Canadian ‘Puck Lit’:
Permanent Minor League Resident or
Promising Big League Prospect?
Jason Beck
T
he common refrain of literary observers critiquing the quantity and
quality of literature dedicated to hockey is, while hockey produces admirably
in the former consideration—on average, twenty-five to forty new works
on the game arrive in bookstores annually—it is in the latter where the
genre suffers. The appetite of hockey aficionados is sated with a constant
outpouring of predictable player-coach-referee-media biographies, standard
statistic and record books, colourful illustrated “coffee table” offerings, and
inevitably one more “inside” look at some aspect of the hockey world by Stan
Fischler, the fast-food equivalent of McDonald’s in the world of “puck lit.”
And while some of these offerings can truly be considered among the best
that sports literature has to offer—Net Worth by David Cruise and Allison
Griffiths, The Game by Ken Dryden, and Gross Misconduct by Martin O’Malley
spring to mind immediately, among select others—the relative lack of
fictional works compared with baseball, a game which possesses a similar
position at the heart of Americana that hockey holds for Canadians, is rather
disconcerting.
However, Canadian works of fiction devoted to hockey do exist in the
form of novels, poetry and theatrical plays, yet that is the problem. They
merely exist; they have not garnered reputations as pieces of Canadian fiction
critical to understanding this country and its people, like many American
pieces of fiction devoted to baseball, such as Bernard Malamud’s The Natural,
for instance. American writers of distinction seem less afraid to devote
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attention to those sports that define their country; often the very best started
out as sportswriters—Hemingway being the most famous example—and
some have built and staked their reputations within the literary community
on works devoted to sport. So why does this apathy exist among Canadians
and Canadian writers towards works of fiction on the game that unites and
inflames this country unlike any other? My purpose will be two-fold. First,
to account for the lack of fictional works that define the game, while also
outlining some of the more prominent works of fiction devoted to the game
and what they say about the country’s culture. Secondly, I will argue that,
rather than a single all-encompassing reason, a combination of interrelated
reasons collectively account for the stunted growth of hockey fiction and, by
consequence, the weaker mythology surrounding the game than that which
exists for Americans and baseball, for instance.
Over the course of researching and writing this piece, I have often
stopped and asked myself, “What is the point of all this? Does hockey fiction
really matter?” Others, such as Michael Kennedy,1 have also struggled in the
attempt to analyze and survey the genre to help explain the importance of
writing on a seemingly insignificant game to Canadian culture. And perhaps
through all of the works I have surveyed, it is simply put best by Doug
Beardsley as he talks of the significance of shinny and, by extension, all
things hockey: “The paradox is obvious but Canadian and true: it doesn’t
matter but it matters a great deal.”2
It does matter. The varied opinions accounting for the slim shelf of
quality hockey fiction—opinions that likely dwarf the number of fictional
works themselves—attest to the significance of hockey and its writings to
Canadians. While the lack of quality—and, at times, quantity—is a common
affliction across most sports fiction, observers rarely share the same view
regarding the sorry state of hockey fiction other than that the anomaly
peculiarly exists within a nation of many puck-mad Canadians who consider
the game a religion, Lord Stanley’s Cup the holy grail and Gretzky the
almighty deity. W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe, which became the basis
for the 1989 film, “Field of Dreams”—arguably one of the best sports movies
of all time—has a mystical, yet surprisingly plausible, theory for baseball’s
crowded shelf of fiction compared to hockey and other sports. In recent
electronic correspondence with the author, Kinsella reasoned that sports
other than baseball have only a smattering of writing devoted to them because
they are “twice enclosed, first by rigid playing boundaries and then by time.
On a true baseball field the foul lines diverge forever eventually taking in a
good part of the universe. This lends itself to magical happenings. It is very
difficult to have magical happenings on a hockey rink or football field.”3 It is
a theory Kinsella enlarged on while speaking through the eccentric character
of Mathew Clarke in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy:
Beck / Canadian ‘Puck Lit’
63
Name me a more perfect game! Name me a game with
more possibilities for magic, wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo,
enchantment, obsession, possession … No mere mortal
could have dreamed up the dimensions of a baseball field.
No man could be that perfect. Abner Doubleday, if he did
invent the game, must have received divine guidance … And
the field runs to infinity … There’s no limit to how far a man
might possibly hit a ball, and there’s no limit to how far a
fleet outfielder might run to retrieve it. The foul lines run on
forever, forever diverging. There’s no place in America that’s
not part of a major-league ballfield: the meanest ghetto,
the highest point of land, the Great Lakes, the Colorado
River. Hell, there’s no place in the world that’s not a part of a
baseball field … Every other sport is held in by boundaries,
some of absolute set size, some not: football, hockey, tennis,
basketball, golf. But there’s no limit to the size of a baseball
field. What other sport can claim that?4
Theoretically, there are no boundaries on true baseball diamonds—balls hit
or thrown outside of any baselines or boundaries are still in play, however
briefly, and games could last forever if the score remains tied—an openness
that allows greater opportunity for the unbelievable, the unique and the
dramatic and, thus, better writing. Perhaps, the hollow fibreglass boards and
clear plexi-glass surrounding most rinks protect spectators not only from
getting too close to hockey’s violent and graceful action but also prevent
the free flow of ideas and creativity from infiltrating the game’s literature as
well.
George Plimpton, on the other hand, has espoused a partially satirical,
mostly scientific hypothesis known as the “Small Ball Theory,” which states
that the smaller the ball used in the game, the better the writing in those sports
tends to be, such as golf, baseball and cricket. Plimpton, the participatory
journalist who, in Open Net, wrote on his brief time as a goaltender for the
Boston Bruins in his characteristic self-deprecatory style, summed up the
state of hockey literature as follows:
Hockey has an oddly limited shelf—odd because its world
was rife with storytellers and legend-keepers and has a long
and absorbing history. Could it be that a hockey puck is not
a proper spheroid, squashed to its familiar shape as if by a
steamroller?5
The point is not that this is an incredibly deep assessment of hockey literature
but that it is acknowledged as strange, even to an American writer noted
more for his work on baseball, boxing, and football—American sports that
have inspired many American writers to dizzying literary heights.
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Considering the importance of the game to Canadians, who have
claimed it as their own despite the fact that formative variations were played
elsewhere earlier (yes, yes, it flourished in Canada though), Canada should
have produced its equivalent to The Natural or Shoeless Joe, two of the great
American baseball novels, although it is curiously noteworthy that the
latter was written by a Canadian writer, the aforementioned Kinsella. And,
perhaps, that is part of the problem—if a Canadian writes the greatest hockey
novel of all-time, which Roy MacGregor arguably did in The Last Season, his
or her work will become moderately well known in Canada and a few select
regions of the United States and other hockey playing countries. Put another
way, the average American today will almost certainly recognize “Field of
Dreams” before The Last Season, and, in most cases, the same will ring true for
most Canadians as well. Granted, it still is something of an accomplishment
to write what literary critics and hockey aficionados consider the greatest
novel of all time in any genre but a Canadian writer might thus be better off
attempting to write the next great American baseball novel for considerations
of financial return, potential audience and future reputation and perhaps
this has deterred some from attempting.
In July 2005, the Vancouver Province published yet another list of the
best in hockey literature under the subheading, “Books on the Game: Once
again, Canadians dominate the field.”6 Now before we go patting ourselves
on the back too fervently for being the front-runner in a one-horse race, it is
imperative to note that, in general, it is largely Canadians that write on the
game and few other nations make the effort. The works on the game from
outside the Great White North barely number a handful. Don Reddick’s
Dawson City Seven, thus, is an anomaly of sorts in the world of hockey fiction.
While Kinsella gained fame and popularity writing on an American game,
Reddick, an American author writing on a Canadian game, has not been
so fortunate. Reddick weaves together fact and fiction in his novel on the
1905 Dawson City Nuggets that challenged the Ottawa Silver Seven for the
Stanley Cup, only to be utterly humiliated by an unmatched performance
by Frank McGee and his eastern team mates after travelling the country by
snowshoe, dogsled, boat, and train—an epic journey to say the least. The
book does well in bringing to life the geographical challenges faced by
inhabitants of this country in the years immediately following completion of
the CPR—especially for those inhabitants in the extreme north, in this case,
the Yukon Territory—as well as displaying the West-East rivalry that existed
so prominently in the first half of the nineteenth century, often coming to
the fore in political and sporting arenas. However, the weakness of a book
such as this attempting to appeal to Canadian audiences is that it relies too
heavily on American influence—the main character is a fictional American
youth from a Southern family recovering after the American Civil War7—
hardly the foundation on which to build a Canadian literary classic, if that
Beck / Canadian ‘Puck Lit’
65
were the intention. Perhaps, the author’s intention by including such sizable
American references within a story about a Canadian game was to increase
the potential audience the book would appeal to in two countries, although
he may have diminished its power with both significantly as a result. The
book remains a solid, if obscure, work on the shelf of hockey fiction.
While Canadians do write on the game more than do writers in any other
nation, conceivably, the indifference of many Canadian writers to the writing
of hockey fiction may be the direct result of the same affliction among the
Canadian public to their work. The sheer volume of new pieces of nonfiction
hockey literature saturating the market annually surely renders the arrival
of those truly significant new works as mere routine to the public, rather
than eagerly anticipated, must-read experience. When Governor-General’s
Award-winning novelist David Adams Richards wrote and published Hockey
Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play in 1996, the literary community
ignored his work and the hockey community largely did the same, not
finding Richards’ elegant prose to their liking.8 Frankly, it is hard to fathom.
