Hockey Writing in Canada

Hockey Writing In Canada:
A Profile

Heidi LM Jacobs surveys
Canadian writing about hockey

"any kid without an instinctive understanding of the game is genetically un-Canadian" -- Levi Dronyk, "The Puck Artist" (74) in Our Game: An All-Star Collection of Hockey Fiction.

When I returned to Canada this winter, after living in the United States for several years, I was reminded of Peter Gzowski's calling hockey the "game of our lives." Driving down the streets and highways of Alberta, I see Wayne Gretzky arm in arm with a smiling Tiger outside Esso stations. I see his face on a dozen boxes of cereal in the Safeways and IGAs. At the VIA train station in Edmonton, the entire waiting room has one eye on the Oilers game. Much of Wainwright's weekly newspaper concerns last week's games and the astounding number of penalty minutes at the Bisons' game. Love the game or hate it, hockey is part of Canadian life.

Historians, sociologists and a range of other academics have addressed at length the enigmatic Canadian identity. Who are we? What are we? What defines us? Many Canadians look to Wayne Gretzky, Guy Lafleur, Paul Henderson, Foster Hewitt, Howie Meeker, Don Cherry or even, for some, Big Bobby Clobber as a way of defining who we are, what we do, and what brings us together.

Some writers, like Bill Boyd, author of Hockey Towns: Stories of Small Town Hockey in Canada writes "I'm not interested in hockey as a metaphor for Canadian life or whether it's our wintry religion or a frozen chunk of our soul. . . I just wanted to go to a few towns, see a few games, and talk with some players and ex-players and coaches and scouts and owners and fans." Others, however, like Ken Dryden, Roy MacGregor, and Richard Harrison examine hockey as a Canadian institution -- as Boyd says a metaphor for Canadian life, our "wintry religion." At its best, hockey writing in Canada doesn't just tell us about hockey. It tells us about our nation's obsession with the sport, it tells us about the nation and it tells us about human nature and our need to connect with our history and with each other. In short, it tells us about us.

Fiction

A hockey player's playing career is incredibly public: his stats are published, quoted, cited, summarized and evaluated. However, once a player hangs up his skates, his life becomes less public. As King Leary by Paul Quarrington and The Last Season by Roy MacGregor suggest, often this is a difficult transition.

In King Leary, the aged Percival Leary reflects on his hockey playing life, his signature "St. Louis Whirlygig," and his game winning goal in the 1919 Stanley Cup finals. A legend in his own mind as well as in the record books, Leary confronts his off-ice life with curmudgeony humour and reluctant reflection.

MacGregor's carefully crafted novel follows Felix Batterinski's attempt to prolong his too brief fame as an on-ice enforcer. Throughout, characters other than Felix ponder about the role of violence in hockey and in society. A moving and compelling read, MacGregor's unforgettable Last Season may well be hockey fiction's Heart of Darkness.

Poetry

Perhaps "poetry" does not spring to mind when one hears the word "hockey" but Richard Harrison's Hero of the Play and John B. Lee's The Hockey Player Sonnets illustrate well the poetic nature of hockey. Both books contain rich elegies to players past and present and evocative imagery which gets to the heart of the sport and the reasons it is "the game of our lives."

Take, for example, Lee's poem "Canine Pylons":
"When I play hockey alone with my dog/ in the moonlight/ I'm Gretzky flashing circles round/ a canine pylon./ He is there paw-splayed/ turning and scrambling/ and falling/ and yelping for his skated over tail"
Or the opening lines to his poem "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."
Lee has written wonderful odes to table hockey, frozen ponds, and games of shinny in the moonlight. Lee approaches the sport with good humour as evindenced in his poem "John Lennon and Yoko Ono cheer for Gordie Howe as an Out-take" and his Shakespearian series including "Falstaff as a Hockey Goalie: taking the Edge off," "Prince Hal on Skates," "When Bolingbroke usurps the Hockey Helmet of a Fallen King."

In Harrison's Hero of the Play, hockey is a means by which he conveys a complex vision of Canada. From his nostalgic remembrance of the 1972 team to his celebration of Don Cherry, Harrison captures those hockey moments which make fans proud to be Canadian. But, through hockey, Harrison also captures some of Canada's more difficult and painful memories. In his "The Silence of 17000 -- Montreal Forum, December 11, 1989," Harrison describes the Forum as fans and players try to make sense of the murder of fourteen young women in Montreal that day:

17000 who came for noise drawn to silence in their
memory this building the shape of the inside of the
mouth it waits for air the women of L'Ecole
Polytechnique fill the Forum we swear we will never
forget but words return and we take sides dressed in
opposing cities we shame and glorify ourselves each
season the enemy goalie wears a white ribbon under
his helmet he shakes his head when the siren sounds
the game begins the police arrive too late as many
dead as on the ice before us

Both collections are highly readable and tighten the link between "hockey" and "poetry"

Collections

For a great sampling of hockey writing, check out Our Game: An All-Star Collection of Hockey Fiction, edited by Doug Beardsley, and ICE: New Writing on Hockey, edited by Dale Jacobs. Combined, these two collections provide an excellent survey of hockey writing.

Beardsley's collection contains fiction from a range of well-known writers like Roch Carrier, Roy MacGregor, W.P. Kinsella, Paul Quarrington, Hugh MacLennan and others. Beardsley's anthology includes excerpts from Quarrington's King Leary and MacGregor's Last Season and has sections entitled "Growing Up on Ice," "Playing the Game," and "Fans and Philosophers." Containing many of the canonical works of hockey fiction, Our Game is an excellent primer.

Ice is a good companion to Our Game in that Jacobs has chosen new and, for the most part, previously unpublished poems, essays and short stories from ex-players, wanna-be players, Hockey Mums, and fans from Canada and the United States. Don Bell's essay "Hockey Night in Métabechouan" describes hockey in northern Quebec: "You've heard of Saturday Night Fever at the Montreal Forum?" writes Bell, "It's nothing compared to Sunday Night Fever in Métabechouan." Diane Weber's poem "Ice Dreams: for those who came before" describes girls "skating and weaving, creating a team/ of women playing hockey --/ women plotting anarchy." Gerald Hill's poems elegantly capture the poetic possibilities of the game.

Nonfiction

There are numerous nonfiction books out about the game but here are two notable books by two all-stars of the hockey writing world. Dryden and MacGregor's books stand out for their insight into the game and their ability to probe the difficult grey areas of the game and the complex implications of its presence in Canadian life. In their reflective, evocative prose, Dryden and MacGregor illuminate the nature of the game, what it means to Canada and Canadians. Ken Dryden's The Game is a classic of sports writing and is part memoir of his career with the Canadiens and part reflection on what makes hockey "The Game." A must read.

MacGregor's The Home Team: Fathers, Sons, and Hockey looks at intersections between lives off the ice and on the ice. Looking at the lives of players like Gretzky, Coffey, Messier and McSorley, major hockey families like the Howes, the Drydens and the Gretzkys as well as relatively unknown players families, MacGregor looks at the thrills of victories and success and the heartbreak of failure. The Home Team not only shows the nature of the game; it also illustrates something about human nature.

This profile isn't exhaustive, it's an introduction -- a pre-game show, if you will, to hockey writing in Canada.

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