serving Detroit team doctor who in 2012 published hockey’s first medical memoir, Hockeytown Doc.
• Dr. Vincent J. Turco, the man whom a fifty-two-year-old Howe consulted when he suffered dizzy spells during the New England Whalers training camp: “Like a drunk without the beer,” Howe said. “I’m no doctor, but I figure it’s related to blood sugars.” Dr. Turco said he wouldn’t be held responsible if Howe continued to play.

Dr. G. Lynde Gately was on duty one night in 1933 at what was then still the Boston Madison Square Garden, when the Maple Leafs were in town to play the Bruins. The New York Times: “Both teams were guilty of almost every crime in the hockey code during the slam-bang first session.” In the second, Eddie Shore skated in behind Ace Bailey, and “jamming his knee in behind Ace’s leg, and at the same time putting his elbow across his forehead, turned him upside down.”

Afterwards, Frank Selke said, Shore stood there “grinning like a big farmer.” The rural glee ended, presumably, when the Leafs’ Red Horner punched him in the jaw, a heavy right that knocked Shore flat, cracking his head on the ice. Horner broke his fist.

The rumpus, the Globe called it. Other contemporary accounts preferred the smashup. Dr. Gately was treating a Garden ticket agent who’d been punched in the chin by a scalper. “I had just finished with him when a police officer was brought in with a finger someone had tried to chew off. I sewed him up and just then the Leafs appeared carrying Bailey and the Bruins were carrying Shore, both out cold.”

Dr. Martin Crotty, the Bruins’ team doctor, was working on Shore, so Dr. Gately looked after Bailey. Gately’s diagnosis was lacerated brain. (Later, what he told the papers was cerebral concussion with convulsions.)

When Bailey woke up, Dr. Gately asked him what team he played for.

“The Cubs,” he said.

Later he tried again.

“The Maple Leafs.”

Who’s your captain?

“Day,” Bailey said. He wanted to go back to the ice.

When a revived Shore came in, he said, “I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t mean it.” Bailey looked up, according to Dr. Gately’s recollection, and replied, “It’s all in the game, Eddie.”

Drs. Gately and Crotty both rode in the ambulance that took Bailey to Audubon Hospital. Dr. Donald Munro was the one who trepanned Bailey’s brain there, twice. His 1938 book, Cranio-Cerebral Injuries: Their Diagnosis and Treatment, is one I reviewed so that you’ll never have to: not a word about hockey.

Once a trepan was a military siege engine for holing stubborn walls. In the hands of non-medieval surgeons it’s a crown saw. A trephine is an improved version, with a transverse handle as well as a sharp steel centre-pin which is fixed on the bone to steady the movement in operating. Some accounts of the Bailey case say trepan, some trephine. Either way, Dr. Munro tapped Bailey’s spine first, on December 14, to drain the fluid. Then he went into the skull, removing damaged tissue and tying up bleeding vessels.

On December 17, Dr. Munro operated again. Afterwards, he said that Bailey’s brain had been more seriously damaged on the left side than the right, even though the skull fracture was on the right. Also, the intra-ventricular hemorrhage that Bailey had suffered usually proved fatal.

On December 21, Bailey recognized his wife. Next day, Dr. Munro declared that he was out of danger and that his four-year-old daughter, Joan, could visit. On Christmas Day, Time wondered whether hockey was getting too violent. By the New Year, Bailey had been released from all dietary restrictions; his doctors said he could even have a steak if he wanted.

Toronto manager Conn Smythe complained that the Leafs had spent $2,500 on medical bills, which included a silver plate inserted into Bailey’s skull. He called for Shore to be suspended for as long as Bailey was out. Toronto would never play the Bruins again if Shore was on the ice. At the NHL, Frank Calder was still thinking. Shore, for his part, had no interest in playing any hockey. “I’m still very nervous,” he said. He sailed to Bermuda with his wife, Katie, for three weeks.

January 2 was when Bailey sat up for the first time. A week later Smythe got a letter from Mrs. Bailey reporting that Dr. Munro had told her husband he wouldn’t be playing any more hockey. On the bright side, Bailey was shaving for himself again.

On January 4, Calder absolved Shore of any deliberate attempt to injure. “Preponderance of testimony,” said NHL managing director Frank Patrick, “is that the contact was accidental.” Shore would be allowed to play again on January 28. On January 12, the Monarch of Bermuda docked at New York and the Shores stepped ashore looking tanned and refreshed.

Bailey went on to coach university hockey, and he was a timekeeper at Maple Leaf Gardens for years, until Harold Ballard fired him. Later he recalled, “During the first year and a half I suffered some bad after-effects of the injury. Since then, I’ve felt fine. For probably a year after I was hurt, I got the jitters just watching hockey. I could see an injury shaping up every time there was a solid check. But that wore off, too. No, I never bore any ill-will toward Shore. He and I are good friends.”

A HISTORY OF hockey booing could start with Gordie Drillon. Not that he was the first to suffer, but his suffering has a landmark quality. For those of us who never saw him play, someone who did called him another Frank Mahovlich, which is helpful, so long as you’re old enough to remember Mahovlich before he went to the Senate. Drillon was big and he was good-looking, a champion goal-getter, a scoring magician, an ace. Also: happy-go-lucky, youth personified, a heck of a player, a wonderful friend of hockey. Journalist John Robertson likened him to “a big blue submarine rigged for silent running.” His six years in Toronto were packed with successes: a couple of first-team all-star selections, an NHL scoring title, a Lady Byng Trophy in 1938. Four years later, he helped the Leafs win a Stanley Cup. Well, he was on the team. Playing Detroit in the finals that year, the Leafs lost the first two games and coach Hap Day took measures, as coaches do. One of them was benching Drillon — on general manager Conn Smythe’s orders, it should be said. Training with his army unit at Petawawa, Ontario, Smythe phoned Day with instructions to sideline Drillon for his lack of toughness.

Nobody likes an enigma, I guess. That’s what the Toronto Star called him in 1941. “Good one night, bad until the fit comes on him again. He’s the inexplicable unit.”

“I used to be afraid to put on my skates,” Drillon said, years later, after it was over. “They booed me even when I was warming up.” For a while he couldn’t walk a street in Toronto without being jeered. Scott Young: “Kids threw snowballs and worse at his house and car.” It’s the mysterious and worse that’s both disturbing and tantalizing here.

Star sports editor Andy Lytle took the time to examine his own part in the piece. He’d been hard on Drillon all winter, goalie Turk Broda, too. Then everybody started. “Comes a night when the morons in the crowd boo Drillon and Broda.” The players resented it, but they carried on. Drillon was the leading scorer in the playoffs. Still with the booing. Nothing Drillon could do would stop it. “So he plays carelessly purposely so he will be sold next fall. Toronto will lose a wonderful player.”

And so it happened. Come the fall, the Leafs put Drillon out of his misery, or theirs, selling him for $30,000 to Montreal, where the children were better supervised and the packing snow not so prevalent. Of course, they’d booed their own in Montreal before and they’d boo them again — Howie Morenz, Bill Durnan, greats of the game, they both suffered. Drillon appeared to have escaped it, but he played just a year for the Canadiens before he went off to the war.

Morenz had a slow start in the fall of 1933. He had a sore ankle, missed a month, put on weight, shed stamina. When he returned to the ice the fans wanted full flight from him, that’s what they were used to. When they didn’t get it, they not only jeered, they hissed. Morenz went home in tears. Booing is big and clumsy, and sometimes it’s just clowning. Hissing is something different, sharper, directed, mean — maybe it’s just the edge of it that’s vicious, but an edge is enough — and it’s as scary as a snake. Canadiens manager Leo Dandurand couldn’t stand to see it, didn’t have the heart to let it continue. Thinking the unthinkable and then actually doing it, he traded Morenz to Chicago.

Bill Durnan didn’t go home to cry, he did it right in the rink. Rocket Richard remembered this: Durnan coming back bawling to the dressing room after a game. Like Drillon in Toronto, he had a sterling record, one of the best ever in the NHL to that point, five Vezina Trophies to his name, also the all-time shutout record of 309 consecutive minutes. And the fans hounded him. In 1947, in the Forum, they constantly chanted for Durnan’s predecessor in the Canadiens’ net: “We want Bibeault, we want Bibeault.” They were still at it in February of 1950, when Montreal was hosting Chicago: “The enraged fans screamed their invective at Durnan as the Hawks went wild and hammered in nine goals on the demoralized Canadiens.”

Oh, Montreal. In 1955, it was Boom-Boom Geoffrion’s turn to suffer. The fans didn’t even need a bad game from him: if anything, Geoffrion was too good. This was the year of the Richard Riot, and in March, with the Rocket suspended for the remainder of the season, Geoffrion overtook him for the NHL’s scoring lead. The fans hated him for that and made his life miserable. Geoffrion, just twenty-four, didn’t know what to do. He thought maybe he’d retire. “I couldn’t deliberately not score,” he said. “So I was sick of the whole thing. Even thinking about hockey made me throw up.”

In New York, at a time when they were booing Rangers defenceman Rod Seiling, a writer asked how it made him feel. Oh, he didn’t mind too much. “The fans pay their money,” he allowed. “They have a right to say what they want.” The writer waited a moment: the truth can take time, coming out. “Screw them. What the hell do they know?”

But of course, they don’t have to know anything, the booers, that’s not in their job description. They boo because they can. In September 1972, when Canada lost that first game to the perplexing Soviets, it may have been that the fans in Montreal were too shocked to boo. This can happen. Three games later, in Vancouver, they found their scorn, and by then it may have been that they were booing on behalf of the whole country. Also maybe pre-emptively, in case Canada lost all four games in Moscow.

Frank Mahovlich got it going. The Soviet goalie was out of his net and Mahovlich did what any self-respecting forechecker would do in a similar situation, which is to say he lay on him. Phil Esposito thought it was a great play. The fans did not. The Soviets won, 5–3. The crowd not only booed their own, they also cheered the Soviets.

Esposito couldn’t believe it; he’ll never forget it. He says this in the second of his autobiographies. In the first, published in 1973, he doesn’t really mention it much, a terse paragraph is all Game 4 gets. The fans were yelling obscenities, he reports thirty years later, though he doesn’t, strangely, cite the specifics. It may be the only page in the entire book that’s curse-free.

Esposito was Canada’s player of the game, and when CTV’s Johnny Esaw interviewed him, that’s when he let go. He was so angry. The whole team was — or at least, all those who wrote memoirs later, other than goalie Ken Dryden, who understood. Bill Goldsworthy was ashamed to be a Canadian. Paul Henderson considered retribution: “Honest to goodness, I almost felt like wading into the crowd with my stick, to use it as a skewer on some of them.”

You might have expected Esposito to follow Henderson into the stands, handing him new sticks as needed, maybe kebabbing a few fans for himself. And yet when Esaw put a microphone in front of him after the game it was a promise he made rather than a threat. Later on, he’d write about how unfair it was, look at what the poor pros had to sacrifice to play this series — “money, our vacations” — but at the time, in Vancouver, he told the viewers that if the Russians booed their players in Moscow then Esposito would be back to apologize — but he didn’t think he’d be back.

Everybody had something to say about the booing. Letters filled newspaper pages, more voices of the people, except this time many of them were lambasting the “booing herd,” telling the country not to worry, have faith, let’s just go over there to Moscow and beat the Commies. Actually, said the head of the Canadian Ski Federation, “they’re booing themselves, booing the Canadian way of life.”