At times, the intense patriotism of Richards’ thought-provoking book burns
off the pages as he discusses the game’s importance to his childhood, to our
identity as a nation, to Canada in general:
If you think that you are a Canadian then my boy I will show
you I am a Canadian too—if they check me from behind
I will get up, if they kick and slash I will get up. If we play
three against five for fifteen minutes I will get up. I too am
a Canadian. They will not take this away from me … I will
prove forever my years on the river on the back rinks, on the
buses, on the farm teams. I will prove forever that this is what
has shaped me. No-one will then ever take this away. This is
our country. This is our country!9
The reader can sense his helpless aching at witnessing the slow erosion of
Canadian control of our game, as the NHL continues its irretrievable drift
south of the 49th parallel. That the state of the game and our connection to
it matters a great deal to Richards is obvious and many Canadians of all
walks of life would ultimately identify with his heartfelt writing but, for
whatever reason, it has failed to register on the public consciousness. It is
highly unlikely that a similar offering on baseball or football from an awardwinning American author would have been received so ignominiously. In
this sense, perhaps the blame for hockey’s shallow pool of fiction can be
divided evenly between artist and audience.
Frankly, though, it may simply be a common state of “intellectual
snobbery” among Canadians concerning their game, although such an attitude
is prevalent concerning most sports. The great American historical novelist
James Michener pointed out this common attitude in his fine examination
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of American sport, Sports in America, noting that a line from Shakespeare’s
King Lear contained a harmless enough insult between the characters Kent
and Oswald: “Nor tripped neither, you base football player.” Yet, it was
in the footnote for this line that Michener singled out “some cave-chested
editor who loved the library better than the playing field” for describing
football (soccer) as “a low game played by idle boys to the scandal of sensible
men.”10 Hockey literature is thus not alone with such an affliction but for
unique reasons. As Richard Gruneau and David Whitson noted in Hockey
Night in Canada, hockey “is a game whose sheer physicality and potential for
seemingly random violence have been at odds with an intellectual sensibility
that has valued control of the emotions and the cultivation of taste for ‘finer’
things.”11 MacGregor remarked on how booksellers were uncertain whether
to place The Last Season in the sports section or the children’s section, as
“many of them refused to believe that hockey could be a subject for serious,
grown-up consideration.”12 And the result has been to the detriment of the
development of fictional ‘puck lit.’ Tim Falconer makes the excellent point
that,
Canadian writers should cut the snobbery and see hockey
as a metaphor … our game is full of dualities. It blends
electrifying finesse and terrifying brutality and the players
switch between offence and defence with a bounce of the
frozen puck. Similarly, our nation is full of dualities: French
and English, East and West, individual and community.13
While this may be oversimplifying things slightly, the fact remains that the
opportunity to employ hockey in national literature clearly exists but tends
not to be undertaken.
This is not to say that it has not been undertaken at all. Perhaps, the
best examples of using hockey as a metaphor for some of the national
tensions afflicting this country spring from French Canadian sources, such
as “The Hockey Sweater,” a children’s story by Roch Carrier. Carrier depicts
the manner in which many French Canadian children grew up idolizing
Maurice ‘Rocket’ Richard, which was made all the more difficult for this
story’s main character when he receives a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey instead
of the number nine from his beloved Canadiens and is shunned by his
fellow Canadiens supporters—all of his friends, coaches, team mates and
presumably any red, blue, and white blooded French Canadian. Believing he
was being persecuted by his team mates and referee for wearing a blue Maple
Leafs jersey during a game, the main character loses his temper and is sent
by the vicar to church to ask for God’s forgiveness, where he instead asks
God “to send, as quickly as possible, moths that would eat up my Toronto
Maple Leafs sweater.”14 More than simply a children’s story, there are many
underlying francophone issues highlighted within “The Hockey Sweater”
Beck / Canadian ‘Puck Lit’
67
that Carrier skilfully unearths. Most powerfully is the importance of the
Catholic religion to Quebec, but as important as Catholicism is to the French
Canadian way of life, hockey’s authority reaches far deeper into the souls
of many. Also important is the symbolism of the on-ice battles of Canada’s
two NHL franchises as representing the real-life struggles of French and
English Canada, a convenient metaphorical tool that many observers have
since employed, perhaps most powerfully by Rick Salutin. Carrier’s blend of
wit, intimate storytelling style, and first-hand knowledge of the challenges
facing French Canadians in Canada have combined to make this short, but
lovable story a staple of hockey literature anthologies and one of the genre’s
best-known works.
Although less popularly recognized than Carrier’s masterpiece, Rick
Salutin’s theatrical play, Les Canadiens, evokes the tensions plaguing FrenchEnglish relations in Canada and the historical legacy of this struggle so central
to the core of the nation much more dramatically—quite literally. Salutin
uses a hockey game as the backdrop to the English and French skirmishes
throughout Canadian history from the battle on the Plains of Abraham in
1759 and onwards to 1976 when the Parti Quebecois were first elected in
Quebec and sovereignty became a legitimate reality for the province. The
arena scoreboard is cleverly used to mark significant dates—for instance,
“19:43” is flashed on the scoreboard before a scene concerning the Second
World War conscription crisis15—throughout the history of French Canadian
oppression at the hands of English Canada. Perhaps more than any other
work of French Canadian hockey fiction, then, Les Canadiens highlights the
central nature of the game at the heart of Quebec nationalism particularly,
employing a hockey arena to shift between the many various historical
locations and incidents of discontent, while also marking hockey as one
of the key sites of resistance to English oppression. Indeed, as esteemed
international sports historian Allen Guttmann noted in Games and Empires,
“in sports, more often probably than in any other domain, the initially
dominated have turned the tables on their erstwhile dominators,” increasing
local self-esteem by “beating them at their own game.”16 More than anything
else, Salutin’s fine theatrical play clearly displays this historically significant
point, helping to explain likely the most important facet of the grip hockey
has on the heart and souls of French Canadians.
Other lesser-known pieces of French Canadian origin or dealing with
French Canadian subjects also indicate the heightened importance of the
game in Quebec. Bob Wake’s Level Ice tells the tale of Bud Alcott, a former
player whose skill and drive seemed to have him destined for greatness until
his career was cut short by a terrible on-ice leg injury. Alcott takes over a
ragtag Northern Quebec men’s team and transforms them from the laughing
stock of the league into the season’s ‘Cinderella’ team, taking them on an
unlikely run all the way to the Allan Cup finals in Saskatchewan before
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finally meeting defeat. Along the way Alcott’s work with the team brings
him into the heart of life in small Lac Ouellet, where hockey is one of the few
respites from the day-to-day struggle of life in this backwoods, economically
starved town. By the end of the book, Alcott is a fully accepted member of the
community, planning on residing there more than temporarily with hopes of
marrying the French Canadian widow who runs the boarding house he lived
in. Here, Wake touches on the significant issue of Anglo-Franco relations
within Quebec. At first, Alcott, as an Anglo-Canadian isolated amid a town
of French Canadians suspicious of anything English, but particularly when
the hated Anglais intrude on really important matters, in this case coaching
the local men’s hockey team. Perhaps Wake is presenting a bit of an idealized
commentary on how French and English-speaking Canadians could coexist
if only the Anglos could speak a little more French and if the French would
only allow more Anglos to coach their hockey teams to unlikely winning
seasons. Pan-Canadianism be damned.
The plot and writing are unremarkable and straightforward—although
Wake does well in constructing a unique and at times memorable collection
of characters on the team—but the book’s strength lies in the sprinkling
of little gems of French Canadian hockey culture within the narrative. A
memorable chapter describes a team party that highlights French Canadien
humour and penchant for embellished storytelling. The Lac Ouellet assistant
coach, Gustave Aubert relates the exploits of a French Canadien baseball
player playing on a northern Quebec ball team that was taking on the
professional Montreal Royals:
… Jean Baptiste Trudeau is de bes’ playeur you never saw
in de whol’ worl’. He’s t’row de ball two hondred mile an
hour, he’s hit de ball twenty arpents in de air, ‘ees ron like
de cariboo an’ ‘ees catch de ball de way a bear is catch de
saumon. We know we gonna beat Les Royaux but we don’
know ‘ow we gonna be back in St. Gabriel before d’eres ten
feet of snow on de groun’… 17
Besides frequent allusion to a few widely recognizable French Canadien
symbols generally granted status on the highest cultural pedestals within
Quebec—the top shelf, if you will, in hockey parlance—such as Morenz,
Richard, and the Forum, the most unique is Alcott’s idea of drawing a chalk
hockey player wearing a Lac Ouellet jersey on the dressing room wall as a
symbol of the position his players found themselves in. Becoming a rallying
point for the team as they embark on an unlikely winning streak, the players
greet this chalk player nicknamed “Ti-Bout” upon each entrance and exit to
and from the dressing room with a friendly tap of their sticks and a polite,
“Ca va, Ti-Bout?” While literally signifying the ultimate sports cliché—“backs
against the wall” with nowhere to go and everything to lose—chalky “Ti-
Beck / Canadian ‘Puck Lit’
69
Bout” could very well signify the threatened position in which French
Canadians view themselves within their own country. Much like Salutin and
Carrier, Wake has identified the frozen game as one of the principal sites of
fiery cultural resistance in the ceaseless French-English Canadian struggle.
