Lady Byng and Old Bungo: Lady Byng, the woman who tried to save hockey from itself, and Governor General Viscount Byng of Vimy in 1922.
“We didn’t have much heart for hockey after he died.”
TOE BLAKE, IN 1956, ON THE MOOD IN THE MONTREAL CANADIENS LOCKER ROOM AFTER HOWIE MORENZ DIED
EVELYN MORETON WAS eight in 1878, when she came from England with her family to live at Rideau Hall in Ottawa. As comptroller, her father looked after the governor general’s books while her mother coddled resentments. As Evelyn told it later, her mother was unhappy in Canada even before the weather turned, on account of the pitiful amenities of our lacklustre and graceless society. But it was the monstrous cold that really repelled her, and before the year was out the Moretons were on their way back home.
There’s plenty to say about Evelyn, but what’s pertinent here is that in due course she grew up, met Old Bungo, and married him. Sir Julian Byng, her husband, had commanded Canadian troops in France during the First World War, most famously at Vimy Ridge, and he was never happier than when Winston Churchill sent him to Canada to be governor general in 1921. Evelyn returned to Rideau Hall with a new name, Lady Byng of Vimy, and that’s the one under which she did her best to save hockey from itself.
Winters in Ottawa were a harsh bondage, and the viscountess never really got used to them. Beautiful? Yes, but the birds didn’t sing and middle-aged people could only watch as the young enjoyed themselves. The Byngs tried to learn to skate, pushing chairs around vice-regal rinks, but they kept falling down. Finally, with relief, they gave away their skates.
Lady Byng and Old Bungo: Lady Byng, the woman who tried to save hockey from itself, and Governor General Viscount Byng of Vimy in 1922.
There were no plays to see in the capital, because Canadians weren’t theatre-minded. That’s how the Byngs ended up, more or less, loving hockey. They watched the Toronto St. Patricks beat the hometown defending champion Senators 5–4: that was their first game, in 1921. Ottawa captain Eddie Gerard presented Lady Byng with a bouquet of American Beauty roses; Lord Byng dropped the puck. Later, both teams joined in giving their Excellencies three hearty cheers. The hockey, said the Globe, was some of the most thrilling ever to have been played on Ottawa ice. There wasn’t a single penalty.
After five happy hockey-filled years, with many Saturday nights spent rooting for the Senators, Lady Byng could count many favourite players — Gerard, Frank Nighbor, and King Clancy were among them — and just two grievances. Needless rough play, she felt, was a threat to the future of the game. As for those childish spectators who insisted on showering the ice with rubbish at the slightest annoyance, didn’t they realize the danger they were putting the players in?
She was right, of course. It was childish and dangerous, and over the years the list of players felled by debris grew long. It took many decades for hockey to arrive at today’s state, where bombarding the ice is a scourge prohibited by the NHL. Lady Byng would be proud of the Senators and their reminder to fans, in 2013, that:
Anyone caught throwing an object onto the ice is subject to ejection from Scotiabank Place and/or criminal prosecution.
“If you’re skating along the smooth surface and suddenly your skate goes over a coin or a paper clip, there’s no way to defend yourself,” says Andy Bathgate. “It can be a terrifying moment.” Everybody on the ice is in equal danger, all the players, the referees, and the linesmen. “An unseen object flying through the air can put an eye out. An unseen object lying on the ice is the worst hazard in hockey.”
Coins “of every denomination” were on the ice when Montreal’s Gilles Tremblay broke his leg in 1964. Just before his NHL debut, playing in Guelph, Ontario, Rod Gilbert skated over a cardboard lid from an ice-cream cup. He ended up with a broken back and a spinal fusion. He describes the mechanics of the crash in his autobiography: “I immediately fell forward and, because of the great speed I had developed, crashed into the hard wood boards at the side of the rink.”
He must have known the story of Jack McMaster, a standout Junior with the Toronto Marlboros who’d gone on to sign for the Senior A Kitchener-Waterloo Dutchmen. He’d been the leading playoff scorer for the 1957–58 season. The following season, taking a shot on the Sudbury goal in the second period, he crashed hard into the endboards. “Hockey fans were at a loss to explain McMaster’s fall,” the Star reported. “No one was near him.” He was carried off with broken vertebrae and other injuries to the spinal cord. He never played another game of hockey and he never walked again. He’d skated over a paperclip.
Hats, programs, newspapers, packets of cigarettes, coins: these are the everyday ammunition of hockey barrages, and have been for years. Belts and watches speak of a more committed abuser, someone willing to divest themselves of useful property as an investment in insult. A whole tray of ice-cream cups coming over the glass in Bloomington, Minnesota, shows a creative flair. In Toronto in 1918, a fan — “a plutocrat in the gallery,” the Star called him — either dropped a large gin bottle or whizzed it past Alf Skinner’s head. I don’t know whether it was a spontaneous review of the book or the reffing or both, but in a raucous 1944 playoff game in Chicago, a plummeting library copy of the Dorsha Hayes novel Mrs. Heaton’s Daughter struck a woman over the eye. The New York Times had felt more or less the same when it first appeared: “No distinction of style or great depth of character.”
A 1927 Boston crowd watching Bruins and St. Pats scattered:
A rubber ball thrown after Montreal’s Terry Harper scores a goal circa 1964 says hooray, just the opposite of its billiard cousin hurtling past goalie Terry Sawchuk in Boston in 1957. Nails say If I had a hammer, while a crutch hoisted over the glass in Toronto in the early 1990s at Los Angeles enforcer Marty McSorley, that’s more of an I wish you needed this. On Christmas Day of 1925, fans in Saskatoon pelted a referee with mud, coal, and peanuts. In Toronto’s old Maple Leaf Gardens, on a Sunday night, a fan sometimes threw a bottle of ink or plastic mustard containers. At least once they threw a persimmon. But the Leafs probably had that coming.
It’s only very occasionally that players return the fire of fans. Brad Park remembers teammate Vic Hadfield, in Toronto, tossing Leafs goalie Bernie Parent’s mask into the crowd. As a Junior in 1962, goalie Wayne Rutledge roared around “in a riotous mood” after a goal was scored against him. He harangued the goal judge and threw a selection of rubbers (including the puck) back at the crowd. Also, spat. No penalty.
Eggs have a special place in hockey, which is to say, splat, on the ice. That’s the transitive verb we’ll assign to them as they hit; as Scott Young says, the rightful noun for the puddle they make is plat (“a flat ornament of gold,” one of its dictionary definings). In The Leafs I Knew, Young charts the source of Toronto eggs (usually the second balcony) and the reaction (nobody comments), and introduces us to the guy charged with cleaning up. He wears a brown fedora and a sweater of yellow and black; his trousers are baggy. His operation has two parts: first he appears with a long-handled ice knife and broom. When he’s transformed plat to pile, he goes back for his shovel. Always he’s applauded, and every time, he raises his hat in response.
An egg is inherently humorous, but even with an egg, as with anything, funny has its limits. Gump Worsley took one in the head at New York’s Madison Square Garden one night, no joke at all: “Gump was badly shaken and had to be hospitalized,” his Canadiens teammate John Ferguson recorded. “He had suffered a concussion.” (New York policemen caught the thrower, a high school student, and brought him down to the dressing room in case Worsley wanted to punch him out, which he didn’t.) The dinner knife someone fired at Worsley in 1969? He kept it for a souvenir.
In 1936, Montreal’s Maroons battled the Detroit Red Wings into six overtimes before Mud Bruneteau finally won it for the Wings. It’s still the longest game in the league’s history, and lucrative, too, for the Wings. Jubilant fans stuffed dollar bills into Bruneteau’s equipment as he left the ice, and he moved slowly enough that when he came to divvy up the cash, he paid out twenty-two dollars to each member of the team, including the trainer and the kid tending the sticks.
Before the Richard Riot, toe-rubbers were generally tossed as a currency of approval: score a goal in the Forum and the men would reach down and remove a precious winter overshoe, hurl it happily to the ice. One rubber emboldens another: Was there ever a fan who just threw one? Red Storey tells of five hundred collected in one night, but that’s galoshes, too, and he doesn’t specifically indicate what the mood was at the Forum that evening. Dennis Hull’s dad went to Montreal to watch him play for Chicago. “When you’re out there tonight,” he told his son, “and Béliveau scores, get me a size ten-and-a-half.”
On one occasion in Chicago, a fan threw a fish that landed in the lap of Bill Gadsby’s wife. Bobby Hull recalls a live rabbit and dead squirrels. Also, firecrackers and a life-sized dummy of Frank Mahovlich wearing a noose around its neck — though attendants confiscated mannequin-Frank before he got to the ice. In Minnesota, someone once tossed a bag, and inside the bag, just like a joke waiting for a punchline, were a duck and a pheasant, both alive. Red Berenson — “an outdoorsman,” Bill Goldsworthy explains — escorted the birds from the ice.
Game of throwns: A January 1935 handbill distributed at Chicago’s Stadium asked fans to keep their enthusiasm from reaching “the danger point.” It’s said to have worked, at least for a night: debris on the ice was limited to “one lemon and one half-folded newspaper.”
“An octopus cannot be accurately thrown,” Dick Beddoes wrote, regarding the fabled Detroit tradition that carries on to this day. George Plimpton notes that the fan who started the whole business only ever tried to hit one player in all his years, Toronto’s Ted Kennedy. He missed, and hit Detroit’s own Vic Lynn.
As a Ranger playing in Boston, Brad Park nearly took a “45-rpm phonograph record” to the head. When a whiskey bottle clonked a Chicago fan named Joe Fusco on his brow, the Black Hawks offered a $250 reward to anyone who could identify the bottler. During the 1943–44 season, Detroit at Chicago, the Black Hawks were leading 2–0 with two minutes to play when the Red Wings came roaring back to tie the game. Charles Coleman describes what happened next: “A roll of adding machine paper was thrown from an upper balcony that struck linesman Steve Meuri on the head and knocked him down.”
When it comes to throwing stuff, there’s really no bigger night in hockey than that of Thursday, March 17, 1955. The next morning, Toronto Star correspondent Frank Teskey reported from the front: “A grapefruit from the grays hit my camera and knocked it spinning.” (There are a few more expressive sentences in hockey’s literature, but only a few.) Montreal’s beloved Maurice Richard had been ruled out of his team’s final three games and all the playoffs. Four days earlier, playing in Boston, Richard had gotten into it with Hal Laycoe. The gory affair, newspapers called it, and the brannigan, and they threw in wild scene and most vicious and said Montreal’s fiery Rocket exploded. The irate French battler ended up punching a linesman in the eye; the linesman tried to punch him back. Asked later what had happened, Richard said, “Ask Laycoe.” Boston police wanted to arrest Richard, but they were persuaded that this was a matter of hockey lawlessness that hockey’s peace officers would address.
They didn’t like the suspension in Montreal, and they didn’t like the suspender, so when Clarence Campbell showed up at the Forum to see the Habs host Detroit, Montrealers had a brannigan of their own waiting for him. The Toronto Star reported: “Campbell, after being punched in the face, was buried under an avalanche of rubbers, peanuts, programs, eggs, tomatoes, and pennies.” Someone threw what was later described as “a U.S. Army–type teargas bomb.” That’s when the smoke began to billow, “as if from a miniature atom bomb.” The organist played “My Heart Cries for You.” Later, of course, the riot spilled out into the streets of Montreal. Cars burned, looters sacked stores.
Conn Smythe said it could never happen in Toronto. “Well, just let anyone try to make it happen,” he threatened. Jack Adams said the same on Detroit’s behalf. Montreal pampered the Rocket, that was the real trouble, according to him. When the Rangers played the Forum the following Saturday, two hundred policeman stood guard, backed up by a fire hose. People were selling looted watches and rings “at ridiculous prices.” A few nights later, back in Montreal for a game against Boston, five hundred policemen joined Campbell in the crowd. On the night of the riot he’d been accompanied at the game by “three girl secretaries from his office,” one of whom, Phyllis King, the papers commended for coolness under fire. “Although she was struck several times by flying boots, rubbers and fruit,” a correspondent wrote, “Miss King never once suggested they leave.” Campbell was down to a single secretary for the Boston game — again, the “attractive” Miss King, his future wife.
AN EARLIER MONTREAL game, in March of 1923, sounds almost as wild, and so appalled General Sir Arthur Currie that he felt moved to comment publicly. The Canadiens were hosting Ottawa’s Senators in the first game of the NHL championship that night, the victor of the two-game series winning the right to head out west to play for the Stanley Cup. “Riotous Scene,” the Ottawa paper reported next morning, and “Disgraceful Attacks.” Montreal’s Sprague Cleghorn was in there, certainly, but it was his teammate Billy Coutu who did most of the damage, and most of it to Ottawa’s Cy Denneny. A word-cloud depicting the worst of it would look like this:
deliberately slugged head cowardly blow from behind
blood heap rolled around
match foul several stitches
The crowd, enraged, threw papers and bottles at the referees and Ottawa players, also fruit. Twice the game had to be stopped to clear the ice. One of the referees, Cooper Smeaton — he’d served in the First World War and been wounded — got himself a megaphone to appeal for a calm that he couldn’t, in the end, command. General Currie was president of McGill University at this time, having led the Canadian Corps through some of the bloodiest days of the war. After the game he issued a blazing statement:
I would rather see every grandstand in the country burned down than a repetition of the disgraceful scenes which took place in the Mount Royal Arena.
Which would have been one way to go. Lady Byng thought of another. If she couldn’t stamp out hockey’s littering problem, what about the behaviour so shocking to General Currie? She tried. In 1925, she wrote a letter to NHL supremo Frank Calder.
Feeling a great desire to help your effort to clean up hockey and eliminate the needless rough play that at present is a threat to the national game . . . I am convinced that the public desires good sport, not the injuring of players, and if, by donating this challenge cup, I can in any way help towards this end, it will give me a great deal of pleasure.
The Lady Byng of Vimy Cup was intended to reward the fairest, most effective, and most sportsmanlike player in the NHL. Her Excellency invited hook-checking Frank Nighbor over to Rideau Hall to ask him what he thought about it and — surprise! — tell him he was the first winner. A committee of sports editors took over the administration after that, rewarding Nighbor again in 1926, before Frank Boucher began his run in 1927. After he won the trophy seven times in eight years, Lady Byng gave him the cup outright in 1935. There was a third edition cast in 1949, after its benefactor’s death, and that’s when it became the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy. That original cup perished in a fire at Boucher’s son’s house in 1965, after mice chewed the wiring.
Did Lady Byng’s honest effort to reform the game help? Hard to say. Billy Burch slipped in to win it pre-Boucher, post-Nighbor, and he’s supposed to have been an awful hothead early in his career before (as a newspaper said in 1925) “taking himself in hand.” But that would seem to have come before there was any trophy up for grabs. Browsing the list of winners, all the Max Bentleys and Jean Ratelles, Wayne Gretzkys through Pavel Datsyuks, I think the conclusion you’d have to draw is that it’s done exactly what it was intended to do, celebrating the silver good citizenship of exemplary hockey citizens. It doesn’t appear to have had any effect whatever on the bad.
OTHERS HAVE TRIED other fixes. Quitting hockey altogether was Bobby Hull’s dramatic gambit in October of 1975. The violence just got to be too much. Hockey had fallen so far that it wasn’t his game any longer, and so, seven games into the Winnipeg Jets’ season, at the age of thirty-six, the Golden Jet walked away in protest.
Or did he? It was front-page news across Canada, but the front pages hadn’t heard from Hull himself and there was some doubt about where he’d gone and why. His general manager, Rudy Pilous, said, “It’s been buggin’ him for a long time, last year as well as this.” The Jets released a statement announcing that Hull had been excused from practice and the following game in order to protest hockey’s brutality “and the type of goon hockey that has been played recently.” Events in a game earlier that week seemed to have propelled him out the door. The Jets’ talented Finnish centreman, Veli-Pekka Ketola, had scored, and three members of the Cincinnati Stingers had, as the Toronto Star said, jumped him “out of frustration.”
Hull’s Goon Hockey Boycott, some of the papers called it. Pilous hoped Hull would be back soon; he wasn’t sure what good the walkout would do. He himself thought the Cincinnati game wasn’t so terribly rough, though another of his players, Perry Miller, had suffered an eye injury fighting three opponents at once. That was pretty bad. But what are you going to do?
“That’s not hockey,” Hull said.
Everybody had an opinion. Christie Blatchford knew an un-hater when she saw one, and believed Hull had grown old and weary, and that was fine. His gesture was probably a pretty good indicator that he was done, because you’re never going to win with that attitude. The Cincinnati coach concurred: it was an easy way for Hull to retire. Toronto defenceman Jim Dorey believed that a lot of the roughness wasn’t necessary, though, you know, the word on stopping the Jets was, go after Hull’s Swedish linemates, Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg. On the whole, the Jets rarely retaliated when the going got nasty, which only seemed to confirm that they could be intimidated. Complicating the issue, their lineup, which included seven Swedes and two Finns, superior skaters all, was seen as a provocation, causing “frustrated opponents [to] resort to all kinds of foul play.”
World Hockey Association president Ben Hatskin tended to blame the Europeans, too. They were so fast on their skates that it was almost a natural reaction of North American players to take a swing at them — imagine, again, the frustration — when they skated by. It wasn’t pretty, maybe, but if things really got out of hand, there were fines and suspensions. “That’s all you can do,” was his answer.
Frank Mahovlich said the game was more brutal than when he and Hull had arrived in the NHL in 1957. “It seems to be keeping pace with everything else: more murders, more crime,” he said, a sentence I admit to having tried out aloud in my best imitation Eeyore drone.
It was an ugly time for hockey: 1975 had started with the Boston Bruins’ Dave Forbes attacking Minnesota’s Henry Boucha. A scuffle the papers called it, though the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office wasn’t sure that was the appropriate term. The reigning Stanley Cup champions were Broad Street’s Bullies, the Philadelphia Flyers. In Ottawa, an mp was worried about violence on TV, and not just gratuitous gunfights or massacres with machetes. “I think,” said James McGrath, “the most violent aspect of Canadian television is Hockey Night in Canada.”
A few months after Bobby Hull returned to the ice — yes, after missing a single game, he was back, scoring a goal — well, nothing had really changed. The NHL didn’t have anything to say because it didn’t have to. Hockey wouldn’t be making any promises to reform. There would be no going down on bended shin pad and apologizing to Bobby Hull. Or anyone else. The editorial writers and columnists weighed in. He should suck it up, they all said, other than the ones who thought hockey was the one that needed to get help.
If you were trapped in a library that year, with no view of rinks or televised games, you could have read your way to the same conclusion that Hull had reached: hockey was in trouble, had lost its way, what was it thinking? The shelves were full of it: Gary Ronberg’s The Violent Game was just out in 1975, or what about Ira Gitler’s Blood on the Ice, with chapters titled “Woodchopping Galore” and “Death and Helmets” and “Techniques of Mayhem.”
Over in fiction, you’d find long gone the era of making-the-team stories featuring Bill Spunska and his ilk (Frank Orr’s Spunskavian Buck Martin, for one). Hockey’s novels had entered a whole new phase, one that went beyond reflecting the ugliness of hockey, achieving a sort of novelistic equivalent of method acting in which the story itself was so noxious that, as with John Craig’s Power Play, if you chanced to put it down, it was almost impossible to pick it up again.
NO ONE DREAMS as a boy of growing up to be a referee, say the referees. “It’s a hell of a job,” said Clarence Campbell. “A man has to have iron in his soul, the will to command. And he can’t be a drinker — he’ll have thousands of hours with nothing to do.”
