Dispatches from the Sporting Life (9 page)

In the lobby of the Malmen, Bobby Kromm, the truculent coach of the Smoke Eaters, was shouting
at a Swedish journalist. Other players, reporters, camp followers, cops,
agents provocateurs,
and strong-armed hotel staff milled about, seemingly bored. Outside, kids with their noses flattened against the windows tried to attract the attention of the players who slouched in leather chairs. Suddenly the Russian team, off to a game, emerged from the elevators, already in playing uniforms and carrying sticks. A Canadian journalist whispered to me, “Don’t they look sinister?” As a matter of fact, if you overlooked the absence of facial stitches, they closely resembled the many Canadians of Ukrainian origin who play in the National Hockey League.

Bobby Kromm and his assistant manager, Don Freer, were also off to the game, but they agreed to meet me at eight o’clock.

When I returned to the Malmen that evening, I saw a car parked by the entrance, three girls waiting in the backseat. Kids, also hoping to attract the players’ attention, were banging coins against the lobby windows. The players ignored them, sucking on matchsticks. Kromm, Freer, and I went into the dining room, and while I ordered a cognac I was gratified to see that the reputedly terrifying Smoke Eaters, those behemoths who struck fear into the hearts of both Swedish mothers and Russian defencemen, stuck to coffee and pie.

Kromm, assuming our elderly waiter could understand English, barked his order at him and was somewhat put out—in fact, he complained in a voice trained to carry out to centre ice—when the waiter got his order wrong. The waiter began to mutter. “You see,” Kromm said, “they just don’t like Canadians here.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“Why do they serve us pork chops,
cold
pork chops,
for breakfast?”

“If you don’t like it here, why don’t you check out and move right into another hotel?”

This wasn’t possible, Kromm explained. Their stay at the Malmen was prepaid. It had been arranged by John Ahearne, European president of the International Ice Hockey Federation, who, as it turned out, also ran a travel agency. “If they’d treat us good here,” Kromm said, “we’d treat them good.”

Freer explained that the Smoke Eaters had nothing against the Swedes, but they felt the press had used them badly.

“They called me a slum,” Kromm said. “Am I a slum?”

“No. But what,” I asked, “is your big complaint here?”

Bobby Kromm pondered briefly. “We’ve got nothing to do at night. Why couldn’t they give us a Ping-Pong table?”

Were these men the terror of Stockholm? On the contrary. It seemed to me they would have delighted the heart of any YMCA athletic director. Freer told me proudly that nine of the twenty-one players on the team had been born and raised in Trail and that ten of them worked for the CM and S.

“What does that stand for?” I asked.

“I dunno,” he said.

It stands for Consolidated Mining and Smelting, and Bobby Kromm is employed as a glassblower by the company. All of them would be compensated for lost pay.

Kromm said, “We can’t step out of the hotel without feeling like monkeys in a cage. People point you out on the streets and laugh.”

“It might help if you didn’t wear those blazing red coats everywhere.”

“We haven’t any other coats.”

I asked Kromm why European players didn’t go in for body checking.

“They condone it,” he said, “that’s why.”

I must have looked baffled.

“They condone it. Don’t you understand?”

I did, once I remembered that when Kromm had been asked by another reporter for his version of the girl-in-the-lobby incident, he had said, “Okay, I’ll give you my impersonation of it.”

Kromm and Freer were clear about one thing. “We’d never come back here again.”

Jackie McLeod, the only player on the team with National Hockey League experience, didn’t want to come back again either. I asked him if he had, as reported, been wakened by hostile telephone calls. He had been wakened, he said, but the calls weren’t hostile. “Just guys in nightclubs wanting us to come out and have a drink with them.”

While Canadian and Swedish journalists were outraged by Kowalchuk’s misadventures, the men representing international news agencies found the tournament dull and Stockholm a subzero and most expensive bore. Late every night the weary reporters, many of whom had sat through three hockey games a day in a cold arena, gathered in the makeshift press club at the Hotel Continental. Genuine melancholy usually set in at 2:00 a.m.