Two short stories, “I’m Dreaming of Rocket Richard” by Clark Blaise and
“The Return of Aurel Joliat” by David Gowdey, should also be considered
among the best French Canadian works on the game. Both stories describe
memories of life in Quebec, which inevitably have been indelibly marked
by the frozen game. While each piece is reputed to be fictional, the overly
personal nature of the writing hints that the memories described may be
at least slightly based on the two writers’ own respective experiences in la
belle province. Blaise’s piece describes a working class family’s struggles in
post-war Quebec, “When poor people could get into the Forum, and when
Rocket Richard scored fifty goals in fifty games.”18 Without the use of any
specific dates, the story is immediately placed in context; presumably hockey
and poverty were two universals for many baby boomers in Quebec. The
story is told through the reminiscences of an old man, who as a boy sold
newspapers to help his family make ends meet, living and dying with Les
Canadiens and the Rocket, although his favourite shirt was a frayed Boston
Bruins sweatshirt, which he wore to the Forum despite abuse from fellow
Canadiens supporters: “’Ey, you, Boston,” they’d shout, “oo’s winning,
eh?” and [he would] snarl back after a period or two of silence, “Mange la
baton, sac de marde …”19 Essentially, the story describes the struggles of an
awkward youth coming to terms with his French Canadien identity, seeing
all around him the better social position of other peoples—the Greeks who
constantly bought up houses in his neighbourhood and, more dramatically,
his well-off cousins, the Schmitzes from New Hampshire, who never failed
to visit Montreal in a new car and from whom the young boy got his Bruins
sweatshirt. One Christmas, the boy’s family visits the Schmitzes, who had
relocated to Florida, and the young boy is forced to come to terms with the
culture shock of what he perceives to be the backwardness of his people—so
glaringly obvious in the environment of the shiny, materialistic good life of
post-war America. Amidst the Bermuda shorts, bright Christmas lights, and
“drinking Kool-Aid in the yard” of North Hollywood, Florida, the young boy
begins to understand a little more about his people and their subordination.
It is an awkward indoctrination:
The front windows were sprayed with Santa’s sleigh and
a snowy “Merry Christmas.” Only in English, no “Joyeux
Noel” like our greeting back home. That was what I’d noticed
most all the way down, the incompleteness of the signs, the
satisfaction that their version said it all. I’d kept looking on
the other side of things—my side—and I’d kept twirling the
radio dial, for an equivalence that never came.20
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Passages such as this display the rude awakening of many young Francophones
to the reality of their people pushed to the fringes of mainstream society as
“the other” despite deep cultural and historical roots in North America. The
boy’s father, who increasingly becomes the most painfully obvious symbol
of French Canadian isolation among the sea of English speaking majority all
around them, provides a further embarrassing spectacle for the boy:
Some men were never meant for vacations in shirtless
countries: small hairy men with dirty winter boils and red
swellings that never became anything lanceable, and tattoos
of celebrities in their brief season of fame, now forgotten. My
father’s tattoo … pictured a front-faced Rocket, staring at an
imaginary goalie and slapping a rising shot through a cloud
of ice chips … Though I loved the Canadiens and the Rocket
mightily … my enormous cousins … pointed and laughed,
while I could almost understand what they were laughing
about. They thought his tattoo was a kind of tribal marking,
like kinky hair, thin mustaches and slanty eyes—that if I
took off my shirt I’d have one too, only smaller. Lacroix, I said
to myself: how could he and I have the same name? It was
foreign …21
While hockey has always been something French Canadians could cling to
and use as a rare piece of common ground with the English majority, in
certain situations the cultural currency of the game does not convert. The
‘ridiculous’ differences between French and English Canada are highlighted
to an even greater extreme when placed in the context of the cultural melting
pot of America, much to the painful embarrassment of a young boy coming
to grips with his own identity and his roots.
Gowdey’s story deals much more with memory and the fragile
construction and harsh deconstruction of mythology. One of hockey’s
most prolonging myths surrounds the death of Howie Morenz, the first
Canadiens superstar to capture the hearts of Quebeckers. The myth claims
that soon after Morenz broke his leg ending his hockey career, the era’s
fastest, smoothest, and most exciting skater died of a broken heart a mere
ten days later. Morenz’s body lay in state at centre ice at the Forum, where
spectators packed the arena to silently pay their last respects, as more than
twenty thousand filed past the open coffin. Gowdey’s story here builds
upon this myth, telling a story of Aurel Joliat, a superstar in his own right
and Morenz’s faithful linemate—“Gehrig to Morenz’s Ruth”—who was as
crushed by the death of his dear team mate and friend as anyone, playing
only one frustrating season following Morenz’s death before retiring. Now
that Morenz was gone, it was said “he would look around him for someone
to pass to … but no one could keep up with him.”22
Beck / Canadian ‘Puck Lit’
71
Gowdey tells the tale of his year in Ottawa, where, like many, he would
commute to work by skating on the Rideau Canal. He is first introduced to
Joliat at the local barbershop while getting a trim, unaware that the “small
man with the thin legs in the corner of the room” had been one of the game’s
great stars in the 1920s with Morenz, racing “through the league together,
changing the face of the game.”23 The narrator later notices the eighty-yearold Joliat skating on the canal, pushing a puck in front of him, wearing a red
Canadiens jersey and the cap he had worn throughout his hockey career,
and one day joins him for a game of pass. It is here that Joliat speaks of
an upcoming tribute at the Forum honouring former Canadiens greats—the
Rocket, Harvey, Blake, Moore—where Joliat will be the last on the ice. The
narrator watches the “historic event” on TV at a bar, applauding as the old
stars were introduced: “the names and faces meant the same thing to all of
us—the tribal legend was being told once again.” Spurred by the crowd’s huge
ovation, Joliat rushes onto the ice and tumbles while chasing a puck, trips on
a red carpet and somersaults awkwardly, before scoring on goaltender Gump
Worsley to the laughing and cheering of the crowd. The ridiculous caricature
of the former superstar from a bygone era is almost excruciating to take and
the effect on the reader is similar to the one described by the narrator, who
seems noticeably bothered by the spectacle. However, a reassurance arrives
in the story’s eerie final passage when the narrator wakes up in the middle of
the night and witnesses a figure skating on the canal in the moonlight:
He was pushing a puck in front of him, and I saw as he drew
nearer that he was wearing a cap. It was Joliat. Tonight there
was nothing in his way, no boards, no players, no carpet.
He drove towards me, labouring a little, clouds of breath
vanishing over his shoulder. He was skating as fast as he
could. The wind rushed in, roaring in his ears like a crowd,
and he swept down the ice past me going full tilt, the way he
had always desired.24
Gowdey’s intention seems to be directed towards those who failed to
have the opportunity to witness Joliat in his prime and how our modern
conceptions of the game have shaped the way in which past players and eras
are remembered. The game has changed and left these once-great athletes
awkward relics of a distanced era, yet whispers of this former greatness
persist. The comical return of one of the game’s early greats into the public
eye years later should not overshadow the memory of how a young Joliat in
his prime overcame and outdistanced all obstacles so effortlessly on the ice
long ago.
French Canadian hockey writers tend to mythologize their hockey
figures much more than English ones. The examples of French Canadian
greats elevated to legendary status are many and well known to all hockey
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fanatics and most casual fans regardless of mother tongue—Vezina, Morenz,
Joliat, the Rocket, Beliveau, Cournoyer, Lafleur. Carrier, perhaps the most
accomplished of all French Canadian writers, has reasoned that this is
because
That’s what all the peoples of the earth do when they feel
small in the face of a world that’s too big. When the ancient
Greeks created the gods of Olympus, they needed them. Gods
are the wind that blows in the sails as they unfurl. For isn’t
truth our memory of facts? And aren’t facts the memory we
have of them? Aristotle dared to declare that legends are truer
than history.25
This is not to say that the exploits of Howe, Hull, Orr and Gretzky have not
been celebrated any less, but that the tales of Rocket Richard, for instance,
seem to burn with a fervent passion absent from most Anglo tales. And if
one needs visual evidence before conceding this point, please see the fine
2006 film, The Rocket, detailing Richard’s life and impact on his people and
Canadians in general—one of the few big-budget (by Canadian standards,
no smirking please), truly Canadian-made feature films in recent times. If
the hockey fan in you fails to be moved by the film’s final lasting image—
Richard’s eyes, flaming passion as the camera fades to black—it may be time
to find a new sport, thank you.
In this same vein, one of the best literary examples of the passionate
celebration of the legendary French Canadian hockey player comes from
Carrier’s recent biography of Rocket Richard, Our Life With the Rocket: The
Maurice Richard Story. In hockey literature, the standard format of most
hockey biographies is rarely strayed from—childhood playing the game, the
rise to the NHL through the minor ranks, glories, failures, and controversies
in the NHL, and an update on post-NHL life outside the spotlight. Carrier’s
depiction of the Rocket is still very factual, but what sets it apart from all
other formulaic biographies is its intensely personal nature. Feelings, spirit,
and passion are the commodities Carrier chooses to discuss rather than
any statistics that can be quantified. Indeed, in some senses it is almost a
biography of Carrier himself and, in others, of the entire French Canadian
people. The touching concluding sentence of the book states that “we
have been, we will be better men because the Rocket crossed through our
childhood.”26
The Rocket was a rallying force, a seemingly unbreakable spirit that
touched all in Quebec. The fact that Carrier rarely touches on the Rocket’s
life after his retirement speaks volumes, focusing almost exclusively on the
period when the Rocket was at the height of his powers on ice. He is well
aware that the memory many people will construct of the Rocket—especially
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those who never had the privilege to see him play, to experience his power
and fiery passion—will be derived from this book. Carrier writes:
I also think about a poem that tells of a bird with a
tremendous wingspan. When it flew in the sky with its wings
spread wide, the albatross was majestically beautiful. Back on
the ground, because of its cumbersome wings the albatross
looked miserable. Majestic in the sky; awkward on the earth.