In the early days their names were Lou Marsh, Cooper Smeaton, Mike Rodden, and, yes, Clarence Campbell, too. They were born in tiny towns like Fleming, Saskatchewan, where their fathers sold lumber, or maybe in Allandale, Ontario, and the doctor who delivered them was the one to nickname them Buster, which stuck. Some of them were lacrosse or football stars as well as referees. King Clancy and Sylvio Mantha both played in the NHL before they took up a whistle; there have been many others.
Campbell said it was a “personality job,” which means, I guess, you have to have a good one. When King Clancy started as a linesman, the veteran Mickey Ion was by his side for his debut at Madison Square Garden. Said Ion, “There are only two sane people in the house — you and I. All the rest are crazy. Just remember that and you won’t be nervous.”
A new rule in the NHL in 1933 forbade any club employee from “entering into an acrimonious argument with a referee on or off the ice.” First to be fined was Detroit’s manager, Jack Adams, who paid one hundred dollars to yell at Bill Stewart.
Reftop: Whistle-tooting Lou Marsh practises his penalty calls above Toronto in the 1920s.
Thankless is a word you often see in referee books, of which there are a few, with titles like Black and White and Never Right, Final Call, and Lone Wolf. Sometimes in the literature referees are called:
Lou Marsh is supposed to have weaponized his whistle, attaching “a small handle” with which, the papers said, to defend himself.
In 1928, a Quebec judge must have lifted the spirits of the whole profession when he ruled that an assault committed against a hockey referee is more serious than any perpetrated on an ordinary person.
HOCKEY’S NOVELS HAD a go at fixing the game, too, by showing how much worse life can be than hockey. This was in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Reading the books from this period, I developed the following test for hockey novels: using your imagination, extract all the hockey from the story and see what’s left. Any residual character and plot at all, and there’s a chance you’ve got a book you’re not going to be tempted to hoist onto the ice the next time you’re at the Air Canada Centre.
Scott Young’s Bill Spunska novels bend and flop with the hockey taken out. The characters don’t have much to talk about, have nowhere to go. There’s a lot of staring into corners. Most important, without hockey Bill has nothing to grasp for, no agency by which to make himself into a full-blown Canadian.
With all the hockey wrung out of Craig’s Power Play, you’re left with a dark love story. When I say dark, I mean turbid, and by turbid, I mean it’s probably best if we leave the hockey in. Les Burton is captain of the Falcons; Lori Adams, an “entertainer” of what I’d better call ravishing beauty. They fall in love and they’re great together, except they can’t make it work. The world won’t let them. “Oh, Les,” says Lori. “Oh, Lori,” Les says. And I quote.
I may have missed the scene where they explain what divides them. Hockey, I think, is part of the wedge. TV might also be to blame, if I don’t miss my mark. If I do, it could be hockey on TV. The message here may be that hockey and TV can’t be together. Power Play is a bit of screed when it comes to TV: it makes the hockey less real, more of an act. It changes the light at rinks.
It’s also a timely novel about players’ rights, their emancipation from indenture, for this was the age in which the first players’ association arose. (Alan Eagleson is a character.) The Falcons go on strike before the sixth game of the Stanley Cup finals. The players in Power Play haven’t read their contracts. But the book’s prevailing pitch is one of nostalgia: it’s about what used to be, before hockey was seized from the hockey men. “It’s not fair,” says a coach, but it’s true.
To say that Power Play ushers in a new age in hockey fiction is to load a lot on a flimsy structure. Let’s just say that there’s a dark, murky time in hockey literature of which Power Play is a good — which is to say, bad — example. In fact, there’s a sullen sameness to the novels that followed Power Play and the world they depict, and the hockey that’s played there would terrify Bill Spunska.
In the 1970s, hockey itself became a bit of an enemy. Early hockey heroes just wanted to make the team; now they struggled to subdue the game itself, to serve their dream. Scott Young published a new novel, Face-Off, in 1971 that must have been much anticipated by Spunska enthusiasts. They might have had a moment’s pause when they saw on the title page the name of a second author, George Robertson, and this ominous credit: A novel based on an idea created by John Bassett.
No room in that brainstorm for Spunska. In the book and a subsequent movie (it’s fine), he cedes the ice to Billy Duke, an altogether different kind of a hero. Chapter one, first paragraph, he’s parading naked, which pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the novel. The hockey and the sex are wrestling around together right from the start, at which point we make the acquaintance, page two, of Billy’s penis. Whom he calls, endearingly, Mister. What a crazy pair! They go everywhere together and get into all kinds of trouble.
Billy is big news as a player, third in the exalted line of Canadian hockey prodigies after Bobbys Hull and Orr. Billy skates like Orr, shoots like Hull. And he’s also smart: the papers (he narrates) always mention how articulate he is, his many scholarships. On page four, it’s back over to Mister and how, aged fifteen, he meets a dark beauty named Adelaide whose clothes have a distracting habit of rustling against her legs and breasts.
Billy and Mister both hail from Sunset, Ontario, a small town north of — where else? — Peterborough. “Did you know,” he confides, “that according to official tests conducted by Lloyd Percival at the Fitness Institute, I have the best blood-oxygen supply in hockey?” He’s savvy and his talk is straight, he calls a spade a spade and referees assholes and he’s as wise as Derek Sanderson in the ways of selling himself. He knows that if you’re squirting champagne after winning the Memorial Cup, you make sure you sign a contract with the champagne company first. (“You are advertising it, and for that you should get paid.”)
There’s lots here to amuse a hockey fan, including a villainous rival named Sprague Lowther (“a real rack-em-up kind of defenceman”). Like Spunska before him, Billy’s drafted by the Leafs. He signs a big fat contract, buys himself a Firebird convertible, becomes an instant Canadian idol. “You’re every kid who ever laced on a pair of skates,” he muses. “I mean they’d give anything to be you.” He’s living Spunska’s dream, as long as that dream includes, lingering beyond the dressing room door, “luscious, juicy dolls just waiting to be plucked.”
But here’s where Billy and Mister go their separate ways, if that’s possible. Because whatever Mister’s preference, Billy has no time for doll-plucking. He spies a singer in a rock group, Sherri Lee Nelson, and with her he finds joy and fulfillment and “all the tenderness and soft yielding warmth of woman.”
So, three years and a few dozen pages on, we’re more or less at the same cross in the roads Les faced in Power Play. Was this really the only fictional possibility for the time? At least in Face-Off, the split, when it comes, is a little clearer. For Billy, it’s when the hockey starts to sour. Away from the game he’s doing fine, on TV they’re showing features about him titled “The Hottest Rookie.” But the hockey is letting him down. All of a sudden he’s lost his touch, can’t score, can’t fight, and here’s the terrible dilemma: is it the life that’s ruining the hockey or the hockey that’s such a poison to the life?
None of it is too appetizing. Billy fights, he loses all his front teeth. The crisis comes when Billy battles Brad Park and bleeds; Sherri Lee flees Maple Leaf Gardens and vomits. When Billy’s friend and teammate Sangster scores and gets slashed down and slams into a goalpost, Billy does the only sensible thing: he punches out the referee, Art Skov. “Even in the NHL,” he dryly allows, “that is a rarity.”
“Cool it,” advises novel-Bobby Orr. “Do you want to get life?”
It doesn’t end well for Billy and Sherri. Not to give too much away, but Billy’s in a taxi looking for Sherri when he spies a wrecked sports car and the driver says, “Looks like an accident.” Later there’s a morgue scene. Hockey wins, Sherri dies.
Billy sleeps. When he dreams, it’s about a defenceman who won’t let him get to Sherri. There’s a bit in here about how hockey has to change, but it’s not too convincing, and anyway what does hockey matter at a time like this? He’s a zombie as he wanders around Yorkville. He goes back to his bed, cries and moans, then wakes and drives up Church Street. Because, though life can be cruel and empty of all meaning, the Buffalo Sabres are in town, and if there’s a sin that’s unpardonable, it’s showing up late for the game.
So far, two novels, two wins for hockey, two defeats for life and its beautiful women.
Billy Duke is one of the last rookies to stand at centre stage in a hockey novel. As the 1970s give way to the 1980s, the heroes (and heroines) move along in years and careers. Once the novels were about being young and breaking into the big time. Now they’re about hanging on down at the end of the bench. Our heroes are a collection of wounded veterans for the most part, a wry, cynical bunch trying not to think about what lies beyond.
YOU COULD ALWAYS ban hockey outright. There are, after all, precedents for this.
An English king, Edward III, nixed hoquet and football and cricket in 1363 because they “interfered” with archery. The law stayed on the books until 1784. American football was famously under siege in the early years of the twentieth century because it was deemed too dangerous, with many American colleges putting a stop to it. Harvard was one: in 1907, the president declared it “an undesirable game for gentlemen to play, or for multitudes of spectators to watch.” Hockey and basketball weren’t much better, in his opinion: all three sports were wastes of money, and the “furious spasms” of competitive sport did nothing to protect players from immorality and vice. Their extreme recklessness exhausted the players and made them incapable of intellectual work. A year earlier, Maine’s colleges attempted to eradicate the scourge of basketball, “one of the greatest evils” with which they had to contend. “Records show,” said a member of the faculty at Bates, “that it causes an enlargement of the heart and a consequent weakening of the health. It is played indoors where the air is foul and dust thick.” To replace it? “Ice hockey is none the less strenuous, but it has the advantage of being played outdoors in the cool fresh air.”
More recently, the regional parliament in Spanish Cataluña voted to ban bullfighting. And in Venezuela, the late president Hugo Chávez pondered doing away with golf as an altogether bourgeois pursuit.
Maybe down deep in our blood we’ve got snowshoe racing lying latent? Canadians couldn’t get enough of it at one point. Same with tobogganing. Those aren’t team sports, though, I’ll grant you that. Curling? Field hockey?
Bandy should be easy to love. It’s a sort-of hockey anyway. Teemu Selanne used to play it in Finland as a boy and loved it, so it has that going for it. It almost made it into the Olympics, in 1952. We already have a national bandy team, in fact, and at the Bandy World Championships just before the Sochi Olympics, we . . . Oh. So, bandying, we lost 22–1 to the Russians.
Montreal people who saw a display of lacrosse on ice in 1877 reported back that the rapidity of the skaters was almost inconceivable. The dodging was magnificent and the stopping — almost instantaneous. In 1917, it was touted as a game that was twice as strenuous as its grassy cousin. Next year there would be a league with half a dozen teams. Not sure what happened to that.
It’s not easy to think of anything better than ice lacrosse except for, maybe — slippery tennis? The father of the lawn game, Major Walter Wingfield, first lobbed the idea as early as 1874, but it was in New York in 1916 that the game caught on. With black lines painted on the ice, using “old” tennis balls (they tried squash balls first), Watson Washburn and Dean Mathey took on F.B. Alexander and Theodore Roosevelt Pell at the Ice Skating Palace, 181st Street and Broadway. They wore full hockey gear, apparently, and once the match got going, sharp volleying was the order of the day. Mathey and Washburn were intent on playing a forecourt game, which was a mistake, since they kept having to scurry back to the baseline and lost, three sets to zip. The game required “more prompt and decisive action even than hockey.” Altogether it was, observers concurred, “far from being an experiment,” not only “feasible” but “exciting” and “worthy of being classed a real game.”
By 1920 in Cleveland, hockey was forced into a back seat by a double whammy of ice baseball (a six-team league, games every Sunday, twenty thousand spectators) and (“the real thriller”) ice boxing. At Rockefeller Park, the fighters were “heavily dressed” in sweaters. “Aside from having to dodge the blows,” an eyewitness reported, “contestants experienced much trouble in keeping their feet when they missed their blows.” The ring was expanded, to give the fighters more room to work with, and regular boxing regulations were amended to allow for wrestling.
Hockey was probably too young to understand fully the existential threat it faced down in the 1890s. Two words: bicycle skates. A young mechanic in New York by the name of Mike Murphy was the inventor. With a long-bladed skate clamped to the front wheel of his safety bicycle, which was fixed straight, he got his power from the rear wheel. In trials, Murphy attained “astonishing speeds.” Smart people who’d seen him go predicted he’d be knocking down speed records just as soon as he could find a straightaway stretch of ice where he didn’t have to take any corners, which the bicycle skate couldn’t really manage due to rear-wheel slippage. Also, there was trouble with keeping your feet on the pedals, which spun superfast. Can’t imagine how it never caught on.
HOCKEY HAD ITS own reforming crusader in John Farina. And if the cure killed the patient? Actually, that was the whole idea. If Farina could have raised up his hand and cleared our winters of pucks and players with a single sweep, he wouldn’t have hesitated.
Briefly, in November of 1957 he was the talk of the nation, and on an early Saturday of that month he shared the front page of the Toronto Star with Maurice Richard. The Rocket, who’d just scored the five hundredth goal of his career, had been summoned to meet the governor general aboard the vice-regal train, parked in a siding in Montreal. He was the first athlete ever to have been sought out for an audience by a Canadian GG, and he and his wife had visited the Rt. Hon. Vincent Massey’s private car, where they talked hockey for thirty-five minutes, after which His Excellency gave Mrs. Richard a white rabbit for her daughter, Suzanne.
Professor Farina was handing out no rabbits. Hockey deserved none. If Richard never scored another goal again, fine. The headline
Condemns All Sports/
They Breed Cheaters/
Doubts Their Value
barely understated the assault he’d made on hockey at a speech the day before, addressing the leadership of the Boys Clubs of Canada, a national organization with some sixty thousand members. He told them that all sports encourage “cheating, larceny, fighting and downright sadism” but he pinned hockey with the prize-ribbon of “most degenerate sport in the world.”
You can see how Farina might have caught hockey’s attention. He was a sociologist and professor at the University of Toronto’s school of social work at the time. In the only photograph I’ve seen of him, he looks like Jerry Lewis playing the part in bow tie and big glasses with a sprung forelock and a goofy smile. Sports, he’d gone on to say, held scarcely any practical value.
Let’s face it, aside from the possible development of skill of questionable use, and perhaps physical development, there is very little use in sport and recreation activities themselves.
It’s ridiculous to say running will contribute to character. Running where? Along a back alley or on a cinder track? Running with what motivation — to win a prize, for the joy of running, or from a cop?
The true value of such activities, is their popularity as a medium in which community leaders can effectively transmit our social and cultural values from one generation to the next. The product of such a process is to be a socially adjusted, participating and democratic citizen.
To those who argued that youth clubs got boys off the street, Professor Farina answered that the clubs were of no benefit whatever. “The boys are just as well off left on the street,” he said. One of his beefs with boys’ clubs was the leadership. “Too many coaches teach boys that the only important thing is winning and not how you play the game,” said Professor Farina. Sports should be about the fun, never mind who was watching, and also, the referee needed stronger support: “the only person who represents integrity in the game.” About hockey specifically, he thought it bred bad habits.
How many times have you seen one player trip another going in to score? The defenceman figures he’ll get a two-minute penalty and it’s worth it if he can prevent a goal. He plays the percentages that the other team won’t score when he’s off. And what do you find boys talking about after the game? The good sportsmanship that has been displayed? No. The fights they saw. They’ll look up to these players as heroes. Look what happened to Clarence Campbell after he suspended Rocket Richard.
He was rolling now. He cited American studies that denied any relationship between recreation and low delinquency rates. “If there is evidence that sports and recreation do not necessarily prevent juvenile delinquency and do not alleviate modern stresses leading to mental breakdown, what is their value?”
As word got out, Farina had questions coming back at him. Who was he, anyway? Why should anyone listen to him, yammering away from his ivoried tower? Had he ever played the game, any game at all? When his sporting credentials were examined, well, okay, he’d played baseball and lacrosse, and it was true, too, that he was a big football guy, a former professional referee, and he’d quarterbacked and coached for the University of British Columbia.
Good for him. But his grapes were sour. The president of Toronto’s Minor hockey league stepped up to say there were ninety thousand hockey-playing boys under the age of eighteen across the country, “and if that many kids love the game, the whole nation must be degenerate.” The president wondered about Farina’s intestines. Where other men keep their fortitude? Farina’s had to be empty.
Jim Vipond, in the Globe, called the professor extravagant. It had to be admitted that there had been incidents in hockey to create such thinking in the minds of social workers. But the chief of referees had a program in place to steer back to wide-open hockey, away from “modern mayhem.” The proof of this was that Rocket Richard had been given but a single penalty in thirteen games. More broadly speaking, closer attention should be paid to the nation’s fitness. Said Vipond, “We cannot forget the high rate of military rejections for the Korean campaign as compared to the health records of the Russian population.” Serious days lay ahead. Who knew what might happen in the next few months? That’s why our military men had to be ready, which was to say, our sportsmen: “Canada’s armed forces have a history in which the inspirational leadership of men who played sports, and played them hard, meant the difference between winning and losing. The whole history of the British Empire has a sports background.”
The Globe sent a reporter to the professor’s home, and in his own living room Farina said his comments had been twisted around in the uproar. All he was trying to say was that sports should try to “develop the muscles between the head as well as the others.”
“The inherent value lies in the leadership and the standards set by the leaders in sports.” Here was the problem: sports were too much in the hands of the promoters when it should be the participants in charge. “If sports are maintained to build and develop ‘social beings,’ they can be of value,” he said.
The Globe’s editorial page felt the need to wag its finger. The evidence seemed to lie on the side of the sociologist. Hadn’t a Junior A player just been suspended for kicking an opponent in the stomach? Farina should be heard. “If he is proved wrong, the error will impose its own penalty on his professional status; if he is right, the motivations of our sports should be examined and corrected.”
Scott Young said it was old hat.
A professor comes out of the wings and proclaims professional sport as a degenerating influence. Bystanders nod their heads. Sportswriters try to shout down the professor. Sports promoters, players, and others connected with the game keep largely quiet, except perhaps for one or two soft renditions of that realistic old refrain: We’re going to have to cut out this kind of stuff. Or we’re going to have to print more tickets.
Young didn’t like fights in sports, either, “but since degeneracy, like anything else, is a matter of degree, I don’t feel that these fights are signs of degeneracy. If they are signs of anything at all, it is that human beings are present.” There were worse things than hockey’s violence. What about drunkenness? How about sexual promiscuity, theft, prostitution, neglect of children, crowded housing, and war? “Does any reasonable person believe that that a fight between a couple of well-padded athletes belongs in the above listing of social evils? I don’t.” The windmill Farina had chosen to charge, said Young, was tiny enough to fit atop a beanie. Clarence Campbell said the man should be thrown out of his job.
Somebody who might have been listening to Farina — maybe he even agreed with him — was Vincent Massey. Maybe the governor general was never going to invite him aboard his private car or give him a white rabbit, but Massey had thought about where hockey was headed, to the point that his idea of the Canadian Pattern had shifted significantly since he’d seen our soldiers strolling the streets of London. In 1949, three years before he moved into Government House, Massey had given the Centennial Address at the Royal Canadian Institute, a speech illustrated with “lantern slides.”
Unable to trace the original text, I rely on contemporary newspaper reports for a glimpse of its grain: Canada was in danger of destroying hockey like it had ruined lacrosse, by playing it in the wrong spirit. That’s right! Wake up, everybody! And what was wrong, precisely, with this spirit? Details are sketchy, but it was nasty and ultimately destructive. There was no reason why our games shouldn’t embody the standards of decent sportsmanship and fair play which, Massey said, we quite rightly label British.
I SHOULD HAVE been a goalie, I think, although of course it’s too late now. I hurt easily and, also, it may be that I’m too tall. Plus, fear. Pucks scare me. Failure, too, which goalies have to face up to in a more direct way than their teammates, along with the ridicule and targeted booing. Isolation. Scrutiny. Both Tiny Thompson and Charlie Gardiner gave up reading, for God’s sake, which they loved but which saps the vision. “After all,” said Thompson, “the only thing a goaltender has is his eyes.” But more than all that, I’m disturbed by the tortured testimony of the men who’ve done the job. Glenn Hall, for instance: “I hate every minute I play.”
