Hockey Dreams Read Free

just learned that the
Titanic
had sunk or Passchendaele had cost us thousands of men for 50 yards of mud.
    Hearing my tone, the tone of a person bleeding, maybe she felt as if she had won a moral victory.
    “Well, we both hate Gretzky you see.” Her accent now turned slightly British.
    “Why?”
    “Oh, he’s just such a Canadian.” She smiled.
    “You hate greatness or just Canadian greatness?” I asked.
    In a way, Canadians have been asking this question all of their lives. And while asking this question they have been running to outsiders for the answer.
    In a way my learned friend’s stance embodies the notion of the intelligentsia that hockey is a part of what is wrong with our country.
    Of course I know this about my country. I have known it since Stafford Foley used to debate the merits of Alex Delvecchio in a room at the tavern, as if he could turn back the clock and make, with the original six, everything right with the world again and with himself.
    It was, by some rascals, rather smart-alecky to cheer for the Russians. I remember this all too well.
    It was December 31, 1975 — all day I waited. Red Army was playing Montreal. I was in Victoria with an acquaintance. He was extremely adept (or he thought he was) at taking the opposite position — the educated, therefore contrived, outrageous part. And so he “wished” to cheer for the Russians. He felt
no one else
would be doing this. (He would only have to listen to one CBC commentary to realize how Canadians bent over backwards to kiss the Russian behinds in order to be fair.)
    I shouted at him, told him if he had only known the dozens of minutes of unrecognizable penalties that were given to our amateurs in Sweden and Czechoslovakia over the years he’d feel different. Or if he had only known the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Hockey Canada had given to the Russians to help their sport, he may change his mind.
    He stared at me, as if I had not just said something wrong. It went well beyond this. It was as if I had demonstrated the kind of unfair sportsmanship he was ridiculing. “My Good God man — get a hold of yourself; it’s only a game — you’re frightening the house guests.”
    What was under attack was simply fear of a lack of Canadian identity. And he, a learned man whose father was a poet, connected to a university, did not wish to have anything to do with the sport that could make us feel — even manhandle us into feeling — Canadian. It was supposed to be done another way; I suppose a more
civilized
way. (Also itwas the elitist idea that the ideal of Soviet life was one that hinged on working-class fairness.)
    For most people who talk this polemic against hockey as a point of identity there is a certain degree of cant, of wrong-headedness. Besides, part of this kind of conceit hinges on the identity crisis itself. Because some of us continue to believe that Canadians are famous for nothing except hockey. Therefore they argue that Canadians must be greater than what they are famous for.
    My answer to that has always been yes and no. And hockey, when you know what it says about us as a people, proves it.
    So we sat in silence, he and I, in a little room on that long ago New Year’s Eve. Montreal did not win that game as we all know. They tied Red Army 3–3, after outplaying them and outshooting them by a margin of 4–1 Tretiak, who the Czechs always seemed mystified by our inability to score against, saved them — and Dryden was in net for us.
    Dryden never played that well against the Soviets, but all in all, well enough.
    I remember at one point during that game Guy Lafleur stickhandling at centre ice, and mystifying three Russian players. It comes back to me time and again when I am lectured, usually by university professors, on how the Europeans taught us finesse, and how shameful I am not to record that. I will and do record the Russians’ greatness. But, my son, they did not teach us finesse.
    Finesse in the age of Orr