Dispatches from the Sporting Life (2 page)

Too many Montreal institutions gone.

Pa’s sports were not, as games are for so many fans these days, vessels for statistics or of contrived corporate competition—a city’s glory purchased by some conglomerate churning money at the gate. Nor was the game, as Pa writes, the place for “intellectual gibberish”—a tableau for some eclectic, European, Umberto Eco–like reduction of philosophical life. It was, instead, a very real matter. It was
about getting ahead, about making your way in the world—as a Canadian. No, we can be more specific than that: as a Montrealer, of the non-WASP kind, during the time that city was original and great.

Pa was serious in his allegiances: hockey in winter, and baseball in summer. Snooker, year-round, was something he could relax to—playing, or watching the sport on television, after his working day was done. Fishing, a pastime he undertook later in life, was, I suspect, a pursuit that had more to do with a feeling of having arrived—as well as his love of the Canadian outdoors, an attribute of my father’s writing that is often underestimated. It’s there in
Barney’s Version,
and in the
a mari usque ad mare
romp of
Solomon Gursky Was Here
—and, of course, in Duddy Kravitz’s dream of purchasing all the properties bordering a Laurentian lake. The love of sports had, most of all, to do with home. In all those years in London, cricket, soccer, rugby—they just didn’t figure. Hockey and baseball were part of the patrimony in ways those sports could never be. What the journalism offered, those forays into Gordie Howe’s garage or to a bodybuilding convention, was the chance to get away from the typewriter and drop in on lives other than his own. One of the unusual complaints my father would sometimes make is that his literary success had come too soon. He’d not had to work in an office or hold down a factory job to get by, so he’d lost out on the material those experiences might have supplied him. The sports assignments helped satisfy that necessary, writer’s curiosity.

Morning in the Richler house, before my father set to work: a hard-boiled egg rolls in a puddle of steaming water on the chopping board. “I made you breakfast,” he tells my younger brother, Jacob, his fishing companion of choice (that’s him on the cover), who’s used to this routine. Pa prepares my mother’s loving tray—hot black coffee with the froth still riding on it, a glass of orange juice freshly squeezed, and my mother’s seaweed and garlic pills—and carries it to the bedroom at the back of the apartment. No one else goes there, unless summoned. In a moment he’s back at the table, for sliced tomatoes and toast, and a look at the sports section of the Montreal
Gazette.

“Here,” he says, handing one of his five children the Business or the Classified pages—
chortle, chortle
—“you want a piece of the paper?” Then it’s off to the loo to catch up on the Expos or the NHL.

“Richard Nixon,” he says, “always read the sports pages first.”

Hockey was his Canadian writer’s trump card, my father capable of using sports as a vehicle for just about anything—as a way of applauding the virtuosity of Frank Augustyn, the
premier danseur
son of a steel worker from Hamilton, or, in
St. Urbain’s Horseman,
Jake Hersh’s fantasy of a life of greater moral rectitude. Try this passage, for instance, imagined as only a Montreal lad could, the reverie of someone who, as a boy, watched the likes of black Jackie Robinson play for the Montreal Royals, the farm team for Branch Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers. Leo Durocher was the coach:

Originals, and rogues, in the Nixon vein, were something else sports had to offer. Iffy characters who’d made a success of themselves against the odds: Gordie Howe, “a child of prairie penury,” the wild-eyed Maurice Richard, or the Jewish baseball player Kermit Kitman, “one of ours,” a scholar who later went into the shmatte trade. And let’s not forget Don Cherry, an affectionate target of my father’s pen. Once the Boston Bruins coach, now a television commentator, he is known in Canada not least for his outrageous, over-the-top plaid suits—and, in my father’s words, for having been hockey’s patriotic xenophobe, forever railing against “chickenshit foreign commies taking away hockey jobs that rightfully belong to our own slash-and-grab Canadian thugs.” These European players, in Cherry’s view, insisted on wearing masks, protecting their teeth and otherwise dragging down the game’s fine traditions. My father later suggested that Cherry should be Canada’s next governor general, as his flamboyant dress sense would satisfy the demands of the oifice, and appeal to jocks and homosexuals alike. “What do you expect the guy to say,” said Cherry, clearly miffed, “I mean, with a name like
Mordecai?”

