Canadians (19 page)

None of this made the slightest sense. Dave King, one of the game's best thinkers and a coach in both NHL and Olympic hockey, once produced research that showed exactly what the odds were for kids “making it,” as their parents so fervently hoped. He took thirty thousand kids born in 1975, all of whom had, at ages five to eight, signed up for the Great Canadian Dream.

Of that original thirty thousand, twenty-two thousand were still playing at bantam age fourteen.

Of that twenty-two thousand, only 232 were drafted by junior clubs.

Of the 232, less than half, 105, played a single game or more in junior.

Of the 105 who got onto junior ice, 48 were drafted by NHL clubs and 2 others signed later as free agents, meaning 50 had a shot at the dream.

Of the 50, 38 were offered contracts they signed.

Twenty-two played at least one game in the NHL.

In 1989, when they were twenty-four years old and in their hockey prime, 11 were playing at some level in the NHL.

The odds, then, were approximately one in three thousand for children signing up in what has traditionally been professional hockey's most fertile training ground.

Something for hockey parents to consider.

Where the greatest reflection took place, however, was at the NHL itself. What began as a lockout over “economic certainty” soon evolved into a shutdown where Canadian fans loudly and clearly expressed their displeasure with the owners, with the players, and with the game. And so, once the owners and the players' association began working together to fix the economics of the game, they also began looking at the game itself.

For years critics had decried not only the fisticuffs but the second level of violence—the hooking and holding and slashing. Ken Dryden, a former goaltender and Hockey Hall of Famer, called for hockey to find its next “forward pass,” a move that would revolutionize the game much as the introduction of the forward pass had back in December 1929.

An answer was found in, of all places, the rulebook. The powers that be simply decided to start calling the rules as they had long been written down, and in the 2005–06 season it seemed the game had been entirely reinvented, with speed and skill now rewarded instead of hooking and holding. None of this ended the fights, but it did dramatically reduce their number and all but put an end to the brawler role. Toughness was still admired, but toughness alone was happily rendered meaningless. You'd have to be able to play, too.

Instead of the post-lockout lack of interest so many had predicted, Canadian fans were delighted to see the game played on the ice as it had been played for years only in their imaginations. The very ones who'd told pollsters a year earlier that they couldn't care less about the professional game now seemed, at the drop of a puck, to care as much as they had in the glory days of Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe, Orr and Lafleur, Gretzky and Messier. American fans were slow to come back and, in some markets, didn't bother coming back at all.

That Canadians did rush back shows why Calgary poet Richard Harrison calls hockey “the national id.”

CURIOUSLY, the game of hockey hasn't attracted nearly as much academic attention as might be expected of something so integral to the Canadian personality. Richard Gruneau, who teaches communications at Simon Fraser University, says that for decades Canadian intellectuals denied that something as basic as hockey could have a “cultural” facet. Gruneau, who co-wrote
Hockey Night in Canada: Sports, Identities, and Cultural Politics
with the University of Alberta's David Whitson, theorizes that perhaps “hockey's physicality has always seemed too far removed from the world of the mind.”

Matters began to change slightly in the 1980s when, suddenly, serious—if largely ignored—novels with hockey themes were published. Hockey became substance for movies, for poetry, for songs—even, finally, for a certain dash of academia. “By the late 1980s,” says Gruneau, “it was perfectly acceptable to write doctoral dissertations on Madonna, and, in this environment, academic writing on sport—even hockey—became more widely accepted in Canadian intellectual life.”

In the years since, the game has sometimes seemed everywhere, and not just on the ice surface. Numerous television series—the most recent being CBC's
Hockey: A People's History
—have covered the game's roots to its economics to its many problems. Hardly a fall goes by without at least one hockey book on the bestseller lists; some, like Ken Dryden's
The Game
and Peter Gzowski's
The Game of Our Lives,
spending months at the very top. It's been the theme for hundreds of children's books. Even toques, of all things, became a must-have item following the Heritage Classic, where the old-timers wore them to ward off the cold and, in the NHL part of the event, Montreal Canadiens netminder Jose Theodore tucked one under his mask–helmet.

