Hockey Dreams (12 page)

There was, in those long ago dark afternoons of 1961 some terrible hypersensitivity in me.

I knew something was strange in how others viewed Canadians — I knew the old Colonel was right in this, but I didn’t quite know how it was happening, only that it was. I did not quite know how to explain it. We were the best and yet it seemed, after Squaw Valley, after Bellville losing to the Czechs and after the 4–0 loss to the Swedish team by the Trail Smoke Eaters that something very fundamental in our nature was missing.

We were cocky hockey players, but we were indentured. As I sat there in that office I was flooded with memoried pain of my uncle and his son, coming to our house, and telling us about how great the Russians were, and then having the audacity to go out and beat us.

The name Bunny Ahearne still drives me nuts. I did not know why then. How could I know? I only knew that every-time a decision about hockey was made it was made (with the backing of hockey powers like Saudi Arabia) to the detriment of Canada. The Canadians knew this — Bunny Ahearne knew this. Everyone, in Canada who gave a fiddler’s fart about hockey, no matter how blind they were, knew there was an unfair, intrinsic mean-spiritedness about the IIHL treatment of Canada — that would not stop until 1972.

But the secret Bunny Ahearne, Irishman, had when brokering deals that would freeze Canada in International hockey was to play upon the Canadian ego and the Russian self-interest in keeping Canada as far on the outside as possible.

We felt we were the best and the toughest and the most talented. What could unfairness do to us? Or mean-spiritedness? Ignore it and get on with the game. I’m sure that this was the posture Ahearne
hoped
for in his dealings with us.

Ahearne had a peculiar antipathy for our nation that came with smiles one day and angry arm-twisting the next. Why he made us a scapegoat was a particular strain of angry envy, mean-spiritedness — and that peculiar idea that he had to be fair to the
others
. The IIHL was also a money-making
venture for his own travel agency, (
Net Worth
, Cruise, David and Griffiths, Alison: Penguin, 1992).

But it was also the idea that their game, the European game, the game of
ice hockey
, was more
moral
than the game of hockey.

Well I know our hockey could be rough, uncompromising in the corners, hard-driven, knock your head off. But it could not, our game of hockey, be mean-spirited. And this is what we faced from 1959 until Paul Henderson’s goal somehow delivered us in 1972. It was not so much that Paul Henderson’s goal won the series (in the Russian Sports Hall of Fame they never tell you who
won
that series — they only tell you that the Russians scored more goals overall) but that his goal somehow delivered us. It proved to all of my generation for once what we thought and felt and believed about our country was essentially true.

That the Russians, could be
mean-spirited —
that they could flood the penalty box with our players, not give us meals before the game, try to keep us awake all hours of the night on the
conviction
that the world would understand that their game and their life was more MORAL. But finally on the ice — on the ice — hockey was greater than ice hockey.

I think of those times, cramped boots and coats, dark, dark afternoons, when the Trail Smoke Eaters were our hope in Europe, on a forty thousand dollar budget.

Michael and Ginette over the bank together shovelling
the snow from the rink, and then the nets made, and suddenly great railway ties coming from somewhere, for the boards.

Tobias thought he had a father somewhere. Suddenly Tobias believed his father was somewhere in Napan — and he knew who he was, because one of his relatives told him. He was excited about this. And Michael told him not to be.

At this time too, Stafford began to rebel — he began to reduce his insulin intake, believing he could eat candy if he did. We had left his house, and had gone down over the bank to help with the railroad ties Michael had collected. It was a clear night in February, the stars were dazzling, and suddenly, there was a sound. It was Stafford and his brothers fighting.

“Get some sugar into him — get some sugar.”

He kicked, screamed and roared, and threw Darren off him as if he was nothing at all. Out of Stafford’s back pocket fell two pamphlets that he had sent away for. They lay in the snow as a symbol of Stafford’s hopeless hope.

He had collected twelve labels from Corn Syrup for these pamphlets. And for those Corn Syrup labels he had received:
How to train for hockey
and
How to play better hockey
, written by Lloyd Percival in the 1940s and adopted by the Russian program in the fifties. And still around in 1961.

