Hockey Dreams Read Free Page A

and Lafleur?
    Finesse in the age of Lemieux and Gretzky? In the age of Savard (Denis) or a hundred others?
    I was in Australia in 1993, at a literary festival. It is a wonderful country and has a rugby league and Australian rules. In some way (this is exaggerated) the difference between these two kinds of rugby is the same as the difference between ice hockey and hockey.
    I was sitting with a writer from the Czech Republic and a woman who worked for Penguin Books. The writer from the Czech Republic and I had an interesting conversation about Australia and how it compared to our countries. All of a sudden he gave a start, and he said, “Oh — you are
Canadian —
I thought you were an American — so mister Canadianman tell me — who is the greatest hockey player in the world today?”
    “Gretzky or Lemieux — I’m not sure which,” I replied.
    “Gretzky or Lemieux — Gretzky or Lemieux — bahhh! What about Jagr —?”
    “Who?” the young woman from Penguin asked.
    “Jagr — Jagr — the greatest to ever exist.”
    “Great, no doubt,” I said. “Definitely a great asset to the Penguins — but not the greatest who ever lived — he isn’t even the greatest of his era — he isn’t even the greatest for the Penguins.”
    “Pardon me?” the woman from Penguin said.
    “The Penguins would be nothing without him,” my Czech acquaintance said.
    “I agree — he is great — but Lemieux is far greater — anyway the Penguins might get rid of them both within the next few years. I am very cynical about it.”
    “Who are they?” the woman from Penguin said.
    She made a stab. “So what do you think of Kundera?” she said to the Czech gentleman after a moment’s silence.
    “Kundera — what team does he play for?” the Czech writer asked, and winked my way.
    The sales representive from Penguin excused herself and did not come back to the table. Her meal got cold. This is true, and I feel badly about this now (a little).
    Earlier that day in Melbourne, I needed a pair of shoes for this particular dinner. I went with my wife and son to a shoe store near our hotel. In this store one of the salesmen was a young Russian immigrant. He was fairly new to his job, and new to Australia.
    He told me that the one thing he missed was hockey. He mentioned Larionov and Fetisov — he asked me if Fetisov had retired. I was never a big fan of Fetisov (except when he got punched in the head by Clarke) but I understood that his hockey talk was more than a sales pitch. And even if it were only a sales pitch
it worked
. For how many customers could he have used it on in Melbourne?
    Years before, in my home town I got drunk one night with a boxer off a Russian ship. We liked each other very much. We talked two things — hockey and boxing. The only thing I cansay is that all through the evening this partisan Russian who lived fifteen miles from Leningrad never once mentioned hockey as “ice hockey.”
    Ah but the game is lost boys, the game is lost. To go on about it, at times, is like a farm boy kicking a dead horse to get up out of a puddle.
    But still, some horses are worth a kick or two. And if it is good and even noble to have sport, and if hockey is
our
sport, and if we can make the claim that we play hockey better than any other country — if we can make that claim, without having to listen to apologies about why we made it — then who speaks for
us
, as a HOCKEY nation, when three-quarters of our NHL teams are in the states, and 324 of our players as well?
    It is not America’s fault, maybe not even ours. Perhaps it is just the nature of the economic beast. And a few years back — in the dark age of Mulroney, when we spoke about selling out our culture, what great ballet were we thinking of — what great ballet had we already let go?
    I remember an American friend laughing when she asked where Canada got its baseball players. It was the year Toronto lost to Kansas City and it had put a scare into many Americans. In