And sometimes more than that, it seems. I am reminded of the great— and mysterious—Freddie “The Fog” Shero, who as coach of the Philadelphia Flyers in their
infamous “Broad Street Bullies” days once sought to fire up his players during playoffs by writing on the dressing room chalkboard: “
Hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games.”
Canada is, after all, a country where, in any given hockey rink, more fans will know the words to Stompin' Tom Connors's “The Hockey Song” than to the national anthem.

It is a country so attuned to its national game that the Ford Motor Company can run a television spot in which car horns at a traffic jam honk out the theme music to the CBC's
Hockey Night in Canada
—with no explanation required.

It is a country where, for nearly three months each spring, playoff games that mean nothing to the rest of the world regularly bump
The National
news, with the latest score from Iraq and Afghanistan forced to wait until the scores are in from Ottawa and Edmonton.

It is a country where, in the lead-up to the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, the organizers of the Team Canada entry could call a press conference—heavily attended and carried live across ten provinces and three territories—to announce that no decision had yet been made on who would serve as the team's
third
goaltender.

All this for a player who wouldn't even be
dressing
for the games. Lester Pearson, appearing before a London audience in 1939, many years before he'd win the Nobel Peace Prize or become prime minister, told his baffled audience that hockey is not just a game to Canadians. “It is perhaps fitting,” Pearson said, “that this fastest of all games has become almost as much of a national symbol as the maple leaf or the beaver. Most young Canadians, in fact, are born with skates on their feet rather than with silver spoons in their mouths.”

Pearson was partly right. Hockey had certainly become a national symbol. The Stanley Cup was the ultimate sports icon. And yet the Grey Cup, the pinnacle of Canadian three-downs football, was always considered fundamental to Canadian unity. After all, except for a few ill-fated years of thoughtless expansion in the 1990s, the Grey Cup has been contested by Canadian teams, for the most part east versus west,
with several of the teams community-owned to provide an added dash of passion.

Grey Cup weekend—often referred to as “The National Drunk”—is such a tradition that it attracts millions who haven't paid the slightest attention to the threadbare league the entire rest of the season. In 1962 the Diefenbaker government ordered both national television networks to carry it so that as many Canadians as possible might tune in. As Mordecai Richler once so delightfully wrote in a magazine piece, “Other, more brutalized nations were knit by civil wars or uprisings against tyrants, but Canada, our Canada, was held together by a pigskin.”

But even so, football is not hockey. Canadian football, in fact, is more a cousin of American football—slight differences in downs, size of field, and number of players—whereas hockey is absolutely and entirely
Canadian
. And in far more ways than as a game played on frozen water.

The Canadian climate may have given hockey its first ice surfaces, but the makeup of the players and of its burgeoning fans—people of different cultures, different beliefs, more often separated by religion than brought together—was what ensured that the rink and not the church would become where community met, the home team where they kept the faith. That hockey often gets called “the true religion of Canada” is no accident.

The wall plaques that honour the great players of the game in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto ring with the very history of Canadian settlement during the twentieth century: Schmidt, Dumart, Bauer, Delvecchio, Mahovlich, Mosienko, Esposito, Gretzky …

More and more new Canadians are arriving from parts of the world that consider ice a curiosity, if not a luxury, and who know absolutely nothing about this strange winter game until their children insist on signing up with the other kids in the neighbourhood. This new reality was happily realized in recent years when the Calgary Flames' Jarome Iginla— whose father came from Nigeria—became the first black player to win a National Hockey League scoring title.

As Dryden and I wrote in
Home Game,

Hockey is part sport and recreation, part entertainment, part business, part community-builder, social connector, and fantasy maker. It is played in every province and territory and in every part of every province and territory in this country. Once a game for little boys, now little girls play hockey as well, and so do older men and women; so do the blind and the mentally and physically handicapped. And though its symmetry is far from perfect, hockey does far better than most in cutting across social division—young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, French and English, able and disabled. It is this breadth, its reach into the past, that makes hockey such a vivid instrument to view Canadian life.

