Flirt: The Interviews (3 page)

—Tell me some of it, but stop if I say so.

—It's about self versus other.

—I follow.

—Competitive sport demands that the masculine colonizing urge conquer the space of an “other” while protectively enclosing the space of the self. Isn't that the definition of an offensive defenceman? Heading across the red line but still ready to hold your own blue line? Or sexual desire coupled with the need to be as manly as possible.

—Okay, but if that's your metaphor, it seems obvious.

—All right, make it sexual. The player whose desire to win produces the most invasive phallus, called offensive strategy, coupled with the tightest asshole, defensive strategy, wins the game.

—Stop.

—Nietzsche called it a festival of cruelty. Look at the Greeks!

—Stop, I said.

—When my father saw my muscles building, the risk to him was that I would join – visually and sexually – the masculine realm of sports. But there's only one way for women to be both phallus and asshole.

—Be lesbians?

—According to this model, yes.

—That would be hard on a man like your father.

—He loved Peggy Lee's ankles.

—And Jean Béliveau. Tell me about the rehab after your surgery.

—Bobby, I was nineteen.

—No rehab?

—I was depressed.

—You sound like a goalie.

—The exercises hurt. Come on. My sister was dead, I had one epileptic dog and two wrecked parents – “Don't upset your father” – and everything got dark, hopeless, loose and preventable. My mother didn't push me to work out. I remember bags of sand but only the occasional lift. I had no coach. The surgery – see the scar?

—Can't look now.

—The surgery punished me for everything. Who cares about walking when you've quit university and have to live with sad parents and be the daughter who isn't the one who died? Losing a quad muscle hardly seems significant.

That feels good on my face. How did you do that?

—There's switches for all the windows right here. I can lock your door, too. The passenger ejector seat was optional and pricey so I passed. I'm having second thoughts.

—That's a mean joke, Bobby Orr, but I see your point. How many operations on yours?

—Six on the left knee, going on seven.

—Now, they say you revolutionized the position of the defenceman in hockey by taking the traditional moves and blasting them open to drive for the net. Three strides, top speed, spinning past forecheckers, around the net and up to the goalie's open side. Scotty Bowman said for each possession you “took pictures” from your defensive position and then built a story.

—Scott said that?

—I added the story part. I think you were an astute reader. You read the game, recognized its patterns because you'd read so many examples so thoroughly before. You saw characters who'd likely follow a predictable course given their motivations, flaws, desires and limitations – and you found a way to enter and influence the story, to make it more poignant or thrilling, given existing patterns. Fast, maneuverable.

—I saw room, spaces. I wanted to keep the puck moving. I regret that my play made others seem inept. They weren't. Just caught out. You've looked at highlights packages and see goals. After a rush I knew I could make it back to defend my own end. But I didn't always. My style caused problems, believe me. I made mistakes that cost the team. Bad mistakes.

—You also became known for the behind-the-net clear to centre ice, where often Derek Sanderson would pick up the pass, you'd catch up and you two would kamikaze for a short-hand score.

—You see guys use that play today, but they don't get enough slick on the stick, and they turn it over in their own zone.

—My father wasn't keen on Sanderson.

—No, mine neither.

—The handlebar moustachio, the white skates, hair even longer than yours. Sex on ice, compared to say a Béliveau or a Cournoyer. I went
through a Sanderson phase – revisited it when Dale Tallon played for Vancouver – but always came back to you. Remember the nude centrefolds of Joe Namath and Jim Brown in
Cosmopolitan Magazine
? I still have those.

—Derek always got the draw, and he practically invented the sweeping poke check. To my knowledge, he never sold pantyhose.

—He took the white skates thing from Namath, right? They opened a bar together next door to the Playboy Club. Sanderson said he was obliged to live out every sex fantasy he'd ever had.

—That would be plenty.

—What about you? I'm told – by a writer friend on the limp, a duffer hockey enthusiast sans gall bladder, a guy who visited your house when he was ten and saw the room where all your trophies lived, and noticed you being shy albeit a legend already, your freckles and carrier cut. He says you playing for Chicago was like a dog in leg casts and that you partied very hard one summer in a fish camp on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.

—Derek and I didn't hang out much, the occasional eighteen holes. I went to his bar a few times, but you could see the fall starting. It wasn't funny to see the addictions take his judgment. And we couldn't tell him anything, the coach couldn't crack down. Part of the power of the Big Bad Bruins was Turk and his excesses. The city wanted that almost as much as the Cup. They got both when Turk played. He was doomed and the million bucks finished him.

—Last week, our neighbour David's truck rumbles down the driveway, exciting my lab who loves his tennis balls and fast hands. He has sliced his thumb from tip to base on his new Australian axe. While he cut cords and stacked them, a wasp bounced up to his eye and took his attention. He tells me about the blood, the pain, the clamping while the mother-in-law called First Response, the new pain when the paramedic pinched where David had clamped, the Demerol's bliss. He holds his hand upright, like a surgeon ready for duty, and hangs it from one finger at the neck of his white T-shirt. A Bobby Hull tuft.