He carried those pamphlets about with him like the two tablets of The Ten Commandments. He would read them and reread them with his half-blind eyes. Each pamphlet had a place for your name:
property of
Stafford Foley, 609 King
George Highway, Newcastle, NB, Canada, North America, Western Hemisphere, Planet Earth.

The pamphlets lay in the snow and were almost washed under a drift until Darren, who had a bloody lip, saw them and picked them up. Then we went back up the hill together, through the drifts, in the frigid air.

The secret was, he had drunk the corn syrup, sitting in his basement hidden behind the furnace. After this episode, he walked in a daze many days. Sadly it became known by us that he still wet the bed. Often at night the lights would snap on, and he would be wandering the house, soaked to the skin. A smelly bucket of pee sat under his bed.

One day just after this he began to question me about my grandfather. My grandfather was a diabetic and had graciously volunteered to be one of Banting and Best’s guinea pigs. He was one of the first diabetics to try insulin, and died of insulin related complications.

When I related this story to him Stafford turned to me and clutching my arm with his small brave hand said, “Thank your granddad for me,” and smiled.

Like Michael he had already seen the depths and was at times tired, very tired of swimming.

I remember the path Michael took to get those railway ties down to his rink. In 1961 there was one squad car in the town police force, driven by Sergeant Hood, and there was the paddy wagon. The paddy wagon had a stickshift and shifting
between second and third caused the whole engine to shiver and the truck to knock. We could tell when the paddy wagon was coming at least a half a mile before it arrived.

Michael would go out after dark wearing his leather gloves, his jean jacket, and, hauling a sled, would walk to the tracks where he would steal two replacement ties at a time and haul them down past the creamery. Once on the creamery lane he would swing to his left over a snowbank and cross the dark field. He was in Skytown territory now, and ran the risk of getting his ties stolen by the Griffin boys who had their rink just beyond Morrison Lane.

He wore no hat though it might be -15°F — he always believed that exercise would keep him warm.

He would cross Old King George Highway, and through the apple orchard to King George Highway. Once on his lane he was safe. He would haul the ties around to the back of his house and hide them. Then waiting an hour or so he would bring them down to his rink.

Michael’s rink was beginning to look as fine and as accomplished as the Sinclair rink. And he knew this. We skated and played hockey on his rink now, with the bubbles of air trapped in the ice under the icy moonlight and a fire going. We all believed we had a great hand in it, but actually it was he and Ginette who had never given up on it.

Now they could not tell him he did not belong to a team. And no-one was going to tell him that he couldn’t play the game. That was the right, and the legacy, of every Canadian child.

He never invited you into his house, and almost always tried to refuse to go into yours. He never spoke about owning anything. He didn’t compete with the boy who showed him his new hockey pads and Tacklebury skates. He could never brag about his dad getting a car, or a truck. But once you were on the lane or street, or down at his rink you were on his territory and he knew he was on even ground.

There were a lot of tough boys in the neighbourhood, and he was as tough as any. I remember this now, again that in my small block of neighbourhood houses and garages I knew a cross-section of life that homogenized middle suburbia never has experienced.

Those times in the dark night air with his woollen sweater on, smelling of his house, flicking the pucks at us and smiling as he skated backwards, turning on a thin dime and breaking into strides that seemed to swallow the ice — at those times, the hurt wherever it came from, was all gone away, and he was free.

Where we had once lived seemed so little that day, in 1989, walking with Paul. Coming back to the town — everything seemed smaller, less important. The mill was now three times the size — and our river had lost its innocence. Where the gully once was, the new yuppiedom had built spectacular houses to overlook it, and no small boys and girls played on a rink. Now and then there was still the smell of smoke but it did not bite the sharp night air as it used to.

The house where Michael and Tobias lived had been torn down years before, and the lane near the creamery where Michael had dragged his railway ties looked very small and ordinary. The field too was gone.