No reading in the net: Bruins goalie Tiny Thompson shows his 1930s goal-guarding style.
You hear a lot about the eccentricities of goalies, Jacques Plante knitting his own toques (“I use four-ply wool,” he said), Patrick Roy talking to his goalposts. Eccentric? To me, goalies just seem more interesting than other players. And maybe, is it possible that they could be the key to hockey’s salvation?
They used to not wear masks in order that everybody could see their misery and know. They used to say — Gump Worsley said — it helps to be crazy. They’d promise you that the goaltender is the loneliest man in the world. Sorry, on the ice. That was Emile Francis. They used to fine a goalie two dollars if he fell down to stop a shot. It was another three dollars for a second offence — and a five-minute penalty.
None of the reasons famous goalies give for going into the nets ever came up for me. Worsley’s grocer in Montreal told him he was too small to be anything but a goalie; in Peterborough, at the A&P, nobody said a word to me. Bernie Parent’s brothers noticed how well balanced he was and that, combined with Bernie’s poor skating, convinced them he ought to try net. I’ll give my brother the benefit of the doubt: it may be that my balance was nothing special.
In Floral, Saskatchewan, young Gordie Howe was having such trouble on his skates that his teacher decided he’d be better off standing still in the goal. Vladislav Tretiak is supposed to have volunteered himself for the net because he couldn’t bear to be cold and thought that the goalie’s equipment would be warmer. Before he departed for right wing, Yvan Cournoyer kept to the net so that he’d never have to leave the ice. “It’s a chance for a shy person to be onstage,” Chico Resch said. Gilles Gratton, for whom shyness doesn’t seem to have been an issue, told teammates that he was fated to tend goal by what he’d done in a former life, in Biblical times, when he’d stoned someone to death.
Asthma sent Plante to the net, where he wouldn’t tax his lungs so much. For Ed Belfour it was the lure of the equipment, especially the masks, which were “awesome looking,” back when he was a boy. Parent says that at the age of three he used to play policeman and “sit” in the middle of the street to flag down trucks. “If you read deeply into behaviour like that,” writes Parent, “maybe I was showing then I could handle danger and eventually be a goaltender.”
The truth is, as to the cloth, you have to be called to the net. Steven Galloway touches on this in Finnie Walsh.
There is a difference between someone who plays goal and a goalie: Finnie Walsh was a goalie. He believed it was his mission, his duty, to keep pucks out of nets and, in the larger scheme of things, to keep tennis balls from hitting sleeping mill workers’ garage doors.
To Worsley, embarrassment was the key: you stopped the puck to keep the shame at bay. The most difficult position in all of sport, Gary Ronberg says. An almost wholly negative duty, the stopping of pucks, the preventing of goals, the disappointing of would-be scorers.
I drew goalies. For a long time they were all I drew: many Parents, Gilles Gilberts, the odd Ken Dryden, some Grattons and Doug Favells, and a single tactical Dave Dryden. Before the goalies, I was drawing a lot of retreats from Moscow and slews of pirates. In 1972, I sketched a famous still life depicting a detachment from the French Foreign Legion overseeing rehearsal by an orchestra. There’s a lot going on in this drawing, but mostly it comes down to the sabres and bassoons, timpani and rifles. In other words, the hardware is what mattered, as in the goalie drawings, with their blockers and masks and goalie sticks.
In my Dave Dryden drawing, when I look at it now, I can see no Dave Dryden. Studying the eyes—well, there aren’t any, just a vacant mask.The rest of his equipment is stacked up artfully, with the help of coat hangers or pipe cleaners. Dave himself didn’t even notice this, or else he was too polite to say anything. I’d sent the drawing to my grandfather in Edmonton, and he’d passed it on to the Oilers. What was I thinking, sending him a drawing of his empty equipment? He autographed it anyway, and returned it with his regards.
I never would have said so to my grandfather, but Dave was always my second-favourite Dryden. Dave probably got a lot of this, likely still does. Is it fair that Ken won all the Stanley Cups, beat the Russians, wrote all the books, had all the novels and poems written about him? No, probably not.
“A strange and lonely occupation,” says Grant Fuhr. The burden is fourfold, or so it was said to be in a 1959 article, because the goalie
There’s some dispute about 3: Jacques Plante calculated that it might be as low as 50 per cent; Scotty Bowman put it at 75.
Dryden, Ken, didn’t like to think of himself as a mere target, another piece of the net, preferring to believe that the goalie creates action rather than denies it.
Oh, but the tortures. Goaltending of old truly does sound like testimony from the trenches of Flanders, complete with rubber shock (“a first cousin to shell shock,” according to Ed Chadwick, who played for the Leafs) and walking wounded (Tiny Thompson had to be helped across a street after a bad game).
Gerry Desjardins once caught a slapshot of Bobby Hull’s on his leg. It was still sore two months later. Another Hull, brother Dennis, used to say to himself before every game, “I hope I don’t hurt a goalie tonight.” Not that he had a lot of choice in the matter; much depends on how the puck decides to hit you, in Gump Worsley’s experience. If it comes in flat, a puck can stun, slice, or knock you silly. “But for some reason the puck is more dangerous when it hits you straight on. Then, it’s like a sabre. It has a cutting edge. Maybe it’s something like the difference between slapping someone in the face and hitting them with your fist.”
Most goaltenders drink beer, Worsley said. They dream of scoring seventy-five goals as a left winger. There’s no goalie alive who doesn’t dream that, according, again, to Ken Dryden. Your mistakes will stand out like sore thumbs, Gordie Howe warned. You must have intestinal fortitude or, to put it bluntly, the guts of a burglar, Emile Francis thought you might like to know. When you get a shutout, you feel nine feet tall! (Howe again.) Stay on your feet! (And again.)
Good goalies have different physiologies than the rest of us. Jack Adams said that Turk Broda had not a nerve in his body. “He could tend goal in a tornado and never blink an eye.” Do the pucks drive you to eccentricity, or is it the eccentricity that keeps you from the maniacal laughter? Either way, quirky behaviour is expected, forgiven, enshrined in anecdote. Bob Froese used to bark like a dog.
It’s the waiting that gets to you, goalies agree, all the spare time. Murder, said Worsley. Butterflies plagued Plante before a game, and shivers buzzled between his shoulder blades. Mark Jarman has a goalie who lines up three coffees in paper cups, lets them cool, and gulps them just before the game.
Glenn Hall would puke if you talked to him. Or if you didn’t. Hall’s stomach and his habit of throwing up before each game is a standby of hockey lore. It’s dutifully mentioned in his biography at the Hockey Hall of Fame. “We’d hear him in the bathroom,” teammate Bob Plager said, that’s how they knew he was ready to go. His penchant, it’s sometimes called. Every game he puked? If that’s so, then the NHL (and maybe even gastrological) record would have to sit in the vomit of 906 regular season games and a further 115 in the playoffs.
Hall himself thought the media went a little overboard reporting on all this.
A taste of Gump Worsley’s seven-point recipe for goalie survival might include (1) forget your mistakes, (3) don’t expect too much of life, (6) chew gum (“best tension-breaker I know for someone who has to stay in one spot”), and (7) read mystery stories. After the game, once you’re home. No better way to (1).
What does it take to be counted as one of the greats of the goal? When Dryden came into the NHL late in the 1971–72 season, leading the Canadiens to the Cup and winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP, Plante cautioned wariness. It takes four, five seasons to determine how good a goalie is, he said. The shooters don’t know him to start with, let them learn and then decide. “When they get to know him and he still stops them, then you’ve got a great goaler.”
Though, of course, nobody liked Plante, according to Maurice Richard, not in Montreal and not in New York. He got on people’s nerves and he never took any blame for anything — a requirement of the job that, strangely, Plante fails to mention in his book.
Thirty-six years after they skated on Luzhniki ice in Moscow, Phil Esposito turned his lip as he said that Tretiak was one of the worst goalies he ever faced. A little surprising, that. Tretiak learned at the blocker of Viktor Konovalenko, the great CSKA Moscow goalie. He looked ungainly. He never complained. After a puck got by him, he’d mutter to himself, “Outwitted, outwitted . . .”
Sometimes what happens with goalies is that they grow old and forget to duck. This was Bernie Parent’s fate, at the age of thirty-four, when a stick from a passing Ranger poked into his eye through the hole in his mask. Subluxed is the medical term for pushed back, and that’s what the doctor saw when he looked, a permanent sublux of the lens of the eye. What Parent saw was no more hockey. Of retirement he said:
It’s an awful feeling. I loved being a goalie. I loved the responsibility it demanded, the spotlight it brought with it. My job was to give the team what it needed, when it needed it. Not when I was uninjured, untired, unsick, unworried enough to give it, not when I felt like giving it, when the team needed it.
Frank McCool, in a snub to his own surname, quit when he was twenty-eight and severely ulcerated. Bill Durnan said, “It had gotten so bad that I couldn’t sleep the night before the game. I couldn’t keep my meals down. The job — it was with me all the time, wherever I went. Nothing is worth that kind of agony.” Durnan quit Montreal in the middle of the Stanley Cup playoffs. His successor, Gerry McNeil, gave up the game to preserve, he said, his health and his sanity.
The famous story about Detroit’s Wilf Cude is that he was at home eating supper one night when his wife asked him about a goal he’d allowed. He picked up the steak he was eating and hurled it at the wall. That’s how he knew his goalie years were over.
YOU CAN TAKE your pick of Ken Drydens, or not. It’s true that not everyone is as sympathetic to Dryden as I am, and while his gifts are granted, these people would prefer not to hear from any of hims. There are those, too, who say that while they wish him no actual harm, the idea of Dryden is one that tempts them with dreams of firing a puck at his mask. I’m not entirely sure why one of the most incisive thinkers on the game — a man who happens also to have been one of the best goalies it ever saw — inspires such negative feelings. I sometimes wish the derision surprised me more, and that it didn’t typify so much of hockey’s self-protective armour.
Is it because he turned his back on the game when he was still at his best? Did it have to do with his opinion that there were other things more important than stopping pucks? For a while, the Dryden I liked the least was poem-Ken Dryden, who’s enshrined in Milton Acorn’s “Dryden in the Net.” “Stone face of a pharaoh” is memorable, but I didn’t understand the part about Dryden’s “arrogance.” I guess that’s what a lot of people saw, and see, in him, though.
Where you stand on Dryden can depend on your view of the game. To some, his curiosity, the incessant need to study and analyze, made him suspect. In the old NHL, the law degree he was determined to pursue in the 1970s looked like an insult to hockey. It showed a lack of appreciation. Guy’s got hockey, a Stanley Cup, a Conn Smythe, what more can he want? Why couldn’t he be satisfied being what he did?
Dryden may be the multiest-media hockey player, which is to say the most widely represented across the culture. Richard and Gretzky have their statues, Bobby Orr, too, outside the Bruins’ rink in Boston. Howe, Orr, Gretzky, Crosby: all the greats show up in children’s picture books, though Orr may be one of the few (along with Derek Sanderson) to have been immortalized in full-frontal naked glory by the American painter Kurt Kauper. But not since Rocket Richard has a hockey player been so widely represented across so many different canvasses—novels, memoirs, articles, and Hansard as well as movie-screens, plinths, and actual painterly canvasses.
And yet, for all those, it’s hard to tell whether we really know him.
Goalie-Ken Dryden I admire almost unconditionally. In Peterborough in the 1970s, on CHEX-TV, we used to get the Canadiens’ broadcast on Hockey Night in Canada. I suppose you could have driven down to Port Hope to catch the Leafs, though I never heard of anyone doing that: it was Dryden’s Habs, after all, who were winning Stanley Cups in those years. I can’t recall much of Dryden’s actual goaling, no particular saves leap to memory, but then Dryden says that’s true too for him: fifteen saves he can recall from his career, max. He had a great defence, as everybody knows. Phil Esposito called him a “thieving giraffe,” which is pretty good. What was important about goalie-Dryden was his mask — and his calm.
When he first came into the NHL, and also against the Soviets, Dryden wore one of the ugliest masks known to men, the one that made him look like an Orc chieftan weeping blood in The Lord of the Rings. His more famous second mask had loops of blue and red, modern, friendly, as cool as a Danish dinnerplate. It complemented the famous Dryden stance, enhanced its portrait of his calm, and maybe even his virtue, as the game skittered on at the far end of the rink.
In Pete McCormack’s Understanding Ken, the ten-year-old hero thinks he looks like God. The New Yorker’s Herbert Warren Wind described it this way: “He stands up straight in front of the goal and, with his hands and arms resting on his stick in a way that suggests Cincinnatus at his plow, surveys the distant proceedings.” Cincinnatus, if you look him up, was a benign Roman dictator, which doesn’t really fit Dryden.
Nowhere, I submit, is he better summed up than in kids’-book-Dryden. The book in question is Hockey Showdown (1979), a picture book by Bruce Kidd. It’s the story of Domingos, six years old, who watches Dryden tend the goal for Team Canada that September, and of course, he wants to get out there in the driveway to practise making the save for himself. But: the big fat mean neighbour, Mr. Sheppard, hates kids. Keeps your tennis ball, if he can grab it. Calls the police on you. So Domingos has to skulk, and what kind of hockey is skulking ball hockey? No kind. Fortunately, Ken Dryden’s aunt lives on the street, and along comes Ken for a visit. He sees Domingos and wants to play.
Wouldn’t he have a clause in his contract forbidding him from playing street hockey? If so, he doesn’t care. Just then, Bill the Cop shows up. Mr. Sheppard has sounded the alarm on kids disturbing the peace. But Bill the Cop wants to play, too. This is Ken Dryden, after all. He’s wowed. Next thing you know, Mr. Sheppard has joined in. You see what’s happening here and you can guess the message: something to do with simple pleasures and being a good neighbour, or that there are things more important than hockey. That would be a typical Ken Dryden message. In some ways, that’s the message of his whole career on the ice.
Shockingly grammatical: Goalie Dryden faces the shooter in his rookie season, 1972.
Once, when he was starting out, people worried about Dryden, but later a lot of them grew to be annoyed. First of all, though, he surprised them. This surprise has been traditionally expressed in two forms. One is to wonder: What’s a smart kid like him doing playing hockey? The second is closely related: this kid’s not like any hockey player we’ve seen before. Sometimes in the early profiles the surprise is mock surprise, but mostly it’s authentic enough. When the novelist Jack Ludwig profiled him in 1976, he heralded his intelligent listening, “small cussage” (he hardly swore), and articulate answers. He was “shockingly grammatical.” Phil Esposito had his carnal pre-game rite ahead of Game 1 in Montreal; in Moscow, the night before Game 8, Dryden went to the Bolshoi Theatre to see Anna Karenina. “Unlike a true NHL player, Dryden didn’t have himself a pile of paperbacks girlied up or severely bloodied.”
There are those who’ve resented over the years all his book-learning, note-taking, glasses-wearing, thought-thinking, meaning-wondering. The mini-series Canada Russia ’72 pays tribute to their derision with Gabriel Hogan’s performance. Whatever his puckstopping skills, movie-Dryden is a bumbler, telling his tape recorder what hockey means when he should be getting geared up, forlorn, bewildered by his own braininess maybe, visibly taken aback by his brash, guffawing teammates. Either way, Jack Ludwig’s right: it’s impossible to ignore the hockey meaning of Dryden.
Boston drafted him in 1964, but when he wouldn’t sign, a trade sent him to Montreal. Three things that worried the Canadiens were one and two, his eyes, and three, the path he was looking to follow. The eyes were tested, and Dryden was fitted for contact lenses. As for his attitude, Scotty Bowman called it a “lack of ambition.” The trouble? “He kept talking about going to school instead of playing Junior A.”
He refused to go to Peterborough, a bitter repudiation, hard to comprehend. How are you going to get to the NHL if not via Highway 28 on your way to the Lansdowne Street exit? But to Dryden and his family, school was more important. Instead of Peterborough, he headed for Ithaca, New York, to study and skate at Cornell University. The team there was good in those years: Newsweek called the 1967–68 version the “Royal Canadians,” and in fine Canadian fashion, they clobbered most comers, including Yale (19–1). At Harvard, students hung a sign proclaiming Stand Up For America; at Brown it was Welcome Home, Future Farmers of Canada. In three years, Dryden’s record was 76–4–1.
In 1969, the Canadiens again tried to harness him to their plan. Dryden wanted to go to law school. Joining Canada’s national team seemed like the perfect compromise: he could play and study at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, where the team was based. Perfect. What could go wrong?
There wasn’t much respect, though, for the Nationals. They were seen to be stealing away perfectly good hockey talent and even (a commonly held opinion) souring the skills of some of those players. Then the Nats got whacked for not winning, and why would anybody want to be associated with losers? In the end, the National Team ceased to operate in 1969. Stories that the Canadiens were behind its demise, doing whatever was necessary to get Dryden to Montreal, were not true. But Sam Pollock did set him up finally so that he could study at McGill and play for the Canadiens.
Even so, the NHL couldn’t bend Dryden’s will. He sat out a year when he felt that Montreal wasn’t paying him his worth, articled for a Toronto law firm, played defence in a beer league. There was talk he’d leap to the WHA, play for the hometown Toros. And he wrote, including an article in Sports Canada where he noted our “smug proprietary attitude towards ice hockey,” among other things.
Other countries can take a game and make refinements to fit their emotional make-up — the rejection of violence in the game, for example. When they do this they quite properly believe they have made an improvement.
He went back to the Canadiens, of course. Andy O’Brien called him the “most unusual personality” in the NHL. The New York Times tracked him down in Washington the summer before his first full NHL season, immediately detecting “a Naderesque earnestness,” maybe what you’d call an “impassioned common sense.”
Out on the ice it didn’t matter what people said, because the Canadiens were winning. Oh, but everybody had to have their say. Don Cherry: “He had a law degree and a great pair of legs.” That kind of thing. Dennis Hull thought he was more normal than most goalies. “The only strange thing about Dryden was you needed a thesaurus to figure out what he was talking about.” He offended Boston’s Derek Sanderson, even his own teammate John Ferguson. “I don’t like his attitude,” Sanderson grumbled, “the way he approaches my game. He comes in for a couple of years, then he’ll be gone. Hockey doesn’t have to be his life — I resent that. He’s like a psychiatrist always analyzing things.” Ferguson thought he was cheap (topping Red Berenson, another college boy, in “the Department of Ridiculous Frugality”) and uppity and you know what? Mediocre.
He definitely had an attitude problem. He was a rookie who had expected to be treated like a veteran, and he was the most selfish kid who ever came up. As for his goaltending, just look at the record overall — we had to score six goals in some of the games to win it for him. He wasn’t that great.
Dryden played eight seasons. He said he knew it was over when the best part of hockey was the showers, which is to say 1979, when the Canadiens had won their fourth consecutive Stanley Cup. When he gave up the games, he wrote The Game. He said none of the books he’d read reflected what he’d known on the ice.
Is The Game the best hockey book ever written, now and forever, amen? I’d say first that it depends on what you like to read; there’s no way to gauge best and no real point in it, for me. I’d add: the revolution doesn’t start here. If we’re talking about non-fiction, the short shelf of books I keep returning to includes Lawrence Martin’s The Red Machine (1990), Carrier’s Our Life with the Rocket, Lawrence Scanlan’s Grace Under Fire (2003), and Jack Batten’s The Leafs in Autumn (1975). I’m fond of oral histories like Stan Fischler’s Those Were The Days and also The Habs (1991) by Dick Irvin. In a sport that can be so earnest about itself, there’s no funnier book than Plimpton’s Open Net. Bidini’s Tropic of Hockey is great, and Roy MacGregor’s collected columns, and all of Trent Frayne. Oh, and my copy of Gzowski’s The Game of Our Lives is going to pieces from too much admiration.