Meanwhile, Paul Henderson explained some of the rules of the business. For example, if a guy is playing for the Leafs, where he’s being paid for it, and things aren’t going well, then okay, a few catcalls might be expected. But “it’s a whole different thing when you’re playing against a different country and you’re doing it for your country.”

IT MAY BE that the Petun who used to live near my rink played lacrosse or Huron hubbub or a version of tabegasi, which is what the Omahas used to play in Nebraska. There are, of course, any number of not-hockey games they could have taken up. If you read the books, they’re full of what are referred to as Indian games, many of them hockey-like. They had it all figured out, other than the skates.

The Walapai and the Mohave played tas-a-va in Arizona, arguing over whose ball to use. The Mohave (says historian Andrew McFarland Davis) usually gave in, knowing that they could win anyway, no matter whose ball was in play. The Makah in the Pacific Northwest used a ball of whalefin cartilage. For a while they only played to celebrate the capture of a whale, but later they played whenever they felt like it. In what’s now Michigan, the Passamaquoddy had e-bes-qua-mo’gan, which they suspected the spirits played also. That’s what the aurora borealis was, a big game under the lights.

A lot of these games were lacrosse or like lacrosse, and they allow you to make the connection between the game they used to call the Little Brother of War and its twenty-first-century incarnation. White observers of the time used to say that if you happened upon a game in open country, you might take it for serious combat. In 1667, the trader and government agent Nicolas Perrot watched Miamis near Sault Ste. Marie play a game of lacrosse with two thousand players: “a constant movement of all these crosses which made a noise like that of arms which one hears during a battle.”

The purpose of the games, in many cases, was to prepare young warriors for war. The Dakotas, before they played their ball game, invoked the aid of supernatural influences. In the Choctaw Nation, injuries inflicted upon a man during sport were often avenged by the player’s relatives. Women had key supportive roles here, too, giving the men hot coffee as they played and also, quirt in hand, lashing out at anyone who wasn’t competing hard enough.

An observer of the Mississauga at play near Rice Lake, Ontario:

No one is heard to complain, though he be bruised severely or his nose come in close communion with a club. If the last-mentioned catastrophe befell him, he is up in a trice, and sets his laugh forth as loud as the rest, though it be floated at first on a tide of blood.

Here’s a French Jesuit, Pierre de Charlevoix, watching a Huron game of platter in 1721:

They sometimes lose their rest and in some degree their very senses at it. They stake all they are worth, and several of them have been known to continue at it till they have stript themselves stark naked and lost all their movables in their cabin. Some have been known to stake their liberty for a certain time. This circumstance proves beyond all doubt how passionately fond they are of it, there being no people in the world more jealous of their liberty than our Indians.

Games lasted for five or six days. Spectators watching were many times “in such an agitation as to be transported out of themselves to such a degree that they quarrel and fight, which never happens to the Hurons, except on these occasions or when they are drunk.”

Here’s author A.W. Chase reporting on Oregons in the 1880s playing a game, he said, that appeared identical to hockey:

Sides being chosen, each endeavours to drive a hard ball of pine wood around a stake and in different directions; stripped to the buff they display great activity and strength, whacking away at each other’s shins, if they are in the way, with a refreshing disregard of bruises.

Abbé Ferland, a later observer, talked about a particular ball-carrier’s defensive measure: holding the ball between the feet while opponents tried to clout it loose.

Should he happen to be wounded at this juncture, he alone is responsible for it. It has happened that some have had their legs broken, others their arms and some have been killed. It is not uncommon to see among them those who are crippled for life and who could only be at such a game by an act of sheer obstinacy. When accidents of this kind happen, the unfortunate withdraws quietly from the game if he can do so. If his injury will not permit him, his relations carry him to the cabin and the game continues until it is finished as if nothing bad happened.

The Cherokee of North Carolina played a ball-game called anetsa. Matches took place every other week, and when the Cherokee weren’t playing they were training. The serious player observed a strict diet. He wouldn’t eat the flesh of a rabbit because the rabbit was too timid, easily put to flight, liable to drop its wits when chased by the hunter. Also off-limits were frogs (too brittle-boned) and the fish known as the hog-sucker (sluggish). And salt and hot food and women. Plus, if a woman so much as touched his stick on the eve of the game? “It is thereby rendered unfit for use,” reported an interested observer.

And what about the Jesuit Relations from 1636? We have to acknowledge Jean de Brébeuf and his accounts of watching Huron sports in southern Ontario, even though it’s hard to separate Brébeuf from his death, which came gruesomely in 1649 when he and his fellow Jesuit Gabriel Lalement were captured by Iroquois raiders, tortured to death, and eaten. Accounts of Brébeuf’s ordeal talk about the fleshy parts of his arms and thighs, and they use the word succulent. He died after three hours. Lalement survived for fifteen hours in a suit of burning bark. Brébeuf had the skin of his head torn off and his heart extracted while he was still alive, and some Iroquois ate that too, believing that “nothing so much contributes to courage in war as to eat the heart of brave men, unless it’s drinking their blood.” All of which, for me, more or less obliterates the rest of his life, including his sports commentaries.

Still, in happier days Brébeuf had watched the Hurons play at their field games. He’s the one who’s said to have given lacrosse its name, although there are those who claim Rabelais described it in books he wrote a hundred years earlier. These games, Brébeuf noted, were thought to be supremely good for the health. Sometimes an ailing man was commanded to play to save his own life. Some other times — a hockey reverie if ever there was one — the invalid himself dreamt that he would die unless the country engaged in a game of lacrosse, a.k.a. cross, in aid of his health. “Sometimes also one of their medicine men will say that the whole country is ill and that a game of cross is needed for its cure,” Brébeuf further noted. “The chiefs in each village give orders that all the youths shall do their duty in this respect otherwise some great calamity will overtake the country.”

BILL GADSBY CLAIMS a career total of 640, which seems like a big number the first time you see it. Bigger, for example, than the number of points he scored as an NHL defenceman (568). Averaged out over his 1,248 career games, it works out to about 0.51 per game. To put that in perspective, Wayne Gretzky, over his career, averaged 1.92. Though, of course, with Gretzky what we’re talking about is points per game, while Gadsby’s tally is for stitches to the skin.

There are several levels of meaning to sutures in hockey, starting with the useful medical purpose of closing a deep cut. Beyond that they serve as a gauge of many hockey attributes, including durability, tenacity, willingness to suffer, poor timing, and bad luck of a kind measured out in monofilament.

It may take a period of adjustment for newcomers to the game to figure out how to read their hieroglyphics. Unlike thread-count in bedsheets, the numbers don’t automatically indicate quality. Before he coached Pittsburgh’s Penguins, while he was still playing for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, Dan Bylsma said he stopped counting when he’d accumulated 550. “Stitches are a routine thing,” Bill Goldsworthy’s biographers shrug. “Once he had his tongue split open. This required ten stitches to close.”

Derek Sanderson was eight years old when a puck hit him in the face at practice one day. Blood everywhere, Sanderson remembers. His dad, Harold, told him to keep going. “So I bled for the entire practice, and when it was over he took me to the hospital where I had three stitches.” They started a ritual after that: when the stitches were plucked, the remnants went into a little plastic box. “Harold saved every one of my first hundred stitches,” Sanderson says, “and, pretty soon, I started to become proud of them.”

“The reason I know how many stitches I had,” Gadsby writes in his cheery autobiography, “is that my dear wife, Edna, kept a log of how many times I was hurt, just like some spouses keep a list of birthdays and anniversary dates.” And it was worthwhile: Gadsby was one of the NHLers who bought stitch insurance in the 1950s. A hundred-dollar-a-year policy paid out five dollars for each stitch it took to close a hockey cut. Sounds like a story, but no. One year, Gadsby bled so much he ended up making a fifty dollar profit.

It’s not a competition, of course, but if it were, how many stitches would it take to win the all-time NHL sweepstakes?

Borje Salming took three hundred in his face on just one night in 1987 after Gerard Gallant’s skate puzzled it. Same count for Buffalo goalie Clint Malarchuk, who barely survived a skate in the neck two years later. Jacques Plante says he had two hundred stitches by the time he started wearing his mask in 1959. Gump Worsley tallied 250; Johnny Bower, 280.

There’s a photo of Terry Sawchuk you shouldn’t show to a child. It’s painful to look at, even if it was doctored to illustrate a career’s accumulation. Before he put on a mask in 1962, goalie Sawchuk was up to 350. A subsequent count tallied more than four hundred stitches to his face and head alone, including three inside his right eye.

Theo Fleury estimates five hundred for his career. “Most people who don’t know I play hockey,” he once said, “think I was thrown through a plate-glass window or something.” Keith Magnuson estimated that in a typical NHL month, seven hundred stitches were “dealt out” across the league.

I’ve taken the liberty of organizing Lionel Conacher’s list of career wounds in case anyone — Leonard Cohen? — feels the urge to put it to song:

Nose broken eight times,

leg and arm broken,

several broken bones in hands,

ten cracked ribs,

a skate-gash across the throat near my jugular which almost dropped the curtain on me and required sixteen stitches to pull together,

another skate-gash near my mastoid which again had me a matter of inches away from eternity,

a four-square-inch slash of a razor-edged skate on my thigh,

which resulted in gangrene and a red-hot bout

with the Grim Reaper,

two smashed knee cartilages which resulted in

surgical operations,

a total of more than 500 stitches in my face and head,

another 150 or so in the rest of my gnarled anatomy.

Then, those innumerable routine injuries, classed as ‘minor,’ which include sundry sprains, pulled ligaments, twisted muscles, black eyes, bumps, aches, bruises,

Hallelujah, Hallelujah . . .

Saga magazine’s November 1968 issue ran an article titled “Gordie Howe: Hockey’s Man Of 1000 Stitches,” but somehow that just seems like a speculative number conjured up by editors. Mr. Hockey does make a good case for his claim on most career stitches at gordiehowe.com. Enduring a career of “crippling injuries,” he amassed five hundred stitches in his face alone. The skin over the bridge of Howe’s nose was so often sewn that it took a particularly firm hand in later years just to get a needle in. Howe, incidentally, blamed himself for many of his sutures:

I was taught to put a lot of weight on my stick, so I’d lean on it. In order for a player to hook my stick off the puck, they would use a lot of strength. When they’d get ready to pull up my stick, I’d pull it out of the way, and their blade would hit me in the face. It would’ve been prevented if I left my stick where it was. About three hundred of my stitches were mistakes.

Between 1925 and 1940, Eddie Shore “received” six hundred stitches, which makes them sound like birthday wishes. I’ve also seen estimates of 900 and 978; Trent Frayne says 964. A 1947 report prefers “taken” for a stitching verb, and adds that Shore acquired them all “without ether.” He also had his nose shattered fourteen times and accepted five broken jaws.

It’s with stitch stories that hockey’s trainers come into the historical limelight. In the early days, the trainers were the ones with the needles and surgical thread. Bill Head did the job for years for the Canadiens. Like Bill Gadsby, Montreal defenceman Dollard St. Laurent was stitch-insured, and he recalls sometimes asking for more than actually needed, seven or eight when four would have done the job. Ed Froelich, the trainer for the Chicago Black Hawks and the Brooklyn Dodgers, had fond memories of goalie Charlie Gardiner in the final game of the 1932 finals. He went into that game with six stitches closing a wound over one eye, a further four eyebrowing the other, and ten more closing a wound on his scalp. “He had the wounds covered and wore a football helmet for additional protection and went out and held the Bruins scoreless to give the Black Hawks the championship.”

