Working the Dead Beat (10 page)

For a while, Berton added editor-in-chief of M&S to his many titles. McClelland wanted to start an illustrated books division and persuaded Berton to head it up by promising him it would take only one day a week. When this proved illusory, Berton told McClelland that either he could stay on as editor-in-chief of M&S or he could quit and write another book. That book turned out to be
The National Dream
(1970), the first volume of his history of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and a mega-hit for Berton and M&S.

He wrote the manuscript in three weeks, although he took a year to revise it. The second volume,
The Last Spike
(1971), took longer to draft — a month — and the same amount of time to polish. Historian Michael Bliss agreed to be the academic reader for the
CPR
books. “I came to that job with much skepticism, thinking he was probably a phony who relied on researchers, and then was quite surprised that the manuscripts were so good and that in conversation he clearly knew his material extremely well,” Bliss said in a 2004 interview with the
Globe
. “He obviously had high intelligence, good writing skills, and a flair for story-telling, and what more does one want in a popular historian?”

The Last Spike
won Berton his third Governor General's Award. Both books sold about 130,000 copies each. It led to another triumph when the
CBC
produced
The National Dream
in 1974, eight dramatized documentaries based on his bestselling books. The series, introduced by Berton, netted 3.6 million viewers, a mammoth audience in English Canada at the time.

Flamboyant, daring, and fiercely patriotic, McClelland was the perfect marketer for Berton's colourful narratives about the building of the railroad, the opening of the West, the Great Depression, the War of 1812, and the Dionne quintuplets. Together they rode the roller coaster of cultural nationalism, with Berton providing the content and McClelland supplying the razzmatazz.

The relationship with M&S continued through dozens of books and the sale of the financially beleaguered firm to real-estate developer Avie Bennett in 1985, and only ended a decade later, when Berton took his memoir
My Times
to rival publishers Doubleday in a dispute about money. Bennett, who had taken a hard look at the balance sheet for
Starting Out
(1987), the first volume of Berton's memoirs, was unwilling to offer the advance that Berton demanded.

The blockbuster sales for Mr. Canada were over. So, too, were the days for the kind of history that he had made his own. When his forty-seventh title,
Onward to War
, a history of Canada's dutiful response to declarations of war in South Africa, Europe, and Korea, was published in 2001, it was less well received than earlier titles. Reviewing the book in the
Globe
, historian Modris Eksteins asked: “If the world changed in the last century as dramatically as Berton insists, can — or should — history be written in much the same way Carlyle and Macaulay presented it over a century ago?”

Eksteins had a point. Berton will not be remembered for any great archival discoveries or new theories or interpretations. His skill was in creating a large popular following for his re-creation of the characters and events of the past.

In his last years, Berton suffered from congestive heart failure, diabetes, and a slew of other lifestyle ailments. Although he had slowed down, he continued to work — he wanted to go out writing. In the fall of 2004, aged eighty-four, he began a monthly column for the
Globe
and published his fiftieth book,
Prisoners of the North
, a quintet of profiles of Arctic adventurers that included Klondike Joe Boyle, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and Robert Service.

He also continued to make radio and television appearances, demonstrating his technique for rolling a joint on
Rick Mercer's Monday Report
on
CBC
TV, using a copy of
The National Dream
as a flat surface. Some viewers were reminded of the time he almost severed a finger on
90 Minutes Live
back in 1978, demonstrating the workings of the then-revolutionary Cuisinart food processer while aghast host Peter Gzowski watched his guest's blood flow onto the studio floor. The
Monday Report
segment was Berton's last television appearance, and it was a classic: self-parodying, flamboyant, and a poke up the nose of the Canadian lawmakers who refused to legalize the smoking of recreational marijuana.

In the middle of October 2004, Janet Berton fell and broke her hip. As soon as she was admitted to York Central Hospital for what turned out to be a prolonged stay, Berton's own decline accelerated. By the end of the month both Bertons were in separate wings of the same hospital. He was transferred on November 29 to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. There, with his wife Janet and his daughter Peggy Anne at his bedside, the man everybody called Pierre died the following afternoon of complications from heart disease and diabetes. He was eighty-four.