It’s no secret why The Game has lasted. It’s because Dryden played — and at such a high level. No other hockey writer has that, blended with the focus, curiosity, and self-awareness that he brings to the page. Because he can tell a story, which isn’t easy to do. Because of his love for the game; because that love makes him more truthful, not less. I’d go on, but every time I get going on The Game I just end up re-reading it again. I recommend that.
For all the acclaim he enjoys, Dryden is noteworthy, too, for the degree and consistency with which he has annoyed the hockey establishment with his commentary, discussion, analysis. Will the man never stop thinking? His forty-dollar words! What a bag of gas! “If you ask him the time, he’ll build you a watch,” snarled Bobby Clarke. “You didn’t dare ask him a question because you had to stand and listen to him spout off for half an hour.”
For a while, hockey-Dryden was subsumed by House-of-Commons-Dryden. He rose to begin debate on motions urging the Government of Canada to withdraw from Iran, and said things like “Mr. Speaker, is the minister saying that the childcare providers of Napanee and Halifax-Dartmouth are not telling the truth?” Once in a while he looked back to his hockey-playing days. In 2006, in the running to lead the Liberal Party of Canada, his stump speech bracketed references to his dad’s backyard rink. How could he avoid it? That October he told party members at the final leadership debate that in the 1970s, Montreal had had no choice but to defeat the Philadelphia Flyers because they were bad for hockey. Same with the Conservatives. “Only twice in my life have I felt as if I was on a mission against an opponent,” he thundered. “The first time was against the Flyers, the second is in terms of beating Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.”
Stirring stuff, though Dryden lost the leadership race. His indictment did rouse Clarke’s slumbering wrath in Philadelphia. “Not relevant to anything,” he muttered in response to a reporter’s (possibly leading) inquiry. “He thinks he looks good? He looks like an idiot saying something like that.” Clarke’s father and grandfather had always been Liberals to the core, back in Manitoba, but now because of Dryden, he’d have to dump that family tradition. In theory, at least. If he was a voter in Canada, Clarke said, his ballot would go Conservative.
HOCKEY DOES HAVE a history of adapting, which has to be encouraging. Think of smoking. Hockey used to have a lot more smoking, back in William Faulkner’s day and before that, too. Now you almost never see it. Or what about helmets?
To me, the first mention of the word stickfight would have been the sign that the time was right to put on a helmet. But hockey never liked a helmet much. You can’t hear in a helmet, it’s too hot, it raises a question regarding your manlihood, it compromises your hair. And it’s not as if anyone died from not wearing a helmet.
Even when someone did, it wasn’t hockey’s fault so much as a problem of personal responsibility. Take Edgar W. Hawthorne, for instance, a goalie playing for the Royal Bank in Toronto in 1921. The puck that hit him in the head did cause his death, yes, technically, but there was more to it than that, as the Toronto Daily Star pointed out: improvements in sticks and shooting methods had made hockey so exceedingly lethal that players could now, quote, knock down an infant elephant with their shots. “The first goalie who has the moral courage to come out and wear a real protection for his head,” the Star intoned, “will earn the thanks of right-thinking hockey fans.”
This is the history of the helmet debate: clusters of outcry around terrible injuries and awful deaths (Ace Bailey’s trauma in 1933 prompted the first NHL-wide discussion), followed by a few more converts to the cause, mixed with some general naysaying leading up to a long silence, until the next time.
In 1937, the New York Times reported that the Rangers, to a man, refused to protect their heads. Visiting teams were a different story. If fancy headgear could be considered a means of mockery, well, maybe that’s what they were up to, their “heads upholstered in color combinations and designs that suit their own fancy.” Detroit’s Ebbie Goodfellow wore a helmet of “slashed type that gave him a dashing appearance and plenty of ventilation.” His teammate Doug Young’s was black and streamlined and “cut so well over his dark hair that it was almost invisible from the gallery.” Wilfred McDonald’s was deep as a dish, tan-coloured, with criss-crossed bars of leather that fairly “shrieked for attention.” Ralph Bowman had a saucy midget model that perched (a trifle) on the side of his head. Why no Rangers helmets? It was a minor mystery, the Times declared. So far as the paper’s reporter could tell, they weren’t a hindrance, causing “no drag on the head,” which is to say that players needn’t worry that their heads would slow them as they tried to build up breakaway speed.
The helmet that Boston defenceman Johnny Crawford donned in the 1950s was said to be a cover for his baldness as much as protection for his skull. It had a coiled white intestinal look to it and may have been on NHL president Clarence Campbell’s mind when he dismissed helmets as “too undignified.” Fans had a hard time telling helmeted players apart. This was another opinion of Campbell’s: helmets stole players’ individuality.
Clarence Campbell repelling boarders isn’t a surprise. That was his job, smacking down anyone who dared to opine on how the NHL ought to run its operation. It was predictable, then, that when yet another serious incident occurred, this one in March of 1950, Campbell was quick to shush at those who said that a helmet would have made a difference.
Toronto captain Teeder Kennedy had come at Gordie Howe and Howe had fallen and been grievously hurt. Detroit coach Tommy Ivan said Kennedy had butt-ended Howe, but players who’d been on the ice didn’t entirely agree on whether there had been any contact between the two. Maybe Howe had only stumbled. Campbell was at the game, and his investigation cleared Kennedy of responsibility. It also served to dismiss the notion that a helmet would have helped. Campbell ruled that Howe had broken his nose on the dasher of the boards by the force of his own speed. Had he hit his head subsequently when he fell? Maybe, but the serious damage was already done.
Campbell had a surprising ally in his anti-helmet crusade: Ace Bailey. “Helmets are not necessary,” he insisted, unless you wanted players to stand still. “Hockey players carry so much armour already, they can’t bear any more.” An injury like his, he said, was just a fluke, wouldn’t happen twice in fifty years, he thought. This was a common enough sentiment. “Helmets would be beneficial to a lot of players,” he said in 1970, “but that’s not what’s really necessary, not if the rules are enforced.”
Some coaches concurred: one player lost in fifty years, what’s the big fuss? As for players, Rod Gilbert pleaded the old-dog defence: he’d gone too long without one to make the switch. Plus, in a helmet, he sweated too much. This was Maurice Richard’s peeve, too: when he tried one, his head overheated. Brad Park had worn one in Junior and it was awful: unhelmeted opponents would tap him on the head with their sticks. And what a nuisance: his sweat would freeze and his head would ache.
My old History teacher, Mr. Armstrong, said, “I tried it once but every time I touched somebody I felt like I was hiding behind the helmet.” Plus the perspiration and the leather — “they used to stain us yellow.”
Dave Balon argued that in most games you never took a hit to the head. Balon was on the ice in Minnesota one January night in 1968 when his teammate Bill Masterton was carrying the puck in the North Stars’ zone. Two Oakland players came at him. He passed the puck to Balon, then fell, slamming his head on the ice. The blood was profuse when they carried him off. Five doctors worked to save him. He was dead at 1:55 AM.
“Quite a few of us on the club put on the helmet after Masterton died,” said Balon. His coach, Wren Blair, tried to talk him out of it.
The Boston Bruins led the protection lobby. In 1969, the team filed a formal motion with the NHL rules committee asking that the wearing of helmets be mandatory. This was in 1969, right after Wayne Maki had chopped the Bruins’ Ted Green over the head in Ottawa. The proposal was rejected when it came up for voting at the committee. Toronto’s general manager, commenting on his team’s decision to abstain from the vote, explained that there was no way he could tell a player like Tim Horton to wear a helmet.
He might have been alluding to what Brad Park so elegantly calls the sissy connotation. Somehow, if you wore a helmet you weren’t as manful as the guy with his hair flapping free. By the sight of your forehead will we measure your mettle. When Felix Batterinski took his career to Finland he had no choice but to wear a helmet, that’s the law of the land, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t complain about having to don “the ultimate suck symbol.” Same with Phil Esposito at the World Championships, 1977. Helmets were the rule, and when it was all over, Esposito threw his at the president of the governing IIHF to register his disgust.
Now that everybody goes helmeted, the stigma has transferred to visors. Many of the arguments are the same; today you display your true sinew by whether or not you wear the Plexiglas.
I don’t know whether Guy Lafleur could have taken his place among Canadiens greats wearing the bobbleheaded helmet he sported when he first played in the NHL. In 1974, at training camp, the story goes that he left it in his hotel room. He’d been a bit of a dud up to then, and the sportswriters were ready to write him off. Without his helmet, blond hair free, he played with joy and with verve. The writers cheered. Right there, right then, he decided he’d never again cover his head. Biographer Georges-Hébert Germain: “As though by magic he had rediscovered the pleasure of playing.” It wasn’t what was on his head, of course, so much as in it. “But the helmet would be banished as a negative fetish for him, a bearer of unhappiness.” Versus the Flyers that year, the Canadiens thought he should put the helmet back on. “He would hear none of it — it was a burden, slowed him down.”
Guy’s dad wasn’t pleased, as noted in his autobiography. “I’ve always been afraid to see Guy play without a helmet.” He and his wife worried when they saw him bareheaded, “especially when he falls or he’s checked against the boards.” When he asked Guy why, he said he’d damaged his helmet and the team hadn’t got him a new one yet. “I never much believed in the story,” his dad solemnly wrote.
Rocket Richard had a change of heart at the end of his career. This was around the same time he started to think before games about getting hit. “Everyone should wear helmets,” he said. “It’s just up in the mind. It would be a good thing. It’s a dangerous spot, the head. We’ve tried; they bothered us, were too warm. But if everybody wore them it would be the same.” It took another nineteen years, but by 1979 the NHL was mandating that all rookies joining the league would from now on be helmeted. Players were allowed to grandfather their bare heads, and a few, like Al Secord and Craig MacTavish, did so.
Right to the end of his tenure, Clarence Campbell battled the headgear. Players couldn’t hear, helmets got knocked askew, and the constant need to adjust them detracted from the grace of the game. And: “A protective helmet also minimizes the sense of responsibility for those who should not be causing the injuries. If everybody wears helmets . . . What is the risk? Bang them on the coco if you have to, he isn’t going to get hurt.”
LLOYD PERCIVAL’S ADJECTIVES would have to include embattled and maybe abrasive. He himself might have added misunderstood and underappreciated. When he died in Montreal in 1974, the papers conferred controversial. His opus, The Hockey Handbook, won adjectival fanfare when it came out in 1951: mumbo-jumbo, the hockey writer Baz O’Meara called it, and theoretical twaddle, though it might have some useful diet suggestions. Dick Irvin the Elder said it was worthy of a three-year-old. Or rather, he said Percival was a three-year-old.
But that wasn’t strictly true. He was by then a strapping thirty-eight-year-old champion tennis player, runner, and cricketer. In 1941, Percival founded the Sports College, a correspondence school for coaches and athletes conceived as a national radio show that ran, eventually, for twenty-one years on the CBC, with as many as eight hundred thousand subscribers at its peak. Queen Elizabeth II gave him a medal in 1953 for his contribution to Canadian sport.
Here’s what I like about Percival: for all his emphasis on physical fitness, what he was campaigning for was readers. The road to improving yourself as a hockey player was paved, for Percival, with newspaper columns and the closely printed little booklets you could send away for, study, and absorb. He believed that you could read your way to hockey betterment.
The Hockey Handbook is a Canadian classic, as far as I’m concerned — up there with Fifth Business and The Stone Angel. What it’s not is a scintillating story, but then that’s not what he was peddling. With Percival, metaphors aren’t important, only facts. Nor is there any kind of violence, which is a little strange, until you see that for all his practicality, Percival worked exclusively in ideals.
As far back as 1951, Percival’s constant contradicting of what hockey people thought they knew kept getting him in trouble. He said, for instance, that Gordie Howe was, scientifically, a better right winger than Maurice Richard: that’s the kind of thing that drove Dick Irvin batty. Sentences in The Hockey Handbook say things like Speed is about twenty-five per cent mental and There’s no such thing as a born skater.
Scoot is an occasional hockey word, nowadays, but does anyone know the technical specifications? Percival has the goods. In 1951, scooting was one of the most overlooked of agility skating tricks. (Much as Percival would hate to hear it, that’s still the case today.) Milt Schmidt was probably the best of the scooters. Use it to shift around a checker! Break away suddenly from a melee of players for the purpose of receiving a pass! Go ahead! Don’t be shy! There are drills you can use to practise, for example, Scooting the Goal, Angle Scooting, and Scooting the Line. He tells us about Edgar Laprade’s shooting percentage (one in four); most players are lucky to score a goal once in every ten shots.
Or take Red Horner. When he first tried to breach the NHL, his skating was like something out of a comedy act. People laughed at him. With a siege of hard work, he became a good skater. Skating complacency is hard to shake. Players think they can skate. They believe they have the three key areas covered: free skating, agility skating, backward skating. Wrong. They can do one of those, but not all of them. Do they fix the problem? Rarely. It’s not hard to do: all you have to do is attend to your body lean and foot action. Free-skating faults include Skating Tension, Bang the Foot, and Tight Roping. Simple.
His mantra is there on his PlayBetter pamphlets, scripted to fit a red shield that would look good on the chest of a hometown superhero:
KEEP FIT
WORK HARD
PLAY FAIR
LIVE CLEAN
Harry Sinden was too busy to listen to him in 1972. Who knows what would have happened if the coach had acknowledged just one of Percival’s letters (he sent three), offering counsel, films, all access to the records at the Fitness Institute. “We had advice from so many people, it was swamping us,” Sinden said when it was all over. As it was, the Soviets were the ones who used The Hockey Handbook: it was their manual for undoing the Canadian professionals. High-tempo skating, pattern-passing, tea-drinking between periods: that was all from Percival. When he was still coach, Anatoli Tarasov sent Percival a letter of his own: “I have read it like a schoolboy,” he wrote of the Handbook. “Thank you for a hockey science which is significant to world hockey.”
Before he sought out Sinden for a pen pal, Percival had actually given up trying to improve Canadians, so it’s surprising that he wrote at all. In 1968, he’d announced that no more would he be pursuing his lifelong dream of trying to transform Canada into a world sporting power. “I can’t fight the establishment any longer,” he said. “I guess I was too far ahead of my time, and it’s been one of the great disappointments of my life.” Still, business did get a bump after the Summit Series. Detroit signed him to a two-year contract to help transform the Red Wings, and the WHA hoped he might be able to transform the upstart league.
The Hockey Handbook makes a cameo in Canada Russia ’72. When the Canadian coaches see the Soviets’ copy, they’re confused and disgusted. “This Percival guy,” movie-John Ferguson sneers, “he play hockey? He play?”
THERE’S NEVER BEEN a time in hockey’s history when there hasn’t been a parallel play-by-play on how to improve the game, patch up the punctures, renovate the front rooms, fix what’s broken.
In February of 1973, four short months after Team Canada returned from Moscow, a national magazine ran an article titled “How We Can Jazz Up Hockey,” in which Joe Crozier recommended more penalty shots and Norm Ullman wanted two referees and a better attitude from the press. Gordie Howe thought maybe it was time to bring back the old Beehive photos for the fans, and then Bobby Hull weighed in to say that players needed to show greater dedication to the game:
We should exhibit more pride in what we’re doing, and we should be more conscious of public relations. I’ve seen guys just rip up fans’ letters asking for pictures. That’s no way to act. We’ve got to get back to where athletes are athletes and not long-haired goons. If they look like men, they’ll act like men.
Unless that’s the whole problem with hockey in the first place: too many man-looking men acting like men. It’s not right that I’ve left it so late to talk about women’s hockey, and even worse that I’m not really going to say very much, but still, here goes: What if the men’s game were more like the women’s? Better yet, forget the men. What if we just turned our attention to the women’s game more often, flocked to its rinks, rejoiced in its stars and values? Governor General David Johnston was an accomplished defenceman at Harvard, knows hockey well, cares deeply about its future (it should be fight-free, he thinks). He suggested that the women’s game “may just be the pinnacle of hockey.” That was in 2013 — a year before Canada’s women won Olympic gold in Sochi, captivating the country with a performance against the United States that was every bit what Dave Bidini said it was: “one of the greatest games played in the history of sport.”
Everybody has a formula for correcting the game’s violence, and they always have. In 1950, Tommy Gorman wanted a penalty shot awarded for every major, with repeat offenders banned from the game for life. Blame the managers, cried a fan in 1953, for baiting referees, you know what we should do, fine all the teams $5,000 and close down the rinks for a month. “Then we might get a little sense drilled into the thick heads and get back to the hockey we all enjoyed.” Or why not make it $10,000 charged to any player who drops his gloves? That’s what two Minnesota legislators suggested in 1989 in a state bill that would surely have ended fighting. “I want hockey to remain an outstanding sport and not degenerate into a circus of blood,” said State Representative Todd Otis. The bill vanished almost as soon as it was proposed.
Money has long been seen as a fix for hockey violence. The cost to Billy Coutu for knocking George Redding unconscious with his stick in 1928 was twenty-five dollars. In 1936, Art Ross paid a five-dollar fighting fine during a friendly benefit game. In 1961, when Montreal coach Toe Blake struck referee Dalton McArthur, the NHL hit him up for $2,000. Compare those to what New York Rangers coach John Tortorella paid in 2012 for saying not-nice things about referees: $30,000. (The price for linesmen who worked a game in 1963 without having shaved properly was fifty dollars. This was George Hayes again, the official whom Clarence Campbell penalized for taking the wrong kind of train between games.)
For a long time, referees had the power to fine players, and when I read the reports from the papers, it always sounds like they were collecting the cash on the ice as the game went along. There’s no way to measure how well fines worked as a deterrent. To me, it seems like another case where real life stops rinkside: money only matters once the game ends and you’ve returned to terra firma. Fines were never going to change much. Near the end of his tenure, Clarence Campbell seemed to think it might be a good idea to enrich players rather than tax them. “The more affluent the players are,” he observed in 1975, “the less inclined they are to violence.”
The hockey books with an eye on rescuing hockey are called The Good of the Game and Saving the Game and What in Hell’s Wrong With You, Game? Sometimes it’s just a single chapter in a book that takes on the challenge, titled “Bringing the Game Back to Life” or “Sorting Things Out” or “The Game Plan.” They all have good and carefully considered ideas that will probably be adopted soon and kick in, oh, at some point in the not-too-long-from-now so that nobody has to write the final installment in the celebrated Death of Hockey trilogy.
When it comes to fighting, the Hockey News is all for taking it slowly — implement a ban over three years, get everybody acclimatized. Sorry, was: that was in 1997, which meant that by the year 2000, when the NHL would finally be ejecting players who fought, everybody would be used to it.
The Toronto Board of Education had an idea for the TV networks in 1975: black out hockey broadcasts as soon as a fight starts. That’s a long way from the fall of 2013 when Steve Yzerman, Hall of Famer and general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning, said it was time for fights to be gone for good. “I believe,” he said, “a player should get a game misconduct for fighting. We penalize and suspend players for making contact with the head while checking in an effort to reduce head injuries, yet we still allow fighting.”
“It is the players,” Clarence Campbell opined in 1950, “who decide what type of game it should be.” By 1974 he was saying, “Fighting is not undesirable, because it’s the best safety valve I know of in hockey.” In Europe, they threw you out of the game if you fought — ridiculous. “It produces a more violent game.”