“If only we could get one of the Russian players to defect.”

“You crazy? To work for a lousy smelting factory in Trail? Those guys have it really good, you know.”

The lowest paid of all the amateurs were the Americans, who were given $20 spending money for the entire European tour; and the best off, individually, was undoubtedly the Swedish star, Tumba Johansson. Tumba, a $10-a-game amateur, had turned down a Boston Bruins contract offer but not, I feel, because he was intent on keeping his status pure. A national hero, Tumba earns a reputed $40,000 a year through a hockey equipment manufacturer. First night on the ice not many Swedish players wore helmets. “Don’t worry,” a local reporter said, “they’ll be wearing their helmets for Tumba on Wednesday. Wednesday they’re on TV.”

It was most exhilarating to be a Canadian in Stockholm. Everywhere else I’ve been in Europe I’ve generally had to explain where and what Canada was, that I was neither quite an American nor really a colonial. But in Sweden there was no need to fumble or apologize. Canadians are known, widely known, and widely disliked. It gave me a charge, this—a real charge—as if I actually came from a country important enough to be feared.

The affable Helge Berglund claims there are more than a hundred thousand active players and about seven thousand hockey teams in Sweden. How fitting, he reflects, that the Johanneshov
isstadion
should be the scene of the world championship competition. “The stadium’s fame as the Mecca of ice hockey,” he continues in his own bouncy style, “is once more sustained.”

My trouble was I couldn’t get into Mecca.

“You say that you have just come from London for the
Maclean’s,”
the official said warily, “but how do I know you are not a… chancer?”

With the help of the Canadian embassy, I was able to establish that I was an honest reporter.

“I could tell you were not a chancer,” the official said, smiling now. “A man doesn’t flow all the way from London just for a free ticket.”

“You’re very perceptive,” I said.

“They think here I am a fool that I do everybody favours—even the Russians. But if I now go to Moscow, they do me a favour and if I come to London,” he said menacingly, “you are happy to do me a favour too.”

Inside the
isstadion,
the Finns were playing the West Germans. A sloppy, lacklustre affair. Very little body contact. If a Finn and a West German collided, they didn’t exactly say excuse me; neither did any of them come on in rough National Hockey League style.

I returned the same night, Monday, to watch the Smoke Eaters play the exhausted, dispirited Americans. Down four goals to begin with, the Canadians easily rallied to win 10–4. The game, a dull one, was not altogether uninstructive. I had been placed in the press section and in the seats below me agitated agency men, reporters from Associated Press, United Press International, Canadian Press, and other news organizations, sat with pads on their knees and telephones clapped to their ears. There
was a scramble around the American nets and a goal was scored.

“Um, it looked like number 10 to me,” one of the agency men ventured.

“No, no—it was number 6.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m with Harry,” the man from another agency said. “I think it was number 10.”

A troubled pause.

“Maybe we ought to wait for the official scorer?”

“Tell you what, as long as we all agree it was number 10—”

“Done.”

All at once, the agency men began to talk urgently into their telephones.

“… and the Smoke Eaters add yet another tally. The second counter of the series for…”

The next game I saw—Canada vs. Czechoslovakia—was what the sporting writers of my Montreal boyhood used to call the big one, a four pointer. Whoever lost this one was unlikely to emerge world champion. Sensing the excitement, maybe even hoping for a show of violence, some fifteen thousand people turned up for the match. Most of them were obliged to stand for the entire game, maybe two hours.

This was an exciting contest, the lead seesawing back and forth throughout. The Czech amateurs are not only better paid than ours but play with infinitely more elegance. Superb stickhandlers and accurate passers, they skated circles around the Smoke Eaters, overlooking only one thing: in order to score frequently, it is necessary to shoot on the nets. While
the Czechs seemed loath to part with the puck, the more primitive Canadians couldn’t get rid of it quickly enough. Their approach was to wind up and belt the puck in the general direction of the Czech zone, all five players digging in after it.