Thus did a poet describe a poet.
With his great wings spread on the ice, Maurice Richard was
beautiful. Can anyone imagine him on the earth with people
who sell insurance, beer, heating oil, hair care products, with
people who work in offices?
… In our memories the Rocket will never stop skating, never
stop scoring goals. We will hear, “Maurice Rocket Richard
shoots—he scores!” till the end of our lives.27
It certainly could be argued that if all Canadian writers took up the
mythologization of past players and events the way French Canadians writers
have, the state of hockey fiction, the mythology surrounding the game, and
perhaps even the larger Canadian culture would all be strengthened. Obscure
stories would become legendary. Legend would blend with fact. The ties
binding together the national fabric would be tightened, lending Canadians
a greater sense of collective identity. As francophone writers have shown, the
raw historical materials exist, but we have for the most part allowed them to
remain lifeless gathering dust through neglect.
In some cases, Canadian writers could follow the examples of many
fine pieces of American sports literature. Laura Hillendbrand’s Seabiscuit: An
American Legend accomplishes that rare combination in literature of
being historically accurate to the most minute of details, while also being
incredibly readable, much like a novel. It is history, but it reads like fiction.
Based around a story about an underdog racehorse and its handlers, she
uncovers the America of the 1930s drawing the story into a wider cultural
circle, which, not surprisingly, many people identified with favourably,
based on the book’s popularity and positive reviews among literary critics.28
Indeed, the book seems to have started a recent trend of historical accounts
of significant athletes and their stories, prominent in their day, but largely
forgotten today. Much like Seabiscuit, Neal Bascomb’s The Perfect Mile and
Michael C. DeLisa’s Cinderella Man present historically accurate narratives of
great athletes and events that read remarkably like the historical fiction of
Michener or Gore Vidal. Both have hatched movies based on the books, the
former currently in production, the latter released in theatres in the summer
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of 2005. This is relevant for hockey and Canadians due to the abundance of
events and characters hockey has produced in its history and how many of
these could be incorporated into a work of fiction to depict a time and place
in Canadian history that may strike a popular nerve. The best examples
from this neglected corner include Carrier’s Our Life With The Rocket and
Roy MacSkimming’s book on the famed 1972 Canada-Russia Summit Series,
Cold War. On a subject that has attracted more writers and books than any
other in hockey, Cold War comes the closest to faithfully recreating the onice events of that rollercoaster September, while also delving into the off-ice
intrigue and controversies that speak volumes about the respective Western,
Canadian, and Russian societies of the time. More books on the abundance
of legendary events and characters of the game on par with Hillenbrand’s are
a lofty, yet still attainable target.
There have been a few notable attempts, though. One of the common
themes running through more than a few works within the shelf of hockey
fiction deals with those originators and innovators, those early superstars
approaching mythic proportions. It is a theme at the foundation of Reddick’s
Dawson City Seven, as well as in Gowdey’s “The Return of Aurel Joliat.” Each
exhibits a subtle respect for those mythic originals that blazed the trail
for those who followed in their footsteps, while attempting to build upon
the legendary status of the game’s seminal events and characters. Michael
McKinley’s short story “Next Year” is one such piece that lends an air of
nobility to perhaps the greatest of all stars from the game’s formative years at
the turn of the century, Frederick “Cyclone” Taylor. Although this is a short
piece, McKinley successfully creates four vivid characters—the narrator,
Ignatius, a shy young lad embarrassed of his preference of the Canadiens
as his team of choice but trying to stand up for himself; Dermot, the knowit-all bully, who is unwilling to accept any views not in line with his own;
Madeleine, Ignatius’ secret crush recently relocated from Montreal; and The
Elderly Gentleman, later revealed as Taylor, who quietly infuses the story
with a dignified, noble air and the worldly wisdom of age and experience.
Taylor enters the story in the midst of the uniquely Canadian pre-1967
expansion question of allegiance and identity—Ignatius secretly supports
the Canadiens, but as Dermot argues “Ignatius is supposed to be Canadian.
The Leafs are Canada’s team. He’s supposed to like them.” McKinley skilfully
uses the Taylor character to bridge the generation gap between the pre-NHL
period and the NHL expansion era, offering up bits of mystical wisdom for
the younger characters and the reader, also presumably of a later generation.
When Dermot claims “Vancouver has no tradition,” Taylor brings out a
medallion from the 1915 Vancouver Millionaires’ Stanley Cup win “when we
beat the Ottawa Senators, who claimed the sea air here fatigued their legs. The
one thing that seems constant in hockey is an excuse for losing.” When talk
shifts to the addition of a new Vancouver franchise to the NHL next season,
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Taylor admits, “It’s been a long time between Stanley Cups, I must say. We
Millionaires thought we’d win another one in 1916, but ‘next year’, as you
will discover, can be a long time in coming.”29 It is a characterization such as
this that aids in the creation and proliferation of the popular memory and
mythologization of one of the game’s true mythic originals. Granted, it is a
characterization from the twilight of his life, but an effective one that harkens
back to those seminal days in the game’s history nonetheless. McKinley’s
underlying theme seems to be one of individual loyalty—not loyalty to the
right or wrong team based on distinctions of race, class, or language, but
proud loyalty to a cause, or in this case a team, even in the face of opposition
and rapidly changing times. Hiding the Canadiens symbol on his toque at the
beginning of the story, after Taylor’s dignified exit, Ignatius defiantly wears
his toque proudly displaying to the world where loyalty to his chosen “tribe”
lies—les Canadiens. As McKinley eloquently notes in the final sentence of the
story, “it was a loyalty whose fabled torch had just been passed, backward to
that year, and forward, forever, to the next.”30 Intertwined with this concept
of loyalty is the game’s unstoppable passage of time; suddenly it is next year
and the passing of time marches on unabated, yet the connection of then to
now remains for hockey faithful. Rules change, players and teams come and
go, new champions are crowned, but the game is still played on ice with stick
and puck, and the thrill of the scored goal remains universal. In a relatively
short story, McKinley has done well to unearth a few more elements of the
surprisingly complex culture of hockey effectively captured and passed on to
future generations within the genre of hockey fiction.
While some works celebrate and honour the game’s mythic originators,
others such as Paul Quarrington’s King Leary forgo any attempt at
mythologizing and instead almost cruelly mock those formerly famous
superstars coming to terms with their fading connection to a modern game
transformed nearly beyond recognition. Quarrington’s work is at times
uproariously funny, wacky, and always tinged with a dark irony, fitting
for the dark ending that befalls Percival ‘King’ Leary, a fictional former
superstar of the NHL’s early years. Quarrington’s quirky sense of humour
prevails throughout. King Leary, a lifetime teetotaller, prefers Canada Dry
ginger ale as his drink of choice because, as he says repeatedly, “It gets me
pissed!” Overly proud of an invitation to appear in a ginger ale commercial
as evidence that his celebrity has not faded, a crushed Leary learns on the
day of filming that the commercial is actually for Acadian Dry, which Leary
has only drank once in his life nearly killing him. The satirization of fading
celebrity is returned to frequently. Credited with creating an on-ice move
named the “St. Louis Whirlygig,” Leary discovers that his move has since been
renamed the “Nureyev” after a Russian ballet dancer and when debating the
intricacies of this move to the fictional Duane Killebrew, the most recent
hockey sensation, Killebrew says rather offhandedly that the details of the
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Whirlygig are irrelevant because, after all, he has seven ‘airborne manoeuvres.’
One of Leary’s proudest accolades is the First Nations name bestowed upon
him in his playing days for his amazing skating ability—‘Loof-weeda,’
which means song of the wind. The reader discovers that this name—sadly,
Leary never does figure it out—actually refers to great flatulence rather than
great skating. Indeed, when Leary reminisces about how the name was first
given to him by a Native chief, he recalled smelling something resembling
“potatoes, death, and cow dung” and that “that was the closest I been to
death, certainly up to that point in history.”31
Coupled with the hilarity of Quarrington’s writing, the strength of
King Leary lies in the manner in which Quarrington skillfully exposes the
absurd, fading nature of celebrity within hockey by viciously poking fun at
it. He seems to be implying that the only thing faster than the on-ice action
is the changing character of the collective memory of those in the game.
One day you are the king of the ice, the next there is a new one replacing
you, forgotten to the point that you are nothing more than a legend in
your own mind. Leary comes to this painful realization rather belatedly,
acknowledging Killebrew as the new ‘King,’ but in yet another cruel twist,
it is of little consequence to Killebrew, the new saviour of the ice. King Leary
seems to be a nasty commentary of the effect the ruthless celebrity-producing
machine of modern hockey has on those actually caught up within it—false
sense of importance, disillusionment, and occasionally total destruction.
Hence, the story’s conclusion is marred by the disturbing demise of Leary at
his own shrine in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame—the price of celebrity
taken to its ultimate extreme. The cost of memories, it seems—especially
false ones—can be high.
The use of humour—particularly uniquely Canadian humour—is
another common theme employed in many works of hockey fiction. It
seems most works devoted to the game have some degree of ridiculousness
to them and often border on the downright strange and bizarre. Perhaps
the ridiculous nature of the game itself—200-pound plus behemoths skating
on razor-sharp blades carrying pieces of lumber that can be used either to
fire frozen pieces of vulcanized rubber 100+mph at bare-faced goaltenders
or to hack an opponent sometimes at will, which if not sufficient can be
bypassed for a good old-fashioned bare-knuckled brawl that is not exactly
discouraged within the rules of the game—is what breeds such writing in the
description of it. Indeed, the 1970s hockey classic “Slapshot” can be credited
with capturing and popularizing this outrageous illustration of the crazy
world of hockey and has undoubtedly heavily influenced more than a few
writers of fictional pieces of the game.