DOES GOD HAVE time for hockey? It’s a big question, not necessarily blasphemous, but probably insoluble. A smaller, and possibly more urgent, one is this: Did God lend a hand when Paul Henderson put that puck behind Vladislav Tretiak in 1972? Probably not. If he did, the troubling follow-ups include: Why couldn’t we handle the Russians on our own? And does that mean, implicitly, that He was okay with the whole breaking-Kharlamov’s-ankle situation?
Tretiak has said that he thinks the Lord himself gave the goal to Henderson. None of the Canadian players mention any such gift in their books, of which they’ve written many. Team Canada 1972 would have to be the most prolific team we’ve ever sent out to face the world in terms of hardcovers, a team with a lot to say, and not just because Ken Dryden was their goalie. It’s not a straightforward calculation, but by my count there are as many as twenty-five books written or authorized or assisted by players and coaches from that team, three by Paul Henderson alone. For all that, Alan Eagleson is the only one to mention divine intervention, and that’s in somebody else’s book: the disgraced former player agent and man-behind-the-1972-curtain says (joking, I think) that if Henderson hadn’t scored the goal, he wouldn’t have had to take his turn to religion to show his gratitude.
There is a strange novel about 1972, Frank Cosentino’s Hockey Gods at the Summit (2010), wherein an all-star team of dead Canadian hockey players manipulates the whole series from on high. God has delegated the job to Bad Joe Hall, Howie Morenz, Hod Stuart, and many bi-locating others. When things go bad for our flesh-and-bone boys, posthumous heroes drop into their bodies and take over. Georges Vézina occupies Dryden; Jack Darragh does the winning work that poor, mortal Henderson couldn’t manage on his own. It’s all very confusing, although we do learn that if there’s one thing God can’t stand, it’s bad refereeing.
Is hockey polytheistic? It may just be a rhetorical plurality when coaches and commentators talk about the hockey gods, but if not, those gods are incredibly busy. They
Religion provides a rich fund of faith-and-devotion imagery, of course, especially in Quebec. It’s also handy when Fred Shero wants to talk to his players about Bobby Orr (“We’ve got to stop treating him like God”) or Montreal’s Serge Savard has something to say after that famous New Year’s Eve tie with CSKA Moscow (“God was Russian tonight. They had three chances to score and they scored on all three of them.”).
One year, when the Leafs’ Don Metz ran into Elmer Lach and broke Lach’s jaw, Canadiens coach Dick Irvin felt that God would rule that it was a dirty play by allowing Montreal to win the Stanley Cup that year. In fact, the Leafs won.
Gretzky’s dad, Walter, says that 99’s talents were given to him by the Good Lord; Wayne himself is on the record as saying he learned them all for himself.
There’s the sin bin, of course, which always seemed a half-hearted rhyme to me. I much prefer Zamboni interpretations: the “liquid absolution” that poet Matt Robinson writes about in Tracery & Interplay (2004), his collection of hockey poems.
In Amazons, Don DeLillo has an announcer giving a talk to delinquents on the subject “How goaltending prepares you to let Christ into your life.” In The Last Season, Batterinski’s buddy Torchy finds religion, though a teammate says it’s just another form of superstition, like a rabbit’s foot. In Fred Stenson’s Teeth, the coach wants his boys to pray between periods, but there’s a Russian who won’t do it: “I no believe God. He dead.”
For a more serious-minded approach, I recommend Bernard Palmer’s 1957 novel Danny Orlis Plays Hockey. Orlis was new to me, but I’m determined, having found him, to venture deeper into the Palmer oeuvre, starting with Danny Orlis and the Strange Forest Fire, or maybe Danny Orlis and the Rocks that Talk. Eventually. I’m still digesting Danny’s hockey adventure, in which characters say things like, “I’ve been a different woman since I took the Lord Jesus as my own.”
How good is Danny? At one point he gets caught in a hunter’s trap and has to take to the ice with just the one unmangled hand. “He called for a puck and darted at top speed from one goal to the other, dribbling it expertly.” It wasn’t as natural using one hand on the stick, but he could manage. Later, Rick — did I mention Rick? — Rick says, “I can’t go on any longer, Danny. I’ve got to become a Christian.” Someone else stops smoking and starts praying. Someone else: “With God’s help, I’m going to live as He would have me to live from now on.”
Actually, I’ve changed my mind: Danny is a big drag. Talking about a movie, he wonders was there anything in it that glorified Christ? Would it make you want to live a better life? Not so much, but there’s lots to want to make you sin. “That’s the reason I don’t go to movies,” he says.
Rob Ritchie’s Orphans of Winter braids hockey and faith tightly enough that I wasn’t able to discern the finer strands, or many of the broader ones for that matter. I believe it’s about the Messiah making his return to the world of men, via Thunder Bay, as an undersized centre with not much of a shot but plenty of wile, including a tricky faceoff move that gets him a goal six seconds into his big-league debut. Again the question arises: “Why the hell would some Messiah waste his time playing hockey?” Casey Bruford is his name. I missed the answer to the question. Wolves also feature.
The most straightforward, unironic consideration of just how God fits with hockey has to be in Keith Magnuson’s 1973 autobiography None Against!, which is disarmingly guileless from the title on in. Magnuson tells us his dad put religion before hockey.
With me, it’s the other way around. Naturally I want God on my side because He has the power to deliver talent or take it away. And being a good Christian is the best way to help my own performance in hockey. Quite possibly this is sinful reasoning. But before games today, I still find myself telling God that if we win I’ll become a better Christian. Then later, when we have won and I go out for a beer with the team, I’ll say, “If you’re up there, please don’t strike me down.” Whether I’m a hypocrite or just human, I’m convinced that if God has been listening to me all this time, He’s thinking, “Well, to Hell with this guy.” And so, whenever we lose a game, I’m sure it’s some form of punishment.
In 1978, when Tom Edur couldn’t reconcile his religious beliefs with hockey’s brutality, he retired. Stu Grimson, on the other hand, saw no contradiction in his role as a hockey fighter. “Jesus was no wimp,” he told an interviewer. “If there has to be a player in this team environment that sticks up for the smaller man, or the less physical athlete, why can’t it be a Christian?”
An Irish kid from South Porcupine, Ontario, Les Costello won a Stanley Cup with Toronto in 1948. Words that adhere still to his playing career are brash and feisty and shit disturber. In the summer of 1950, he heard a voice saying, “I think you should try.” The priesthood, that is. He steered past the Leafs’ training camp and headed straight for the seminary. It shook his family and his teammates, but he never looked back. He’d had his eyes opened, he later said, playing Junior at St. Michael’s in Toronto. “If you’re not careful, you can get seduced by the pleasures of hockey,” he said. “In some ways it could be a useless life.”
Charlie Angus tells his story in Les Costello: Canada’s Flying Father (2005), detailing his piety and good works (also largely shit disturbing) and how he ended up as the driving force behind the team of hockey-playing priests who entertained thousands throughout their years on the ice while raising millions of charitable dollars. In the 1980s, Disney came calling. There was a script involving skating movie-priests prevailing against wicked Soviets, but that’s as far as it went. The priests didn’t like some of the unholier subplots apparently, and then there was the problem with the young actor who flunked the screen test for the starring role: Wayne Gretzky.
I wish Father David Bauer had written a hockey book. I’ve even got a title for him: Let the Spirit Prevail. Bauer was a classmate of Les Costello’s at St. Mike’s, though as hockey players they won separate Memorial Cups in the 1940s. He wasn’t the best hockey talent in the Bauer family; that would have to be his elder brother, Bobby, who joined Milt Schmidt and Porky Dumart to form the Boston Bruins’ Kraut Line in late the 1930s and into the 1940s, when the adjectives he earned were hard-working and seldom penalized; he was known too as the brains of the outfit and the balance-wheel.
David went to war after he won his Memorial Cup, then the following year, he entered the novitiate of the Basilian Fathers to study for the priesthood. He didn’t see any contradiction between the game and his faith. The Basilian motto could serve equally as a hockey slogan to make Anatoli Tarasov proud: Teach Me Goodness, Discipline, and Knowledge.
Father Bauer’s greatest hockey legacy is his advocacy for an amateur national team built on a model in which sport and education were equal partners. He did this while coaching just such a team — the one that law-school-Ken Dryden joined — and in the years leading up to 1972, he was tireless and even heroic in trying to keep the program alive, despite steady opposition to such a hare-brained idea. Why would you bother? The Russians and the Czechs kept winning at the Olympics, and it was embarrassing to send our amateurs to play those wily Communists who were really pros anyway. The NHL didn’t like Father Bauer’s operation because it lured away their star youngsters when they should be concentrating on avoiding injury and readying themselves for the real big time. The country was disappointed because Father Bauer’s teams weren’t bringing home gold medals.
The plan that he hatched in 1962 and took to the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association echoes the plot of Foster Hewitt’s 1950 novel, Hello Canada! and Hockey Fans in the United States, in which plucky, non-swearing, hard-studying Canadian lads called Crasher Kelly and Butch Batting and Buff Jones (“the colored boy”) band together to play their way to the Olympics in Switzerland. While resisting the lures of pro scouts, they skate, skate, skate for four years until the time comes to head overseas with a mandate that includes not only winning, but being nice (important to make the people in other countries like us). They beat Poland and Britain, Switzerland, the U.S., the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and France, all despite the soft ice and inferior referees, and Czechoslovakia, too, in a tight gold medal game that redeems Canadian honour and pride and deserves cheers from us all. (This happens to be pretty much the plot of Scott Young’s 1982 novel, That Old Gang of Mine, too — Spunska returns! — except that the Olympics are in Moscow. One more time: yay us!)
Father Bauer’s real-life Olympic efforts were more or less like that, except for all the winning and widespread cheering. Still, he laboured on. His personal maxim was “Make use of technique, but let the spirit prevail.” Why should it have been so difficult to understand? Some people appreciated what he was doing. Headlines from newspaper articles about Father Bauer’s teams include “The Clean Canadians” and “Everybody Wants Them to Win.”
But if Father Bauer’s devotion to the national team still shines, it’s not the main reason I admire him. For that, you have to go to the Innsbruck Olympics in the winter of 1964. We’re playing our old rivals, the pesty Swedes. A Swedish left winger by the name of Carl-Goran Oberg, having broken his stick while cross-checking a Canadian, skates past the Canadian bench on his way to the penalty box and throws a piece of broken stick that hits Father Bauer on the forehead and cuts him. Father Bauer bleeds, and is still bleeding half an hour after the game. When his players jump up to retaliate, Father Bauer tells them to sit down, which they do. There’s no penalty. Father Bauer says he’s convinced it’s an accident, though there are witnesses who disagree: Öberg threw his stick in the coach’s face. Instead of a brawl, the game goes on. Canada wins, 3–1.
There was aftermath: Öberg was suspended for a game and so was the Italian referee, who was deemed to have been negligent. Öberg apologized. Father Bauer invited him to join him to watch a game the next night. “He’s a fine, clean-cut boy,” Father Bauer said, “a little excitable, but I like him a lot.” Another thing he said was, “Things like that happen in sport. I just happened to be in the way of the stick.”
When it was all over, Canada finished up out of the medals that year, in fourth. But one member of the team received gold. So uncommon and meritorious was Father Bauer’s behaviour — so shockingly unhockeylike — that the IIHF gave him a special medal. Father Bauer’s players weren’t there to see it. They felt they’d been cheated out of the bronze medal by tournament organizers, so they boycotted the ceremony.
THE NEW YORKER has kept an eye on hockey right from the start of the magazine in the 1920s, back in Harold Ross’s day, when Niven Busch Jr. had the watch. Herbert Warren Wind, Roger Angell, and Charles McGrath have all taken monitoring duty over the years. Today it’s Charles’s son Ben on the job, with Adam Gopnik, Alec Wilkinson, and Nick Paumgarten pacing the beat now and again. It was Wind who called hockey “inherently the most dangerous of team sports.” Roger Angell said it was the most emotional and — it’s almost enough to make our nation blush — dubbed it “this wingéd game.”
Raised as a Montrealer, proudly a Habs fan, Gopnik has a hockey pedigree that boosts his authority above those others. He may be the most trenchant and sensible writer on the game since Rick Salutin’s attention wandered away. In 2011, he was the (Vincent) Massey Lecturer, and once he’d crossed the country delivering the lecture in person, Gopnik published it as a sort-of-hockey book, Winter: Five Windows on the Season. Learned and lively, warm with wit, it covers a lot of frosty ground. Of all the games we play, Gopnik argues there, hockey is the mostest: most interesting, most rewarding, most consistently entertaining, most difficult, most beautiful. Also: brainy. You thought it was all chase and whack, a celebration of collision and bad temper, its actions naught but reactions, no time to think?
Wrong. Look at the patterns of the game, Gopnik says, all the angles, the vectors, the chess of the thing. He talks about different kinds of intelligence, spatial and emotional, and situational awareness. Those are the smarts that hockey players have and need, and that hockey reveals and rewards, and with everything happening at such a speed. Look at Wayne Gretzky. As a player, he wasn’t big or fast or particularly powerful, but he had his skating and his brain. In no other sport is the brain so decisive a factor — and that’s to be celebrated. As a friend of Gopnik’s says, hockey is the only game in which a good mind can turn everything upside down.
The other part of Gopnik’s appreciation of hockey has to do with fans and their brains. Maybe because I was always better at reading the game than playing it, this is the bit that I can more readily endorse. As much as we may love a show, we also crave a story. Hockey provides both. “It looks like a reflex, rapture sport but is really a rational, reasoned one,” Gopnik writes. He takes a quick dash through game theory, but what it comes down to is this: for all its apparent headlong chaos, a good hockey game is as complex and lastingly interesting as a good novel. Gopnik: “Hockey offers drama at first viewing, meaning on the second, and learning on the third and fourth, even forty years on.”
It doesn’t excuse all the bad games, of course, the boring, the banal. And it doesn’t justify those parts of the game to which words like brutality, thuggery, greed, degrade, and stupidity apply.
Oh. Right. That.
“I have,” Gopnik writes, “been inclined to abandon it.”
I think it’s just a warning — that’s how I read it, anyway. Winter doesn’t have any remedies to prescribe, just one more stern, loving, reasonable voice calling for hockey to use its brain. “With our selves invested in our games,” he writes, “we have to save the game to save ourselves. It can be done.”
NEWSPAPER NARRATIVES OF early games make it sound so cheerful, hale, and healthy, there’s such an innocent enthusiasm for the spectacle at hand, just the tone alone has the feel of an elixir you could drink to tone up your skin and clean out your sinuses, restore your vitality. “It was a fierce hard contest,” a Toronto Daily Star correspondent reported of a Toronto-Ottawa game in early 1915. “Players went down all over the ice, and it simply became a question of which team could stand the gruelling.” Answer: Ottawa. But both teams suffered. Frank Foyston was so badly battered at the finish that he could scarcely walk, and Cully Wilson collapsed after it was over and had to be carried to bed. Art Ross ended up with two black eyes and a cut face.
A month later, the teams met again. Four men fought two fights on the night of February 17 at the Mutual Street Arena. Wilson, who played for Toronto, was up and about again, spry enough in the third period to skate into Ottawa goalie Clint Benedict, which started an argle-bargle that the referees tried their best to stop, and did. Benedict and Wilson were banished without further incident, other than Wilson whapped Benedict in the jaw with his stick and also, later, a spectator wrestled with one of the referees. The law looked the other way. Exhausted, maybe? Fresh out of handcuffs?
Police did lay charges against Art Ross and Toronto’s Minnie McGiffen for their fight near the Ottawa goal, though just what it was that made their encounter more actionable than any of the others is hard to discern from the newspaper. “The men first tried to get at each other with their sticks, but finally dropped them and went to it with their fists.” Businessman Lol Solman, a director of the arena, eventually bailed the players out of jail.
All this the Star duly reports on page 14 the next day. Three pages later, the story continues. The scene has moved two blocks south and seven to the west, from rink to police court. Inspector Geddes takes the stand to conjure the fight for the court. McGiffen and Ross had dropped their sticks, he says. The blows they exchanged were a dozen.
T.C. Robinette rises for the defence. “But you can’t play hockey and be orderly,” he says. “I am told the people won’t attend the games unless there is some excitement, a little of the hot stuff. A tame game means an empty house.”
Minnie McGiffen — sorry, your honour, Roy McGiffen — is sworn. He admits to fighting but, says he, not to worry, both players wore padded gloves. It’s not as if they were going to hurt one another. The magistrate is His Worship Squire Ellis. He’s bespectacled and white-haired, like Caesar (it’s said) in the winter of life, a plain, practical man. “But when a great many people go to see a clean game,” he suggests, reasonably enough, “they don’t want to see rowdyism.”
Inspector Geddes points out the danger “with feeling running high” and a big crowd on hand: “There is likely to be a riot on the ice, starting with a fight such as this one.” Staff Sergeant McKinney pipes up on the larger issue: “Toronto’s good name as a home of clean sport shouldn’t be ruined by this sort of conduct.”
Squire Ellis: What about the referee? Inspector Geddes: He was standing thirty feet away, and he didn’t interfere until McGiffen fell down.
“I’d like to fine him,” sniffs the magistrate, “but I can’t.” Instead he does what he can, fining McGiffen and Ross one dollar each plus costs for disorderly conduct, a price they presumably accept in place of the alternative: fifteen days in jail.
So hockey goes free, until the next time.
Cooper Smeaton was one of the referees that night. He’d started his career in 1913, patrolling a Canadiens and Wanderers game in which Newsy Lalonde is said to have taken issue with the very first offside he called. Smeaton fined him five dollars. It took nerve to referee in those years. That and a solid right hook. In 1917, Smeaton gave Howard McNamara of the 228th Battalion team two majors and tried the five-dollar treatment. McNamara rushed him, and the two men punched each other until other players intervened. You can see why Smeaton might have felt the need for a short sabbatical from hockey, which he took with the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s McGill University Overseas Siege Battery (motto: By hard work, all things increase and grow).
After the war, Sergeant Smeaton returned to his insurance job in Montreal with a Military Medal on his tunic for bravery in the field. On the ice, he didn’t delay in making his return to being battered and besieged domestically. In February of 1932, he was on duty at another game in Toronto, this one featuring Montreal’s Maroons. You never saw such a sight, or at least the Daily Star never had. Imbroglios, free-for-alls. There was backbiting, haranguing, and gouging. It was one of the most disgraceful scenes in the history of Canadian hockey. The Sino-Japanese War — remember that joust? — was pink tea compared to Maroons and Maple Leafs. Riotous was a word you could use, but a weak one. Smeaton and his fellow referee, Mike Rodden, were said to be powerless and under attack.
Inspector Marshall from No. 2 Division, Toronto Police, had sixteen men in the building. Why hadn’t any of them intervened? “It seems the only time the police step into hockey arguments is when a player strikes a spectator,” he said, not sounding too sure. “The Crown attorney would only act on a complaint from the police.” Anyway, the referees hadn’t asked for help.
This continued. When sticks swung, suspensions were served and hockey authorities cleared their throats for more special pleading about hockey policing itself. Nothing to see here, no one to charge as you might be tempted to do in real life, move along, move along. Something about NHL rinks — maybe the rinky oxygen, an imbalance of ions — impairs the logic of policemen and prosecutors; whatever the case, it confuses the legal experts every time. Not just the legal establishment, of course; it confuses us all: What are we seeing here, a spectacle removed from the regular rules of society, a sanctuary, a spurline, self-regulating, with a unique auto-correct function? Anyway, it’s not to be taken as seriously as real, regular life because — but this is where I always lose my grip and have to let go. Why, again, isn’t it to be taken as seriously as real life?
