Hockey Dreams (11 page)

I couldn’t disagree with him. Especially when he was feeding me a nice bowl of weeds.

By January of 1961 the old Colonel was listening to his radio. Of course he had been for years. The idea that the Americans had won the Olympics in 1960, rankled him. The Americans for God’s sake.

The Americans were laughing at us, “laughing up their holes” was the expression we used on starry winter nights here. The Russians too, and we still did not have anything approaching a national team. We had teams from small towns going over to play for the World Championship. And it was back in 1960–611 was first becoming aware of the disaster of it. I loved them, but it was getting more and more evident that they could no longer keep up. I was also beginning to hear the name which would become synonymous with every foul trick perpetrated against Canada by the Europeans for the next ten years — Bunny Ahearne, the persistent, diabolical, president of the IIHL. When Brendan Behan the Irish writer mentioned that Canada should stick to its league, ice hockey, we should have taken his advice. What Mr. Behan wouldn’t have been aware of, is that an Irishman named Ahearne was trying to keep us from this as much as he could.

And now, in 1961, we were sending another team called the TRAIL SMOKE EATERS.

I can only tell you what I remember about them from my vantage point on the Miramichi. I had heard about them. And in my mind they were dark forms moving across sections of large unfriendly, unpainted ice, far away in another world fighting for us, and ready to be dismissed by many of us at any given moment. And I felt sad and apprehensive. I don’t know whether I felt sad and apprehensive for them, for me, or for Canada. Perhaps it was for us all. And this apprehensiveness, or the memory of it, has never left me. I remember when they lost their first exhibition game against the Swedes, after travelling for days to get there.

Trail hadn’t won the Allen Cup and were not the first to be asked. Chatham, Ontario, did and was, as Mr. Scott Young reports in his book
War On Ice
. But because of finances they couldn’t take up the challenge. And it was left to Trail. It was left to Trail — a place so far away from me, from my view of Canada, from where I was, it was strange that they were representing us. Except we both knew, that is the Miramichi and Trail, what hockey meant to us. We could still smell the hockey blades in the fall night air.

I sometimes like to think that our attitude has gotten better since the Trail Smoke Eaters. Yet I think our international hockey has been like this: we have stuck our head in the sand and refused to really examine what we are doing and why we are doing it in our attitude toward our sport. It happened
just as the old Colonel said it would, just as the Second World War did.

For years, all during the terrible seventies and eighties, we thought we had to find a system to beat the Russians or the Czechs, or the Finns or Swedes, and we relied on defence. Can you imagine, thinking we needed a special system?

For Canada to rely largely on defence is similar to having Joe Frazier decide that the best way to beat Mohammed Ali is not to throw his left hook.

“A lapse in defence” or “a breakdown in our own end” was always what cost us this game or that and our national coach for a number of years was always there to tell us this, and to reassure us, that once our defence got better, or once we played our positions, and remembered what to do, we would raise our game to the level of the opposition.

I am almost positive the Russians and Czechs and Finns and Swedes loved to hear this. This has nothing to do with me not liking defence — I remember Paul Coffey stopping a two-on-one against the Soviets in 1984 just before Canada scored the winning goal.

I remember being amazed at our three players on the ice for seven — eight minutes in the eighth game against five rushing Soviets in 1972. In their rink with their referee; with
their
system. And I can also say that I don’t think it was a defensive system that made these moments so great for Canada. It was the absence of a system.

The one thing a defensive system did for Canada in international
hockey was inhibit what we could do instinctively. Taking the man, and hitting him. And actually shooting. A system relying on defence always made a nation who relied on intuition a nation of second guessers.

Besides, the one thing we tried to curtail in our defensive systems of the seventies and eighties, was the one thing Canadian defence has always relied upon — hitting. We were frightened of hitting, because of our reputations. So we played defensively many times by doing anything but hit.

Defensive play often worked. It made us lose by two goals instead of four. At a certain point it broke apart anyway. And it broke apart because no matter what kind of team we sent to Europe our gut instinct told us that this was not us. No matter what the philosophy behind the bench was. Yet for years we tried this.

And we tried this defensive system for more than just hockey
on
the ice. We tried this system for public relations in Europe and at home. We tried this so the newspapers would be nice to us.

“They played a nice — clean game, with good backchecking, and lost 4–2 — the one thing I can say is that they acquitted themselves like gentlemen. But don’t the Russians just dazzle —”

The idea was that we couldn’t beat them but we could stop them from beating us. Too badly. This was the philosophy, and it got us some bronze medals in international play. And made me sick at heart.

For everyone was on pins and needles all through the late seventies and eighties when this philosophy was at its high water mark. We were on pins and needles because we were told — as we had been told for years and years and years — to stay out of the penalty box.

With a defensive system, we might clear the puck a half a dozen times, but sooner or later we’re going to get caught in our own end. Sooner or later my friend we are going to take a penalty for holding or tripping the man. And then what else are we going to take, when trying, shorthanded, to clear the man screening the goalie in front of our net? A crosschecking penalty. So we are two men in the box for 3:22.

If you have relied on defence and you have two men in the penalty box and you have the Russian sharpshooters buzzing about — that’s the game right there. Because the one thing we did when we relied on defence is for some peculiar reason not rely
on offence
. Even on a breakaway we would seem to be unsure of ourselves.

Team Canada, of ’72 fame, two men short was still dangerous because they never had the man behind the bench telling them not to be. And they knew, like the Trail Smoke Eaters, that the last thing fair, in Europe, or in Russia would be a penalty call.

I am not meaning to slight these National teams of the recent past. They worked their guts out playing against great Soviet teams. Only such a system caused them their second-guessing. I know they tried their damndest. But they were not
only fighting the great Russians or Finns, they were fighting their natural instincts, to take the other team to task — take the body hard and push the puck forward.

