The Game (11 page)

With the kids at the back waiting for the team bus, the sidewalk in front of the Gardens is clear. I open a door to the lobby and drop my eyes to the floor, moving quickly for an entrance gate so as not to be recognized. I needn’t have bothered. The lobby has the near-empty look of a bus station at midday. There are a few untidy lines at ticket windows marked for future Gardens events; several unhurried clusters of mostly middle-aged men, tourists perhaps, talk idly, glancing here and there at the pictures on the walls. On the day of a game, a Canadiens game, I expected more. I wanted clamor and excitement, but except for a few general admission tickets that disappeared like phantoms many weeks ago (always to someone else), the rest of the tickets have been gone since season-ticket subscriptions were renewed last summer.

I am a few minutes early, happy/unhappy to go unnoticed, and decide to look around. Many of the same pictures are still here—the team pictures in the lobby, the pictures of Boesch and Day, of Barilko’s goal—but as I look at them, at the haircuts and the equipment, at the maskless goalies and bareheaded skaters, it is those pictures that now look old and dated to me. I look for the Richard picture, but it is gone; several action pictures from the Stanley Cup-winning teams of the sixties—of Frank Mahovlich, Tim Horton, Johnny Bower, Red Kelly, Bob Pulford—have gone up, but as I get to the end, I notice that I have seen few from the present. One or two action shots, a few ceremonial ones, of Leafs captain Darryl Sittler and owner Harold Ballard, of Sittler and Ballard and Sabres captain Danny Gare, of Ballard and Bobby Orr—

“Two Hockey Hall of Famers

Bobby Orr 1979 Harold E. Ballard 1977” (t)he caption reads—but little else, as if the legacy of the Leafs died with those teams more than ten years ago.

Now in his late seventies, Harold Ballard is the new star of the Leafs. He has become a Toronto, even a national, celebrity. Known locally as jovial and outrageous, nationally above all as outrageous, as owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs he is
ipso facto
a celebrity, and there is nothing he can say or do, nothing
anyone
can say or do, to change that. He can be unfair and erratic; he can be unequivocally wrong. It doesn’t matter. He is Ballard, owner of the Leafs. What he says, what he does, we pretend is news. In turn, used to the attention, he pretends that it isn’t his money that has bought him his celebrity. It is the dis-ease of the sports entrepreneur.

Ballard, George Steinbrenner, Ted Turner, Nelson Skalbania, Peter Pocklington, Jerry Buss—money buys celebrity, and celebrity means being able to say anything about anything and someone will report it as if it were true; money and celebrity together mean thinking that no one,
nothing
, can stop you. The cost is small—just a few millions among the scores you have—except sometimes to the fan. It is easy to say that a fan can stay at home, or at home he can change a channel and watch something else. But it isn’t as simple as that. A sports fan loves his sport.

A fan in Toronto loves hockey, and if the Leafs are bad, he loses something he loves and has no way to replace the loss.

Not long ago, I was speaking with a friend. I knew he was not a Leafs fan, and I was laughing at the team’s snowballing demise. My friend was laughing too, until suddenly, looking pained, he stopped.

He explained that when he had lived in Montreal, he was happy to see the Leafs lose. But now, living in Toronto, he felt differently. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m still not a Leafs fan, but I want to see good hockey and who else have I got to watch?”

Yet as his team sinks lower, Ballard continues to parade himself before us, apparently invulnerable—his Maple Leaf Gardens filled by more and more events, his television revenues increasing, his team selling out as they have since 1946; his celebrity status intact. The press and the public vie with each other in attacking him, then pause to praise his charitable generosity or his devotion to his late wife (maybe we’ve got him all wrong?); then, like the wrestling villain who touches his audience to make his next villainy seem worse, he does something or says something to start up the cycle again. But, check and checkmate—the currency of the celebrity is attention, and each angry attack only means more attention for him.

As a member of the Gardens board, as vice-president, he was perfect. Likeable, convivial, able to be disregarded at the proper time, without the title that brings the platform that brings the rest; but as president, as principal owner, he is very imperfect. And the Leafs fans suffer. Yet I can’t help feeling sorry for him. Though he confronts the public, almost challenging fans to stay home if they dare, laughing at them when they don’t, taking their money, telling them that he cares for nothing else, in part it must be a pose.