Fred Stenson’s Teeth is one such bizarre look into the underworld of
hockey, rarely shying away from the weird and wacky. It often appears that
simply presenting the game as merely a series of strange and unfortunate
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events for the various characters trapped within this bizarre world of ice,
pain, and money is Stenson’s intent. The story begins with the main character,
Dougie Burns, an under-achieving formerly highly regarded draft pick slowly
playing his way out of the league. Ironically, Burns is a man who prides
himself on his vanity—more specifically his perfect teeth—but is employed
in a game that often requires the sacrifice of such attractive facial features
for a man to be successful. While in the midst of a wild bench-clearing brawl
in a game in Montreal, Burns is again daydreaming about some far-off place
in his past, when suddenly grabbed by an overzealous, expletive screaming,
pimply-faced rookie from the opposition, who proceeds to drive the top
of his helmet into Burns’ mouth knocking out Burnsy’s precious two front
chicklets. Initially, Burns is disconsolate beyond reason. “Money, unlike
teeth, can be replenished,” he says overdramatically. “A missing tooth is a
hole in your head for life.”32 The story proceeds from here as Burns attempts
to find meaning in the loss of his teeth and peace with playing a game he
barely cares for anymore.
Wayne Johnston’s The Divine Ryans is another work bordering on the
strange. At the heart of the story is young Draper Doyle Ryan, whose unusual
and devoutly Catholic family predictably runs … wait for it … a failing
newspaper, a funeral home, a convent, and an orphanage. The story plays on
the themes of religion, spirituality, and sexuality as Johnston incorporates
some wacky, laugh-out-loud situations with some of the strongest passages
of writing in the realm of hockey fiction. For instance, a confused Draper
consults his eccentric Uncle Reginald for some weekly advice—the sagely
Reginald charges his young nephew for this worldly advice we might add—
and Uncle Reg offers up some gems of wisdom, the most memorable that
the young boy’s wrinkled scrotum is actually a powerful oracle named
Methuselah, serves as the centre of the world, and is able to predict the
future. The invocation to Methuselah, this most powerful of all oracles, was
to be spoken while looking at him, that is, while looking
at his reflection in a mirror held between your legs. “Oh,
Methuselah … oh Great Hairless One, Great Wrinkled One,
oh Oracle of Oracles, oh Prune of Prunes, oh Wisest of the
Wise, I command you, tell me all.”33
The Methuselah would answer Draper’s inquiries about who would win the
Stanley Cup in a deep god-like voice and tended to confuse the boy even
further leading him into strange situations, of which there is no shortage in
this delightful novel. And while Johnston employs such humour frequently,
he is also capable of following it up with mystical passages about the game
that can be quite sobering:
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I lay down on the ice on my back, spreading out my arms and
legs. Looking up at that clear cold February sky, I remembered
something my father had once told me, a variation on that
old idea that what we call stars are really holes in the sky with
the light of heaven shining through them. A star, my father
said, was a hole made when a puck had been punched out of
the night sky. All pucks came from the sky, he said. And the
end of the world would come when there was no sky left.34
Other pieces employ a more subtle humour that is no less effective. Edo
van Belkom’s amusing short story, “Hockey’s Night In Canada,” turns the
tables on one of the game’s most storied events—the 1972 Summit Series—
poking fun at the heightened importance Canadians place on this nearly
sacred climactic event in the game’s history and development in Canada,
as well as the importance of the game itself to our national pride. Van
Belkom has turned the hockey world as we know it upside down because
Paul Henderson hit the post in the dying seconds of Game 8 in 1972 and the
Russians went back up ice and scored the winner to take the series. The results
are enough to make any red and white-blooded Canadian with a Maple
Leaf tattooed over his or her heart run for the hills screaming hysterically.
A minimum on the number of Canadians each NHL team must dress on
its roster? The Canucks winning the Stanley Cup the previous season by
dressing an exclusively Russian line-up? Gretzky and Lemieux playing out
their careers for the Minsk Maple Leafs of the Russian Hockey League, the
top minor league below the NHL? And the most sacrilegious of all—Viktor
Tikhonov instead of Don Cherry on Coach’s Corner!?!35 Sacre bleu! After
reading van Belkom’s sharp piece, Canadians should thank their lucky stars
that Henderson beat Vladislav Tretiak and everything has been right with the
hockey universe ever since. Amen.
Undoubtedly, the best piece of hockey humour from recent years and
arguably one of the best ever has to be Pete McCormack’s delightful novel,
Understanding Ken. Those well versed in the intricacies of the game and
even those that are less familiar with it will frequently cackle with glee and
identify with this easy-to-read story written in the unmistakable voice of
an innocent ten-year-old boy obsessed with all things hockey. Growing
up in the 1970s interior of British Columbia, the name of this young boy
is never revealed to the reader, lending the book a sense of universality of
experience and nostalgia. The young boy is forced to grapple with a number
of confusing issues—most notably the separation and possible reconciliation
of his parents and the inexplicable retirement of Canadiens goaltender Ken
Dryden to pursue a law career after three successful NHL seasons—that pull
him in a number of different directions and often lead him to retreat into
a fantasy world revolving around hockey, the Canadiens, and the Stanley
Cup.
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Sometimes this fantasy world can be amazingly industrious, such as his
frequent attempts to construct a backyard rink, but are usually thwarted by
some uncontrollable force with a cruel sense of humour, in this case the
weather refusing to grow cold enough to freeze his backyard ice regardless
of the great lengths he goes to. Usually any activities the boy undertakes are
influenced by Dryden’s unexplainable and inexcusable action—leaving the
remaining Canadiens to suffer for his selfish pursuit of a real job. He chooses
Canadiens high-flying winger Yvan Cournoyer as the subject of his school
report on someone famous from history who overcame hardship entitled
“YVAN: HOW HE KEPT TRYING EVEN THOUGH DRYDEN DID WHAT
HE DID.”36 The boy’s teacher was also not impressed with a poem he wrote
soon after to make amends for his poor grade:
Ken Dryden played for Montreal
They call Montreal the Habs
Ken Dryden quit Montreal
Now the Stanley Cup is up for grabs
Some of you might find this funny
But you can’t win with a goalie named Bunny.37
Some of the best laughs come from wacky thoughts conjured up by this
troubled boy when daydreaming. After battling Phil Esposito in an imaginary
game at the Forum—in which he provides play-by-play in the voice of Danny
Gallivan—the kid recounts the exchange with the Bruins great after besting
Espo:
Espo can’t believe it. “Gee, kid,” he says. “That’s the best
face-off I’ve ever seen.”
I say, “Thanks, Mr. Esposito, and you were pretty darn
good against the Russians.”
Esposito says, “Hey, call me Phil.”
And then when Phil turns around I trip him just like Bobby
Clarke would.38
The young boy is well meaning and largely innocent; it is simply his turbulent
environment and external social pressures that have left him misdirected and
more than a little warped. It is incredibly funny, but also very instructive.
Amidst the wacky characters and their bizarre quirks, hilarious situations,
and running gags, there is also a subtle commentary on the depth of the
influence that parental separation, obsessive hockey parents, and the
unreasonable societal pressures to succeed in minor hockey permeate into
the minds and actions of children.
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As debilitated and veiled as the state of hockey fiction may find itself in
at present, it is a markedly improved situation from even just twenty years
ago. In 1982, Brian Fawcett wrote in his short story, “My Career With the
Leafs,” “if more poets were to play hockey instead of pretending flowers or
vacant lots are really interesting, things might get better.”39 Quite simply,
things have. The genre is expanding and the quality of writing is improving
also. Perhaps the most dramatic example is in the recent arrival of hockey
poetry accepted by a more mainstream hockey audience. Poets such as
John B. Lee, Al Purdy, Stephen Scriver, and Birk Sproxton brought us the
first books of poetry dedicated entirely to the game and others followed
including Richard Harrison’s Hero of the Play, which recently was republished
in a 10th Anniversary edition, indicating the growing popularity of this area
of hockey fiction. A new generation of hockey fanatics has experienced the
game in new and different ways thanks to the images and ideas conjured up
in these poems.
Some readers may initially think the secret to writing the great Canadian
hockey novel can be found in Sproxton’s “Rules for a Hockey Story”:
1 For your starting line choose strong verbs up front with
concrete nouns rock-solid on defence.
2 Use proper nouns—quick, quick, slide from one to another—
throw the quick pass. Hockey is measured by the speed of the
proper nouns, running and running. Pro nouns.
3 All common nouns and adjectives are to be preceded by
obscenities which end in “ing.”
4 Remember, nonetheless, that hockey is a sweet game and
goalies are tender folk.
5 A hockey story is an anatomy. Catalogues, rosters, lineups,
histories, biographies, statistics (home and away) are
necessary. Include height and weight and scoring records
and notes on position, disposition, indisposition. Tell of the
time around scars, sprinkle liberally with clichés. There is no
tomorrow, the tale has to move quickly. You have to give it all
you got to take what you can get.40
Perhaps the reason for the state of hockey fiction is because Canadian writers
have failed to follow Sproxton’s advice. Perhaps not. Regardless, Sproxton’s
unique poetic style adds much colour to the collection of hockey poetry.