And sooner or later their natural instincts would bubble over and they would upend someone, or deek with perfect balance, and find themselves in the box. The game was lost anyway. If you are so terrified of penalties, that you mention it to everyone who ever wrote a line for a paper, you are almost bound to get more of them than you deserve.

As long as we play at our best, we are going to get penalties. This will be as true in 1998, as it was in 1958. There are always horror stories about refereeing from players who played in Europe. The first eleven penalties called would go to Canada.

This idea that you can make hay by blasting Canada, has been around for years. No team ever complained about Canadian backchecking on sensitive virtue alone. Virtue has nothing to do with it.

And it was always there. It followed the Penticton Vees and the Trail Smoke Eaters — just small town Canadian boys going over to play for the world, when all of Canada, like the old Colonel by his radio, knew what was really at stake.

I
WOULD LIKE TO MENTION THIS:
I heard a song once by an old black man, from the south. And I said to myself: that does sound familiar — those guitar riffs, that old refrain; ah, yes — I remembered it was sung by a white rockabilly boy that winter of 1961

It was not made famous by this old blues man — this sad old blues singer from Mississippi; it was made famous by the be bop a loo bop rockabilly boy with the white complexion, who could introduce the song to mainstream America — package it in a comfortable way to the girls who would not swing their dresses so high, wiggle too, too much.

It was a great song. At first, I liked the rockabilly version. The old man’s version seemed so strange — so
foreign
to me, that I did not accept it.

The record company wanted the old blues song that came from blood and sweat in that Mississippi delta. They wanted the guitar riffs, the lyrics. But they wanted it not so troubling,
not so rough. They wanted to hide it away, and tuck it in. And they didn’t want the black voice husking out into the microphone.

But yes, they could profit from it. They wanted the song. They did not feel they had to tell you where this song came from. They did not feel a need to tell you that it came out of a person’s love of country and gift of life and tragedy when both have been taken away. They didn’t want those young college girls and boys — who so desperately needed a song such as this — to know quite what it all was about.

And those record moguls knew that they didn’t need people to know the song’s history in order to sell the song. Nor did they consider that if people did not know the song’s history they might never know the song well.

But, as I say, I listened to it. I listened to the rockabilly version of this song in 1961 when I was a child playing hockey in the street. It was the rockabilly version under the cold sky that everyone tapped their toes to. It was the version that everyone heard which to them represented all the authenticity and spontaneity they believed the song had to offer.

Years later I heard the black man from the delta singing, in his gravelly voice this same song, in a house on a dark and solitary back street in Saint John, NB.

The rockabilly version is still out there. But now, nothing about it is so remarkable. It is a version with a mask, a front. It is still in its own way, something you might dance to, buy, or send as a gift, as memorabilia of that long ago lost age.

But the song, written and sung by the black man from the delta, goes beyond all of this. It is
now
, just as it was
then
. It has not lost itself in nostalgia. It has not changed. It is not dated, because it comes as it was written, in sacrifice and courage and love.

Those who invent the world for us, do this often. They legitimize by delegitimizing. For so many songs, ideas, books, opinions, etc., are best sanitized just a bit for the broader marketplace. The place where the glossy edition comes out.

The world is invented for us. It is made palatable. The old black man did not understand this. Some of the greatest songs of all time were written by black men who got fifty bucks for them.

The honour supposedly came when they listened to the radio and heard the be bop a loo bop, party-pack version on some rockabilly show, from somewhere in Tennessee. They were never mentioned as the inventors of those wonderful songs. Their names never spilled out onto the airwaves.

What does this have to do with my hockey book? I don’t know. It’s just something I thought I’d mention.

Back then from 1961 through to 1967, when we walked out in the snow after school the long shadows of evening were against the slanted frozen buildings, and the hockey game in Europe was almost over. We would always try to catch just a bit of it. Running home — I remember running home — we would pick up the CBC broadcast from Europe, amid the
static, and when it finally came in, the sound of whistles and jeers from the fans. Sometimes there would be interference, and silence for whole minutes.

Then it would break out again. The sickening sound of whistles and jeers. I can never think of a game in Europe where the jeers and whistles did not fulfil some prophetic sense of doom, no matter which of those years we happened to catch it.

“What are they whistling and jeering at?” Darren would ask.

“Shhh — we got — two more minutes.”

“Ohhh —” Darren would answer. And he would look in the kind of startled way children have. Stafford would fumble with the dial, his pants drooping, the back of his shirt untucked.

“Shhh.”

Out of the corner and now up along the boards — here come the Canadians — now Dewsbury — here, now just a minute here we go again, Dewsbury is called — another penalty to Canada and the Czechs are up 4–2
.

I remember hearing something very much like this when I came home from school in 1959. That was the year Bellville was wearing the Canadian colours.

I remember sitting with Stafford and Darren, shaking just a little. Darren sat in a chair staring at the wall. Stafford stood near the radio, as if moving the dial one fraction of a millimetre would bring in a better score and a different announcement. But it never did. Sometimes I would lay down on the couch and put a pillow over my head, listening, rocking back
and forth, and hoping that my rocking would drown out the drone of whistles, the static, the idea that time was passing and we were behind.

Far away in Europe on those cold, shadow-filled arenas Canadians were playing for us. No one here could help them.

I
don’t know now — you get the feeling that Canada might not be able to make this up — that missing that breakaway — might have demoralized them a little
.

And again we would wait and listen. And then usually clearer than anything else, the long ago beeping buzzer that would end the game. Rushing home from school to hear these games we would never really know what period we were getting, and so Stafford would always say hopefully: “Well there is probably another period.” Only to find out that they were signing off, and there suddenly was string quartet music of some sort.