Looking over these essays, I wondered why, as a boy, I’d never asked my father if he could skate—even as he praised his great friend Jack Clayton, the English director of
Room at the Top
(with whom he worked on the screenplay of John Braine’s novel, which won an Oscar) for being good on skates. I found the answer in these pages: he couldn’t afford a pair—though it’s also true that observing, and not playing, is the writer’s game. Amazing, that I never asked him.

So Pa would be off to the bleachers at Delormier Downs, to take in a ball game with the Montreal Royals—or, more often than not, to the poolrooms of Park Avenue. Pa, as I knew him, was a man who bought himself few treats. (One Christmas he was given a bottle of Remy Martin V.S.O.P., his favourite brand of cognac, by each of his five children—we couldn’t think of anything else he would like more, and he was delighted). There was a motorboat for the country house on the lake in the Eastern Townships, the place where he preferred to write, and when the childrens’ educations had all been paid for, he bought himself a snooker table, a throwback to his youth. Ma housed it in a beautiful, airy, cedar-and-glass addition on a terrace overlooking the water—and in winter, the frozen lake. An old chisel that my father’s father had used is pinned to one wall of the snooker room. On it are written, in yellow chalk, the words “Moses Isaac Richler—
No Success!”
On Boxing Day, we’d host a tournament, Pa inviting Sweetpea and his other local drinking pals, Eastern Townships descendants of United Empire Loyalists who’d been not much transformed as characters in
Solomon Gursky Was Here.
Ma would cook up a pot of
her wonderful chili, safely removed from the boozy action, various of her children and their friends joining the day-long party, playing, at $20 each, for a pot of maybe $200 or $300.

The Richler kids didn’t do very well. No success, I’m afraid, letting their father down—
in public.
Pa would usually make it to the final rounds, as would my brother, Daniel, but any of us was hard put to sink three balls in a row. Pa, seeking to improve our play, taught the kids a couple of hustling tricks: how to distract your opponent by standing behind the pocket he is aiming at, tossing the cue from hand to hand as a Catskills entertainer might a microphone, subtly putting off his aim. A bit of cheating, I gathered, is acceptable in sports—as long as you are not caught, that is. The lesson was not so much that crime pays (which it probably did, for a couple of his poolroom pals), but that you need to be vigilant if you’re going to play a good game. As Max Kravitz writes to Duddy—but affectionately, note—“Remember, the world is full of shits.” Or, as Jake Hersh is told by his father, Izzy, in
St. Urbain’s Horseman,
“You want me to be proud? Earn a living. Stand on your own two feet.” That was the kind of advice he liked to give.

For my pa, sports were also about escape. When I was in my early teens, I remember—I think we were watching some old Pathé Joe Louis newsreel, or could it have been a James Cagney movie?—he told me that boxing and baseball were easy ways out of the ghetto, for blacks and Jews especially. It is interesting to me that Pa writes of the NHL athletes of his day that they were “the progeny of miners and railway
shop workers and welders,” and that in the summer they were “driving beer trucks or working on construction sites” to get by. If it’s an idea that is repeated, in subtle variations, it’s because it is one of the most important ones. My father was a ghetto boy. He did not forget where he came from. (That was a favourite bit of his writer’s advice.)