Puck poets have been remarkably productive to cover even the most
obscure aspects of the game. Forgettable fringe players will forever be looked
upon differently after reading Harrison’s ode to Jergus Baca, immortalized as
the Czech who idolized Bobby Orr and will “take the game in his superstar
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hands the way Bobby played the opposition and his own men like two sides
of table hockey in his time” at least within the stanza, if not in his brief ‘cup
of coffee’ with the Hartford Whalers.41 Harrison also does well to capture
the universality of the game in “African Hockey Poem #1” where even in
remote outposts of the game—“where leaves rot as they grow and the air is
sweet as apples with their dying”—two men of vastly different societies and
traditions can find common ground within the culture of hockey:
… I say What position? He says Left Wing. I say Like
Bobby Hull. And Bobby’s name makes it: he draws
his hand up, and it smiles at the end of his arm:
this is The Shake, the one that begins with the slap
of palm against palm, the one between men
who’ve found enough between them to confirm
the world for a day and go on …42
Other poems serve as signpost and barometer marking important events
in the game’s history and measuring their impact on the hockey world and
beyond. Particularly powerful is Lee’s “The Trade that shook the Hockey
World”:
When Gretzky went to L.A.
my whole nation trembled
like hot water in a tea cup when a train goes by.
Something about Hollywood and hockey.
Something about Canadians in Babylon.
Something about gold and the gilded blades of grace.
Something about kings and the great republic.
Something about titans and the golden gods.
Something about the myth of boys and the truth of men.
Something about beer in the holy grail.
Something about the commodity of the human heart.
Something about the fast life …
fast food, fast cars, fast women, and a fastness.
But mostly something about moving too fast in time.43
In “Tear Gas,” Mark Cochrane recalls the Vancouver Canucks’ magical 1994
playoff run, which caused many on the West Coast to become infected by
playoff fever well into June—unfamiliar territory for followers of the Cupless Canuck franchise more accustomed to planning vacations at this time
of year than watching playoff hockey. Cochrane describes watching Game
Seven from a cabin “on a fourteen-inch screen beside Rathtrevor Bay, a
hundred km from the Coliseum” while his concentration on the game is
broken by his young son, before “deking” him and leaving the child to seek
out the attention of his mother outside on the porch—“benched” as he puts
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it. The heartbreaking conclusion to that final game and the subsequent riot
are vividly illustrated later:
This is Canada’s game. Red-eyed, broken, sobbing
in MSG, shuddering up a manly breath
for post-game reporters. The Canucks tearful on tv,
my kids wailing, what a waste of pathos, what a shame
the father I become, looking for myself
in this spectacle:
WE ARE REFLECTED IN ALL WE SEE
spray-painted on the boarded shops, the broken teeth
of windows in downtown Vancouver
after the riots & the news, the corner of Robson & Thurlow
like a James Cameron film, hazy & gunmetal blue,
where troopers with masks & plastic shields also watch
as angry fans kick the canisters back.44
Historic players and events are often celebrated in poetic form, but more
common are commemorating those quirks and characteristics of the game
known most intimately by those who have played the game in some way,
shape, or form. In “What the Coach Said,” Sproxton recalls classic pre-game
dressing room instructions from the hard-headed win-at-all-costs coach
every hockey player seems to have played for:
… I want forechecking—that means two guys in, I tole you
before, first man on the man, second guy on the puck, third
man high, stop waven you goofball and lissen up. There’s
gold in them checks. Muck in the corners and weel clean
up on these muckie mucks and the fat cat owners. Forwards
come back, dee keep yr arses outa the goalie’s face. Make
sure you cover the slot, doan want no sunburnt goalies this
team. Warm up now and remember Arnason hit the net, ain’t
hunting ducks, give Redlite a chance to grabba few.45
This is the mysterious dialect of the locker room, mastered by many, loathed
by some, and memorable to all who have ever tightened skate laces within
the confines of the locker room, safely hidden from parents, wives, and
reporters. The bland, sports cliché serves as the antithesis and protector of
this odd, pulsating language shrouded in secrecy from those outside the
fraternity.
While it is unlikely that any of these puck poems will ever equal the
stature of Ernest Thayer’s famed poem “Casey at the Bat,” Lee’s “The Hockey
Player Sonnets” has at least immortalized in print this unique language so
often heard echoing in arena locker rooms across the country:
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“What about them Leafs, eh!
(expletive deleted) couldn’t score an (e.d.) goal
if they propped the (e.d.’s) up
in front of the (e.d.) net
and put the (e.d.) puck on their (e.d.) stick
and the (e.d.) goalie fell asleep
and somebody (e.d.) yelled, ‘SHOOT THE (e.d.) THING!’
(E-E-E-E-E. D-eeeeeee.!!!!!!!!!)”46
Sproxton and Lee effectively channel the voices of the Canadian hockey
everyman, be it spectator or coach, professional athlete or ‘weekend warrior,’
providing the reader with a brief glimpse into the fascinating and at times
disturbing hockey underworld where the culture of extreme masculinity,
the win-at-all-costs obsession, and the almighty dollar all meet and
intermingle.
While the voices in most hockey fiction are male, matching the
increasing participation of women in the sport in recent years has been an
increase in those pieces devoted specifically for women on the ice. It is still
a developing area of the genre, but new pieces written by female writers
focusing on female characters and experiences in the game are beginning to
pop up more frequently in the ever-growing collection of hockey anthologies
each providing different combinations of important and obscure pieces—all
claiming to capture the essence of the game’s literature in under 240 pages.
Two such anthologized short stories capture very different experiences of
women in hockey, but both displays how the female experience has been
minimalized by male dominance of the game.
Delores Reimer’s aptly entitled short story, “The Shut Out,” describes
young Fiona’s struggles to participate in neighbourhood games of shinny
with the boys her age, but all those around her usually thwart her ventures
into this exclusively male realm. Her male peers see her as little more than
a hockey “groupie” important for little else than retrieving the puck during
the boys’ games. Her father, although never discouraging her from following
the game, still possesses a harmful attitude: “It’s impossible for girls to play,
so don’t worry about it. Leave the girl alone. There’s no harm done.”47 And
most destructively by her mother, who sees her participation as alarmingly
immoral and unfeminine. The powerful conclusion of the story features
Fiona’s mother making a scene while trying to get her daughter to leave a
boy’s game of shinny. The pressures around her force her to flee, but in this
flight she finds an unexpected freedom in rebelling against these restricting
social forces beyond her control. The concluding passage speaks volumes
of the discrimination faced by women who have dared to venture into the
overwhelmingly male realm of hockey:
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… Fiona … ran as fast as she could. With her hood down,
all she could hear was the roar of the wind in her ears. This
is what hockey players hear. She thought of the roar of the
crowd on Hockey Night in Canada. This is what they hear
skating down the ice. She clutched the puck harder in her
hand … When she reached the edge, Fiona twirled like a
discuss[sic] thrower—once, twice, three times around.
“A spin-a-rama. SHE SHOOTS; SHE SCORES!” Fiona yelled
as she let go of the puck; watched it arc into the dark winter
night.48
Marsha Mildon’s short story, “Number 33,” could almost be considered
the sequel to Reimer’s tale, but later on in life when forces were not so
fervently against female participation in hockey. The main character, Cal,
describes her experiences with the game—one of the few things in her life
that gave her true pleasure—throughout her life from childhood to middle
age, but these experiences are all invariably as a spectator. Then at the age
of 49, she finally takes up playing the game on a women’s recreational
team after not skating for 37 years and never having held a hockey stick. It
is a glorious feeling for her and she equates it with finally possessing full
Canadian citizenship, imbued
with a remarkable, new feeling of completeness. No longer
am I merely a fan, cheering from the sidelines for the great
Canadian game and the great Canadian players. I am one of
“us”: a hockey player, and therefore (I can’t help feeling) a
Canadian, fully-fledged at last.49
Judith Alguire’s entertaining novel, Iced, illustrates the next logical
extension of the participation of women in the sport—professional women’s
hockey. Indeed, a passage from the book’s prologue reads almost like an
emancipatory speech for hockey playing females worldwide:
We play for love, for the pleasure of each other’s company, for
the good feelings in our bodies. We play because somewhere
on an icy patch in a farmer’s field or on an outdoor rink we
learned how good it felt to move like the wind, to stop on
a dime with a spray of clean white powder off shiny silver
blades or release a shot that lifted the puck off the ice like
magic and made the net bulge.
There have always been girls who dreamed of playing
professional hockey. Eventually, they’ve had to drop their
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dreams at the door along with their shoulder pads and black
hockey skates.
But not anymore. All that’s changed. I’m Alison Gutherie and
I’m a professional hockey player.50
The book is doubly unique within the genre as a work written by a female
author specifically on female hockey players, as well as focussing on the
lesbian relationships these women pursue within a hockey world that is
notorious for its rampant heterosexuality and at times blunt homophobia.
The writing and plot are straightforward, as to be expected with any romance
novel, but Alguire’s book still is a valuable addition to the shelf of hockey
fiction regardless, simply for venturing into previously exclusively male
domains so that others may follow.
Another subsection of the genre that has been marked with growth in
recent years are those pieces written by First Nations authors or dealing with
First Nations subjects concerning the game. Often the game is represented in
First Nations works, not unlike the aforementioned female pieces, as a rare
place of true freedom and peace—a common ground—in a world that often
seems eager to eliminate, ignore, and discriminate against these peoples.