My father’s theatre had disappeared and was replaced by videos. The young generation — mine, was hurrying along to middle age. Our children were as much interested in baseball and soccer as anything.

Hockey had become a sport dominated by a new ideal. Hardly a child I knew back in my day would have been able to afford hockey now, the way its costs had skyrocketed.

All of this Paul and I talked about on the way to where we were going.

There were not as many fires in the winter either, in which people lost their lives, as there were in our town of grey wooden buildings when I was young.

The Sinclair Rink was gone also — it had been burned down by some boys in a hoot, and was replaced now by the Miramichi Civic Centre.

I thought back, to those foolish thoughts Stafford and I once entertained; that when hockey expanded it would expand to Newcastle — that we would have our own NHL team. (In the part of me that has never been able to grow up, I still think we could do this — that the Hartford Whalers do not deserve a team. Certain hopes you have as a child keep you one forever. That, to quote Robert Browning, is what a heaven is for.)

And looking down at the river it was as if I could see us all.

T
HE TEAM
M
ICHAEL SHOULD
have been on was doing well. They beat Bathurst 3–2, which was never supposed to happen. The little peewee they had brought up, Tony LeBlanc, who had scored against Boston, was scoring for them. He had scored on a breakaway against Bathurst with a minute and ten seconds left. He was no bigger than Stafford. Yet he could move about you as if you were standing cold; he slipped through checks all year long, and he came out of nowhere from behind the net, could always tuck the puck behind the goal tender, and then raise his stick with one hand as he glided into an embrace, his big Bantam A shirt down to his knees.

A dozen times in a game you thought he would be creamed, only to watch him slip through, and head towards the net. And the older boys seemed to be like big brothers to him.

I mentioned that they had brought Darren up from the Peewees as well and had put him on the wing. The team had jelled since its loss to Boston, and was waiting to go back to
Boston in the spring to exact a terrible revenge. Even Phillip Luff knew enough to pass the puck so others could score.

The rink was becoming filled again for the Bantam As. Suddenly there was the idea that the town had a team again — kids who were giving everything they had, wearing ancient hockey sweaters and mismatched socks.

In the house league that Stafford and I still played in, we too had spectators — small children who had figure skating before us, the few rink rats who were obligated to be there, the woman who ran the concession stand, and a few mothers and fathers. Also the coach, who was the coach of the Bantam All-Stars also, and who Stafford was a terrible suck-up to. I suppose he knew I knew, and only wanted me to realize that he couldn’t help it.

Now and then, playing his heart out he would be castigated by the mother of one of the other players for allowing the team to fall behind. “Are you blind?” Sharon would yell at him. Stafford would wipe his eyes, would look over, smile and keep on going.

“Ah get off the ice and go sit down — who are you — the coach’s pet — hang around the coach — don’t worry now boys you can just
waa — Ik
in and score —
walllk
in and
sc-OORE. Idiot arse
is on the ice again. Ole Idiot Arse Piss the Bed is on the ice.”

And so it spread, and Stafford was known, secretly as Piss the Bed and Idiot Arse. If you went over and told people he was a sleepwalking, fall-down diabetic with a maniacal desire
to participate in events normal children around the country did, it might have made a difference. But he did not do this. Nor would he want anyone else to.

Of all the people who ever yelled and screamed at the coach or children, or bullied, I found mothers to be by far the worst. The most vicious. Every moment on the ice must have been agony for some children. And Stafford was one of those children. Those who made it with ease, like his brothers, or those who refused to let it destroy them like Michael would not have much idea what Stafford went through.

Sometimes we would stand there, as the play just carried on about us, nodding now and again to the other players as they skated by. Once or twice when Stafford touched the puck, usually having it hit his stick — he would yell out to the coach, his face gone mad with glee, “I touched the puck — I touched it.”

“Ya, good — great,” the coach would say. “Keep up the good work.”

Worse, was when Stafford’s sisters would arrive and yell out to us, “There’s Rocket and Pocket — there’s Rocket and Pocket.”