Dispatches from the Sporting Life Read Free

determination, and the hunger for a new and better life—a bit of fame, fortune, prowess—but they are also about choosing.
    Pa found his own unlikely way out, though he never did leave his beloved Montreal behind. Not in all those years in Britain, perusing the hockey listings in the
Herald Tribune
—or, in the sanctity of his loft office, conjuring up the subtext of a crazy expats’ ball game in London’s Hampstead Heath (that chapter from
St. Urbain’s Horseman
is included here). He never did stray far from home, eventually, in 1972, coming back to it all, to the seat of it—because he felt he was drying up as writer, he told Ma. (He liked to quote V. S. Naipaul, who’d said of his own writer’s relationship with Englishmen that “I don’t know what they do when they go home at night”—an explanation for the family’s move from Britain that Ma did not easily accept.) That summer, he took the kids to see the Expos in Jarry Park frequently. And come winter, he told his friend the longtime Montreal
Gazette
sports columnist, Dink Caroll, who’d supply us with a pair of his Forum press tickets from time to time, that I was a fleet defenceman.I think he
wanted
that to be true, and I remember having to keep up the pretence for many years, until Dink died.
    Then, in June 1998, my father telephoned me from Montreal—I was living in London at the time—and told me that he was going into hospital, the Montreal General, to have a cancerous kidney removed. I flew to Montreal, knowing remarkably little about operations and hospitals, thank God, and spent the nights there in his small, gloomy, dilapidated room. (So much of his Montreal felt diminished then.) We rented a television set so that I could watch the World Cup and Pa, I’d expected, the hockey playoffs. Except that he was not interested. He was on morphine—hell for a mind like his—and other thoughts were racing through his unfettered consciousness. It must have been the surgical masks of the doctors who’d leaned over him on the operating table, stemming an unexpected loss of blood, that provided his delirium with a thread of crazy reason. “No!” said Pa, bolt upright, that great head of thick hair a standing tussle, when, a few days after the operation, a nurse tried to put an oxygen mask on his face to help him through his recovery. “No. I won’t—
it’s an anti-Semitic machine.”
Even the French-Canadian doctors laughed at that. Then, the queue of doctors and nurses abating for a while, Pa would drift in and out of sleep and the topics that were his lifetime’s concerns: Canadian politics, Israel and Palestine—and hockey.
    “Noah?”
    “Yes, Pa?”
    “Where did the U.S. make the speech recognizing Israel? Was it in San Francisco?”
    “I think so, Pa, in May 1948, wasn’t it? Harry Truman sent a cable.”
    “Oh dear, oh dear. Who would have thought it would all end so badly?”
    “It’s not over yet, Pa.”
    What does he mean, I wonder. Israel? Himself? Pa lifts his arm, as if it were a stranger’s, looking at the intravenous feed indignantly. Then he rolls onto his side and lets out a big sigh.
    “What are we going to do in this country? Canada’s in such a mess. Did you get to the Knesset? Did you get to the meeting of the men with masks?”
    “No, Pa. What meeting was that?”
    “That Don Cherry—ha ha!—great guy.”
    And, before giving in to sleep again, he says, “But can you imagine,
hockey in June.”
    Three years later, Pa went into hospital again, and this time he died. The family, according to his wishes, buried him in Montreal’s Mount Royal cemetery, in a grave on Rose Hill, overlooking his boyhood home on St. Urbain Street. (The “ghetto” is a much more affluent community now.) We put this notice in the paper.
    Mordecai Richler died from complications related to kidney cancer early Tuesday morning at the Montreal General Hospital. He will be sorely missed by Florence, his beloved wife of forty years; his