And much like work by or about French Canadians, at other times it often
represents a site of resistance against these forces working against First
Nations. Both themes are readily apparent in the scattering of First Nations
works devoted to the game. In Wes Fineday’s short story, “The Hockey Game,”
the main character—a young First Nations boy—is left behind at home for
the day, locked out of the house by his foster parents who wanted to go out
on a ‘family outing.’ The boy spends the day in the back yard passing time
idly and growing hungrier. His only respite is memories of hockey games
from back home on the reservation. The boy’s saving grace turns out to be
the neighbours, who are barbequing and invite him over to eat dinner with
them. It is revealed at the story’s conclusion that the man who extended
the invitation is a player on the Moose Jaw Canucks and gives the boy two
tickets to his next game against the Regina Pats. Put simply, acknowledging
his gratitude at the hockey player’s kind gesture, but also hinting at further
unfair disciplining and forced restraint from his foster parents, he says, “I
didn’t go to the game but I hope they won.”51
One of the most notable First Nations pieces is the mystical and
uplifting semi-biographical novel, Keeper’n Me, by Richard Wagamese. The
story centers on the rehabilitation of the main character, Garnet Raven, an
Ojibway who was taken from his reservation and got lost in the government
foster system, losing his own identity in the process and getting in trouble
with the law. But an unexpected reconnection and return to his family on the
White Dog reservation in northern Ontario turns his life around and allows
him to rediscover his roots. Hockey is an important part of his personal
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spiritual transformation in White Dog, where he acknowledges, “Around
here hockey’s the next biggest thing to bingo.”52 One of the early struggles to
his acceptance in the community after such a long absence comes from his
older brother who is unconvinced that Garnet is in White Dog to stay. Yet,
when nothing else appeared likely to work, it is hockey, during a competitive
game of shinny, that melts the ice between the brothers in one of the more
touching passages of the book:
Finally, just as I was making my famous loop-de-loop at the
blueline, he reached out and bear-hugged me to the ice. The
force made us slide into the corner with our arms wrapped
around each other, sticks sprawled at the blueline and the
puck forgotten. We were laughing real hard and almost
choking from the lack of breathing … Pretty soon we started
to notice that we were still bear-hugging each other and there
got to be a kinda embarrassed feeling but we never let go.53
With the increased participation of larger numbers of women and First Nations
in the game that holds such meaning for these groups, but marginalized
them for so long, it can only be hoped that more contributions to the shelf of
hockey fiction describing their respective experiences within the game will
grow in similar fashion.
One subsection that has always remained relatively healthy are those
novels written expressly for youth. Although well known for his writing
geared more towards adults, Roy MacGregor has written a series of hockey
novels for youth known as “The Screech Owls Series,” which follows the
adventures of this team in exotic locales and faces challenges while playing
the game they love. The series could almost be equated to the Hardy Boys on
ice. Respected hockey writer, Scott Young, another writer known more for
his adult works on the game, has written three of the better works directed at
youth—Scrubs on Skates, Boy on Defence, and A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp—each
loosely connected with overlapping characters and events. While the writing
is understandably simpler than adult pieces, juvenile pieces about the game
tend to promote idealized morals and values regarding participation in
hockey—healthy competition, sportsmanship, teamwork, friendship, and
racial tolerance, among others. While these pieces—particularly Young’s—
tend to support the ageless, yet outmoded sports participation cliché of ‘it’s
not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game,’ this ideal seems to
be trumpeted as useful only as long as the characters are successful in their
endeavours. At times the message almost appears to be ‘play the game just
for fun if you must, but you’d be better off winning and being successful.’
The efforts of juvenile authors could be argued to be slightly misdirected,
regardless though, works such as this do serve a useful purpose for getting
youth interested in reading on a subject most kids actually like in an era
Beck / Canadian ‘Puck Lit’
87
when television, movies, Playstation, and the Internet are grabbing more
and more of children’s attentions and books and reading are increasingly
seen as boring.
This paper has dealt with the many subsections of fictional pucklit and
yet, even after over twenty years, one novel stands out among all others
within the genre. Roy MacGregor’s The Last Season is generally regarded as
the classic Canadian hockey novel, although some have pointed out that
this is due to the lack of competition. Regardless, the story centres around
Felix Batterinski, a fictional former player who found fame with the ‘Broad
Street Bullies’ of the 1970s, but who now finds himself in the twilight of his
career, clinging to his fading celebrity and reconciling himself to his dark
upbringing. His attempt at prolonging his career playing in Finland ends in
a downward spiral of depression and confusion before a peculiar demise.54
Curiously, McGregor’s book exhibits all of the main conclusions highlighted
by Wiley Lee Umphlett in The Sporting Myth and the American Experience
that are common in popular American sporting fiction, presenting “young
athletes who are: 1) anti-urban in their basic mindsets and always longing
for a return to a simpler life closer to nature; 2) anti-feminine and incapable
of coping with women; and 3) victims of a prolonged juvenilism, clinging to
memories of youthful glory and rarely attaining enough maturity to grapple
with adult problems.”55 Perhaps the critical and popular success of The Last
Season is because it tends to conform to such American literary constructions.
It certainly would not be the first cultural trait from south of the border—or
elsewhere for that matter—absorbed successfully into Canadian culture.
Paul Rutherford noted that the lack of an indigenous tradition of popular
literature in early nineteenth century Canada led to “a parasitical dependence
upon the dreams, the romances, the adventures, the tragedies, the plays, the
epics, all the stuff of fancy and fantasy manufactured by outsiders.”56 It may
be due to the unique manner in which MacGregor plays upon the well-worn
hockey myth of “making it” and the positive outcomes that accrue from this,
while also contrasting less celebrated “parallel myths that embrace the everpresent possibility of failure, even tragedy.”57
Yet, as critically acclaimed as The Last Season is, it pales in comparison
in terms of popularity when compared to Shoeless Joe or The Natural. The
fact that both of these latter works of fiction were later made into major
motion pictures, while The Last Season has not, should not be viewed as
mere coincidence. It is not uncommon for the best of American fiction to
be transferred onto the big screen and it certainly could be argued that this
has lent these pieces of literature a sizable spike in popularity among a wider
audience than each previously would have garnered solely in print form.
This doesn’t make MacGregor’s work poorer by any means, but merely
illustrates but one arm of the American myth-making apparatus: the
manufacturing of culture within the powerful American culture industry.
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Who determines what is great and what is not is closely tied to the interests
of the mass media and commerce of the dominant economy in the Western
world. The fact that Kevin Costner and Robert Redford played the literary
characters created by Kinsella and Bernard Malamud respectively on the
silver screen lends these characters, the stories they appear in, and the sports
they represent the appearance of greatness—whether it exists in reality or
not is irrelevant to the overriding pursuit of the almighty dollar. To simply
be glorified on the silver screen is an affirmation of what is great, brilliant
and genius, even if this honour is often false and undeniably superficial;
culture is just one more commodity that can be produced, promoted,
distributed, and sold. It is simply an additional brick in the construction of
the mythologization of whatever sport Americans deem as uniquely theirs.
American sports such as baseball and by extension the literature
devoted to them feed off one another, elevating each by the proliferation of
constructed mythologies. Essentially, these constructed myths become part
of the game, while at the same time the game becomes the stuff of myth.
The mythology surrounding hockey should not be viewed as weaker than
those of baseball or football, but it often is mistaken as such because it is
more subtle. It is not unlike hockey fiction in this sense: it is out there, as I
have attempted to show, it is breathing—often in disconnected and isolated
places—but it does exist if one carefully looks to discover it, to put the
disjointed pieces together. Because the mythologies of baseball and football
are more in-your-face obvious, thanks to their rampant proliferation as pieces
of manufactured culture, these mythologies are often mistaken as stronger/
greater simply since they are clearly present, while hockey’s is not so readily
apparent. The true difference lies not in which is stronger or weaker, but
which mythology is publicly promoted and distributed more effectively.
Outside Canada, hockey on screen and in print has generally been
presented more as curiosity, novelty, or setting when it does appear, rather than
something truly significant or culturally meaningful—and it is meaningful,
but mainly to Canadians. Perhaps the root of the problem lies in what David
Adams Richards distinguishes as “greatness or just Canadian greatness.”58
Even those rare elements of our culture that truly are extraordinary are
viewed as inferior compared to foreign cultural elements from North
America, Europe, and elsewhere. It is a dilemma we as Canadians have been
struggling with for some time and will have to overcome ourselves, however
tempting it may be to run to outsiders for the answers. Like so much of
Canadian culture, the fact that hockey fiction, exemplified best by The Last
Season, is Canadian—not American—relegates pucklit to second rate status,
perhaps in our minds as much as the rest of the world’s.