Leafs doctor Jim Murray was so trusted by the players that when they got cut during games on the road, they left their wounds unstitched until he could tend to them at home. Bobby Baun said, “He’d come at you with those fingers and they were just so big, you’d wonder how he was ever able to stitch as neat as he did.” (Another careful counter, Baun estimated that Dr. Murray applied half of his 143 career stitches.)

Whether or not Gadsby holds the record, his experience is memorable. One year (could be the year he was making all his stitch money) he took on sixty. In one lip he had thirty-one, inside and out, thanks to an unseen Tim Horton shot. His gums turned black. For two weeks he couldn’t eat. “The sorest stitches I ever had,” he said, “were inside my nose.” Marcel Bonin had followed through on a shot. Doc Nardiello told him it was going to hurt. Doc was right.

A CRUCIAL QUESTION about the game in its earliest incarnations has to be: How did the rules hold up? More to the point, were there fights? I have a theory about this, just a small one, easy to fold, fits in your pocket. Here it is: If at the original organized game in Montreal in 1875 there was a fight — or not even a fight, but a terrible slash — what if right then and there, at the very first opportunity, someone had objected? The prime minister or the governor general, say. There’s no evidence that they were there on the night, but if they had been, they could have stepped up and said, “Look, hold on, I think the way we’re going to do this is with no fights or grievous slashes, you’re simply going to have to restrain yourself.” I believe an announcement like that would have stuck.

Anger is an unavoidable hockey emotion, a fuel and a byproduct, undeniably a part of the game. But does it help you as a player or hinder you? In April of 2007, Hockey Night in Canada commentator Harry Neale watched Dallas centre Mike Modano take a petulant slashing penalty. “Anger,” he thought, “is just one letter short of danger.” In Ralph Henry Barbour’s Guarding His Goal, it’s a risk you run, though help is as close as the blanket on your bed, as our narrator explains: “Violent emotions such as anger generate a poison, the scientists tell us, and sleep is one of the antidotes.” What to do, though, if you can’t catch a nap on the ice?

An old hockey word for angry is ornery, one that’s often associated with Ted Lindsay. A crackling competitor, Look magazine called him in 1952. Descriptions of volatile players often emphasize the contrast between their demeanour on the ice and off, and Look’s is no exception. In the drawing room, Lindsay exuded gentility and charm. He wore quiet clothes. He was not unhandsome. His name suggested a minor diplomat or maybe the local harpsichord teacher. Even his lungs were peaceful: a cigarette made him sick when he was seven, so he never lit another. Hockey transformed him. It was the devil’s brew that turned Jekyll to Hyde. Brattish, snippy, a picture of unmitigated villainy. Gus Mortson from the Leafs was his good friend, but never mind, he’d brawl him anytime. Doug Bentley said you’d be a fool to take your eye off him. He called him the little so-and-so.

This is all played for chuckles, which is to say in the standard way for hockey profiles, now as then. Al Shields was rough when he had to be, but easygoing without his skates. The idea here, I suspect, is to establish clean character; otherwise, why would they be let loose on the ice where the law can’t reach? Especially since hockey anger is a stronger proof than the regular civilian stuff.

Roy MacGregor’s Felix Batterinski is a reliable guide on this, noting that when he starts to feel “anger akin to hockey anger” he’s talking about the high-test, blinding, swing-your-stick variety. At the rink it’s important to distinguish further, Batterinski explains. Playing in Finland, he suffers that dread Canadian affliction, a penalty called by an idiot foreign referee for a perfectly clean bodycheck. When he’s thrown out of the game for abusing the dumb Finn-of-a-moron, it’s not the bad call that incenses him, but the fact that his feelings have been misconstrued. He wasn’t angry at the ref, only frustrated. “There is fury against an opponent, which is something I enjoy, and there is frustration, which I despise. Yet they call it anger.” If they’d just understood his right to be frustrated and let it run its course, things would have been fine. Instead, the ref’s failure to properly identify his mood flares in the empty dressing room, where — anger? you want anger? — he destroys Kohos, stomps a mask, smashes a toilet seat, murders a sink. “Frustration,” says Batterinski, “has no cure.”

Maurice Richard would stab his stick at fans. His, of course, was some of the most notorious anger to have fuelled a hockey career. Ed Fitkin: “When he blows his top the result is atomic. No one can pacify him, it seems, until the rage within him runs its course.” Hugh MacLennan explained that Richard was affable once upon a time, “but ten years of being close-checked and nagged by lesser men have given him a trigger temper.”

INTIMIDATION IS A common hockey tactic, attempting to cow an opponent by threats or taunts or just by being someone named Georges Laraque or Bob Probert or John Ferguson. Making the other guy mad is another way to go, as in the case of Howie Morenz’s winger Aurèle Joliat, who used to wear a black baseball cap when he played to cover a growing bald spot. The word on Joliat was that if you kept knocking the hat to the ice he’d get so mad he couldn’t take a pass. He finally abandoned the cap.

Newsy Lalonde used his anger, in fiction, at least. In Hockey Night in the Dominion of Canada, Eric Zweig gives him an uncle who tells him never to smile when he’s carrying the puck. “You should snarl,” he advises. “A hockey player should have no friends on the ice.” In Quarrington’s King Leary, Lalonde glares with eyes “black as a nun’s habit.” When he’s angry (always) they take on a “lunatic” glimmer. “Many a player was beaten just by a look at those eyes.”

As a coach, you want to keep all your players firing on all their cylinders. One of the big worries that dogged men like Jack Adams and Conn Smythe was that marriage sapped players of their vital antipathy. Sports Illustrated suspected in 1960 that the Rangers’ Lou Fontinato had been, quote, tamed by the happiness of his marriage. (They were glad to report his eventual recovery.) When Ted Lindsay got himself engaged in 1951, Adams wasn’t sure what to expect. The happy couple appeared in a Detroit newspaper that year in an ad for electric stoves. “I think he’s so much in love, he may be softening up,” Adams said. Not to worry, though. While Adams was speculating, Lindsay had raised his stick as though — this is how it was reported — to decapitate New York defenceman Hy Buller. The game after that, he punched his good buddy Bill Ezinicki, who punched back.

In Rob Ritchie’s 2006 novel Orphans of Winter, a bodycheck is “a release of hatred.” The main character, Stephen, remembers his father telling him what Gordie Howe once said: “Hockey is an angry sport.” That’s how you have to play, he’s told, again and again: “For best results play angry, like there’s a storm inside you.” But if you draw on anger to win, you should be prepared also for the anger of losing, one of the symptoms of which is throwing equipment, such as skates, down stairs (a ten-year-old character in Pete McCormack’s Understanding Ken) and sticks out of hotel windows in Krefeld, Germany (real-life Soviet forwards after losing to Canada in 1955).

THE FIGHT AGAINST fighting presupposes that hockey and fighting can be separated, and that like Peter Pan and his shadow, the two come easily apart. But maybe the fighting is what makes the hockey possible? When Bobby Orr first got to Boston, manager Wren Blair was quick to identify a problem: “Bobby’s polite, friendly nature.” The league’s tough players were pushing him around. “You must stand up to them,” Blair counselled. “Show them that you’re willing to fight and before long they’ll stop bothering you. Then your hockey ability can take over.”

Let’s accept for the moment that there’s no divide: be it resolved that fights are a part of the game (which, by the way, is a man’s game). Also, they’re inevitable. Plus, they’re a safety valve, releasing naturally occurring anger and frustration, all of hockey’s volatile gases that would otherwise build up and explode. And there’s the argument, too, that a punch to the head is good for you once in a while, a shot of wake-up tonic.

That last one is borrowed, in fact, from boxing, and while I’ve never seen it offered as a defence of hockey fighting, it’s probably only a matter of time before someone reaches that way. It comes from a study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1954 asserting that a blow to the head (by a gloved fist) rarely produces cerebral changes. Moreover, Drs. Kaplan and Browder found that while some punches “may stun,” others can cause the brain to be — ready? — “altered to alertness.”

Certainly fights do alter the fans, or some fans. The ones who look happy when the fight starts, they stand up, hammer on the glass. The TV cameras catch their smiles. This is what Conn Smythe was talking about when he said, “We’ve got to stamp out this sort of thing, or people are going to keep on buying tickets.”

Madison Square brouhaha: Rangers and Black Hawks square off in a 1941 game in New York. Note the eager photographer up by the blueline.

You don’t have to want it, but you have to expect it. This is the argument of older men in big collars on TV. Tiger Williams said you consent to assault every time you lace on your skates. “It’s what hockey is all about.” Fighting, you see, is a byproduct of the swiftness and excitement of the game, “inevitable,” said Billy Reay, “with spirited men.”

Purist fans may dislike the brawls, as do a large number of the players. But coaches and players both know that there is no way to avoid them and remain competitive.

There must have been a first fight. The history books didn’t get it down — who was involved, where, why — not even the histories of violence, like Ira Gitler’s Blood on the Ice. He says it’s a delusion to think that the game was genteel until it moved north into the mining towns where the miners corrupted it. For evidence, he points to Toronto’s Granite Club in the 1890s, where players and spectators alike forgot themselves (as the Globe reported) and ended up in the newspaper followed by the words fisticuffs, regretted, and deplored.

There was more open-ice bodychecking in the early days. The game, all those old players agree, was rougher or, to use Sprague Cleghorn’s word, tougher. It was just a more robust world back then. Frank Boucher said that it’s hard to pinpoint when the toughness stopped and the violence started. Straightforward fist-to-fist combat was never a threat, according to Scott Young in 1955. He’d been watching the game since the 1920s: “If fighting had been going to kill the game, it would have died in infancy.”

At some point the sticks came into play, which is to say that when players got irked, annoyed, angry, or blinded by vengeance, they might just as well choose to use them for weapons. This was frowned upon at the time, though maybe not as much as now.

If it happened in the late 1930s that Baldy Northcott of the Montreal Maroons commenced swinging sticks with Babe Siebert of the Canadiens, nobody condoned that. Were they shocked when a fistfight followed, combined with a wrestling match down on the ice? No: hockey is a game of frictions and reactions. Then, in the penalty box, they went at it again, and Northcott went down and Herbie Cain jumped Siebert, bringing Stew Evans hurtling over the boards, after which nobody saw what happened down in the rumpus until Northcott emerged with blood in a gush down his face and said Siebert had kicked him, though Siebert said it was his fist and the referees said they would report Siebert for bicycling, and later Maroons coach King Clancy challenged Siebert to a fight and later still Siebert said, “Sure, I bicycled when I was down on my back on the ice, but I didn’t kick with my skates on the bench,” and Tommy Gorman said, “That guy Siebert has been kicking with his skates for ten years in this league.” Canadiens goalie Wilf Cude, who didn’t like to lose, stood by with tears in his eyes.

As early as 1918 it was serious enough in the newborn NHL that president Frank Calder had a warning for players who assaulted other players on the ice: Don’t even think about it. Or — go ahead. Try it. Be his guest. In which case, he’d launch them right out of the league. “He says that he will not allow $60-a-week rowdies to wreck enterprises in which several thousand dollars have been sunk,” the Globe reported. The Toronto Star applauded the toughness of the talk. “Rough-house rowdism will kill any sport, and it will kill pro hockey if it is allowed to flourish.”