 

Maurice “The Rocket” Richard

Hockey Player

August 4, 1921 – May 27, 2000

M
AURICE “THE ROCKET”
Richard always insisted that he was just a hockey player. No matter how heartfelt and accurate, those denials didn't stop fans, politicians, team owners, and opportunists from appropriating his name and power for their personal, political, philosophical, and commercial goals. Even after he died of abdominal cancer on May 27, 2000, his state funeral — extremely rare for an athlete — threatened to become hijacked by politics. Should the coffin be draped with the fleur-de-lys flag, symbolizing the nationalist aspirations of Quebec, as Premier Lucien Bouchard wanted? Or should it be covered with the maple leaf of Canada, as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien desired in that tempestuous era of national unity debates? Wisely, Richard's family chose the apolitical route that the hockey legend himself had always tried to skate: they ordered a blanket of yellow roses, insisting that the final public ceremony be about the man, not other people's expectations or ambitions.

His career statistics are still staggering: He was the first player to score fifty goals in a fifty-game season and to amass a career total of five hundred goals, achieving 544 markers in regular play and 82 in the playoffs in his eighteen years skating with the Canadiens. He helped win the Stanley Cup eight times for Montreal, was captain for four winning years in a row between 1957 and 1960, and played in every annual
NHL
All-Star game from 1947 to 1959. He was also the only hockey player to single-handedly spark a riot in the streets of Montreal, on March 17, 1955 — St. Patrick's Day — after league president Clarence Campbell suspended him for the rest of the season after a violent altercation with a linesman four days earlier in Boston.

Why was it that Richard became more than just a hockey player in the hearts and imaginations of Canadians? Sure, Howie Morenz was already a star before Richard laced up his skates for
les Canadiens
in 1942, but Morenz was an anglophone from Ontario. The Rocket was the first French-Canadian hockey legend. He emerged as a jet-propelled scoring ace in the 1940s and early 1950s, when radio controlled the airwaves. An entire generation of Québécois boys, including future teammates Jean Beliveau and Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, grew up listening to the play-by-play, visualizing the Rocket tearing up the ice (and any defencemen) in his zigzag path as he roared from the blue line, eyes blazing, to slap a puck into the opposing team's net.

One of those kids was Roch Carrier, the distinguished playwright and short-story writer (
La guerre, yes sir!
and
Floralie, où es-tu?
among other titles),
arts administrator, and author of the classic children's book
The Hockey Sweater
. Born in May 1937, Carrier turned eight the year that Richard scored fifty goals in fifty games. In
The Hockey Sweater
he describes his adulation for Richard and his chagrin when his mother ordered him a new sweater from the Eaton's catalogue and the retailer sent a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater by mistake. “We all combed our hair like Maurice Richard . . . We laced our skates like Maurice Richard, we taped our sticks like Maurice Richard. . . . On the ice . . . we were ten players all wearing the uniform of the Montreal Canadiens . . . [and we] all wore the famous number 9 on our backs.”

Although Richard is often forced into the heroic mould of a hero of the Quiet Revolution, he is a reluctant and imperfect fit. He did grow up in Quebec at a time when anglophone commercial and cultural dominance was pronounced and he played in an era when the ultra-nationalist Maurice Duplessis was premier of the province, but Richard was always his own man. Moreover, he retired from hockey a year after Duplessis died in September 1959, just as the not-so-Quiet Revolution was beginning.

Richard never made a political speech other than to complain, quite rightly, that in his day the owners treated the players, who drew in the fans and filled their coffers, more like serfs than heroes. But that was a common grievance throughout hockey and not limited to francophone players.

Introverted and shy, Richard remained apart — not aloof, but apart — from the camaraderie in the locker room and the kibitzing on the hockey award banquet circuit. Richard led by example, not words, as Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante observed decades after the legendary player had hung up his skates. “The Rocket was a very quiet man and on the road trips, he would watch us play cards and laugh at the jokes.” More important, “He always took the blame himself for a loss, never faulting anyone else. If a player wasn't working hard enough or playing smart, one glare from the Rocket usually corrected the problem.”