Frank Udvari was the referee on duty when Rocket Richard and Hal Laycoe flailed sticks at one another’s heads in 1955. Six years later, in Toronto, he invigilated a game between Chicago and Toronto, a 2–2 tie. In those years, referees were still levying fines as the game went on, taxes on abuse and dissent. In the second period, Udvari hit the Leafs’ Billy Harris, for instance, with a twenty-five-dollar fine for questioning a penalty call. The worst of it came when Toronto’s Eddie Shack angered Pierre Pilote with a hook and Pilote (as the Globe’s Red Burnett described it) “bounced a vicious two-handed stick slash off the shoulder, stick and head of the Leaf right winger.” That was just the start. Bert Olmstead hit Pilote with a snakey left jab. Reg Fleming pounded Larry Hillman. A photo of Shack has him screaming at Stan Mikita as he brandishes a high fist to punch his head. From the Chicago bench, Tod Sloan and Bill Hay javelined their sticks at Shack and missed. “We didn’t lose the game and we won the fight,” Punch Imlach said when it was all over. Pilote said Shack had speared him in the stomach. “But it was a lot of fun, reminded me of my Junior days.”
Red Burnett rated the night a wild pier-sixer, a battle royal, the least tame since the Toronto-Montreal tong war of December of 1953. (That one Burnett had described using the words schemozzle, donnybrook, tangle, mix-up, hassle, a 3–0 Leafs win with a sock-sock ending. The penalty box: the sneezer.) Before it was over, Udvari had called a total of forty penalties, an NHL record, including seven majors and eight misconducts. He’d also imposed $800 in fines. At least temporarily, he’d been reinforced by a Toronto police sergeant and three constables who’d ventured out onto the ice to try to help out with the ruckus near the Chicago bench. They didn’t last long. Having tried without success to summon some of their colleagues, they retreated. To Burnett, the attempt was futile in the first place, and the task of peacemaking was left “in the rightful hands of the game officials.”
Clarence Campbell wasn’t happy. He couldn’t believe it. “Police are never requested or desired to invade the ice during an NHL game,” he bugled from Montreal. “It is a league matter that can be handled by our officials.”
Word got to Conn Smythe in Florida, where the sunshine may have made the whole affair seem more amusing. “Only way I’d let a policeman on the ice,” Smythe said, “would be if he qualified for the team.”
Sparked by this “brutal brawl,” the Globe didn’t hesitate to brew up a long lead editorial, “Law on the Ice,” which took the time to quote, for everybody’s edification, section 230 of the Criminal Code:
A person commits an assault when, without the consent of the other person, or with consent when it is obtained by fraud, he applies force intentionally to the person of the other, directly or indirectly.
To which the Globe added:
Contact between the players had far exceeded anything permitted in the rules. Fine the managers and coaches, and may the fines be heavy . . . NHL players are regarded by thousands of people in this country, particularly by youngsters, as heroes. When they disregard the law, when they employ violence, they set an example which their admirers may be tempted to follow. Teen-agers cannot be expected to differentiate between violence on the ice and violence elsewhere. Let there be an end now to the notion that hockey teams and games have some form of immunity from the law.
The NHL investigated, and so did Toronto’s deputy police chief, Robert Kerr. The sergeant and three constables at the Gardens, he said, were off-duty, and they were being paid to maintain order off the ice. Going onto the ice, he said, was a mistake. “The sergeant apparently interpreted a gesture by referee Udvari as a plea for assistance.” But Udvari, in his report to NHL headquarters, insisted that he hadn’t asked for any help.
It turned out, just to confuse things, that Stafford Smythe, chairman of the Leafs hockey committee, had asked other policemen, on the west side of the rink, to intervene. They had respectfully declined, saying they’d only go out there if they had to arrest somebody.
Campbell reiterated, “The referees don’t require any outside assistance. They are capable of dealing with any situation. Police on the ice would only complicate matters.” The police were there “to present an atmosphere of authority . . . They are to take care of the non-combatants, at least those who aren’t players.”
Chicago coach Rudy Pilous was reported to have said that such an outbreak couldn’t occur in the Chicago Stadium because the police wouldn’t tolerate it. Campbell ridiculed the suggestion.
“What a pop-off,” said Campbell. “He should be squashed. They don’t have police in attendance at games in Chicago. They have ushers.”
A few days passed. The police had a new statement. They said they could do what they wanted, thank you very kindly, and the NHL should be grateful there were no assault charges. “It is a fallacy that no charge would succeed because an assaulted player in the same league wouldn’t prefer charges,” a police official said. Police officers witnessing the donnybrook — the kapuskasing, better yet? — would be enough. Had the brawl taken place on Carlton Street among civilians, they would likely have found themselves in the station cells for causing a disturbance, the police said. They were happy to quote the Criminal Code, too, specifically the part that says:
Everyone who not being in a dwelling house causes a disturbance in or near a public place by fighting, shouting, swearing, screaming, singing, or using obscene or insulting language is guilty of an offence.
Under the Criminal Code, furthermore, prize fights are the only sports events in which assault charges can’t be laid.
On March 28, Conn Smythe received a letter from his lawyer, Ian S. Johnston, Q.C. “You have asked my opinion as to whether the Editor of the Globe and Mail was correct in implying that the hockey players who became involved in the incident at the game on 11th March were guilty of assault.”
Unlikely, he thought.
I am of the opinion that when a person volunteers to engage in a game of bodily contact he volunteers to accept the foreseeable results of his action and the possibility that he may become involved in a dispute with an opposing player which will result in the use of force. This same principle applies in civil matters: spectators are often held by Courts to have voluntarily accepted the risk of injury. In cases under the Criminal Code it has been held that where the issue of consent is material, the onus is on the Crown to prove lack of consent, and it would be extremely difficult for the Crown to satisfy the onus that the players involved had not consented.
There was a qualifier, though. If a player attacked another out of the blue, with no provocation, with the intent of harming him, thereby exceeding “the degree of roughness which a player normally expects to meet in a hockey game,” then that would be something different, and possibly actionable.
But this didn’t happen on March 11, Johnston didn’t think.
SOMETIMES DURING THE reading-all-the-hockey-books years, I arranged to meet the hockey authors; occasionally we had lunch. By no means did I meet all the hockey authors, nor did I want to. I wanted to meet Dave Bidini, and we ate (vegan bacon cheeseburgers), and also Randall Maggs (quattro stagioni pizza), poet of Terry Sawchuk, author of Night Work (2008). Maggs said that some day he was going to write poetry women might like. We talked about goalies, and he described meeting Butch Bouchard and a trip to Ireland to read where people there who loved hurling found that they could love hockey poems, too:
Reading to the Irish has deepened my knowledge of what this goddamn game is all about. I used to think these sports were civilizing things, this is how we got away from war, we play these sports. It’s not, it’s almost the opposite. It doesn’t inspire you to go to war, but it preserves the qualities that you need so that you can protect yourself when you have to . . . It is a survival thing.
With Bidini it wasn’t all Dave Keon but almost. What were the Leafs waiting for, not retiring his number 14? Titles he’d weighed before he got to Keon and Me (2013): Eat, Pray, Leafs and Diary of a Loser. He said: “One of the things I liked that Keon said, when I asked him about fighting — were you ever tempted — he was like, All the time. But he just didn’t. He just didn’t.”
It was too early for lunch when I went to see Roy McMurtry at his law firm office high above downtown Toronto, but I took a coffee and for a few minutes studied the former Ontario chief justice’s oil paintings, lakes and trees and skies, some of which he has hanging above his desk. You don’t need to know that he was a friend of A.J. Casson’s who joined him on sketching trips to hear that they’re fine paintings, but he was and did, and they are. After a while, we sat down to talk about arresting hockey players.
Memories and Reflections (2013) isn’t strictly a hockey book. Now aged eighty-two, McMurtry has a long and illustrious legal, political, and diplomatic career to chronicle. But he does take a chapter to recall what happened when he was appointed Ontario’s attorney-general in 1975, just as the NHL’s new season was getting underway.
“My brother really helped focus my attention on what was becoming a more serious issue,” McMurtry says. Also a Toronto lawyer, Bill McMurtry had been commissioned in early 1974 to investigate the circumstances surrounding a violent Junior B game, which he duly did while also broadening his scope to take a frank look at the state of the sport in general. Bill, who died in 2007, was big news across the continent that year. His “Investigation and Inquiry into Violence in Amateur Hockey” (1974) was a tidy, eloquent little booklet with white covers that he delivered to the province’s minister of Community and Social Services. It could have been a bestseller, too, except that they were giving it away for free at the government bookstore in Toronto.
If his substantive recommendations weren’t exactly embraced by the hockey establishment, they did set the stage for the non-literary sequel that began to unfold soon after older brother Roy started his new job. One of the first letters he wrote as attorney-general went out to Clarence Campbell and Ben Hatskin, respective presidents of the NHL and WHA. McMurtry was instructing Toronto police, he informed them, to keep a close eye on professional hockey games played in Toronto. “I stressed that any clear infraction of the Canadian Criminal Code could attract a criminal charge.”
And so it happened. In November, police charged Detroit’s Dan Maloney with assault causing bodily harm after (McMurtry writes) “repeatedly banging the head of an unconscious Leaf defenceman, Brian Glennie, against the ice.” Maloney was subsequently acquitted in court, but hockey was on notice, again. Clarence Campbell was sufficiently concerned that he sent a memo around the NHL. McMurtry smiles at the thought. “He told the league to be careful in Toronto because we’ve got this crazy attorney-general there.”
Conn Smythe was writing, too. He was eighty by then, and very upset with McMurtry. The letter he fired off to the Globe and Mail on hockey’s behalf captures a larger exasperation at the overbearing expectations of a civil society. Hockey dangerous? A threat to the population? Why, the Globe itself was reporting that 22 Canadians had been killed and 537 injured in snowmobile accidents just that year, a terrible toll, and McMurtry wanted to chase after hockey?
On April 26, 1976, Smythe addressed McMurtry himself:
For as long as one can remember, it has brought fame and prestige to Canada. Professional hockey has produced as many or more decent Canadian citizens in every hamlet, town or city as any other Canadian profession. Like all other professions, there are problems. Those in charge of professional hockey have shown that over the years they have the ability to recognize these problems and are capable of getting the right solution.
As for the attorney-general, didn’t he have enough on his plate? Toronto was in the grip of a “body-rub disgrace.” Drugs were stalking our teenagers, drunken drivers killing our citizens. What about all the unsolved murders? “Why,” Smythe wrote, “don’t you mind your own business?”
On McMurtry’s watch, Toronto police went on to charge four more hockey players the following spring, Philadelphia Flyers all. After they ended up pleading guilty to lesser assault charges that was pretty much the end of it, other than the shouting. McMurtry felt that he’d made his point and left hockey to its own devices. It’s true that in 1977 the NHL did introduce new rules that sought to reduce fighting, though there’s no way to gauge the McMurtry factor in those.
McMurtry says he still loves hockey. He played on into his 50s. Now, as a father to six and grandfather of twelve, he remains a true believer in the value of sport for social development. “I have a lower profile,” he says, “but I’ve been working with Dr. Charles Tator, the neurosurgeon, and Ken Dryden. My concern relates simply to young people. I’m very distressed by the fact that tens of thousands of them have dropped out of hockey in the last thirty years.” It’s not just, he says, the “hooliganism and the chance of injury, the concussions and the fighting.” The game is so expensive to play. What do we need to do to ensure that it’s not only safe, going forward, but all-accessible?
“The NHL is well aware of the dropping enrolments in amateur hockey,” he says. “My view is that they don’t care because they know there will always be an inventory of elite young players who can feed their needs and that’s all that matters to them.”
As for fighting, he’s as frustrated as ever:
I really do believe they’re an irresponsible bunch. And that includes the Players’ Association. I’m pro-union, I don’t have anything against unions, but they’ve got this crazy idea — in my view — that they have thirty or thirty-five members who are the so-called enforcers and they owe them representation. And part of their representation is to fight to maintain fighting as part of the hockey culture. I just don’t know when people are going to wake up.
Thirty-seven years after he first wrote to Clarence Campbell, McMurtry still finds himself mulling strategy. What about sending in inspectors to the Air Canada Centre from Ontario’s Ministry of Labour? “I’ve thought,” he says, “it would surely shock the hell out of the NHL if they laid a charge. I mean, this all has to do with workplace safety.”
ESCAPE VALVE IS something Clarence Campbell liked to talk about when he talked hockey fights in 1974. Safety valve was another favoured Campbell rhetorical fitting, and, I think, better suited to his line of arguing. Safety sounds more reassuring, for one thing — exactly what any responsible boss should provide to his workers when they are working in such dangerous, high-pressure conditions. Escape might cause a bit of a panic among the employees — why would they want to be escaping? And what exactly is an escape valve anyway? Wouldn’t you want some sort of escape pod if you were planning to flee, roomy enough inside to allow for fisticuffs?
Hockey season was over when Bill McMurtry’s inquiry got going in June of 1974, the game itself gone into hibernation, players and coaches flown to the south, or wherever it is hockey players settle in the summertime. But for five days that summer, hockey stood at a crossroads in the Ontario Room of the Macdonald Block, at Queen’s Park in Toronto, trying to decide which way to go.
You can borrow McMurtry’s forty-page report from the library, or you could buy your own copy online for about twenty-eight dollars. If you want the full story, the deluxe edition, you can visit the Ontario Archives in Toronto, where all 1,256 pages of transcript are collected in five volumes. I spent two summer afternoons there, trying to keep quiet amid the hush of deep research, reading my way through McMurtry’s questions and the answers he got, or didn’t get. It’s a fascinating tale, though the plot wanders all over the place. The dialogue is the best part — well, it’s all dialogue, really, the whole thing. If it were me, I’d have tightened up the characters, except for Commissioner McMurtry, who’s pretty strong. Others are just not that convincing. With some it’s hard to tell whether they’re joking or not.
As Canadians we’ve grown used to committee rooms full of commissioners trying to find out what happened and why, and who’s to blame, and if it seems like we live in a society in which public inquiries hum constantly in the background, well, don’t they? What was going on over there in Somalia between those paratroopers and some of the local people? Did those policemen really need to Taser that man five times in that airport? What about that other man and his packets of cash to that former prime minister in the hotel room? It’s easy to picture the tables and the witness chairs. It’s a scene we know.
Bill McMurtry questioned some of the players who’d been involved in the original Junior B incident. Cal Herd was one of the first witnesses to be called, number 15 for the Hamilton Red Wings. He took questions from Mr. B. Templeton, representing the Red Wings.
Q. What do you understand as physical intimidation in a hockey game?
A. Taking your man out, taking your man hard when he has the puck and skating with your man.
Q. Anything else?
A. Bothering the man when he is on the ice.
Q. What is the best way to bother him?
A. To talk him [sic].
Q. Anything else?
A. Well, you can give him a few jabs with your elbow as he is going down the ice.
Q. Where did you learn this style of hockey?
A. I have always been brought up by that [sic].
Q. From what age?
A. I think ever since bantam, age 14.
At some point McMurtry decided that as much as his inquiry needed to hear from the likes of Cal Herd, it would also tilt its ear to experts from the wider world. Social scientists and psychologists were invited to contribute their views, and so were coaches, players, and administrators from the professional ranks. Players stayed away, most of them. Some, like Bobby Hull, were willing to talk but asked that their views not be publicized.
Clarence Campbell came willingly. I don’t know if McMurtry was surprised to snare him. The president might have easily have avoided the Ontario Room, observed from afar, ignored the whole thing. But he came. The performance he gave was high in its dudgeon, couched in a vocabulary (if not a worldview) rooted firmly in 1931. He talked fisticuffs again, and mentioned a roughy, by which he meant a fight rather than a fish. He was a wonderful character, I have to say, right up there with Mordecai Richler’s nefarious Hooded Fang in the way he came bursting in through the doors of the committee room, to wreak his havoc on the assembled body with fireballs and adamant denials. He twisted and turned, blamed helmets and referees, obfuscated, condescended. He seemed to say that fights in which no one is injured don’t really count for anything and that demands for such a widened definition of violence — “anything that would possibly produce a serious injury” — meant that you might as well try to eliminate sticks and skates from the game as fighting.
Campbell court: NHL president Clarence Campbell passes sentence on Detroit’s Ted Lindsay (left) and Boston’s Bill Ezinicki (wounded) after their epic 1951 fight of fists and sticks. Both were suspended for three games and fined $300.
It was June 3, after lunch, when Campbell was sworn. McMurtry asked what was the purpose of the National Hockey League? Business? Entertainment? Both?
A. Yes, it is a business of conducting the sport of hockey in a manner that will induce or be conducive to the support of it at the box office. I think that is reasonable.
Q. So in determining the rules, is one of the most important criteria what sells tickets?
A. Yes. We have two factors to keep in mind constantly. Show business, we are in the entertainment business and that can never be ignored. We must put on a spectacle that will attract people basically not in the short run but in the long run. We have to keep in mind a number of factors associated with it; that the game is one which entails the engagement or employment of human beings, players, to perform acts of skill and to try to develop the game in a way that will ensure your skills are constantly on display and to ensure that the minimum risk — they will be exposed to the minimum risk inherent in participation (I am talking about personal physical risks) not only because of the fact that it will be good for the spectacle but because of the fact that the value, the asset value of the player is of very great concern to the club contracting for his services. And of course it is completely destroyed by any serious loss of his competence by reason of physical injury.
McMurtry wondered whether the NHL felt it has any moral duty to society. “Well,” said the president, “I would start out on the assumption we would not sanction or tolerate anything we consider to be basically anti-social at any time. I think that everyone’s concern is to conduct our business in a manner acceptable to society and the environment in which we operate.”
I said the story strays all over the place. There’s a good bit where McMurtry cited a referee who quit the league because in his mind, the NHL was only interested in selling tickets to American fans and therefore wanted to encourage violence on the ice. “Well, let me put it this way,” Campbell guffawed, “if you had not mentioned his name I would have forgotten him.”
It went on like this, swipe and parry. McMurtry proposed that if you’re a player who wants to remain in the NHL, you have no choice but to fight. “I think that is an absurd hypothesis,” Campbell said. Okay, what about if Dave Schultz punches you in the face? “I don’t think I want to indulge in hypothetical situations.” McMurtry wasn’t giving up. What if Schultz punches John Van Boxmeer in the face, which had happened recently, and knocks him out? Well, said Campbell, we deal with it. We have our rules and we apply them. The proper response to a Schultzing such as McMurtry was suggesting: a major penalty. “I think that is appropriate in the circumstances.”
Q. In actual fact, sir, he was awarded a roughing penalty of two minutes.
A. Whatever it was.
Campbell paddled fast. He should have been assessed a major. McMurtry moved on.
Q. Do you not think that like every other contact sport in the world, with the exception of lacrosse, which is having its problems surviving and as I understand it is one of the reasons it almost passed as a professional sport; is there any other professional sport in the world which would tolerate such behaviour?
A. I don’t know whether there is or not. I have never addressed myself to it for the reason that I think we have a problem to solve of our own. And I don’t — while it is relevant to consider what other people are doing I don’t think that necessarily sets a standard which we should accept.
This flummoxed McMurtry: “I do not follow you.” Campbell splashed about: “If I express myself badly I apologize. I don’t think we are under any obligation to accept somebody else’s solutions for our problems.”
I have to say, reading this, I barked out loud. In the archives, reading Campbell, he got a bark out of me and a bang of my knee on the table leg. Meanwhile, McMurtry was trying to widen the focus.
Q. Now, I suppose you are familiar — I think it was some 200 years ago and I think it was Edmund Burke who said example is a school of mankind. They will learn by no other. Do you think that is a fair statement?
Nice try. Campbell’s lawyer interjected: this game didn’t take place two hundred years ago. A quick tussle and McMurtry abandoned Burke.
Q. Do you not feel some moral responsibility to conduct yourself in a way which is conducive to the best interests of the children playing hockey?