Rowdism? Rowdyism was the more common term, and from contemporary reports, it was rife in the early days of hockey, just a scourge on the game. It seems to have covered a wide swath of unpleasantry, from a Brooklyn player clubbing another from the New York Athletic Club over the head with his stick, the latter collapsing on the ice bleeding, while the former was pursued off the ice by spectators, all the way to a punch-up between timekeepers at an early OHA game. After a 1918 stick brawl in Toronto, Alf Skinner and Joe Hall were convicted of disorderly conduct and given suspended sentences. The First World War was still on, which explains the notice Toronto manager Charlie Querrie pinned up in the dressing room: “It does not require bravery to hit another man over the head with a stick. If you want to fight, go to France.”

Lately, the fighters themselves have started to fret. In 2006, Georges Laraque, then with Phoenix, sounded sick with worry when asked by Canadian Press about “his craft.”

“I know that within two years there won’t be any fighters in the league anymore,” he said. “Within two years, I’m serious, because this is how it’s going. More and more teams don’t have fighters.” CP did the math: eleven teams were regularly dressing tough guys, seven others occasionally, twelve more not really at all.

Laraque:

I’m depressed about it because I sympathize with the guys who do my job. Those are my brothers. I was lucky that it wasn’t this way when I started nine years ago. If I lost my job tomorrow I could say I played a decade in the NHL. I’ve been fortunate. But the younger guys like McGrattan, I feel bad for them. They may not have a job soon.

Remember the old days when Probert and Domi fought? People would line up three hours before the game. They were so excited and would talk about it for days. It was crazy. Now we talk about revenue sharing and things like that. We’re turning hockey into a ballet league.

MICHAEL CUSACK HAD an idea. He also had a preamble. This is going back to the late days of 1884, about a decade after hockey had organized itself in Montreal in 1875, and to Ireland, where Cusack was born in 1847. He was a schoolteacher and a civil servant, also an athlete, strident in all his dealings, and he believed that traditional Irish games were fading. This, to Cusack, constituted several sorts of shame, including one that was cultural and even metaphysical — the notion being that a nation that loses its games loses into the bargain bits of its soul and nerve, many of its better angels, not to mention its mojo. So he thought he’d do something about it.

Ireland’s famine wasn’t too far in the past at the time, and English rule was very much in the present. Along with everything else the English were imposing on Ireland were English games like rugby. Worn down by their historical hunger, the Irish weren’t up to resisting. “The tyranny of imported and enforced customs and manners,” Cusack decried in “A Word About Irish Athletics,” an article he published (unsigned) in October of 1884. The games of the people must be preserved, he said. “Voluntary neglect of such pastimes is a sure sign of national decay.”

In November, in the billiard room of Miss Hayes’ Commercial Hotel in Thurles, County Tipperary, Cusack and a company of like-minded men founded the Gaelic Athletic Association for the Preservation and Cultivation of National Pastimes (GAA). There was handball and there was rounders, but the main GAA sports were (and continue to be) hurling and Gaelic football. The early rules that were laid down the year following are like commandments anywhere: they have a tendency to bark at you in a way that makes you want to break them, just because. Lots of There shall bes and musts. They measure the field and outline the fouls. What they don’t tell you is how to comport yourself, what to think of your opponent. And though the Archbishop of Cashel, T.W. Croke, did suggest amendments banning the sale of porter and ale and alcoholic drinks on match days, for the most part the GAA rules steer clear of moral instruction and behavioural prompts.

Then there’s the preamble. It sounds like a little stroll you take before a bigger hike, but in fact it’s important. You wonder if hockey, with a similar vision enshrined from the start — a graceful few paragraphs to guide its principles, some declaration of spirit and intent — might look different today. Cusack published his preamble on February 21, 1885:

[W]hether it is granted or not that with the decline of the Irish language came a decline of religion, of morals, and of intellect, I am sure no sensible person will deny that, as a nation, we have very considerably declined physically since we gave up our national game of Hurling.

The game is called baire, in Irish, and the hurley is called caman. The goalkeeper is cul-baire. The game is probably the oldest game extant. There is not a shadow of doubt that it was played in Ireland two thousand years ago. It was the training of the hurling field that made the men and boys of the Irish Brigade.

Guard the game well. But in doing so it will be necessary to play without anger or passion. Irishmen have endured many agonies for the sake of their country without going mad. Why, then, should we gratify our enemies by getting up an unseemly row because one of us get an accidental crack of a stick from a fellow-workman?

Other sports? Baseball’s rules come with a Foreword, but other than a quick wag of the finger — the popularity of the game will grow only if everybody respects “the discipline of its code of rules” — it’s straight to business. Given the geography of baseball’s diamond, all that fair territory and foul, you’d think there’d be room in the rules for some light moral guidance, but the best baseball can do is a few pointers on good grooming. Otherwise, zilch.

Basketball has a no-nonsense addendum, the “Comments on the Rules,” that manages to maintain a friendly, just-giving-everybody-a-heads-up kind of a tone. Section K covers “Punching, Fighting, and Elbow Fouls.” No room for confusion here: “Violent acts of any nature on the court will not be tolerated.” Towards the end, there’s this plain warning:

There is absolutely no justification for fighting in an NBA game. The fact that you may feel provoked by another player is not an acceptable excuse. If a player takes it upon himself to retaliate, he can expect to be subject to appropriate penalties.

As if this didn’t wave its arms and point at hockey’s silence, there’s always the NBA’s Section N: “Guidelines for Infection Control.” This is the one that stipulates procedures in case a player sustains “a laceration or a wound where bleeding occurs or if blood is visible.” Of course, what happens is that the ref “shall suspend the game” and get the guy some help, also he’ll want to be on the watch for “any lesion, wound or dermatitis,” making sure it’s patched up, because of course no sense risking “contamination to and/or from other sources.” The NBA’s rules take a stand on taunting, too. I’m just saying.

Over at the NFL, if you look at football’s rules, there’s no mission stated there, no rousing reminders on conduct other than a brief review of “Unfair Acts.” As for the other football, the Beautiful Game, you’d think maybe that might be the sport to trump all the others in eloquent outline of values and verities. It’s not so: soccer’s laws are as prosaic as any.

The early rules of hockey have a Shaker simplicity. It might have been an elegant argument for deregulation they were making, a willingness by the game’s founders and their heirs to keep things simple, stay out of the way, let the market decide. Turns out, hockey’s rulebook is the wrong place to look for philosophy or oratory; there’s no preamble to be found. It’s probably too late anyway. The whole problem with preambles is the pre-ness involved. If you don’t get in there right at the start, you find that the pre has already ambled. You can’t unring the bell, as the poet says.

Unless you, um, simply decide the time has come for a change. Take cricket, for example, which enshrined its preamble in 2000, introducing a preface to its rules called Spirit of Cricket. The Laws, as cricket calls its rules, are strong and Biblical, riding along on words like obey and responsibility. The bit I like right at the beginning is this: “Any action which is seen to abuse this spirit causes injury to the game itself.” There’s the reminder to RESPECT, all caps, your opponents, your own captain, the work of the umpires, and the game’s, quote, traditional values. There’s the decree against “cheating or any sharp practice.” And there’s point number 6, just the summary conviction: “There is no place for any act of violence on the field of play.” Cricket is four centuries old; its preamble, a decade and a half. It gives you hope.

WILLIAM BEERS WAS our Michael Cusack, a tireless organizer and promoter of sport, a fervent nationalist, a great Canadian, and a dentist. More, too: Beers is the man who’s usually credited with having started dental journalism in this country, establishing several journals, and when he died, he left behind the most extensive dental library in the country. But, sport: Beers really had room in his heart for only one, and it wasn’t hockey.

He was called, quote, a flaming lacrosse evangelist. In 1869, he published a book, Lacrosse: Canada’s National Game, claiming his subtitle had been officially ratified by an act of Parliament, which isn’t true, no matter what you may have heard. Lacrosse, Beers wrote, “dislikes all hypocrisy, unnaturalness, and assumption, and it is the very thing to knock all such out of a man.” Which is impressive, you have to admit, and possibly enough to keep the game on the ascendant. Undeniably, by the mid-1880s, it was breaking out all across the country, and Beers was leading teams overseas, including a famous tour of Great Britain that used lacrosse as a vivid advertisement for emigration to Canada. Sprague and Odie’s father, William Cleghorn, was on that tour, along with Caughnawaga Iroquois players named Deer Whispering, Strong Arm, and June Stand Up. They travelled ten thousand miles, handed out half-a-million brochures, and played 452 games. If any sport seemed to have momentum on its side, a bright, expansive future both amateur and professional, it would have to look like lacrosse.

So what happened? Lacrosse didn’t die out entirely, of course, but nor did it grow in the way that hockey did in the early years of the twentieth century. One wag blamed big business: “Its destruction began when business enterprises — railways, ferry companies, wealthy individuals — started spending large sums on the purchase and salaries of players.” The best players were thereby lured away to the big cities, which discouraged local pride, and that’s why the patient died.

Perhaps it was the roughness. Or the terrible refereeing. Newsy Lalonde starred at lacrosse and hockey; he thought it was the war. Four hundred good lacrosse players went overseas to fight in 1914–18, he said, and the game was never the same again after that. In 1958, Clarence Campbell told a panel in Ottawa that Henry Ford was to blame. “The man who ruined lacrosse,” he said, apparently in earnest, “was the man who provided the people with a means of going for a drive on a Saturday afternoon.”

This is just one more hunch, I admit, but was the demise dental? When Beers died in 1900, widowing his library, he left the nation’s dentists without a strong voice to rally them to the game he so loved. Sure enough, the evidence of more and more hockey-minded dentists starts to accumulate in the first decade of the new century. Could there have been a recognition — how to put this? Did they see in hockey’s hard ice, her free-flying pucks and elbows, the creative high-sticking — was there simply more professional potential for dentists? It’s impossible to say. All I can do is plead the facts, one of which is that by 1916, one of the stronger teams on the OHA senior circuit was the Toronto Dentals, also known as the Toothpullers.

YOUR TEETH TAKE their chances. Harry Howell kept all of his through a career of 1,411 NHL games. Goalie Ed Giacomin’s survived 609. Another New York Ranger, Rod Gilbert, lost four to a puck when he was fifteen, but no more after that. But don’t count on preservation. You never should. No-teeth is a defining feature for hockey players, better than a driver’s licence, as detailed by Don DeLillo in Amazons: “Bent noses, glazed eyes, those gaps in their teeth.” When Dave Bidini calls a chapter in Tropic of Hockey (2000) “Bobby Clarke’s Teeth” to evoke an old rink attendant in the Chinese city of Harbin, nobody who watched the Flyers in the 1970s (or beer commercials thirty years later) has any trouble picturing the man’s ruined grin.

In 1971, according to a survey of NHL gums, 68 per cent of players had sacrificed at least one tooth to the cause. I’ve heard it said, offhandedly, that Eddie Shore had every living tooth in his head knocked out during his career, though that may just be antique newspaper shorthand from a time when American newspapers were still trying to understand why these Canadians took the game so seriously.