The spectators—except for one hoarse and lonely voice that seemed to come from the farthest reaches of Helge Berglund’s Mecca—delighted in every Canadian pratfall. From time to time, the isolated Canadian supporter called out in a mournful voice, “Come on, Canada.”

The Czechs had a built-in cheering section behind their bench. Each time one of their players put stick and puck together, a banner was unfurled and at least a hundred chunky broad-shouldered men began to leap up and down and shout something that sounded like “Umpa-Umpa-Czechoslovakia!”

Whenever a Czech player scored, their bench would empty, everybody spilling out on the ice to embrace, leap in the air, and shout joyously. The Canadian team, made of cooler stuff, would confine their scoring celebration to players already out on the ice. With admirable unselfconsciousness, I thought, the boys would skate up and down poking each other on the behind with their hockey sticks.

The game, incidentally, ended in a 4–4 tie.

The Canadians wanted to see blood, the posters said. Hoodlums, one newspaper said. The red jackets go hunting at night, another claimed. George Gross, the Toronto
Telegram’s
outraged reporter, wrote, “Anti-Canadian feeling is so strong here it has become impossible to wear a maple leaf on your
lapel without being branded ruffian, hooligan and—since yesterday—sex maniac.”

A man, that is to say, a Canadian man, couldn’t help walking taller in such a heady atmosphere, absorbing some of the fabled Smoke Eaters’ virility by osmosis. But I must confess that no window shutters were drawn as I walked down the streets. Mothers did not lock up their daughters. I was not called ruffian, hooligan, or anything even mildly deprecating. Possibly, the trouble was I wore no maple leaf in my lapel.

Anyway, in the end everything worked out fine. On Tuesday morning Russ Kowalchuk’s virtue shone with its radiance restored. Earlier, Art Potter, the politically astute president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, had confided to a Canadian reporter, “These are cold war tactics to demoralize the Canadian team. They always stab us in the back here.” But now even he was satisfied. Witnesses swore there was no girl in the lobby. The Malmen Hotel apologized. Russ Kowalchuk, after all, was a nice clean-living Canadian boy. In the late watches of the night, he did not lust after Swedish girls, but possibly, like Bobby Kromm and Don Freer, yearned for nothing more depraved than a Ping-Pong table. A McIntosh apple, maybe.

Finally, the Smoke Eaters did not behave badly in Stockholm. They were misunderstood. They also finished fourth.

A
week before our scheduled departure for Kenya in 1982, excitement ruled our home. After all, we were soon to abandon wintry Montreal for the fabled Aberdare Salient, Lake Baringo in the Great Rift Valley, and the Masai Mara Game Reserve. Lions, leopards, elephants, zebras, antelopes, and gazelles. Florence and I took to studying Ker and Downey Tented Safari brochures in bed. Our insect-proof tents, we were assured, would include bedside lamps, washbasins, and adjoining shower and toilet tents. African crew would do our laundry overnight, except for women’s lingerie, a task they took to be humiliating. Our group was to consist of three couples. All old friends, all new to Africa. Remember, a thrilling covering letter enjoined us, to bring two pairs of sunglasses. “It’s one thing to drop them from a Land Rover; another, in murky, crocodile-infested waters.”

A week before we left, my arm rendered leaden by a cholera shot, I repaired to my favourite downtown bar. How about one for the road, a crony asked. “Certainly,” I replied.
“But first,”
I added in a voice
calculated to boom across the bar, “I
must take my malaria pill.”

We landed in Nairobi (fifty-five hundred feet above sea level, population 135,000) early in the morning, flying overnight from London. A testing time, this, for at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport we were to meet the two guides with whom we would trek through the reserves for the next eleven days. If the chemistry weren’t right, we all agreed, the trip could be a washout. Happily, our apprehensions were for nothing. David Mead, forty-three, and Alan Binks, thirty-eight, turned out to be affable, cultured fellows, both of them fluent in Swahili. Truly good companions.