A. Of course I do and I believe we do.
Q. Do you feel that the conduct which is sanctioned or condoned and in fact encouraged under your rules of physical intimidation by appearing —
A. Don’t talk like that. I don’t have to take your definition of what we do. If you wish to ask me do I support the play as it is conducted by the National Hockey League I will answer you.
Q. All right. I will take it one step at a time. Would you agree that to a greater extent in recent years there has become almost a science of intimidation in the way some teams approach hockey in the NHL. There has always been violence but now I would say it has become more deliberate and more of a science?
A. I do not concur in that.
McMurtry pressed on. What about Philadelphia, the Flyers? “Would you not believe that part of their game is physical intimidation of the other team?” There are no stage directions in the transcript, but I like to think of Campbell taking a moment to study the ceiling, maybe touching a finger to his lip. “That is a possibility. If you want to say they are being an intimidating team I would have to say they are not being very successful in that respect. I think it is their skill.”
A wounded bear, they say, is the most dangerous bear.
McMurtry started to close in. Is it proper, McMurtry asked, to have players whose only job is to punch other players?
A. No, I don’t think there are any such, regardless of what they may say.
Q. Regardless of what the player himself might say you disagree that is the case?
A. I don’t think he has ever been appropriately quoted if he said he was employed to fight. I just don’t believe he is ever correctly quoted, in addition to which I think he would be very quickly thwarted in his efforts.
On they go. You can almost feel Campbell relaxing. He was enjoying this now, the refreshing pirouettes, the bracing gainsaying. McMurtry hammered on: “You are selling violence.” “No, I am not selling violence.” Teams are drafting fighters now, preferring them to skilled players. “You are so wrong.”
Q. That is what the experts say. I am just quoting the general managers and the people who follow hockey much more closely than I do. The impression they had is that in the draft there is far greater emphasis on personal brawn than ability.
A. . . . I don’t care what they said. I am interested in the facts.
Here the roadrunner seemed, again, to have the wily coyote cornered.
Q. Is fighting undesirable as far as you are concerned?
A. Not necessarily. To excess it can be a terrible thing, but at the same time I have got to say that in my mind it is the best safety valve in the hockey game. It is the best safety valve I know.
Q. Notwithstanding the fact that every study that has been done by many social scientists would disagree with you.
A. I am not prepared to accept that conclusion either.
Q. Have you read any of the studies done by psychologists on the field?
A. Yes, I have.
Q. Are you aware of the fact that as far I know all of them have disagreed with your position that certainly the catharsis theory has no validity? It would appear there are theories now and some research indicates not only allowing violence in the context of hockey promotes further violence in hockey, but also promotes violence outside the context of hockey. Are you aware of this?
A. Yes. And all I say to you is this: within the framework of our operation — I say that it is much more likely to stimulate a different kind of violence which we think is more serious than the fisticuffs from which I have said time and time again is the least dangerous of all the fouls that are committed. The least dangerous.
Q. Is there any reason why if you discourage fighting necessarily you are going to encourage other fouls if in fact you call those fouls as well?
A. In point of fact it will just intensify it then, because the experience in international hockey and college hockey proved it is true.
Q. I am sorry, sir, but the experts I have talked to on both of those disagree with you completely and utterly.
Later, McMurtry floated a theory he had: it’s as if, he said, we Canadians have a certain kind of conceit or arrogance about hockey, as if we are the only people who know it.
“That is right,” says Campbell.
And here, at the end of a long afternoon’s back-and-forth, just for a minute, we get a glimpse of Campbell’s conception of the wider world, and maybe we need to put it to use to help us understand the rest of what he’s been saying in the Ontario Room. To Campbell, hockey was a refuge from the wilderness we inhabit; far from being a venue for the worst of our angels, it was actually a safe haven, a sanctuary over which reasonable men preside. Under questioning from an OHA lawyer, he regretted the general erosion of discipline in the world we live in. “The degree of permissiveness has grown into our society in the past ten or twelve years certainly since the Vietnamese War and the race riots in the United States have changed things a great deal.” Time was, nobody would dream of slapping a policeman’s hat off his head or calling him a pig, but now? Society has to pick that policeman’s hat up off the pavement and be ready to back him up.
Eventually they got back to hockey, and when they did, Campbell did his best to go out on the upbeat. Credit the NHL, he said, with the intelligence to understand that it has a vested interest in improving itself. “We got rid of the stick swinging,” Campbell offered brightly. But McMurtry was in no mood. “It is like saying shoplifting isn’t as bad as bank robbers,” he said, “and if you don’t allow shoplifting you are going to get more bankrobbing.”
THE TIME TO examine fighting’s place in hockey was March of 2007, according to then-NHL director of hockey operations Colin Campbell. That was a month before a national Decima poll declared that 76 per cent of us who describe ourselves as avid fans opposed a ban on fighting. It was more than a year before Mitch Fritz, in his second NHL game, fought his first fight, challenging Georges Laraque, fully two years after Laraque’s prediction that fighters would be extinct in two years. Across the NHL that year, the number of fights was actually up by 48 per cent. Fritz was six foot eight, 258 pounds, and had a left hand that was knuckled with scabs.
In February of 2009, I drove down to London, Ontario, for the Violence in Hockey Symposium. The highway country west of Toronto was bright and white and brittle as I went. I was almost sorry to have finished with the McMurtry/Campbell files: none of the other reports on hockey violence had quite the same piquant readability. Not the 1977 Citizen’s Committee on Children report that advised Ottawa: “the fact of violence . . . in hockey cannot be denied and we should not attempt to shelter our children from all knowledge of its existence.” Nor Gilles Néron’s 1977 report of the Study Committee on Violence in Amateur Hockey in Quebec (referenced within another report, the Interim Report on Minor Amateur Hockey, 1979), noting that children tend to find heroes in NHL ranks and citing a case of Rocket Richardian frustration at the Montreal Forum during which he broke a dressing-room door. The following night there were “about 15” doors broken in Montreal arenas.
Organized by the Middlesex London Health Unit, this one-day gathering of doctors and coaches and parents and journalists convened to consider the game of hockey as they might swine flu or West Nile virus — as a public health issue. Brébeuf took note of the Huron playing lacrosse to cure the country in a time of illness: we were a long way from that. This was the country in a big meeting hall trying to cure the game that ails it.
Early on, someone said, “This is our game — this is our game — so maybe it’s time we did something about it.”
There were tales of referees locking themselves in dressing rooms after games. “How sad is that?” said someone else.
People agreed that unnecessary aggression was — is — the problem. “When hockey’s played the way it’s intended to be played, there’s nothing better.”
Journalist and author Bruce Dowbiggin was there. He called for rugged but not dirty hockey. He wondered: Why do we blame Americans? He also made the case that our national game doesn’t reflect us. “We’re not a nation of hooligans.”
Ken Campbell from the Hockey News wondered about fighting: “If it’s part of the game, why do they stop the clock?” Regarding the media: “Guess what? We’re part of the problem.”
Dave Simpson talked about the pressure in Junior hockey to drop the gloves. A son of London, brother of Craig, Simpson was a Junior star during many of the years that I never was. His adjectives from that time include remarkable (young man) and league-leading (thirty-nine goals). He said that he always tried to play the game as though his mother was in the stands. Which she was most nights, since he played for much of his career right there in his hometown.
A concussion doctor put the number of NHL concussions per season at seventy.
When Bryan Lewis, a former director of NHL refereeing, stood up to say that he believes fights are on their way out, most of us there in the room wanted to believe it, too. I feel obligated to report that some of us, however, couldn’t keep from laughing aloud at his optimism.
At the end of the afternoon, for about twenty seconds, we watched monkey brains. It was an old film they used to show in medical schools, Dr. Ken Bocking told us, right before he said, “Maybe you don’t want to watch this.” For an experiment in the 1960s, researchers had sawed off the top of a rhesus monkey’s skull, replaced it with Plexiglas, then filmed from overhead to record the effects of concussion on the brain. Say, for instance, the monkey took a high elbow to the ear as he was rushing the puck through the neutral zone, or maybe a left in the jaw during a Pokemouche behind the net. Imagine his head snapping back. In the old film, in black and white, we watched (if we watched) what would happen next, as his unstoppable brain went battering brutally back and forth inside his skull.
IN MAY OF 2014, as the playoffs roiled on, I made the mistake of picking up a newspaper that didn’t have one nice thing to say about hockey, and the déjà vu blurred my eyes for a moment. American pediatricians were calling for a ban on bodychecking for players under fifteen. The NHL was looking into reports that some of its players were lying about head injuries during games in order to keep playing. Meanwhile, no one knew whether concussions were occurring less frequently or not, because the league was refusing to release statistics. Two pages away from the column about how playoff hockey encourages thoughts among players of how to hospitalize their opponents was another one explaining why the NHL’s culture of late hits was flourishing. And two NHL players had been fined a total of $7,820.52 for maliciously squirting water at rivals.
I eventually found one nice thing: the Globe and Mail called Montreal’s young winger Alex Galchenyuk a shimmering bundle of puck skills and derring-do.
THE END COMES quickly. One day, a quake in the chest, a flash of white light, and it’s over, time to retire. Be careful, though. You don’t want to go too soon. In the summer of 2008 and on through that fall, thirty-seven-year-old free agent Mats Sundin stayed off his skates trying to decide whether he’d had enough. Montreal wanted him and so did the New York Rangers, and of course, he was also welcome back, probably, maybe, we’ll see, in Toronto. Everybody had advice about what he should do.
“People always told me: ‘Play as long as you can,’” said Joe Nieuwendyk. Steve Yzerman: “If there’s any doubt and guys aren’t sure, I think they should be playing. You can be retired for the rest of your life. You’ll know when you’re done.” Bob Gainey, who happened to be the Montreal general manager trying to sign Sundin, said: “I told him to make a decision. I said, if you feel like you want to retire, then retire. But if you’re not sure, you should play and the emotion will come.”
End days: The Big Train, Lionel Conacher, as a Montreal Maroon in 1937, his last season in the NHL. Skates stowed, he was elected that year as an Ontario mpP. The Maroons weren’t long for the ice, either: they suspended operations in 1938 and never played again.
Towards the end of his career, Montreal’s Bert Olmstead stayed on his farm in Saskatchewan to finish up the harvest before turning his mind to whether he’d play another season. Doug Harvey was one who kept going. In 1969, still playing the St. Louis blueline at the age of forty-four, he was asked why.
Because I’m a hockey player. I like the life of a player. I like the fun that goes with it. And I’m some use in here. I can quiet down the kids I play with on defence. I can show them what they’re doing wrong while it’s still fresh in their mind. I can teach them how to avoid cheap penalties, maybe a bit of science. Defence, you know, seems to come a little later.
To leave hockey is to be diminished to the role of spectator. They stop accumulating your statistics; no longer is the Stanley Cup within your reach. It’s a shock. Real players talk about how suddenly it comes, so it should be no surprise that the fictional ones do, too. Drinkwater, for example, in Mark Jarman’s raucous Salvage King, Ya!:
One day you’re a New York Ranger screwing Vogue models, doing coke off her famous belly; one day you’re sleek as a whippet and smiling in sunglasses, you’re media property, you’re a midtown parade. The next day you’re pumping gas at a Petro-Can in Moose Jaw or flinging yourself from a bridge in Flin-Flon.
So he weighs his options with care. On one hand:
Tired, TIRED! Jesus. Something is wrong. Am I too old? I am held together with velcro and tape, a king of shreds and patches, I no longer speak standard English. I think I need some time away from hockey, from humans, from the locomotion.
But the other side of it: “I can’t imagine not playing. My body feels funny if I don’t skate.”
SOMETIMES YOU HAVE a job to do, other than hockey. Teeder Kennedy was twenty-nine in October of 1955 when he told Hockey Pictorial why he was finished with the NHL. “I’ve got a wonderful wife,” he said, “a wonderful three-year-old-son, Mark, a horse, a Doberman Pinscher, my home, and a job that I really like.” He’d been with Canada Building Materials for five years by then, and the company had been very understanding about his captaining the Leafs.
Sometimes it’s the game that forces you out. “Don’t like the scramble game the NHL plays,” Sweeney Schriner announced as he departed Toronto for good at the end of the 1941–42 season, to the team’s surprise. Other times, you just know it’s time. For elite players, it can come down to painful acknowledgement that they can no longer do what they once did. Mike Bossy couldn’t handle being a fifty-goal scorer in a five-goal scorer’s body. “I hate,” he said, “being ordinary.”
Hanging them up: Sweaters, skates, and sticks belonging to the brothers Richard, Henri (#16) and Maurice (#9), in 1960.
Rocket Richard went to training camp in the fall of 1960, tanned, a little heavy. At the age of thirty-four, he was starting to slow, and the injuries were taking longer to heal. Earlier that year he’d been asked the dreaded question about retirement. “I’d like to leave the game before people criticize me, boo me,” Richard said. “When I’m ready, I’ll go tell Mr. Selke.” A reporter took this to manager Frank Selke, who said, “I’ve been in hockey fifty-three years and I’ve never had an aging athlete admit he was through.” In camp, Richard looked good. Jacques Plante said his release had never been quicker. One scrimmage, he scored four goals. But then came the practice where Richard went from the ice straight into coach Toe Blake’s office to tell him he was retiring. He was worried about his weight, about getting hurt. He said, “The dizziness, the pushing, and the fact that it was so hard to lose weight convinced me that I’d be better off retiring.”
In 2011, Mike Modano announced his retirement on Facebook at the end of a summer of pondering.
Dit Clapper was thirty-nine, coaching while still playing for the Bruins, when he hurt a rib in a game in the spring of 1946. Between periods, Art Ross told him to take off his uniform, and then he told him again, and that was all for him. Clapper didn’t know then he’d be back the following year; nor did his teammate, Bill Cowley, who asked if he could have his sock garters — “real rubber garters.” Clapper handed them over.
Punch Imlach took the time, once, to explain the decay that occurs in hockey players. “As a guy gets older, he becomes less dedicated. Not only does he get a step slower, he also loses his desire to mix it up. He becomes more lover than fighter. This happens to everybody. It’s human nature.” Maybe his spirit is also being undermined inside his own house. “His wife may tell him not to get hurt. Maybe she doesn’t like fighting, and subconsciously he’s worried about that.”
“A growing concern about injuries,” said Andy Bathgate, “is a sure sign of a hockey player going over the hill. When a player starts thinking that the next bump may sideline him for good, his days as a topflighter are numbered.” The pain saps the pleasure. Gordie Howe had an ailing wrist in 1971, he was forty-three, and he just wasn’t having fun. In Detroit, too, his wife said, the crowds were smaller and meaner. Syl Apps was the same. “Hockey is work now,” he said when he returned to the Leafs after the Second World War. “It’s not fun anymore.” He was gone at thirty-three.
The career-ending concussions we know about — Brett Lindros and Pat LaFontaine, for example — are nothing to those no one ever diagnosed, we have to bet.
Chicago’s Kenny Wharram had a heart attack on the first day of training camp in 1969 and ended up with a heart infection. Bobby Orr said, “I’ll play hockey until I can’t skate anymore,” which is pretty much what happened. By 1978, after all those surgeries, his knees weren’t up to it. He was twenty-eight. The left one was a particular monstrosity. “I don’t like looking at it, to be honest,” said his Chicago teammate Bill White. Horrible, Stan Mikita said, like seeing some ghastly thing come down from outer space. “It is not very pleasant in there,” Orr’s doctor confirmed.
Don’t bother trying to prepare yourself. “You can’t,” Batterinski says in MacGregor’s The Last Season. “And anybody who says he does is lying. It’s like a car accident. If you could prepare for that you’d avoid it, wouldn’t you?”
Herbert Warren Wind from the New Yorker ran into a famous retiree and his wife at the Forum one night in the 1960s. “The Rocket’s red glare was gradually replaced by a calm, relaxed expression — the heavy burden of not letting down himself, the team, his friends, the whole province had been lifted from his shoulders. He had become a man with a nice sense of humour and a basic ease of manner.” He talked about fishing, catching a 920-pound tuna off Caraquet, New Brunswick. Retirement? “No, it wasn’t hard at all. Not after those three injuries I had in those last three years.” Mme. Richard spoke up, then. “He quit too soon,” she said, with a wink. “Much too soon,” said Richard, without one.
I CAN’T RECOMMEND that you read all the hockey novels, especially not in chronological order. If my own experience is any guide, even if you do make it all the way through, you run the risk of wooziness, light sensitivity, inability to focus — what’s known in today’s NHL as concussion-like symptoms.
It’s not for me to dismiss the first fifty years of hockey fiction in a sentence, but if it were, I’d use the phrase penny-dreadful and mention weak plotting, dumb outcomes, and a truly shocking lack of Canadians. Like Scott Young’s early hockey novels, they’re all about plucky young lads who make the team just in time to score the winning goal that nobody thought they had it in them to score while a jealous teammate/scapegrace does his best to ruin everything. To say that the fiction improved vastly when Young came along isn’t saying much: even with the Scrubs on Skates trilogy casting its genial glow, hockey fiction remained a bleak, bleak landscape for a long time before it found itself heading into the 1960s. Things got busy then, even if the prose and the plotting didn’t necessarily get better. Where once our heroes hoped for glory, now, in novels like Power Play and Face-Off, they have it all: sublime hockey skills, massive contracts, the adulation of throngs of fans. They can’t hang on to it, of course, it’s just too much, the unyielding pressure and the constant sex and the endless drugs, they get lost, stumble, fall: just like that, it’s over. Not even hockey can save them.
Hockey fiction’s late period begins with Roy MacGregor’s Batterinski in the mid-1980s. I think that’s right. That’s where I’d start if I were looking to read some of the more interesting hockey novels: I’d head straight for Quarrington, Stenson, McCormack, Johnston, Gaston, Jarman. They all have their own individual merits, of course. If they share anything, it’s a tendency their battered heroes have to look to a horizon beyond the game. It’s not necessarily that they want to: they don’t have a choice. The hockey players in the late novels are wounded and wise: they ache and they know. Jarman’s Drinkwater has a scar on his face where novel-Bobby Clarke slashed him for twenty-seven stitches; Gaston’s Bonaduce wakes up to the jarring truth that he’s “a man who had dedicated his life to working violently hard at preventing people with different-coloured uniforms from putting a puck in his net.”
What now? But if I told you here, you wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of reading all the latter-day hockey novels I’ve just finished recommending. Anyway, they don’t really make as monolithic a corpus as I’ve suggested. Forgive me if I’m only just now mentioning The Antagonist, Lynn Coady’s piercing 2011 novel, and Richard Wagamese’s powerful Indian Horse (2012), even as I sweep them up into my neat little theory that what fuels the novels now, finally, is the need to remind hockey that it never escapes real life, and never should, regardless of the game’s haughty notions. Of course, Al Purdy says it better than I ever could, in the poem “Hockey Players,” when he takes us
thru the smoky end boards out of
sight and climbing up the Appalachian highlands
and racing breast to breast across laurentian barrens
over hudson’s diamond bay and down the treeless tundra where
auroras are tubercular and awesome and
stopping isn’t feasible or possible or lawful […]
AS WITH ALL endings, talk of retirement can sound like talk of death. But unless you’re Gordie Howe, one of the strange effects of retiring from hockey is to add life, strip away the years. “It’s not every day you get to go from being an old hockey player to being a young man,” said Trevor Linden when he got out in 2008, aged thirty-seven.
Joe Primeau retired at the end of the 1936 season. He was thirty. “I felt that I had devoted enough of my life to pro hockey,” he said. “I had been married nine years and I wanted to spend more time with my wife and youngsters. Then, too, I had worked up a pretty good business in cement blocks and I figured it was time I stepped out and put my energy into my own concern.” It turned out well enough: before he went back to the Leafs as coach in 1950, Joe Primeau Block was producing four thousand blocks a day, with stock on hand of two hundred thousand.