Teeth out, dentures laid aside, hockey players show mouths that look like they’re old apples (Mike Cassidy in Quinn McIlhone’s Trade Rumours, 1985). Andy Bathgate was a boy who whacked his head one time, lost one tooth, cracked another. The attending dentist told him to suck it up. “Andy,” he said, “just remember you can never be a hockey player if you’ve got your teeth.” He could and he didn’t. Flash forward twenty-few years to a 1959 Sports Illustrated sighting: “The hollow-cheeked look he has on the ice is due to the fact that he has no upper teeth and leaves his plate in the locker room.”

Not everyone sacrifices teeth so cheaply. Colleen Howe, Gordie’s wife, explains what’s at stake in her book My Three Hockey Players: “To a hockey wife and/or mother, teeth are more precious than diamonds. No stranger can fully appreciate the joy we feel at seeing a child smile with teeth that are his own.” As coach of CSKA Moscow, Konstantin Loktev felt the same way about his players, which is why he pulled them off the ice one night in Philadelphia. Later, Loktev said he didn’t want his players losing teeth. To which Milt Dunnell, in the Toronto Star, growled, “Anybody who wants teeth doesn’t belong in the NHL.”

In Roy MacGregor’s The Last Season, all your teeth intact is a letter you wear, big and scarlet enough to condemn an entire continent. Felix Batterinski looks around his Finnish dressing room at his new teammates:

They all have their teeth. All of them, all of their teeth. And that says all anyone ever needs to know about European hockey, as far as this boy’s concerned.

In North America, the pre-game routine in the dressing room includes everybody stashing their crowns and bridges away in a paper cup or plastic case. A funny hockey joke used to be for someone to sneak in and switch around all the false teeth. Vic Hadfield couldn’t resist, neither could goalie Eddie Giacomin. In Giacomin’s case, he reports that in practice, vengeful teammates would swear at him and shoot at his face, try to break his teeth. One of Sweden’s all-time greats, Sven Tumba, tried the same prank at the Boston training camp in 1957, which may be one reason why he was mailed back to Sweden without having played a single NHL game.

Doug Burns is the hero of Fred Stenson’s funny novel titled Teeth. Burns is pretty good, a goal scorer who’s never lost one. This unEddie Shore is a first-round draft choice, just into his fourth season with the NHL Bisons; his secret is steady brushing, determined flossing, and the painstaking avoidance of all fights, elbows, highsticks, or errant pucks. He loses his first to a Montreal madman, who drives his helmeted head into Burns’s mouth. Knocks his left front tooth clean out. His first reaction is to retire. That’s it, enough, game over. “A missing tooth is a hole in your head for life.”

But that’s patent absurdity, of course, a hockey player quitting because he lost a single tooth, a fine Canadian joke. Funnier still is what he wants to do next: write a book. “So many hockey nobodies had done this that I thought, why not me too?” But publishers aren’t interested. His is a regional reputation. What about a book for hockey parents on the care of their children’s teeth? (Sample chapter: “Teeth as a Determiner of Personal Identity.”)

In The Last Season, Batterinski goes down to block a shot. He does it well, too, if he does say so himself: “Bill Gadsby-style — knees flat out, hands to the side the way Al Jolson finished ‘Mammy.’” When the slapshot crashes into his mouth, he describes “a painless, almost soft, certainly silent push against my mouth.” It leaves him spitting into the faceoff circle, blood and the last of his premolars. “There was no pain whatsoever.” Plenty of rage, though: he believes that the shot was aimed with malice aforethought.

Fiction tries its best, but reality trumps it every time. Circa 1968, in a game against the Oakland Seals, Philadelphia’s Ed Van Impe took Wayne Muloin’s slapshot full in the mouth. “Three or four teeth on the lower jaw and seven on the upper jaw had been smashed,” recalled broadcaster Gene Hart, “and after being sutured up to stop the bleeding, Eddie had gone back out and finished the game.” The stitch-count came in at thirty-five for Van Impe’s mouth and gums and a further seventeen for his tongue. After the game, his wife shuttled him over to Philadelphia’s Lankenau Hospital for surgery to uproot the shattered battlements of his smile. U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey wrote him a letter conveying his congratulations.

HOCKEY IS RIOT and schemozzle, but it isn’t war. Lacrosse used to be war, we’re told. Soccer causes wars if it’s not careful: for example, the one between Honduras and El Salvador in the summer of 1969. Not hockey, though. “I’m amazed everyone takes Canada Cup nationalism so seriously,” Brett Hull mused in a memoir he published under the bellicose title Shootin’ and Smilin’ (1991). “I never viewed it as Canada vs. USA. I hate the whole anthem aspect of the tournament. We’re not going to war; we’re playing hockey.” Igor Larionov agreed. “I always preferred the word ‘rival’ to ‘opponent,’ which somehow seemed to grate upon the ears. It sounded too much like ‘enemy,’ and we were playing a game, not going to war.”

Almost, though. The closest hockey has come to spilling into international conflict may have been in the spring of the year of the Soccer War. Nothing to do with us: this was in Czechoslovakia, a year after the Soviet Union had invaded. Continuing unrest in the former had the latter revving up its armoured units. Careful, the Kremlin warned, any more of your agitating and we’ll send in the tanks to run over demonstrators. In March, the 36th World Hockey Championships got underway in Stockholm. On March 21, the Czechs beat the Soviets 1–0. They did it again, 4–3, on March 28. In Prague, the people poured into the streets to celebrate, bait any Soviets they could find, and trash their national airline offices. Happy hockey fans smashed windows and built a bonfire of chairs and desks. They burned all the models of Aeroflot airplanes and the pictures of Lenin. In this, perhaps, they mistook hockey for life: the results in Stockholm didn’t, in the end, change anything in Prague. In fact, they didn’t even win the Czechs the championship, which the Soviets took home a few days later. Czechoslovakia ended up third. For one night it didn’t matter, though. The people wore paper hats and the hats said 4–3 and the chants in the streets of the capital were “Russians go home!” and “Today Tarasov, tomorrow Brezhnev.”

Wartime can present a major existential test for hockey. The First World War was a serious war, hockey was firmly established, and people had had time to connect the two: hockey as a preparation for war, an incubator for soldiers. Not in quite the doctrinaire way that the Soviets later would apply it, but it was a start.

Reading about the hockey of this era, you detect just the tiniest hint of rivalry, a sense that war was a bit of a nuisance to hockey, in an upstart WHA sort of a way. The NHL was still a few years away, but its forerunner, the National Hockey Association, had already suspended a player named Art Ross, who’d been bruiting the idea of a rival league in 1914.

In August of that year it was still possible to imagine business as usual, to ignore the silliness that was starting up in Belgium and France. There was a British letter, reported in the Times that summer. B.M. Patton, captain of London’s Princes Club, wrote to his counterpart at the hockey department of the Berlin Skating Club. “It is our warmest wish that the good relations between our two clubs remain unclouded in the interest of sport, independently of anything that may happen.” He looked forward to next winter’s championship. He sent his greetings to all ice hockey players in Germany.

Shadowy men in a shadowy Garden: Bruins host Maroons on spectral Boston ice in the early 1930s.

In Canada, when war broke out and the clouds lowered over Europe, more and more players were joining the ranks. Who better to fight? In 1916, the mp and soldier Colonel J.A. Currie published a book called The Red Watch in which he praised the vigour with which lacrosse and hockey players had taken to the ranks of Canadian imperial battalions for overseas service. “It was afterwards to be shown,” he enthused,

that the manly and strenuous native Canadian sports, lacrosse and hockey, practiced by almost every boy in the country from the time he is able to walk, are of a character admirably suited to produce bold and courageous soldiers. Boys who have been accustomed to handle lacrosse and hockey sticks, develop arm and shoulder muscles that make the carrying and use of the rifle easy. Firing for hours during a hot and sustained engagement does not fatigue nor exhaust them as it otherwise would. In the rough work of the bayonet charge they keep their heads, and have confidence in their ability at close quarters to overcome their antagonist. They do not dread a blow or a bayonet, for they have been accustomed to roughing it all their lives. When it comes to “cold steel” it is the man who has the courage and confidence in himself that wins, for nineteen times out of twenty the other man is dominated before blades are crossed, and at once either throws up his hands or runs.

Fine words, and a good reason to keep on taking all those cross-checks. And yet: Was it possible to play hockey without insulting the serious work at the front? Was it right for young men to be out on ice in Canada while their peers were overseas facing the fight?

The president of the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada addressed this at the start of 1917. Praising those who’d joined up, he also wanted to reassure their stay-at-home friends. “To those who for various reasons cannot go,” he said, “I would ask of you to keep the game going, and the sacrifice of your time and experience for the training up of the younger generation in clean, manly sport, so that we may always be prepared for any emergency.”

War maimed and killed hockey players just like it did to everyone else. Having carried your stick to boost your bicep only took you so far. Red Dutton played for the Maroons and the Americans, but in 1917 he was nineteen-year-old Private Mervyn Dutton, a member of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, when a German barrage filled his legs with shrapnel. Bullet Joe Simpson, one of the first players to be called “the Babe Ruth of hockey,” served with the Cameron Highlanders and won a Military Medal for bravery. Twice he was wounded, “once by machine gun bullets in his legs,” though “good surgery kept him from lameness.” His forte, said the New Yorker, was “solo goal-shooting from mid-ice.” There’s no way of calculating how much post-traumatic stress hockey absorbed when the war was over and the hockey players returned, just as the NHL was making its debut in 1918.

Lest we forget: Frank McGee lost the sight in one eye to a puck in 1900, retired as a player, refereed, but couldn’t stay away, and so came back. In 1905, he helped the Ottawa Silver Seven beat Dawson City to win the 1905 Stanley Cup, scoring fourteen goals in one game. Don Reddick wrote a novel, Killing Frank McGee (2000), in which a character observes, “He doesn’t look like a hockeyist, he looks like an altar boy.” He was thirty-two when he somehow passed his medical to enlist in 1914; he died a lieutenant at the Somme in 1916. His body was never recovered.

Nobody talks much about Scotty Davidson, but some people who saw him play rated him the best ever. He’s in the Hall of Fame, like McGee; Stephen Harper also has a (passing) place for him in his book: the PM calls him a power forward. In 1914, six months after captaining the Toronto Blueshirts to Stanley Cup victory, Davidson signed up to serve with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was twenty-three. Nine months later he was in France, a lance-corporal with E Company, 2nd Battalion, Eastern Ontario Regiment. Volunteering for a bombing party, he handed over his bayonet and watch to his friend George Richardson, another hockey player, saying, “I may never come back, but those Germans are going to catch blazes before morning.” He was within a few feet of an enemy trench when his companions withdrew. He stayed to get rid of his grenades. By Richardson’s account, German soldiers surrounded him, called on him to surrender, and heard him refuse. He crashed his last grenade against the body of a German officer. When friends retrieved Davidson’s body next morning, it was torn with bullets and bayonet wounds. He deserved a Victoria Cross, they said.

NO MORE, SAID Clarence Campbell in December of 1948; he’d had enough, and he wrote a letter to the NHL’s general managers to tell them so. Was he demanding an end to fighting? Nixing all ear-chewing? The ambushing of referees, the selling of their whistles for scrap?

No. The president had decided that indiscriminate profanity by players, coaches, and trainers had to stop. It was getting worse and the fans — certain fans — needed protection. “In our game,” he wrote, “the best and most high-priced seats are located in the vicinity of the players benches and closest to the ice. It is very offensive indeed, particularly to women, and contributes absolutely nothing to our spectacle and will inevitably drive some people out of the rinks.”