For as someone who has spent most of his life in hockey and with the Leafs, it is impossible to imagine that he doesn’t feel some of the immense sadness and anger a Leafs fan feels at seeing a once great team, a once great
institution
, now shabby.

The team arrived from Montreal by charter this morning. Lafleur and Robinson, in their longjohns, stand outside the dressing-room door, talking to Toronto reporters; Risebrough, a few feet away, planes and files some sticks for the game. When I walk into the room, Tremblay looks at me sharply.

“
Câlisse
, Dryden,” he snarls, “one set of rules for the team, another for you,” then, as I begin to feel uncomfortable, he smiles and slaps me hard on the back. Napier and Hughes shout around for unused tickets for more family and friends than they had yesterday, but too late, they are mocked and find none. Reading a Toronto newspaper, Lapointe suddenly crumples it in disgust.

“Lookit this,” he roars, pointing to the paper. “‘The great Leafs-Canadiens rivalry.’ Who the hell they think they’re kidding? Shit, they must think we’re the goddamn Pittsburgh Penguins.”

Startled, we look up, waiting for a smile, waiting for a punch line, but none comes.

The conversation returns to Houle and his breakaway against the Sabres. Quickly it moves to Houle’s other breakaways, and as each is remembered, several others come to mind. I yell out my favorite—one last season in Chicago against Tony Esposito. Houle’s smile disappears. “
Câlisse
, you can’t stop me,” he growls. I stop laughing—he’s right, I can’t—but he presses on. “Some of the goals you let in.
Câlisse
, Reggie Leach, Schmautz,” brightening with each name he says.

He is beginning to sound like a catalogue, so I interrupt him.

“Hey, what’re ya starting in on me for?” I ask, trying to sound wound-ed; but it’s no use. The bandwagon has stopped, turned, and is coming my way. Ten voices, busy with their skates, come alive:

“…McDonald…” someone shouts.

“…Ramsay…” says another.

“René Robert…”

“Barber…”

The names stream out—Dionne, Gare, Tommy Williams stored away waiting for this moment, each name bringing a quick laugh, then a longer one as the memory of the goal returns. Finally, it is Shutt who remembers; it would be Shutt. “Hey, what about Plager’s goal?” he chirps, and there is a scream of laughter.

I had had a promising start, then everything came unravelled. In the next ten minutes, St. Louis scored three goals, at least two of which I should have stopped. I survived goalless the next few minutes, and began to feel better, wondering if I had finally settled down enough, if Bowman thought I had settled down enough, to play the rest of the game. With eight seconds left in the period, there was a faceoff in our zone. The puck went to the boards; Bob Plager, a big, ponderously slow defenseman for the Blues, came in from his left point position and flipped it towards the net. I reached out to catch it, and felt it hit off the heel of my glove, then watched mesmerized as it rolled up my wrist, through my legs, onto the ice, and over the goal-line, just as the siren sounded to end the period.

When the second period began, I was on the bench.

“
Câlisse
, Bob Plager,” Lapointe mutters to himself, still disbelieving, “it was so slow, there were three minutes left when he shot it…”

Hah hah hah.

“…the ref almost called it back—delay of game…”

Hah hah hah.

The next year, when we were back to play the Blues, a local announcer asked me for an interview. He apologized for not knowing much about hockey, but I reassured him, going into my “you don’t really need to know anything about hockey; it’s just like everything else” routine. Suddenly, his eyes brightened.

“Hey, you’re the guy Plager scored on from the parking lot last year. That was his last goal, ya know. Hell, it was almost his first. Hah hah hah, well I’ll be…”

The names continue on without a break. A little desperate, I try again.

“Hey wait a minute. Wait a minute!” I shout. “Getting back to your breakaway, Reggie…” But no one is listening.

“…hey, remember Larry Romanchych?” someone shouts, and there is more laughter.

“…and Simon Nolet?” “… and what about Tom Reid’s goal?”

“…Tom Reid’s goal! That was seven years ago! How did we get on to this?”

It is not easy to say what Réjean Houle does for a team. On the one hand he is a good skater and forechecker, capable of playing any of the forward positions, a better-than-average playmaker and penalty-killer; on the other, he is not big, not strong, not tough, often injured, a worse-than-average shooter, and has surprisingly little goal-scoring touch. On a winning team, where goodwill and kind words abound, it is often easy to pretend that someone is better than he is (on the Orr-Esposito Bruins, Derek Sanderson was a “great” player), but by his own admission Houle is “very, very average.” He says it without bravado, without the survivor’s ubiquitous pride, not intending to appear modest as others insist on doing (preferring to praise themselves by implication for having the character to overcome their defects), but because, as he says evenly, “It’s the plain truth.”

