Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play

I had a nightmare.

Local governments couldn’t afford to operate hockey rinks in Canada anymore.

Climate change had ensured that no ponds or rivers remained for pick up games.

The U.S economy went kaput pulling us down too. Synthetic backyard rinks, an exciting new phenomenon costing around 50k, grew to be beyond the reach of most Canadians.

And finally, the Toronto Maple Leafs moved to Barcelona and Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum was put up on a very large flatbed and trucked off to Kansas City so the Nashville Predators could relocate there.

Before it gets worse I awake - been reading too many hockey books lately, I guess.

Many of our great writers - Hugh MacLennan, Al Purdy, Morley Callahan, Mordecai Richler, to name just a few, have written on hockey.


Hockey and Ice Hockey

I’ve just finished reading Paul Quarrington’s book King Leary (Anchor Canada, 1987) winner of this year’s CBC Radio Canada Reads award. A funny book about hockey beats out more serious efforts by the likes of Timothy Findley and Mavis Gallant. Recognition of Quarrington’s writing skills or a comment on our national obsession?

I’ve also just completed another older hockey book – David Adams Richards, Hockey Dreams – Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play Doubleday, 1996.)

Richards won a Governor General’s award for fiction (Nights Below Station Street) and non-fiction (Lines on the Water: A Fisherman’s Life on the Miramachi). He is a fine Canadian author writer and he is passionate about hockey.

And that is “hockey” not “ice hockey.” Hockey, according to Richards is greater than ice hockey - the later being a European invention.

To Richards’ hockey is “more than a game.” It can be played with a puck and skates on ice. It can be played with a ball and galoshes on the road. Or it can be played with any combination of the aforementioned equipment.

A story illustrates the difference in these two games:

Richards, as an adult, recalls hearing a song by an old black man from Mississippi. The song had been a hit when covered by a white rockabilly singer in the winter of the year much of the action in this book takes place - 1961. This was the year Richards (and your blogger) turned eleven.

But the record company wanted a cleaned up “not so troubling” version of the song.”

“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 a country and gift of life and tragedy when both have been taken away.”

Think of the original version of the song as hockey; the rockabilly version is ice hockey. Ice hockey was created by those who invent the world for us as they often do. “They legitimize by deligitimizing.”


Childhood Memories

As a child Richards was certain the NHL would expand to Newcastle, New Brunswick. But corporate (i.e., American) interests and the shady international ice hockey community were taking over the game while on his river a friend would be occupied in trying to find a “busted stick in what seemed to be the remotest corner of the country while others were thinking of multi-million dollar television syndication rights.”

Richards’ writing takes me back to my childhood; my own memories of a man (boy) who couldn’t play.

My recollection is that most of us got a chance to play. Some who aspired to stardom got it. Others for reasons I didn’t then understand would never achieve stardom.

Richards’ friend, Michael, lived in difficult circumstances. He wasn’t allowed on the organized team as a result of perceived low social status. It hurt. But on the rink that Michael made and maintained:

“(F)licking the puck at us and smiling as he skated backwards turning on a thin dime and breaking into strides that seemed to swallow the ice – at those times, the hurt wherever it came from, was all gone away, and he was free.”


Much More than a Game

Richards reflects on the famous 1972 Canada/Soviet series:

“It was more than just a game to us. We existed with it, and if it was forgotten then we could not exist without it. Without hockey the country would not exist. Not in the way it should.”

This is a terrific book marred only slightly by a surprising number of spelling mistakes.