It was that old tension between the realities of the game and the demands (and perceived sensitivities) of the paying public. Campbell increasingly found himself standing up in defence of the sensitivities. On the practical side, as Dave Bidini says, “There’s no room for polite in hockey.”

Insults are a part of the game, always have been. Tempers fray and flare, but the burn is fast. “Sure there’s cussing out there,” referee Wally Harris once shrugged. “It’s just like it is anywhere men get together.”

Percy LeSueur’s 1909 primer How to Play Hockey included advice: “Do not listen to remarks from the spectators. It is a habit, particularly at the general admission end of the rinks, to call all kinds of things at the goalkeeper and he cannot listen to them and keep his mind on the game.”

There are some hold-outs. Eddie Bush, an early mentor to Paul Henderson, was known as a coach who stood on the bench and screamed when he helmed the Hamilton Red Wings in the 1960s. But in his dressing rooms (which he insisted on keeping spotless), Bush kept a cuss book, logging fines of five to twenty-five cents against players caught bluing the atmosphere. In the NHL, there have are documented abstainers: Milt Schmidt of the Bruins was a gentleman, says Rocket Richard, and so was the second Harry Watson, who played for the Leafs and didn’t antagonize any Americans in 1924. Syl Apps, too: “Never, absolutely never, would he say anything on the ice.” Igor Larionov has good things to say about the Swede Kent Nilsson (he was open, free; Larionov saw in him “somewhat of a Russian soul”) and the Czech goalie Dushan Pasek (“kind-hearted, approachable, a well-wishing person”).

On the other side of the ledger: nobody could cuss like the Gump, according to Vic Hadfield. And what about the spitters? Georges Vézina, Paddy Moran, and Nels Stewart are all supposed to have chewed tobacco when they played in order to have a cheekful at the ready to unleash into opponents’ faces.

In southern Ontario in 1914, Frank Selke was coaching his hometown team, the Berlin Union Jacks, when war broke out. It was two years before the city changed its name — Industria, Newborn, and Confidence were in the running before Kitchener was finally chosen — but in the meantime:

We were called “Baby-killers,” “Pro-Germans,” “Flatheads”; and many other grossly insulting names. Often we had to fight our way bitterly out of the arenas when we were playing away from home.

“The language could get real thick,” says Red Storey, who refereed through the 1950s. Herbert Warren Wind observed that Phil Watson, when he played for the Rangers in the 1940s, believed that the worst slur was to suggest that a rival was fading. “You damn been-has!” Watson might cry. “Pollution! I run you up two trees, you no-brains, mal de tête, mother of pig, fils de chien!”

Dennis Hull says that Gordie Howe never talked to rivals. Maurice Richard, he says, was selective: he only insulted stars, players in his own orbit. From the Rocket’s brother, Henri, Hull always heard the same thing, which, in his autobiography, he thoughtfully renders in his best Henri accent: “My brudder is bedder dan your brudder.”

Henri figures in a lot of trash-talking tales of old. Toronto’s sly Bobby Baun: “I never dared look at Henri and call him a ‘frog’; instead, I used to call him ‘gorf.’” Hull says that his Chicago teammate Stan Mikita hated Henri, and vice versa. Mikita talks about this: “Henri would call me a ‘DP’ and I’d snap back with ‘Frog’ or ‘Pea Soup’ . . . Words led to fists and penalties.” It was nothing Mikita hadn’t heard before. As he writes in his autobiography, “Among the first words I heard from Canadian boys were ‘foreigner’ and ‘DP’ and even before I knew what the words meant their tone stung me like a sharp knife.” In 1962, he wrote about what he’d learned about NHL needling. “In the heat of the game . . . when the pressure is on . . . if you talk to an opposing player, find his weak spot . . . bug him, the chances are that he’s going to come after you.” He goes on:

Needling is an art. There are some players you just can’t get excited, no matter what you say or do to them. These include Andy Bathgate, Gordie Howe, Johnny Bucyk, Red Kelly, Dave Keon, and Alex Delvecchio. You can usually accomplish a lot by needling Brewer . . . Carl is also a pretty good needler himself. It’s very easy to irritate Eddie Shack. All you have to do is use psychology.

Ted Lindsay used as much as he could when he played against Maurice Richard. “I used to go to the Rocket and I’d say, ‘You dumb fuckin’ Frenchman, I’m going to take your head off your shoulders with this stick.’ And before you know it, he’s forgetting the puck.” On his side, Richard acknowledged that Lindsay was the “worst” he faced. “It wasn’t so much that he was a dirty player, but as far as I am concerned he had a dirty mouth. He swore at everybody on the ice.”

Ken Dryden says, “the most damnable thing an NHL player can be called is a ‘snow thrower.’” Which sounds like Dryden wasn’t paying close attention.

In 2004, Ontario’s Junior Hockey League announced that it was suspending for five games a Plymouth Whalers defenceman who’d called an opponent a “Euro.” A year later it happened again, same word, new suspension. “This comes under our non-tolerance in the area of diversity,” said OHL director of operations Ted Baker. “We don’t feel there was any intentional malice, but we’ve taken a strong stance on any type of reference to a player’s country of origin.” In this case it was a Slovakian player, Stefan Ruzicka, who’d been targeted — by young Jonas Fiedler, from the Czech Republic.

If only Clarence Campbell had succeeded in stamping out foul language in 1948. In 1955, Campbell started the year at a Canadiens-Red Wings game. Another three months and he’d be in the middle of the Richard Riot. (He was already investigating Richard for having slapped linesman George Hayes across the face.) For now, he was concerned that Detroit was sullying the game with bad words. Hockey is a business in which obscenity has no place, he said, “can’t benefit anyone and can have no defender.” Sure, once in a while, hockey’s strenuous pace and the resulting “harassed feelings” might generate the odd mild curse, “such as when you hit your thumb with a hammer.”

But it is revolting to make obscenity part of standard speech and it is on this basis I am approaching the situation. It is not a matter of disciplinary action against individuals; it is something that has to do with [the] standard of conduct of our organization.

During the game in question, Campbell was sitting too close to the Detroit bench to ignore coach Jimmy Skinner’s squalls of profanity. He felt he had no choice but to intercede and quell them.

“It was the most absurd thing I had ever heard of,” Red Wings manager Jack Adams said afterwards; he wanted the NHL governors to censure the president. Skinner, for his part, had told Campbell to sit back down: “You’re only a spectator at this hockey game.” Campbell agreed with this version of events. For some reason, though, he wouldn’t go into specifics. “In effect he told me to mind my own business,” was the most he’d say to reporters.

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER of 1939, as Canada’s Parliament met to decide whether the country should go to war or not, the NHL’s rules committee was mulling over some important questions of its own. Should the league continue to compel referees to delay a game every time one of the coaches wanted to debate a decision made on the ice? What about the penalty-shot rule? Leave it as is? There was time still, of course, to deliberate before the new season opened in early November, and if weightier decisions needed to be made, well, the league’s full board of governors was meeting in Detroit in a few weeks’ time.

League president Frank Calder addressed the larger pending storm. If the government felt that they shouldn’t play, they wouldn’t. “Professional hockey,” he said, “is just as patriotic as any other endeavour.” Players who wanted to volunteer for the fight would be aided in every way. Still, though, “we feel that well-conducted sport will be of great benefit to the national morale in these days of worry and mental stress.”

Meanwhile, the NHL soldiered on. The Rangers won the first wartime Stanley Cup in 1940, beating the Leafs. Given the times, there wasn’t room for news of the win on the front page of the Globe and Mail, which is fair enough with serious matters afoot, the British having taken control of Narvik in Norway, for instance. Maybe if the Leafs had won, they’d have it made it to page one. Overall, there was a new sobriety to the coverage, a self-subduing instinct.

By the start of the next hockey season, Red Dutton’s New York Americans had lost fourteen of sixteen players, mostly to the Canadian Army. (Eventually, Boston’s Art Ross would call for all wartime records to be expunged from the books on account of the weakness of the teams.) Again there was debate about the role of sports in wartime, none of it too fierce: by this time there was no real doubt about their value. After the United States joined the war, Paul V. McNutt, the federal commissioner of Manpower, made the point that baseball was the number one recreational diversion and morale-builder for both soldiers and the home-front working man (movies were number two). He had the stats handy: fully 70 per cent of the news cabled overseas by the Office of War Information was sporting news.

The war would see some sports curtailed — so long, golf and bowling — but baseball would go on. He said, “No concessions will be made to baseball, but no cease-and-desist order will be given either.” Seventy-five per cent of the Major League’s players were serving in the armed forces. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be changes: game times were shifted to 10:30 AM to help war workers and the teams cut back on travelling. Colleges shut down football for the duration, and campus rinks that used oil to drive the refrigeration were closed. To keep students active, one paper reported, “simple games, such as softball and touch football, and games that have a carry-over value in after-life, like tennis and squash, will be taught and played.”

Ahead of the 1942 season, the NHL showed its warlike resolve by doing away with overtime. There were discussions about shaving club rosters from fifteen to twelve. Editorial pages murmured impatiently now and then. Said the Globe in 1942: “Hockey battles strengthen the conviction that the game has produced a fine crop of prospective Commando troops, and that the sooner they are in uniform the sooner the war will end.”

As NHLers flocked to the war effort, the war effort gave back what it could. For example, in 1942 a young machinist helping with the manufacture of Ram tanks at the Montreal Locomotive Works was invited to try out for the Montreal Canadiens. (An ankle hockey broke kept him out of the Army.) He himself had a hard time believing the Habs wanted him, for though he’d been playing for their affiliate team in the Quebec Senior League, he’d got himself a reputation as fragile, plus Maurice Richard had scored eight meagre goals the previous year.

There were those who argued that wartime presented a perfect opportunity to reshape the rickety edifice not just of hockey but of the whole tenement neighbourhood of sport — tear it down and rebuild, they cried. John R. Tunis wrote a long article in Harper’s suggesting that here was a chance “to institute a program of sport for everyone, the only system worthy of a nation calling itself a democracy.” Canada was a good example: “Hockey is Canada’s national game and every Canadian can skate because every small town in the Dominion has a municipal rink.” That was the way, he said, to build “a race of outdoor-loving and outdoor-living people.”

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND SOCIAL psychologists have wondered whether sports might be a means by which societies manage aggressive behaviour. Using words like recrudescence (a great potential hockey word) in close proximity to terms like ergic tension and substitute discharge (sounds uncomfortable as well as messy), social scientists have had a lot to say about combative sports and the societies who practise them. A Toronto lawyer made news in 1973 when he said that there was a good reason Canada didn’t send troops to Vietnam: we already had all the fight we needed in hockey. Do peaceful peoples use them as an alternative to war? That is, they don’t need to fight, having burned off all their aggression on the field, or the rink, of play?

Most of us would probably lean the other way, towards the idea that, actually, it’s the warlike people who are more likely to play at combative sports, that their violent pastimes embody who they are as a people rather than separate them from their identity. Richard Sipes’s research bears this out. In 1973, Sipes published a holocultural correlation study looking at a sample of twenty societies from world history, and while I was hoping he’d chosen Peterborough or Flin Flon as one of them, the closest he came was the Copper Inuit of what is today Nunavut.

His definition of combative sport:

There is actual or potential body contact between opponents, either direct or through real or simulated weapons. One of the objectives of the sport appears to be inflicting real or symbolic bodily harm on the opponent or gaining playing field territory from the opponent.