Because of our historical connection to the British and our geographical
location beside the United States—two of the most dominant cultures in
history—unique pieces of Canadian culture have mostly disappeared, if
Beck / Canadian ‘Puck Lit’
89
they ever existed at all or have often been pushed to the outer fringes of our
cultural awareness. In addition, the development of national myths, which
should inevitably comprise hockey to a large degree, has been undermined
by our own efforts in literature, so often falling back on satire or humour at
the last moment. Perhaps it is not unlike the common attitude of Canadians
towards Americans in most unequal cultural exchanges between our two
countries, in that we have seen the “mythomania and self-inflation” so
prevalent to the south of us and have been repelled by it, using satire as our
answer to myth.59 It is as Rick Salutin has written, “It comes from assuming
your experience is the inherent stuff of myth. If we’d had our own Moby Dick,
we’d probably have our own Rink of Dreams by now as well.”60
Yet hockey is not alone in the lack of Canadian fiction devoted to
mythologizing it, as other sports and Canadian athletes, have also been
unduly ignored; hockey is merely the most obvious example. The most
glaring omission to this writer’s mind is Percy Williams, arguably Canada’s
greatest Olympic athlete, who had a career balancing equal parts triumph
and misfortune, not unlike Howie Morenz’s in some ways, but, outside of
inclusion in generic summations of Canadian sport,61 his deeds have gone
largely unrecognized, unmythologized. Indeed, I am always appalled at how
often picture-taking tourists choose to use the statue honouring Williams,
crouched in the starting blocks outside BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, as
a timely opportunity for a crude pornographic joke captured on film for
future laughs. When questioned about whom it was these pranksters had
just ‘mounted,’ the common response was a blank stare or an unconcerned
shrug of the shoulders. One would find it hard to fathom a similar situation
occurring with statues of Babe Ruth, Jesse Owens, or Muhammad Ali, three
of the more mythologized figures in American sport. (But it is not unheard
of—Ozzy Osbourne did get arrested for relieving himself on the Alamo
after all!) It is no coincidence that these athletes have been incorporated
into the common American mythology of sport and to disparage their
athletic exploits represented now in bronze would be akin to sacrilege,
while Williams has suffered perhaps an even greater insult at the hands of
Canadians—indifference—largely ignored in most forms of literature, nonfiction or otherwise.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the game that is so integral to
understanding Canada and Canadians should have such an underdeveloped
fictional literature and mythology compared to other foreign sports is a large
part of why Canada struggles to uniquely define itself, its culture. American
interference in Canadian economic and political circles will inevitably
engender consequences for Canadian culture as well. Although a few gems of
hockey fiction, such as The Last Season, Understanding Ken, The Hockey Sweater,
and Hero of the Play, have arisen in recent years, “puck lit” still lags behind
American baseball fiction both in terms of quantity and quality, leaving
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its contribution to Canadian culture more or less minimal. And, as I have
illustrated in this paper, observers have no shortage of theories to explain
why the development of the literature surrounding the sport so critical to
understanding this country has been so very diminutive. It has also been my
intention to display that quality works of Canadian hockey fiction do exist,
but for the most part they remain largely hidden. The works are out there
if an individual is willing to search. While the slow, contemplative pace of
baseball, it is reasoned, allows time for “introspection and imagination,”62
and, thus, better writing, perhaps the extended nature of the NHL lockout
that forced the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season and was finally
settled in the summer of 2005, may be all that was necessary for Canadian
writers to catch their collective breaths, gather their deep thoughts, and write
the next great Canadian hockey novel.
Notes
1. Michael P.J. Kennedy, “Hockey as Metaphor in Selected Canadian Literature,” in Textual
Studies in Canada no. 12 (1998): 81-94.
2. Doug Beardsley, “The Sheer Joy of Shinny,” in David Gowdey, ed., Riding on the Roar of the
Crowd (Toronto, Macmillan Canada, 1989), 17-26.
3. Correspondence, August 27, 2005.
4. W.P. Kinsella, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (Toronto, Collins Publishers, 1986), 44-45.
5. George Plimpton, The Norton Book of Sports (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1992),
14-15.
6. Peter Darbyshire, “Hockey lit’s all-star Canucks,” Vancouver Province, 24 July 2005, Section
B8.
7. Don Reddick, Dawson City Seven, (Fredericton, Goose Lane Editions, 1993), 1-319.
8. Tim Falconer, “A Cry for Puck-Lit,” Globe and Mail, 27 October 1997, Section C1.
9. David Adams Richards, Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play (Toronto,
Doubleday Canada, 1996), 203.
10. James Michener, Sports in America, (New York, Fawcett Crest, 1976), 298-299.
11. Richard Gruneau and David Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities, and Cultural
Politics, (Toronto, Garamond Press, 1993), 12.
12. Roy MacGregor, “Foreward,” in Richard Harrison, Hero of the Play: 10th Anniversary Edition,
(Toronto, Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd, 2004), 9.
13. Falconer, “A Cry for Puck-Lit,” Globe and Mail, 27 October 1997, Section C1.
14. Roch Carrier, “The Hockey Sweater,” in The Hockey Sweater and other stories (Toronto,
House of Anansi Press Limited, 1979), 77-81.
Beck / Canadian ‘Puck Lit’
91
15. Rick Salutin, Les Canadiens (Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1977), 90.
16. Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York,
Columbia University Press,1994), 171-188.
17. Bob Wake, Level Ice (Burnstown, Ontario, General Store Publishing House, 1990), 174.
18. Clark Blaise, “I’m Dreaming of Rocket Richard,” in Doug Beardsley, ed., Our Game: An
All-Star Collection of Hockey Fiction (Victoria, British Columbia, Polestar Book Publishers,
1997), 30.
19. Blaise, “I’m Dreaming of Rocket Richard,” 32.
20. Blaise, “I’m Dreaming of Rocket Richard,” 34.
21. Blaise, “I’m Dreaming of Rocket Richard,” 35.
22. David Gowdey, “The Return of Aurel Joliat,” in Doug Beardsley, ed., The Rocket The Flower
The Hammer And Me (Winlaw, BC, Polestar Press, 1988), 296.
23. Gowdey, “The Return of Aurel Joliat,” 295.
24. Gowdey, “The Return of Aurel Joliat,” 299.
25. Roch Carrier, Our Life With the Rocket: The Maurice Richard Story (Toronto, Penguin Canada,
2001), 156.
26. Carrier, Our Life With the Rocket, 292.
27. Carrier, Our Life With the Rocket, 291-292.
28. Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, (New York, Ballantine Books, 2001),
1-399.
29. Michael McKinley, “Next Year” in Doug Beardsley, ed., Our Game: An All-Star Collection of
Hockey Fiction (Victoria, British Columbia, Polestar Book Publishers, 1997), 59.
30. McKinley, “Next Year,” 60.
31. Paul Quarrington, King Leary, (Toronto, McClelland & Stewart – Bantam Limited, 1987),
136.
32. Fred Stenson, Teeth, (Regina, Coteau Books, 1994), 11-12.
33. Wayne Johnston, The Divine Ryans, (Toronto, McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1990), 52-53.
34. Johnston, The Divine Ryans, 147.
35. Edo van Belkom, “Hockey’s Night In Canada” in Dale Jacobs, ed., Ice: New Writing on
Hockey (Edmonton, Alberta, Spotted Cow Press, 1999), 70-81.
36. Pete McCormack, Understanding Ken, (Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre, 1998), 106.
37. McCormack, Understanding Ken, 107.
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Aethlon XXV:2 / Spring 2008 / Summer 2008
38. McCormack, Understanding Ken, 23.
39. Brian Fawcett, “My Career With the Leafs,” in Doug Beardsley, ed., The Rocket The Flower
The Hammer And Me (Winlaw, BC, Polestar Press, 1988), 109.
40. Birk Sproxton, The Hockey Fan Came Riding, (Red Deer, Alberta, Red Deer College Press,
1990), 62. Reprinted with permission of Lorraine Sproxton.
41. Richard Harrison, Hero of the Play: 10th Anniversary Edition, (Toronto, Wolsak and Wynn
Publishers Ltd, 2004), 64. Reprinted with permission of the author.
42. Harrison, Hero of the Play, 31. Reprinted with permission of the author.
43. John B. Lee, The Hockey Player Sonnets: Overtime Edition, (Ontario, Penumbra Press, 2003),
36. Reprinted with permission of the author and Penumbra Press.
4 4. Mark Cochrane, “Tear Gas,” in Change Room, (Vancouver, Talon Books Ltd., 2000).
Reprinted with permission of the author and Talon Books Ltd.
45. Sproxton, The Hockey Fan Came Riding, 53. Reprinted with permission of Lorraine
Sproxton.
46. Lee, The Hockey Player Sonnets, 52. Reprinted with permission of the author and Penumbra
Press.
47. Dolores Reimer, “The Shut Out,” in John B. Lee ed., That Sign of Perfection: From Bandy Legs
to Beer Legs, Poems and Stories on the Game of Hockey (Windsor, Ontario, Black Moss Press,
1995), 49.
48. Reimer, “The Shut Out,” 53.
49. Marsha Mildon, “Number 33,” in Doug Beardsley, ed., Our Game: An All-Star Collection of
Hockey Fiction (Victoria, British Columbia, Polestar Book Publishers, 1997), 209.
50. Judith Alguire, Iced (Toronto, Women’s Press, 1995), 2.
51. Wes Fineday, “The Hockey Game,” in Doug Beardsley, ed., Our Game: An All-Star Collection
of Hockey Fiction (Victoria, British Columbia, Polestar Book Publishers, 1997), 51.
52. Richard Wagamese, Keeper’n Me, (Canada, Doubleday Canada, 1994), 103.
53. Wagamese, Keeper’n Me, 106.
54. Roy MacGregor, The Last Season, (Toronto, MacMillan of Canada, 1985), 1-361.
55. Summarized in Michener, Sports in America, 282-283.
56. Paul Rutherford, The Making of the Canadian Media, (Toronto, McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 1978), 3.
57. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 141-142.
58. Richards, Hockey Dreams, 15.
59. Rick Salutin, “Why Pucklit won’t produce a Rink of Dreams,” Globe and Mail, 21 January
1994, Section C1.
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60. Salutin, “Why Pucklit won’t produce a Rink of Dreams,” Globe and Mail, 21 January 1994,
Section C1.
61. Examples of this are surprisingly many when searched in library catalogues. Examples
include Canada’s Sporting Heroes by Fisher and Wise, Champions by Jack Batten, or Champions:
A British Columbia Sports Album, by Jim Kearney.
62. Salutin, “Why Pucklit won’t produce a Rink of Dreams,” Globe and Mail, 21 January 1994,
Section C1.