Dispatches from the Sporting Life (17 page)

I
n the distant future, after I die before my time, a promising 120-year-old writer, my seminal novel unfinished, I can anticipate my youngest son saying to his son, “I’ll tell you what your grandfather was like. Wonderful, truly wonderful, except for Wednesday and Saturday nights from October to May.”

“What happened then?”

“There were hockey games on TV, and if I dared to tiptoe into the living room to inform him, say, I’ve just won a scholarship to Harvard, or I’m getting married tomorrow, or, ‘Hey, congratulations! My wife just gave birth—you’re a grandfather,’ he would glare at me and say, ‘Not now, you fool. We can discuss such trivialities between periods.’”

My wife will have another story to tell.

“On New Year’s Eve 1975, when all the other ladies were preparing to go out to dinner parties or dances, dressed in their finest gowns, he took me to the Forum, where I could eat lukewarm hot dogs and watch the Canadiens play the Russians.”

The quality of play isn’t what it once was; the endless regular season is meaningless. After 840 games, only five of the twenty-one teams in the NHL have been eliminated from the playoffs. I know, I know. But once that first puck is dropped, I’m married to my TV set. Come game time, if one of my daughters is foolish enough to protest that
Hamlet,
with Olivier, is playing on another channel, I will point out, justifiably, that I know how
Hamlet
comes out but not how the Montreal Canadiens will fare tonight against the fabled New Jersey Devils.

In the fall, professional sports schedules overlapping as they do, I watched football, a baseball playoff, and a hockey game all in the same day.

Bliss.

Speaking of baseball, Canadian paranoia, never far from the surface, suffered a vintage eruption even as the skies turned wintry, the trees went black and bare, and we were adjusting to the coming hockey season. In a bar where I drink, nobody was surprised when the Toronto Blue Jays lost the first game of their crucial end-of-the-season series with the Yankees. Instead, there was much wagging of knowledgeable heads. “Of course, the Jays are not going to make it,” I was told. “If they did, can you imagine what a disaster it would be for NBC-TV? The fix is in.”

As we all know, the Blue Jays did take their division title but choked in the playoffs they were favoured to win. Mind you, by failing to appear in and perhaps win a World Series, they did avoid a possible international incident. Obviously had the Blue Jays won the World Series, calls of congratulations to the
dugout would have come from both President Reagan and Prime Minister Mulroney. Which one would manager Bobby Cox have put on hold?

Another problem: Even had the Blue Jays won, after the shouting had died down it would still not have counted as much as it once did to bring home our true Holy Grail, the Stanley Cup. It would only mean that Toronto’s hired hands out of California and Florida had beat somebody else’s mercenaries out of the same sunbelt states. Once, however, it was different, certainly in the grand game of hockey. Once, if the Canadiens won a Stanley Cup, something of a habit in the old days, the players who had turned the trick were either from Montreal or Thurso or Trois-Rivières or Chicoutimi, which is to say they were Quebeckers like the rest of us. They were
our
team, unlike the players, however splendid, who performed for other dynasties, say the Yankees or the Reds, but were not really of New York or Cincinnati, Pete Rose being the happy exception to that rule.

Once hockey was ours, its nuances an enigma to most Americans and just about everybody British. When Canadians ran into each other in New York or London, cities rumoured to have other things going for them, we could talk about hockey, our joy, our secret idiom, excluding sniffy superior foreigners, much as my parents used to lapse into Yiddish on a bus when they didn’t want
them
to know what they were going on about.

Now all that has changed. Though most Americans are still without puck sense, something red-blooded Canadians are born with, they do
support fourteen of the twenty-one teams in the NHL. Where once the Canadiens, as well as lesser teams here, used to comb the northern bush and mining towns for raw talent, today they scout Sweden and Finland, they tempt adolescent Czechs to defect, and—above all—they cover the American colleges. Having watched a number of skilful but timorous Swedes on NHL ice, a sportswriting friend of mine has observed, “I now understand how come Sweden was neutral in the Second World War.” But young Americans do not avoid the corners; they are doing very well indeed here, six of them now regulars on the Montreal Canadiens. They are a new hockey breed—young men who have seen cutlery before, know how to dial long distance, and are capable of saying more to a young lady than “How much?”

As if that weren’t enough of an intrusion, we are now being asked to suffer an American carpetbagger. That notorious amateur professional, George Plimpton, has had the audacity to surface with a book about our game,
Open Net.
Picking up this necessarily offensive trifle, I recalled the hero of Walker Percy’s memorable novel
The Moviegoer.
Only after a Hollywood company had filmed his hometown did it actually seem real to him. Would Plimpton, I wondered, having exhausted the possibilities of baseball, football, golf, and hockey—coming to our game in desperate middle age, as it were—make hockey real or would his cultural imperialist gesture be redeemed (for me, at any rate) by a plethora of boners, proving Plimpton out of his league at last?

There are, it grieves me to report, no boners in Plimpton’s presumptuous study. If it is not the most
knowledgeable book I have ever read about the game, it is certainly one of the most engaging. It is so intelligent, charged with such enthusiasm, such fun to read, that I can even forgive Plimpton, who is a fellow
GQ
contributing writer, for revealing in his final chapter that he once actually addressed the “Junior Achievers” of Edmonton. This, I should explain, is a group of prairie brats so unspeakably pushy as to sell stocks in their little companies and busy themselves with bottom lines and profit margins at an age when they could have been doing much more socially useful things, such as shoplifting or looking up dirty words in the dictionary. However, the trip did afford the intrepid Plimpton an opportunity to go into the nets against the Great Gretzky. Mind you, by this time Plimpton was an experienced net minder, certainly as literate as Ken Dryden, if not quite so adroit between the pipes.