For these reasons, he did not care much for modern players, earning big bucks yet unwilling to go into the corners. By and large, they were athletes schooled by hectoring parents on covered rinks at 5:00 a.m., and not on some frozen backyard or river. They did not appeal much to the storyteller in him. In their smart Gucci suits, with PR flacks to stand between them and the kind of clumsy—but poetic—Ring Lardner utterances he so enjoyed, they struck him as men without character, too specifically trained. Wayne Gretzky, I suppose, put to work by his father, Walt, from an early age, was the beginning of that sea-change. Pa preferred the struggle: the striving Pete Rose, grittily singling his way into the record books, every hit a determined grunt; the heroic obduracy of Jackie Robinson, enduring the abuse ordered on him deliberately by Branch Rickey, who was readying his brilliant shortstop to break the colour barrier in baseball’s National League. Or, consider it, the unknowing certainty of young Gordie Howe: “pre-paring for what he knew lay ahead, he sat at the kitchen table night after night, practising his autograph”—and long after that, amazingly, at the age of fifty-two, playing on the same line as his children, Mark and Marty. It interests me, as his son, that Pa quotes—
unmockingly—this poem of the third Howe boy, Murray, a pre-med student.

These were stories about talent, determination, and the hunger for a new and better life—a bit of fame, fortune, prowess—but they are also about choosing.

Pa found his own unlikely way out, though he never did leave his beloved Montreal behind. Not in all those years in Britain, perusing the hockey listings in the
Herald Tribune
—or, in the sanctity of his loft office, conjuring up the subtext of a crazy expats’ ball game in London’s Hampstead Heath (that chapter from
St. Urbain’s Horseman
is included here). He never did stray far from home, eventually, in 1972, coming back to it all, to the seat of it—because he felt he was drying up as writer, he told Ma. (He liked to quote V. S. Naipaul, who’d said of his own writer’s relationship with Englishmen that “I don’t know what they do when they go home at night”—an explanation for the family’s move from Britain that Ma did not easily accept.) That summer, he took the kids to see the Expos in Jarry Park frequently. And come winter, he told his friend the longtime Montreal
Gazette
sports columnist, Dink Caroll, who’d supply us with a pair of his Forum press tickets from time to time, that I was a fleet defenceman.
I think he
wanted
that to be true, and I remember having to keep up the pretence for many years, until Dink died.

Then, in June 1998, my father telephoned me from Montreal—I was living in London at the time—and told me that he was going into hospital, the Montreal General, to have a cancerous kidney removed. I flew to Montreal, knowing remarkably little about operations and hospitals, thank God, and spent the nights there in his small, gloomy, dilapidated room. (So much of his Montreal felt diminished then.) We rented a television set so that I could watch the World Cup and Pa, I’d expected, the hockey playoffs. Except that he was not interested. He was on morphine—hell for a mind like his—and other thoughts were racing through his unfettered consciousness. It must have been the surgical masks of the doctors who’d leaned over him on the operating table, stemming an unexpected loss of blood, that provided his delirium with a thread of crazy reason. “No!” said Pa, bolt upright, that great head of thick hair a standing tussle, when, a few days after the operation, a nurse tried to put an oxygen mask on his face to help him through his recovery. “No. I won’t—
it’s an anti-Semitic machine.”
Even the French-Canadian doctors laughed at that. Then, the queue of doctors and nurses abating for a while, Pa would drift in and out of sleep and the topics that were his lifetime’s concerns: Canadian politics, Israel and Palestine—and hockey.

“Noah?”

“Yes, Pa?”

“Where did the U.S. make the speech recognizing Israel? Was it in San Francisco?”

“I think so, Pa, in May 1948, wasn’t it? Harry Truman sent a cable.”

“Oh dear, oh dear. Who would have thought it would all end so badly?”

“It’s not over yet, Pa.”

What does he mean, I wonder. Israel? Himself? Pa lifts his arm, as if it were a stranger’s, looking at the intravenous feed indignantly. Then he rolls onto his side and lets out a big sigh.

“What are we going to do in this country? Canada’s in such a mess. Did you get to the Knesset? Did you get to the meeting of the men with masks?”

“No, Pa. What meeting was that?”

“That Don Cherry—ha ha!—great guy.”

And, before giving in to sleep again, he says, “But can you imagine,
hockey in June.”

Three years later, Pa went into hospital again, and this time he died. The family, according to his wishes, buried him in Montreal’s Mount Royal cemetery, in a grave on Rose Hill, overlooking his boyhood home on St. Urbain Street. (The “ghetto” is a much more affluent community now.) We put this notice in the paper.