If he was a slightly better player, but mostly if he allowed it to be so, his story would have an almost monumental quality to it. Instead, typically underplayed, it is a quiet story, a nice story, a story sure to have a happy ending, though it is far from over.

Up close, he has a little boy’s face, lumped and scarred by a decade of pucks and high-sticks. But stand back, a few feet more each year, let the lumps and scars go out of focus and disappear, and you will see the real Réjean Houle, still untouched: the eyes and smile that tighten and twinkle; the shock of thick brown hair, his too-long sideburns, his persistent wisps of cowlick, the fan of hair that falls on his forehead. And listen to his voice—its highpitched, exuberant bursts, never far from a laugh, his guileless candor and simple eloquence that sound naive. It is the look and sound of a fourteen-year-old boy, and it is both real and deceptive.

He was born in Rouyn, a small mining town in northwestern Quebec, neighbor to Noranda and to the small mining towns of northeastern Ontario a few miles away. In the heart of the Canadian Shield, a vast sweep of lakes and forest and mostly rock, it was an area largely unsettled until early this century when rich ore bodies were discovered—nickel and silver mainly to the south and west, gold to the west, iron, lead, zinc, and copper in and around Rouyn—and towns went up as if overnight. Houle remembers Rouyn as a town of
travailleurs
, workers—Québécois, Italians, Poles—miners like his father, who worked for the giant multinational Noranda Mines. Noranda, on the other side of the tracks, north and west, was where “the big boss-es” of the mines lived. They were English (“as usual,” Houle laughs) from Montreal and Toronto, and lived in big white houses, with big gardens and beautiful lawns. Houle was rarely in Noranda, except for hockey games, and remembers being uncomfortable there, as if he didn’t belong. Yet asked if he ever felt any bitterness or resentment, he said without apology, “No, I respect people for what they are.”

His father was a driller, working in stopes, big hollowed-out caves deep underground, drilling holes for dynamite charges in the face of the ore body. The base wages at the mine were low, and he worked hard for bonuses, sometimes working faster than he should. One time a heavy wrecking-bar bounced back, hitting his face and knocking out several teeth; another time, he badly injured a hand. It was dangerous work, Houle recalls; then, suddenly remembering a jaw he had broken twice, a leg, finger, toe, and collarbone once each, a shoulder separated, the other dislocated, and the more than two hundred stitches that line his face, “like a hockey player,” he says, and laughs with great delight.

But his father’s injuries were mostly inside him, and, like his fellow miners, he tried to keep them there, avoiding doctors as best he could.

Finally, at forty-two, his health deteriorating, and spitting up black saliva, he was retired from the mine, later to work in a halfway house for delinquents in Rouyn. I asked him if his father had ever made his experience in the mine a lesson to him. Houle said that his father often talked about his work, and like every other father wanted something better for his children, but that no, it was never a lesson. His father liked being a miner, he said.

Houle remembers his childhood mostly in a series of hockey images: the games under a solitary street light, the only one that his street had; a friend’s backyard rink, with lights for the early northern nights; Saturday morning, every second week, his father working from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., sleeping for two hours, then taking him to play; Saturday afternoons and Sundays at a local
collège
(high school), where on a single rink there were four pucks, scores of kids, and four games played simultaneously—three across its width, one down its length; and Saturday nights, on a couch in the living room with his family, listening to announcers René Lecavalier and Jean-Maurice Bailly, and watching the Canadiens on TV. They were his team, and “Boom-Boom” Geoffrion was his favorite player—“I thought he was spectacular,” he would say later. “A kind of showman, and when he scored goals, he showed lots of expression, smiling, jumping up and down. I liked that.” Yet while those around him dreamed of playing in the NHL, Houle did not. Not until later when he was fourteen or fifteen years old. I asked him why. He paused a moment, choosing his words carefully as if unsure I would understand. “You see, working-class people have no confidence,” he said in his quiet, straightforward way. “It just takes a while to get some.” Later, he explained it to me another way, and in doing so told much about himself. “I never dream of something I cannot be,” he said.