He looked at Hutterites and Dorobos, Tikopians and Abipons. Guess what? Those societies that tended to be always attacking other peoples played aggressive games, except for the anomalous Tikopians, who rarely bothered anyone, despite their enthusiasm for a zestful game in which the object was to advance on the opposing team and smack them on the head or the ribs with a sago-leaf stick.

WOULD THERE BE enough sticks and pucks to keep going? Wartime put a stop to the manufacture of bowling pins, to save on maple, and in 1941, the war in the Pacific cut off the supply of crude rubber. Stockpiles would last for a while, but reserves of corsets, golf balls, and sink stoppers would be gone by the end of 1942. Still, it was February of 1943 before the U.S. government put shoes under rationing, including boots attached to ice and roller skates. (Boudoir and ballet slippers were exempted.)

The Chicago Black Hawks appealed to their fans:

It would be a shame to see a great sport and morale-building game like hockey go into the discards because of a shortage of pucks. That’s why we call upon our fans to throw back our pucks in the interest of sport and conservation of valuable defense material.

Lots of players served both hockey and military, keeping their skates when they donned the uniform, like Max Bentley, if not Hec Kilrea. After a long NHL career with Ottawa, Toronto, and Detroit, Kilrea fought with the U.S. Army at Anzio in Italy and then participated in the push across Alsace into Germany in the war’s last winter. He won a Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman Badge, and twice saved his company from what the citation for his Distinguished Service Cross called peril by personally stopping two German tanks with a bazooka. He ended up wounded, taking sixty-six pieces of shrapnel. Said Hec: “War is almost as dangerous as hockey.”

In 1944, Canada’s Defence minister announced that army teams and personnel were hereafter banned from participating in the Allan and Memorial Cup playdowns. “The Canadian Army,” he said, “has always regarded hockey as a great sport, but now we must carry the puck to Berlin.”

Red Dutton, meanwhile, advised that players returning from battlefield to rink would need some specialized conditioning. He was thinking back to his own experience following the First World War. “We could stickhandle just as well as before going to war,” he said. The problem was that all the military marching and physical training developed the wrong muscles for a puckster. It would take hockey’s soldiers a while to regain their skating legs.

HIS NICKNAME WAS Terrible, as in Ivan the. His given names were Blake and Theodore, but people used to say better options might have been Vicious or Venal. He was no choirboy and played like a Tasmanian devil. Accounts of his career tend to include words like bloodshed and waged war. Even teammates hated Ted Lindsay sometimes, because of what he did to them in practice. A mean sucker, they said, don’t get too close to him or you’ll bleed.

In March of 1956, someone telephoned a threat to shoot him dead on the ice, his teammate Gordie Howe, too, if they attempted to play against the Leafs that night in Toronto. The police said they’d be on their guard. Two peculiar things happened: first, Toronto Star sportswriter Jim Hunt dressed up in a long coat and hat and went into Maple Leaf Gardens shaded behind sunglasses and carrying a fake wooden rifle in a real shotgun case. He sat with it between his knees for the first period and then laid it down under his seat. No one noticed. Second, in overtime, Lindsay scored the winning goal for Detroit and afterwards, to show his sense of humour, he skated to centre ice and raised up his stick, blade to his shoulder. Then he pretended to machine-gun the Toronto fans. At Lindsay’s website, where he raises money for autism research, you can buy an autographed commemorative photo from that night, US$125 for the shot of Lindsay taking aim at the stands.

“Fully three-quarters of the men in this Hall of Fame are sons of bitches!” says Quarrington’s King Leary. Because it helps?

Some, maybe, can’t avoid it: Eddie Shore, says Michael Farber, was “preternaturally mean.” Sprague Cleghorn, too, maybe, although he pleaded self-defence: “I never did anything to anybody who never did anything to me.” You can understand anger having a hockey use, as a motivator, as fuel. Mean could have a tactical application, helping you to crush the spirit out of a rival by, say, breaking his ankle with a lumberjackly swipe of a slash. To some it might seem a viable option. Mostly, though, mean seems like a nasty indulgence, a personal style, a question of what you can get away with. Ed Van Impe, one of Kharlamov’s many attackers, wasn’t mean, according to a long-time Philadelphia broadcaster; that was just his approach to the game.

Mean is the protagonist’s brother, Kirby, in Steven Galloway’s charming first novel, Finnie Walsh (2000). Playing road hockey and executing what in the playoffs of 2014 became known as a Lucic, “his favourite trick was to come at you from behind, put his stick between your legs and then pull back, sending the blade into your crotch. He called this ‘harpooning the whale.’”

When Howie Morenz first came to Montreal from Stratford, Cleghorn was one of the veterans who wouldn’t talk to him. Billy Coutu and Bert Corbeau wouldn’t talk to him, either, but Cleghorn is suggested to have been more extra-insidiously silent. Later, Cleghorn and Morenz were good friends, and liked to kick up their heels by stocking up on, quote, cannon firecrackers, which they’d toss under police cars in Montreal traffic jams. “They’d howl in glee,” the story goes, “when the cops came tumbling out of each side of the patrol car drawing revolvers.”

In Chicago, Stan Mikita was mean but Bobby Hull wasn’t. Billy Reay, their coach, testified to this. “Bobby is just a big, easygoing kind of guy,” he said. Hull was handsomer, too. Mikita’s scars, his battered nose, “Slavic features,” cold brown eyes: “Put it all together, it doesn’t exactly spell mother.” Bob Gassoff — he played for St. Louis in the 1970s — was the meanest of the mean, says Tiger Williams. “He would do anything to get an advantage: gouge your eyes, kick, spear, even push his finger into your nose and twist it to increase the pain.” Also: “He was mentally tough in a way that Dave Schultz will never know about.”

The word mean has many meanings, including an older sense signifying communion and fellowship and intercourse. As an adjective, it’s a benign enough word for intermediary, and also signifies inferiority and smallness of character, pettiness. He swings a mean stick can be both a censure and approbation. Disobliging, unkind, vicious, and cruel — that’s the hockey usage.

Is the ice to blame? What is it about stepping out to skate that turns a man? It’s a strand that runs through the hockey books. In Net Worth (1991), David Cruise and Alison Griffiths write of former Toronto defenceman Carl Brewer: “Though often a mass of nerves before games, once on the ice Brewer played with such coolness that observers wondered whether it was the same man.”

Often it’s framed as a kind of an apology or disclaimer. Here’s a former Toronto Maple Leaf, Kris King:

Many fans who come to the games are under the impression that those of us who play tough hockey have tough personalities away from the rink, but that isn’t the case. People who know me on the ice are surprised to see me off the ice. I’m a laid-back kind of guy. After the season, my family and I head right back to our cottage in Ontario where I love to fish. I try to do a bit of charity work . . .

Away from hockey, Montreal’s fearsome John Ferguson was cited as “the type of fellow who washes the floors for his wife.” You have to admit: a willingness to do housework makes for a convincing plea of innocence. Elmer Lach might have been one of the most-penalized players of his day but, said the Saturday Evening Post in 1950, “he wears sports clothes in good taste.” Mostly, though, it’s hobbies that are entered into evidence. Deadly Dave Schultz? “He tends his lawn and shrubs as if he were a landscape gardener,” the Miami News reported in 1975. Boston’s nefarious John Wensink was a dollhouse enthusiast. Montreal’s Gazette profiled the Canadiens’ Babe Siebert in 1939 and found, guess what? On the ice he was “a roaring, driving charging demon.” Off ice, in the dressing room:

Siebert sat in a corner by himself, smoking. He never bothered anyone; talked only when spoken to. Even on trips . . . you’d find the Babe curled up in his lower berth examining fondly a new rod or reel, some new line or a set of flies he had just bought. For he was a confirmed fisherman and hunter.

In Hockey: For Spectator, Coach and Player (1939), Richard Vaughan and Holcomb York called it “The Dual Personality:”

The most puzzling of all personal problems is this: How is it possible for a grand fellow off the ice — courteous, thoughtful of your interests, and devoted to the idea of fair play — to discard all this the moment he gets on the ice and become mean, to go out of his way to relieve a personal grudge, and to take all the fun out of the game through his constant crabbing and lack of good sportsmanship?

If players let off steam, well, would they be human if they didn’t? The best players smile after the explosion, and isn’t it a wonderful thing. The problem? “The fellow with a dual personality is the victim of an inferiority complex, and he puts the game on a personal basis as a part of his defense mechanism.” He’s not beyond help:

To put a stop to this dualism it is necessary to reveal to the individual concerned a contrasting picture of what he thinks he is doing on the ice and what he is actually doing. I have had some fellows react to this by saying that they just can’t help it, that [it] is a part of a nature. To this the reply is, ‘Bosh!’ What is will power for, if it is not for the kind of self-control that will enable us to do our best?

And you can thrive as a player without being mean. You can be Jean Ratelle, for instance, who played for Canada in 1972, a two-time Lady Byng winner. His teammate Dennis Hull called him “one of the nicest people I met in my career in the NHL.” Bill Quackenbush, who played with my History teacher, was one of the game’s cleanest players. Rocket Richard? He was rated, in his time, aloof, sullen, moody, peculiar. But, says Frank Selke: “There is no meanness in Maurice Richard. He’s 100 per cent solid gold; someone you’d be proud to have as the husband of one of your daughters.”

When Jaromir Jagr came from Czechoslovakia to his first NHL training camp as a bright young phenom, he navigated a new language, a new culture, and the wariness of new teammates. “The best players were the friendliest to me, which is understandable because they had nothing to be afraid of. The others treated me more or less normally, although some of them glared at me a little. Those were the ones who felt threatened.” Once the season began, he quickly found out about Montreal’s Claude Lemieux:

He was unbearable. He constantly fought, provoked people and poked and stabbed with his stick behind the back of the referee. He wasn’t even very well liked by his teammates. He was always complaining. The food was bad; his gear wet; the bus was too cold or too hot.

Ebbie Goodfellow had a theory that truly mean players didn’t last, that word got around. “Somebody would say, ‘That dirty sonofabitch gave me the stick’ and the other guys would then lay for him and straighten him out.”

I don’t know how this squares with Ted Lindsay, who just seems to be a case study for mean. Or what about his fellow bullseye, Gordie Howe? Howe also had a strong reputation for meanness. It’s on the record. John Ferguson said, “Somebody like Howe, he never said much at all. He didn’t have to. He was a mean bastard, and that look of disgust he’d give you made you want to crawl into the ice.” Phil Esposito recalls Howe spearing a guy “in the balls” during an old-timers’ game. Gary Ronberg is one who cautions a wider perspective: “Despite all the stories about Howe’s meanness, he probably never hurt another player unless he felt that the guy deserved it, or that it was necessary for self-preservation.”

Lindsay retired from the Chicago Black Hawks at the end of the 1959–60 season and went to work in the automotive industry, but he returned to the Red Wings for one more season in 1964. Clarence Campbell tried to persuade him not to, but he couldn’t resist and back he came, aged thirty-nine. It was tough. “In business, you get so you love everybody,” he said halfway through the year, “but in this game you have to be mean or you’re going to get pushed around. I keep telling myself, Be mean! Be mean!”