The game also transcends emotion. Love hockey with a passion or hate it with a passion, the game still dominates Canadian small talk at a level comparable only to the weather.

Consider the following: the most-treasured children's story in the land is Roch Carrier's
The Hockey Sweater;
the most-popular modern film in Quebec is
Les Boys
and its sequels, the ongoing tales of a local beer hockey league; and in Mordecai Richler's final novel,
Barney's Version,
the main character descends into Alzheimer's disease, his memory losing all but the crystal-clear recollections of games played by his beloved Montreal Canadiens.

Small wonder, then, that 115,000 in Montreal would wish to file past the coffin of a man who hadn't played a game in forty years, that 57,167 in Edmonton would want to sit in –20°C and watch a bunch of retired players play shinny in a makeshift rink so far away most fans couldn't even see the puck.

Small wonder, then, that when country star Shania Twain—as famous worldwide for her navel as for her songs—appears on stage in Canada with the upper half of her body draped in a bulky, totally non-form-fitting hockey jersey, Canadians will stand and cheer.

If you can understand that one, you're closer to understanding Canadians.

Six

The Canada of the Imagination

THE DARKEST EYES of the national game may have been closed forever that day in Montreal, but the brightest eyes in Canada never shut in Ottawa.

They're the clearest blue eyes in the National Gallery, and though they hang in the European section, they're every blink and tear Canadian. Yet they have nothing whatsoever to do with the likes of Lawren Harris or Emily Carr, Canadian artists whose self-portraits have stared out from the rooms devoted to Canadian art; nothing at all to do with Jean Paul Lemieux's famous portraits or Alex Colville's haunted studies.

They are the eyes of Henry Wentworth Monk—“Wenty” to family and friends—and what he saw, and foresaw, with those eyes should be the stuff of movies and books. But this is Canada, and perhaps he's fortunate to find space in the European section, his portrait more notable by the name of the artist, William Holman Hunt, than by the subject, poor Wenty of Mosquito Cove, not far upstream along the Ottawa River that flows so quietly past the National Gallery of Canada.

And yet, for those very few who know his curious story, Wenty was at one time a force. He was, in fact, the first person ever to use the term “United Nations” as he preached for the creation of an international tribunal that might bring some order to a chaotic world.

A devout Christian, he was first to call for a special land to be set aside for what would eventually become Israel.

He was also the first in this country to suggest that Canada might one day serve the world as a military peacekeeper and peacemaker—a role that has cost some 150 Canadian lives since the United Nations he foresaw began such missions in the 1950s. No other country has paid so large a price.

Monk had the ear of Czar Nicholas II, of Lord Salisbury, and of Horace Greeley of the powerful
New York Tribune
. And yet he couldn't even get in to see Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald. They laughed in his face in Canada, dismissed him as a “crank” and, soon after he died, forgot all about him.

“We tend to forget all our interesting characters,” says Frederick McEvoy, who has written about Monk in
The Beaver
magazine and hopes one day to produce a full biography.

Monk was most certainly interesting. He was born on April 6, 1827, in a small settlement along the Ottawa River, a pretty cove on the Ontario side now known as Pinhey's Point. He was the sixth of what would eventually number ten children. A wealthy neighbour, apparently so taken with the strikingly intelligent stare of the child, offered to pay for a fine education once he was old enough to head off to boarding school. When the time came the neighbour wasn't nearly so well off, but he did have enough pull left to arrange for seven-year-old Wenty to sail for London. He entered Christ's Hospital School, an institution established by King Edward VI for the promising children of the destitute. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been a student here, as had Charles Lamb, who later claimed that the school's rigid devotion to religion and starvation was what produced such pronounced oddity in so many of its graduates.