That silence, that distance, left plenty of space for sportswriters and pundits to speculate about the extraordinary surge of emotion this smouldering-eyed, taciturn lumberjack on skates could summon from the stoniest heart. There isn't a single answer, but the best explanation is probably that fans and foes alike recognized in Richard a simple man driven by love — for the game, his family, and his country — all of those basic values that need no fancy filigree to shine brighter than precious metals.

JOSEPH HENRI MAURICE
Richard, the
eldest of eight children of Onésime and Alice Richard (née Laramée), was born on August 4, 1921, in Montreal. His parents, who were both from the Gaspé region, had moved separately to the city, seeking work during the First World War. They met, courted, married, and found a small house to rent in the east end, near Lafontaine Park. By the time Maurice was four, his father, a woodworker for the Canadian Pacific Railway at their Angus Yards, had saved up enough money to build a small house in the Bordeaux district, near rue Jean-Talon in the northeast part of the city. That's where Maurice learned to play hockey on a backyard rink flooded by his father.

Organized hockey teams began when he entered the school system. He played peewee, bantam, and midget while a student at Saint-François-de-Laval elementary school. After Grade 9 he went to the Montreal Technical School and played for its team as well as the community one in his neighbourhood. As a teenager he added boxing and baseball to his sporting repertoire while continuing to play as many as two games of hockey during the week and four on weekends — adopting aliases such as “Maurice Rochon” so he could be on more than one roster.

He even met his future wife, Lucille, through hockey: she was the younger sister of Georges Norchet, his hockey coach at the Paquette Club, in the Parc Lafontaine Juvenile League. Norchet often invited team members back to his parents' house after games. Unlike his more outgoing teammates, Richard would stand quietly off to the side, sipping a soft drink, when the rugs were rolled back and the gramophone wound up. Lucille, then only thirteen, was a petite and pretty redhead with a ready smile and easy social skills. “I took it upon myself to teach Maurice to dance and to act as his fashion consultant too,” she reminisced later. Much to her parents' shock, the couple became engaged when she was seventeen. By then Richard had quit school and was working with his father as a machinist as well as earning some money as a player for the Canadiens' senior farm team in the Quebec league.

They married on September 21, 1942. The Richards had reared seven children and had been married for more than half a century when Lucille died of cancer in July 1994. Richard was so devoted to his wife that he refused to leave her side to accept a symbolic appointment to the Privy Council. The Queen herself was to convey the honour at Rideau Hall on Canada Day, 1992, in commemoration of the 125th anniversary of Confederation. Adding the designation
L'honorable
to his name paled next to comforting his ailing wife. The
PMO
offered to send a nurse to the Richard home, but the Rocket declined. Finally, Richard agreed to accept the honour in a special ceremony organized in his hometown.

As a player, Richard was fast and relentless. He got his nickname “Rocket” in 1942 from another player. Left-winger Ray Getliffe was sitting on the bench in the Forum watching Elmer Lach feed “a lovely pass” to Richard. “I leaned over [to one of the other players] and said, ‘Wow, Richard took off like a rocket.'” The comment was overheard by
Montreal Star
sports writer Dink Carroll, who immortalized it in print.

In his short biography
Maurice Richard,
Charles Foran describes Richard as having the upper body of a logger, complete with barrel chest, broad shoulders, tree-trunk arms, thick hands, and permanently swollen knuckles. “He does not skate over the ice so much as impose himself upon it with each pressuring stride. His strokes are economical rather than elegant, commanded by force more than grace,” Foran writes, having watched Richard's solitary skate in a 1975
CBC
documentary. “Shoulders square and elbows at 90 degrees, chin up and gaze ahead . . . he manoeuvres the puck side to side on the blade of his stick with the ease of someone stirring milk into coffee.”

Even more often than documenting Richard's glide, journalists and opposing players invariably commented upon Richard's gaze, especially the ferocious stare in his “anthracite eyes” as he barrelled towards the opposing team's goal. Over the years several opposing players described the effect. “When he came flying toward you with the puck on his stick, his eyes were all lit up, flashing and gleaming like a pinball machine. It was terrifying,” said Hall of Fame goalie Glenn Hall.