The core of Plimpton’s entertaining book deals with the post-Orr-and-Esposito Boston Bruins, a team that allowed him to mind the nets occasionally at their training camp. Why, they even let him risk life and limb in an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Flyers, or Broad Street Bullies, as they were then known, an aggregation of thumpers and slashers and goons that included Gary Dornhoefer and Bobby Clarke and Dave “the Hammer” Schultz. Plimpton’s account of his net-minding stint in this game and the teasing in the Boston locker room that led up to it is rendered with considerable panache.

I am especially grateful to Plimpton for his portrait of Don Cherry, who was then coach of the Bruins. Cherry, whom I had long ago dismissed as insufferably brash, is revealed as a likable and astute
observer of the game. He was particularly good on the days when he had to play for the notorious Eddie Shore, a former hockey great, in minor league Springfield. Shore, Cherry confirms, “was the stingiest guy you ever heard of. To keep the light bills down, we had our practices in the semi-darkness…. When it was payroll time, you never knew quite what was going to happen. If the payroll was too high for the week he’d simply fine guys for poor play… though maybe the guy hadn’t been on the ice for a month!” Shore, Cherry quotes, also had “these strange ideas about sex and especially sex and the athlete. Once, when the team was going terrible, he called a meeting for all the players and their wives, and in this little steamy locker room, with the jockstraps hanging from the pegs, he proceeded to tell the wives they were allowing their husbands too much sex. It was affecting their play. ‘Now you just cut that stuff out!’ he yelled at them.”

Plimpton soon discovers that goaltenders, who contend with pucks zooming in on them at one hundred miles per hour, are a special breed. The immensely talented Glenn Hall was regularly sick before each game as well as between periods. Jacques Plante, a Canadiens great, once commented on the indignity of allowing an easy shot to slip past. “Imagine yourself sitting in an office and you make an error of some kind—call it an error of judgment or a mistake over the phone. All of a sudden, behind you, a bright red light goes on, the walls collapse and there are eighteen thousand people shouting and jeering at you, calling you an imbecile and an idiot and a bum and throwing things at you, including garbage.”

While a player is with a team, the camaraderie is intense—there is nothing else like it—but retiring is hard, very hard. “You see your teammates every day,” former Bruin John Wensink explained, “and then when it’s over, it’s over. You never see them again. You wonder why so-and-so who was your friend, and you roomed with him on the road trips, wouldn’t give a call when he comes through town. You could sit around and tell stories. Have a beer. He could come to your house and see your children…. But they don’t call. They never call. You wonder. You wonder. After you leave, there is no contact with anyone. It hurts. It makes you feel like you’re a gust in the wind.”

According to Don Cherry, “the only club which has any concern about this is, as you might expect, Montreal. The Canadiens. In the Forum they have a room set aside for their old-timers. It’s down the corridor; the old players can go in there with their wives and sit around….”

George Plimpton’s
Open Net
belongs up there on that still unfortunately small shelf of literate hockey books, alongside the best of them.

I am grateful, as I am sure Plimpton is too, that he survived his ordeal without ever taking a puck in the groin, “ringing the berries,” as they say. The pain, one goalie warned him, is like “taking your top lip and folding it back over your head,” a thrill professionals contend with each time out.

January 1986

A
s usual, early one morning in August, I climbed upstairs to my studio in our dacha on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, tea tray in hand, and sat down at my long plank table, ready to begin work. I could no longer make out the cigarillo burns and tea stains on the table, because it was now buried end to end in snooker books by various hands, newspaper clippings, photocopies, computer printouts, stacks of
Snooker Scene,
and tournament programs and press releases. I just had time to flick on the power on my electric typewriter when the phone rang. It was an old Laurier poolroom chum who was still driving a taxi at the age of seventy-three. Last time I had run into him, outside that singularly ugly warehouse, the Molson Centre, where the Canadiens now play hockey of a sort, he was trying to flog tickets for that evening’s game. “So,” he said, “you became a writer and I became a scalper, and we’re both
alter kockers
now.” We exchanged phone numbers. I promised to meet him for lunch one day, but I had never called. Now he was on the phone at 7:15 a.m.

“Have you seen this morning’s
Gazette?”
he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Maxie Berger died.”

“How old was he?” I asked, because this information is of increasing interest to me.

“Eighty-three. I want you to write something nice about him. He was a good fighter. A
mensch
too.”

“I’ll call you soon, Abe, and we’ll have that lunch.”

“Yeah, sure.”

H. L. Mencken once wrote, “I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”

George Bernard Shaw was also disdainful: “It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits of which necessity have imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from kicking and beating their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.” Or each other.

Back in the days when I used to hang out in poolrooms, boxers were greatly admired by my bunch, some of whom could rattle off the names of the top ten in each division, as listed in Nat Fleischer’s
Ring
magazine. I had hoped to qualify for the Golden Gloves but had been taken out in a qualifying three-rounder; my ambition then was not a Booker Prize or a perch on the
New York Times
bestseller list but a Friday night main bout in Madison Square Garden, sponsored on radio by Gillette razor blades (“Look sharp! Feel sharp! Be sharp!”).

At the time, I believed snooker to be a game
played only by working-class hooligans like us. I was unaware that Montreal’s most elite men’s clubs (the Mount Royal, the Mount Stephen) boasted oak-panelled rooms with nifty antique tables. All right, that was naive of me. But I thought then, and still do, that no sport comes without its class or racial baggage.