The first time King Clancy played against Montreal’s Bert Corbeau, Corbeau cross-checked him headfirst into the chicken wire and then dropped down on his back with both his knees. (They got to be pretty good friends, later, Clancy chirrups.) Red Storey said that Corbeau taught him how to break a man’s ankle and not get caught by the officials. Corbeau said, too, that no one ever got by him twice. “A guy passed me once and the next time I broke every muscle in his stomach.” Which does sound exceptionally spiteful.

THERE’S NO MORE famous lack of teeth than Bobby Clarke’s, a front-upper gap, four-wide, with the gums glistening Flyers-red, a smile so famous maybe it’s the Canadian Mona Lisa, and as with Mona Lisa, we can’t be certain just what Clarke is smiling at. The 1970s were good to the Philadelphia team he led, bestowing two Stanley Cups. Is it the happy warrior he’s advertising, livid as his welts, in photos from those years? There’s a seven-year-old’s gleam in Clarke’s eyes, proud and defiant, a wildness that you have to assume he was relying on to terrify future opponents who might be looking on, especially Russians.

He was twenty-three when he was named captain, the youngest ever in the NHL until Steve Yzerman showed up. In 1976, he was elected to the presidency of the players’ union, and so it was on his watch that the NHLPA declared that the players wanted all fighting gone, whether by stick or fist, time to rid the game. The previous fall, under the direction of Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry, police in Toronto had started charging hockey players for alleged criminal acts committed on the ice. Five were headed to court. The players were concerned. They didn’t have specific suggestions, so far. They wanted to parley with the league’s owners.

Bernie Parent said that Clarke reminded him of Jean Béliveau. “Both are very quiet, but they are great leaders. Clarkie’s judgment is amazing.” Really? Béliveau? Denis Potvin said Clarke only appeared to be working hard. “The fact is, he takes two strides and assumes that desperate look of his because he’s such a poor skater . . . Bobby skates with so much desire that it inevitably rubs off on his teammates.” Dennis Hextall called Clarke’s style “cute dirty,” and a good part of it was his ability to keep from getting caught. “I’ve already told him he’s the dirtiest SOB in hockey today, but I don’t hold that against him.” Dave Schultz, former Philadelphia enforcer, echoed that assessment: “The funny thing is that when people talk about Clarke, the cute little word ‘chippy’ keeps popping up. Chippy! How about ‘dirty’?”

I watched the broadcast of that Moscow Game 6 again. Second period, Canada leading 3–1. There’s 10:22 left in the period. Gary Bergman runs into Kharlamov near the Canadian blueline. Foster Hewitt: “Bergman was particular, how he handled him.” Yes, true: he shoves gloves in his face, pushes him down. Clarke gets the puck, backhands it high into the Soviet end. Icing. They’re four-on-four. Also on the ice for Canada: Paul Henderson and Guy Lapointe. Faceoff to Ken Dryden’s right, Clarke and Kharlamov. Kharlamov snaffles the puck back to the point. The whistle goes but the Canadians keep skating and, man, are they peeved when they have to stop. Hewitt: “It’s awfully hard to hear it.” Canadian players throw up their arms, the universal would-you-believe-these-fucking-foreign-joker-referees? gesture. The camera swings over to the visitors’ bench where Peter Mahovlich, looking seriously pissed, throws his stick on the ice just to illustrate how seriously pissed he is.

Faceoff, Clarke and Vladimir Vikulov. Clarke wins. Puck goes down, Soviets bring it back. Kharlamov carries through centre, primes to shoot — it’s just him and the withdrawing defenceman, with Clarke cruising just behind to his left. As Kharlamov crosses the line, Clarke slides his hands up his stick. Starts his swing. Never seen a photograph of this. Slo-mo it and you see Kharlamov has no clue. It’s a full Clarkovian backswing that’s delivered just as Kharlamov backhands a pass to his trailing winger. Attawapiskat! He doesn’t go down. “Here’s a roller in front,” Hewitt says, eye on the puck. Whistle. Clarke is on his knees. Kharlamov stands over him. Dryden is looking on. The referee is chopping on his arm. Clarke is facing the camera, talking to Kharlamov, who push-punches him, skates away. Bergman chases. “That nearly started something,” Foster Hewitt says just before the TV feed cuts out. “Because they don’t understand English,” Hewitt reports, “it doesn’t really mean whatever they’re saying.” Clarke’s mix-up, he calls it, like a bowl of nuts. Kharlamov, he notes, “seems to be exhausted from whatever check he took.”

Clarke’s penalty is two minutes for slashing, ten for misconduct.

“I gave him a good rap on the ankle,” Clarke says after the game. Henderson protests that he was the one who was slashed: “I get axed and we get the penalty.”

The nasty and premeditated slash it’s sometimes been called since. The Hockey Hall of Fame prefers aggressive chop.

John Ferguson did later confess that he’d given Clarke the word, though Clarke says that was just Fergie being gentlemanly.

“What the hell,” the assistant coach also said, “I would have done it myself if I had to.”

Clarke in 1981: “I’m surprised he can walk after the shot I gave him.”

The ultimate compliment, Canadian Press wrote on one of the anniversaries.

Henderson in 2005: “Obviously, I look at it a little differently today. Hindsight is 20–20 for all of us. But I really don’t think any part of that should ever be in the game. But in ’72, I thought it was fine.”

Clarke: “We didn’t win because of the slash.”

He explained it to his daughter, Jakki, for her book, Flyer Lives, in 2012. “If I hadn’t learned to lay a two-hander once in a while, I never would’ve left Flin Flon.” While we still weren’t quite yet beating Latvia during the 2014 Olympics, her sister Jody took to Twitter to suggest that a Bobbyesque slash might help the cause, quote, #sorrynotsorry #dontjudge #proudofdad.

Kharlamov spoke up, too, before his death. “I looked into his angry eyes, saw his stick which he wielded like a sword, and didn’t understand what he was doing. It had nothing to do with hockey.”

IF MEAN IS a satellite of angry, where does hate fit in? Because hate is another thing entirely; it can be a crime, not a word to use lightly and one that all upstanding people would say there’s no place for in hockey. Where you do hear it is in the phrase get a hate on, or players you hear about who hate to lose, but it’s understood that the sense is mostly figurative, or as the dictionary designates a strong aversion, “Now chiefly poet.”

John Ferguson advised Peter Mahovlich when the latter first came to Montreal: “You’ve got the size and ability. Get mad and start leaning on people. You gotta hate those other guys.” Or Denis Potvin, who wrote in his book Power on Ice (1977), “I hated the entire Toronto club — but especially their captain, George Armstrong, who was half Indian.”

Anatoli Tarasov admired Canadians, loved Americans, but the Czechs — he hated the Czechs because the Czechs hated him. They used to shoot pucks his way, aiming to hit him behind the bench. Was that Canada’s problem in 1972: the team only discovered its hate halfway through the series, waiting for them in Sweden? Frank Mahovlich seems to have hated the Soviets going in, but it took a while for the feeling to spread, and there’s a strong case to be made that it was largely Swede-hate that drove the team in Moscow. Canada Russia ’72 follows the flow of the team’s anger: losing in Montreal is embarrassing, and the team plays better. By the time they get to Vancouver, they’re furious at the nation for booing how hard they’re trying. So they take this anger over to Sweden, where they generate some more. In Moscow, Canadian ire nearly razes the rink.

It wasn’t that simple, of course, but that’s the narrative that we’re left with, along with the iconic images of J.P. Parise swinging his stick at a referee. If you read the biographies, the hate is unavoidable. Channelling Paul Henderson a year after it was all over, author John Gault wrote that he’d come to despise Russians, Communism, the Soviet hockey system: everything.

Hate is a regular feature of playoff hockey. Its absence was the reason (pundits said) that Philadelphia couldn’t beat New Jersey in the second round of the 2012 playoffs. This allowed the Devils to spare their reserves of acrimony for the semifinal against the New York Rangers, a team they hated so much that when they’d met previously during the regular season, three fights broke out in the first three seconds of the game. Where else in civil society do you see the word hate used so casually, without question or qualification? Maybe you thought that speed or excitement is the prime NHL product. Not according to Colin Campbell, the league’s director of hockey operations who in 2007 told Randy Starkman from the Toronto Star that he didn’t believe that bad hits in hockey happened because players lacked or had misplaced their respect for another.

A crock, he called that. “I just think that that’s overblown and the players who say it don’t understand. Players are competitive. We sell hate. Our game sells hate. You guys, the media, sell hate.” It was worse when he played in the 1970s, he added, either wistfully or as a proud measure of progress.

Back in 1975, when she was a columnist at the Globe and Mail, Christie Blatchford wrote in defence of hate as an essential commodity in the hockey world. Like it or not, she argued, there’s a vein of madness that runs through sport, a current of illogic that is not only normal but necessary. That’s hate, and it’s what non-hockey people don’t understand, “just as they find little beauty in the sound of a body hitting the boards.” To be great you have to embrace the hate. “That’s our game, guys,” says Blatchford. Here’s the recipe:

bravado + bravery + (some) phony machismo + (a dash of) meanness

Maybe it’s not a draft that’s going to cure anybody’s cold or even refresh you much: it doesn’t taste like raspberries, but it is what it is and who are you to fool with the formula? In fact, you should be vigilant that no one spikes the brew, or worse, dilutes it. “If we’re not careful,” Blatchford rails, “somebody’s going to take what’s hard out of hockey.” You know who’ll be happy when that happens? The Swedes.

Our country has a surplus of nice athletes who play by the rules and play clean and never stoop to try anything for an edge. They don’t hate. And they hardly ever win.

THE HOCKEY HALL of Fame used to keep its archives in downtown Toronto, upstairs from the vaults where the cups and hallowed members are honoured, Gretzky’s sticks and the two thousand pucks, all the hanging sweaters, and the portraits of players. You came in the doors by the sculpture of the boys on the boards and took an elevator to the second floor.

The fame wasn’t so well organized up there in the archives. It looked like the building had bred memorabilia overnight and piled it by the wall. Beneath the massive Jean Béliveau portrait, a table teemed with hockey cards and heaped photographs. Thickets of sticks crowded up against trophies whose tarnish had rubbed off on someone’s famous golf bags, next to meaningful old slatted seats from an old arena somewhere.

One morning, looking for traces of Sprague Cleghorn, I pulled out a file: Hockey Related Deaths. It was an altogether unhappy index, but contained no surprises. Hockey can, and often does, kill, though you’d think it might kill more. All those skates and sticks, the slippery ice, the collisions and confrontations, all that male anger moving at high speed. Looking on the bright side, as per the Saturday Evening Post circa 1938: “Though battles waged during the thirty years of professional hockey have stained the ice of a thousand rinks, only one player died as a result. And he was a minor leaguer.”

The Toronto Star, from the evidence here, may have at one time been the official crier of subsequent hockey deaths.

Head hit ice in fall

Thorold player dies

Town in mourning

over young referee

Killed by a puck

Begged For A Chance

But Hockey Player Dies

Hit in neck by puck

goalkeeper, 13, dies

Death Stuns Team

Game goes on

The bad news covered the table with its headlines. “Player dies during game,” was one more. Steven Dale Hedtrath, from Coon Rapids, Minnesota, was seventeen. He was considered one of the hottest prospects in the state, and he had died at the Cook Arena on Wednesday night when he swallowed his mouthpiece.

One more, from 1978, “Untimely Death” the headline. A family friend reported what the boy’s father said when they told him his boy was gone: “I dreamed too much for my son.”