John Ferguson took his leave in the fall of 1970, at the age thirty-two, and went straight into the presidency of Butternut Enterprises, a knitwear company. (“I matched my colours and was never outlandish with my colour schemes,” he writes in his autobiography.) He returned to the ice after a short stay away: Jean Béliveau asked him back, Sam Pollock gave him a raise. Lots of players have returned. Gordie Howe went down to Houston to play with his two sons.
In 1988, a couple of days after Guy Lafleur was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, he decided he wanted back in. He felt he had some top-level hockey left in him. Plus his son, three-and-a-half, had never seen him play. His agent tried Los Angeles and Detroit, but they weren’t interested. The New York Rangers were, but he had to make the team at training camp. He stopped smoking — for a month or so, at least, he put away the cigarettes. The coach said he was the best New York player in the pre-season. He scored forty-five points that year, and went on to play two more seasons after that with the Quebec Nordiques.
Mark Jarman’s Drinkwater wasn’t so lucky. He couldn’t get past the wondering and wavering.
If I could just do another year or two, I could make a lot of money, the way salaries are going. I could get back what the agent has pilfered or gambled . . . The right team — I could help, show some young D-Men some tricks. I’m a role model.
Well, I’m not but I could be.
Forget it. It’s over. I accept my demise.
HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA long ago lost its song, and within a few years it may be gone altogether from our Saturdays. Doesn’t matter. A Saturday in wintertime is still the day of the week we’ll always associate with hockey. That it also happens to be the day, statistically, most Canadians die is a fact as unlikely as it is true. It’s probably just a coincidence, but can we accept it as proof that deep and mysterious forces flow below the ice?
You can’t prepare yourself, not really. The best you can do is close your eyes, like Pete McCormack’s wise young hero in Understanding Ken:
And imagine dying! All that electricity sucked out of your ears and mouth and nose and then it’s just like before you were here: no hockey, no anything.
In 1989, Doug Harvey was admitted to Montreal General Hospital suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. Before that he’d been living at an Ottawa racetrack in a marooned private railway car that had once accommodated John Diefenbaker when he was going places as prime minister. Confined to care, as preordained by Howie Morenz, Harvey had a long line of visitors: Orr and Béliveau; Lafleur; Geoffrion; friends who brought him contraband gifts, in Harvey’s case mainly luncheon treats, smoked meat sandwiches, a lobster. He died on Boxing Day, though his life, a columnist wrote, had already ended forty-four years earlier, when he had to stop playing hockey.
Spanish flu kills hockey players. Near Gravenhurst, they collide head-on with a light panel truck, whose driver suffers only bruises while they, the hockey players, are pronounced dead at the scene from broken ribs that puncture their hearts. Drunkenly they take the wheel of a red Porsche 930 Turbo and hit a wall in front of a red brick schoolhouse on Somerdale Road. On vacation they die, suddenly, at Wasaga Beach, Ontario, and also diving in the Bay of Quinte where it’s too shallow to be diving. They succumb to congestive heart failure and after heart surgery that gets complicated. Liver cancer and leukemia claim them. They fall asleep and don’t wake up. Milt Dunnell said that Cyclone Taylor lived so long — ninety-four years — that countless Canadians thought he was a legend their grandfathers made up.
Johnny Bucyk once said he couldn’t imagine the brothers Richard not playing hockey. He thought they’d die with their skates on. In May of 2000, more than 115,000 people filed past the Rocket’s casket, and the next day some 2,700 mourners attended the funeral at the city’s Notre Dame Basilica. Lucien Bouchard, premier of Quebec, said, “When we see him go today, we recall our youth, our childhood. He was the man of our childhood, for people of my generation. It’s a bit of our childhood that disappears.”
Terry Sawchuk got into a quarrel over money with his teammate Ron Stewart in their backyard on Long Island. There are different versions of what might have happened, some featuring a barbecue that Sawchuk fell on, but all ending with blood pooling in Sawchuk’s liver and, at 9:50 on the morning of May 31, 1970, his death. Brad Park talks about Sawchuk’s Ranger teammates hearing the news. They went to practice, carrying on as usual according to the hockey player’s code, “as if Ukey had been traded away.”
Following his stint in Chicago, Howie Morenz went to New York, another sad step down the staircase out of hockey, it looked like. But then the Canadiens brought him back in September of 1936. He was thirty-four. Cecil Hart, his old friend, was in again as the coach, and he reunited Morenz with Joliat and Gagnon. By Christmas the Canadiens were at the top of the league, with Morenz one of the leading scorers. “I’m going the limit right now,” Morenz himself said. “I’m giving the fans everything I’ve got. The end may be in sight but the heart is still sound. You know what I mean.”
If you were writing this as fiction, you’d never make it so starkly obvious. He’s supposed to have told Frank Selke that he was quitting. “It’s getting too tough.”
On January 28, a Thursday, the Canadiens played Chicago at home. Morenz’s knee was heavily bandaged. He was down at the south end of the Forum, closest to St. Catherine Street. Nowadays there’s a rule to stipulate that the boards shall be constructed in such a manner that the surface facing the ice shall be smooth and free of any obstruction or any object that could cause injury to players. In those years, though, it was more of a tongue-in-groove design.
As Toe Blake saw it from the Montreal bench, Morenz went looping behind the Black Hawks’ net, where he lost his balance and fell into the boards, then Chicago’s Earl Seibert “kinda fell on him.” Sportswriter Andy O’Brien saw one of Morenz’s skates dig into the boards; when he rolled over, the leg snapped. Joliat watched it from the ice: Morenz lost his footing, went down, put his feet up as he slid into the boards, and the “heels” of his skates stuck in the boards. Somebody checked Earl Seibert, who fell on Morenz’s legs, and broke the left one.
Clarence Campbell was the referee that night. The way he describes it, Seibert dove headlong at Morenz, knocking him down, skate stuck, buckety-buck-buck. There was a novelist in the house, too: Hugh MacLennan remembered (as a novelist might) a little smile on Morenz’s lips. “But once too often he charged into the corner relying on his ability to turn on a dime and come out with the puck. The point of his skate impaled itself in the boards. A defenceman, big Earl Seibert, accidentally crashed over the extended leg and broke it.” MacLennan adds a detail that no one else mentions: “Howie’s head hit the ice with a sickening crack and he was carried out.” Unless Joliat and Gagnon helped him up and off. That’s another version in circulation.
In the dressing room, there was a scene so stylized that somebody should paint it to hang up alongside Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe. Morenz was, apparently, a little more lucid than the general. He lay on the rubbing table, smoking a cigarette. “I’m all through,” he’s supposed to have muttered, “all finished.” Don’t blame Seibert, he said. “It was an accident. My skate caught.” Joliat thought it was his wonky right knee that had betrayed him. Johnny Gagnon had tears in his eyes. Babe Siebert kept saying, “Hang on, Howie, hang on.” Small boys wept in the Forum corridor as they took Morenz out, and though he was crying, too, he gave a cheery wave on his way to the ambulance.
His ankle was cracked and he had four broken bones in the leg. Or it was a compound fracture with the bones shattered in two places slightly above the ankle and below the knee. The reports varied. When La Patrie published the hospital x-rays, in Montreal, the malleolus became a hockey-bone.
Six days later, from his bed in L’Hôpital Saint-Luc, Morenz wrote a letter home. A couple of years ago, if you’d been quick with your credit card, you could have winked at the auctioneer and bought this actual item. Or whatever the online equivalent of winking is. The bidding started at $1,500. “Hello Dad + all,” it starts. Fate gave him quite a blow, he says. The x-rays show a vast improvement. “Enclosed you will find a little money. If you have not got enough let me know.”
Two days after the crash, the team went to New York and Boston, where they won, which Howie appreciated. Gagnon and Joliat wrote to him every day they were away and went to visit when they got back. Dr. Hector Forgues, the Canadiens’ doctor, was quite satisfied, Joliat reported in his newspaper column. “Howie is most enthusiastic,” he wrote. He’d be back sooner than people thought. The fracture was nothing compared to the ache of not lining up as a Canadien. “This is the suffering,” he told his friends. At the end of February, Joliat’s column offered this little koan:
Hockey temporarily leaves the mind of the player. His nervous system is calm and he can live more at ease. Plans of attacks, errors forgotten, the player returns to play, well-rested, physically and morally.
His cast was arabesqued with a hundred signatures.
There’s a haze of suggestion around these visitations, more winking, drifting innuendo, a whiff of whiskey. Nurses muttered later about bottles hidden under the bed. Stan Fischler mentions the words overwhelmed and well-intentioned friends, and conjures a room filled with flowers, candy, books. The well-wishers took a toll, Morenz’s biographer, Dean Robinson, says, and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Dr. Forgues said no more visitors. Then there was a guard at the door.
There are several photos of Morenz in hospital, one with his wife and his son, another from February 25, when Toronto’s Charlie Conacher came to visit and examine the cast. Morenz looks good. He’s wearing a warm-looking dressing gown, with a pipe in his mouth. I’d like to know the titles of the six books that are piled on the bedside table.
This is said to be his last photo. On Tuesday, March 9, Toronto’s Daily Star reported the stunning news: “Like a tired child dropping softly to sleep, Howie Morenz died in a Montreal hospital last night.”
The time of death was 11:30 PM. Myths and facts were already mixing together by morning. An immediate report said he had a light supper, smiled at his nurse, “then turned his head wearily on the pillow.” One account added a “tired sigh.” A “strange pallor” settled over his face and the nurse called in the doctor. Too late.
Another story was that he’d tried to get up — “took one faltering step,” as Trent Frayne tells it, “then slowly crumpled to the floor.” A Toronto newspaper said that those closest to him weren’t surprised; the decline had been “appallingly rapid,” his weight was down to under one hundred pounds. The debonairly gay caballero was, at the end, a pitiful shadow. “The frame of him was wasted. He didn’t know his friends.”
The death certificate gave the cause as, quote, cardiac deficiency and acute excitement. This is where the broken-heart stories got started. Newspapermen wrote,
To those who knew the strong vein of sentimentality that surged in the make-up of this remarkable athlete, it was as if the fibre of the man slowly disintegrated as he faced the uncertainties of a hockeyless future.
Also, there was Aurèle Joliat to add, “He told me one time, he says, whenever I can’t play hockey, he says, I’d just as soon be dead.” And, yes, if you were writing a libretto, that’s the end you’d write. Further facts that came out, years later, regarding blood clots? The blunt clarity they’d provide wouldn’t be useful to the story of Howie Morenz. You’d have to lay them aside. Meanwhile, hockey hockeyed on. What else was it supposed to do? Three days after Morenz was buried, the Canadiens beat the New York Rangers.
Before the month was out, Dr. Forgues himself had died of a heart attack in the Canadiens’ dressing room, on duty in Detroit during a playoff game.
In 2004, at another auction, Morenz’s “death skates” sold for US$25,000.
THE CREEK BEGAN to rush. Overnight, its adjectives thawed from burbling to torrentine. The whole place was hurrying towards the spring, melting and gurgling, glistening in the bolder sunshine. In the pasture of snow in front of the house, the crisses and crosses of winter paths turned to green, and the snow that was still there revealed its mice trails, faint and blue as veins in your wrist. Then all the snow was gone, except for the ruins of our snow forts. The bats came out in the daylight, too soon, flinging around in front of the living room window as they tried to tune their radar. It was still too cold for them, and for a couple of days the long verandah was where the bats went to die.
Over at the pond, pucks kept turning up along the shore, as pleasing to discover as a crop of vegetables I’d planted myself. Early in March I was still skating but the ice was going soft — sishy they’d say in Newfoundland, according to the poet Randall Maggs. After that, during the week, whoever it was who’d been walking on my rink with big stegosaurus snowshoes left a looping trail at centre and the water rose up through the footprints. One of my nets got stuck, frozen in meltwater, and for the next few days I watched it sink. One Saturday morning I put on my boots and went over and stood on the shore and thought for a while before I didn’t venture out. I’d like to tell you that I hook-checked the net to safety, but it was too far out. I didn’t have to tell the dog to stay ashore. She knew.
I HAVEN’T READ 100 Things Sabres Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (2012), and probably won’t, but could, and might. By leaving some of the hockey books unread, I don’t rule out the possibility that there’s a high shelf somewhere and on it, the volume that explains everything.
The ongoing challenge that all the hockey books present to a reader is that — well, they’re so ongoing. I’m not complaining when I say that there are too many of them, even for me, they just keep coming and coming. Larry Robinson is out with his second autobiography in 2014 which, as Brad Park, Paul Henderson, and Gerry Cheevers will tell you, is the new norm.
Recently I’ve been doing my best to catch up on hockey’s unwritten literature, in particular, the many rules and codes that govern the game. For instance: If you’re challenged to a fight but you’re injured, you’re allowed to decline, respectfully. That’s one, a clause in the legendary honour system that guards hockey’s fighters from harm like a magic cloak. It’s on page 65 of Ross Bernstein’s The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL (2006), about one-third of the way through. I came across it while I was looking for some kind of explanation of who gets to transcribe the codes and under what circumstances. I couldn’t figure it out, though. I always feel so guilty, reading about hockey’s oral traditions, let alone writing about them, though nobody else seems to feel that way.
It’s important to acknowledge the game’s newest languages, which already have their own books, although I haven’t learned to speak any of them yet, can’t even say Hello, how are you? I’m talking here of Corsi and Fenwick, THoR and Zone Starts, and all the rest of the Advanced Stats, including those practised by tribes still living deep in the forests without having yet made contact with civilization.
Hockey’s literature has reached the point where it’s generating whole new genres. I don’t know that the one I’m thinking about in particular has yet produced its own version of The Game, but there’s surely time. Not sure how sales are going either, but the lawsuits filed by former players against the NHL contending that the league knew about the risks of head trauma inherent in the game long before it took steps to address them make for compelling reading. I have two of them on the corner of my desk, from early 2014, and I plan to get to them right after I find out what happens at the end of The Continued Examination for Discovery of David Nonis, Volume II from the Steve Moore lawsuit against Todd Bertuzzi and the Vancouver Canucks.
Books I would have read if they existed:
I’d like to read a Scotty Bowman memoir and a Milt Schmidt, also a Sprague Cleghorn biography and the hockey novel that Philip Roth is working on while he pretends to have given up fiction. I am looking forward, too, to the history someone writes when the fighting dwindles out of the game, which is how Gary Bettman says it’s going to go. “We respect the history, the tradition, and the vibrancy of the game,” the commissioner said in 2013. “You just don’t throw a light switch and effectuate a major change.”
Will hockey last long enough for that? Will there be sufficient winter? In 2007, Walter Gretzky told Roy MacGregor that if Wayne were growing up today in Brantford, he wouldn’t be able to build a backyard rink for his boy, it just isn’t cold enough. And the Nith River? “Winters are warmer now. There’s no ice.” A national study broadcast the alarm in 2012: global warming is endangering the very ice that makes our game and us. Maclean’s was on the case, too: “The Year That Winter Died” was the cover story that March.
So maybe that’s what happens: hockey just melts away. With many recent professional lockouts to help us, the dire warnings do open up just enough of a crack for our imaginations to slip through and conjure an altogether hockeyless Canada. Once you get going, hockey subtracts fairly easily from the equation.
To return a century’s worth of sticks to their natural state would take some doing — every Northland and Bauer, all the Sher-Woods, CCMs, Coopers, Canadiens, Hespelers, Eastons, the Reeboks, the Warriors, every last Supreme Rogue and Stealth Reflex III, rock elm to rock elm forest, carbon fibre to certified recycling facility for thermal depolymerization. Skates to the incinerators — sorry, you ice dancers and short-track speedsters. Unvulcanizing all the pucks might take a while, and we’d want to get that rubber stockpiled away somewhere safe, where we can get at it come the next war. “Hockey never leaves the blood of a Canadian,” Harry Sinden reminds us, but we’d have to figure it out. We now know that reading most of the hockey books doesn’t work, so that’s a start. Some kind of transfusion might do it, a procedure we’ll call hemahockeyamotiosis. Sounds risky.
With no hockey, we’d be looking at a whole lot of real estate freed up downtown in Toronto and Montreal, Peterborough and Voskresensk. In Toronto’s Leafless Gardens there’s a model for what we could do with all of these sudden hulks of rinks: state-of-the-art supermarkets for all! Or better, big parks, filled with gardens, new urban forests with little lakes and many statues of famous and not-so-famous writers and their characters, and poets and scientists and doctors — no politicians. Maybe on Saturday nights in winter, without hockey to watch on our TVs, that’s where we’d go, climbing aboard our bicycle skates, slicing down there in no time.
We’d have to think of other ways to sell our beer and our doughnuts. We’d need to be prepared for the spike in crime. Mordecai Richler was writing in 1981 about the obvious correlation between violence on the ice and the safety of Canadian streets. Why do muggers prowl Detroit, New York, and Boston, while nobody feels threatened in Montreal, Toronto, or Calgary? “This is because we have cunningly put our potential muggers into team sweaters, shoving them out on the ice, paying then handsomely to spear, slash and high stick or whatever.”
If he’s right, if hockey is the place where we channel the worst of us, our self-loathing and base instincts, a national midden for everything we’re not too proud of, all the anger and poor sportsmanship and rudeness, we’re going to have to find somewhere else to stow all that, and soon, maybe with the help of the carbon sequestration people.
And what would all the hockey players do? On the evidence of Eddie Shore and Max Bentley, we know that they can farm, given a quarter section near Peace River, Alberta, or on the road to Vanscoy, Saskatchewan. They drive beer trucks in Kitchener, Ontario (Bingo Kampman); sell Bee-Hive Corn Syrup for the St. Lawrence Starch Company (Bob Davidson); direct funerals (Alf Pike); tend ten million bees (Butch Bouchard); cut toe rubbers at Merchants Rubber Company (Frank Selke). There’s no reason why they can’t work in wealth management (Derek Sanderson); run a billiard academy (Hooley Smith); golf professionally (Bill Ezinicki); divide their time between oil wells and orchards in California (Ching Johnson); be elected band chief (Fred Sasakamoose); sell accident insurance (Nels Stewart); serve in the upper house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, representing Primorsky Krai (Viacheslav Fetisov); or deploy to the war in Afghanistan with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (Ed Staniowski).
Some of us would be harder to disenthrall than others. There would be resistance, maybe some of us up in the hills with a left-handed Titan and a copy of Dipsy-Doodle Dandy.
But would it last? I don’t think so. There’s only so long we’d be able to go without inventing hockey all over again. Curling will never win us over, and lacrosse — lacrosse would present itself, shyly smiling, what about me? and we’d send it on its way, again.
The winter wouldn’t have to be especially severe; just cold enough would do. In November of 1608, in Scotland, a vehement frost locked the tide at the Firth of Forth, and “The sea freized so farre as it ebbed, and sindrie went in to shippes upon yce, and played at chamiare a myle within the sea marke.”
That would do it. Chamiare! How could we deny the stirring in our veins? We’d think at first, why go out in the cold when we can stay in? But pretty soon we’d be looking around for toques and life jackets. It wouldn’t have to be in Canada. It could be anywhere. Maybe this time we’d decide on the rules — maybe even a preamble — before we got out there, to be sure there’s a sense to it ahead of time. I’m just talking here, making it up as I go.
Actually, save the rules for later. When it’s cold, with wind sweeping the snow for you, that’s the time to rig up something like a skate, get out there. The ice can’t wait forever. Its call is urgent. It’s not a page, never was, that’s going to write itself.