In his memoir,
Tales of an Athletic Supporter
, Trent Frayne described Richard as the “most spectacular goal scorer who ever played hockey.” Nobody “electrified onlookers the way the Rocket did, dashing from the blue line in. And nobody I've seen since had his hypnotic flair, either. When he was battling for the puck near the net, driving for it with guys clutching at him, you could actually see a glitter in his coal-black eyes, the look wild horses get.”

Roch Carrier used the same animal image. “He's half wild horse, half well-disciplined soldier . . . with a face as rough as a stone in a Gaspé field and the piercing eyes of someone who has the gift of seeing things invisible to others,” he wrote in
Our Life with the Rocket: The Maurice Richard Story
.

Richard's eyes even became part of the homily delivered by the archbishop of Montreal, Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, at Richard's funeral at Notre-Dame Basilica on May 31, 2000. “What a look! Such strength, such intensity in those eyes. Poets have said that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. All of Maurice was in his eyes. We will not forget that look,” the cardinal promised. And so it has become.

But, for all his power and spell-casting, Richard was injury prone. Even before he showed up at training camp for the Canadiens in 1942, the year he married Lucille, he had suffered a broken ankle and a broken wrist. That season he fractured his leg in December, after only sixteen games. Canadiens general manager Tommy Gorman tried to trade him to the New York Rangers, but the American team scoffed at the deal.

Despite the conscription crisis at the outbreak of the Second World War and the nationalist Québécois opposition to fighting for the British Crown, Richard wanted to enlist in the army and go overseas to fight the Germans. He tried twice to join the combat forces, beginning in 1939, but was refused as unfit because X-rays showed his injuries hadn't healed properly. Finally, in 1944, he applied as a machinist but was rejected because he had neither a high school diploma nor a technical trade certificate, even though he had been working at the trade in a local factory since he was sixteen. Frustrated but determined, he enrolled at the Montreal Technical School, but by the time he had earned his certificate, the war was over.

Instead of serving the war effort overseas, he kept the home spirits stoked by playing hockey. After Richard's wife, Lucille, gave birth to their first child on October 23, 1943, he went to Canadiens coach Dick Irvin and asked if he could switch his number from fifteen to nine to commemorate the lusty birth weight of his daughter, Huguette. For Richard, the number became a talisman symbolizing his love for his baby and his wife and his need to express that emotion, not in words but on the ice, as he skated, stick-handled, and scored goals. Hockey, plus whatever jobs he could get in the off-season, combined later with endorsements and commercials for a variety of products — from hair dye to fishing tackle — were essential in supporting a wife and seven children. Despite his fame and his prowess, Richard never made more than $25,000 a season playing hockey.

In 1944 the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup, with Richard scoring thirty-two goals in the regular season and twelve in the playoffs, including all five goals in a 5–1 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs in the semifinals, a stellar achievement that culminated in Richard's being awarded all three stars at the end of the game that night. The following season Irvin switched the left-handed Richard to right wing, alongside Elmer Lach and Toe Blake in what came to be called the “Punch Line.” That was the year he put fifty goals in the net in as many games.

Richard rarely started a fight, but he didn't back away from one either, often using his training as a boxer to give back more than he got. He had a notoriously short fuse and, once ignited, his temper exploded like a fuel-injected missile. Heckled by rival players, victimized by referees, Richard was drafted into a symbolic martyrdom by a francophone minority who felt persecuted in their home province — the way they felt he was abused on the ice — by the mercantile and political masters of the rest of Canada.

One cultural commentator, Benoît Melançon, author of
The Rocket: A Cultural History of Maurice Richard
, has actually gone so far as to compare a colour photograph of Richard in the April 1955 issue of
Sport
magazine with a seventeenth-century painting of Saint Sebastian, the early Christian martyr, by the Baroque painter Luca Giordano: “both bodies stand out against a black background; where one has an arrow in his side, the other holds fast to his stick.” But Melançon isn't content with visual similarities between the painting of the martyr and the photograph of the hockey player. He contends that the photograph, which was hanging in the Montreal Forum before the March 1955 riot, gave marauders “the image of the martyr Richard was to become that very evening,” an overstretched juxtaposition that collapses under its own hyperbole.