He has stopped in to show off the new kits. Wine kits. I hear the words and see the tidy boxes stacked in the back of his truck, my heart
thumps and terror or desire rushes into my hands. Kits: young foxes, home pregnancy, Craftsman homes in cleaner times. Kits. “Those kits, they're top of the line, they're primo, they're like Chardonnay,” he says, his chest big beneath the sliced thumb all wrapped in gauze.

It's been fifteen years since my last drink – a cold bottle of pear cider I guzzled the Labour Day morning before I trimmed the laurel hedge in Sapperton, went to the top of the tallest step ladder with hot and weak knees, began to cry and couldn't stop, couldn't climb down, couldn't fathom the branches I'd shorn, longed for a rough blade at my own neck.

“It's like Chardonnay,” he repeats and wants me to treat him as our dog does, the huge and wet smile, the pissing on his sandals. I say, “I have no interest in this. I'm an alcoholic and I don't want to talk about this.”

—Nice shot.

—“I think of it as cooking,” he says, “but fair enough.” I've known this man for eight years. I know his wife, his children, his beach-stink dog, his wheel-chaired mother, his injuries, trespasses, preference for breasts, his fishing holes, and I've dined on his smoked salmon; I know the colours of his dahlias, I know he can't get jeans to fit because he shears sheep and builds fences and his thighs, like yours, are Popeye thighs; I know where he and his wife first made love and that their lovely daughter was thus conceived, I know he wept the first day he left his boy to stay at our co-op preschool, I know he played trumpet once for Mel Torme in high school in North Vancouver.

How does he know so little about me? How does he ignore or forget the crucial detail, the one important pattern? When I quit, my friends were relieved and also put out. That's normal. But the worst betrayal: not one – guitar players, singers, funny people with large enough hearts – not one told me it was time to stop. Not one said, even sober, “ever thought of quitting? Don't you want to be happy? We love you, be well.”

You had a reputation, Bobby.

—For?

—Puck bunnies.

—And the reputation?

—Circumference, length, vigor.

—History forgets I was twenty, scared skinny, a boy with a crew cut from Parry Sound. These are now my fifties, my legs have walked a century. They don't bend or take my body's weight. Pain always. I've earned and been robbed of a half million dollars. I introduced my teammates – strong boys who skated ponds and slow rivers and worked their uncles' butcher shops come summer and never finished high school – to sonofabitch Alan Eagleson. You talk about betrayal? I'll never make it up to them. That reputation you refer to – the details I still see when I don't want to – seems old and silly now.

—I stopped watching when you left the Bruins.

—You had other things to do.

—The game changed. My father stopped watching when the WHA salaries went stupid. He said he'd rather play golf than watch mediocre players make that much money. After his first heart attack, exercise became crucial and he went back to grass court tennis.

—If Béliveau was his man, I understand his disappointment.

—If the “neutral-zone trap” were an animal, what animal would it be?

—Pirhana.

—It swallows what?

—Momentum. Pride. The story of open ice.

—They build new knees, Bobby.

—So I'm told.

—My father and I watched that game, in May 1970, thirteen months before my sister would die. She will spend her nineteenth summer in Paris and die in St. Paul's hospital in Vancouver – pneumonia – the following June, after Béliveau and the Canadiens beat the Bruins in seven games to advance for the Cup. But the world of my father and me in the den in 1970, that world is still capable of ice and sports and naughty long-haired heroes like you. In that photo of the Cup-winning goal you scored in overtime – the trick and planned pass from Sanderson (“This is it,” I said to my father as the puck came around and found you) – in that photo you are flying, Bobby. You're so up. You are a boy above the city, taking off and flying home to Parry Sound. Your wings are spread and there's no pain, your knees cushioned by the frozen air, and you will
never need walking again. No more vertical. All is flight and victory. And then you disappear; Sanderson – happy like a boy on sports day – slides in and lies on you, loving you, wanting you young, his hands on your face, that embrace. Men in love, so up. You do seem young, even now. Your hair has gone more golden than grey, along this line, at the temple.

—We're here.

—We are?

—Stay where you are. There's ice. Stay put. I'll come around and get the door.

—Wait up.

—Come on, you can stay with me on water this calm. A kayak's about pushin' more than pullin'. You're pullin' too much. Firm the wrist. Push the paddle. Push.

—If I had triceps like yours I'd be zooming into Victoria harbour by now. I should've gone with the fiberglass like you. My shell's dragging.

—Push.

—So, that naggy groin's all good? The concussion, the bone chips are vacuumed and the cartilage cleaned out of your elbow? The scar over your eye still bothers me – did you not use cocoa butter? – but I suppose you're more hockey tough to look at. Any pain from last year?

—You mean physical.

—I do.

—Because I'm not goin' to talk about the other. You said I'd be able to breathe out here. You said you'd stay away from playoffs and scandals.

—It's your body I'm interested in. What was that look? Hey, come back here.

—I saw a personal trainer five days a week in the off-season back in Sweden. I'm thirty years old and in the best shape of my life. I want to win the World Cup.

—Markus, get real. The goalie situation: you can't be everybody.

—I've improved all parts of my game last year, especially in the defensive zone. I'm confident we can give Tommy more support in goal. Some saves – I'm thinkin' of Belarus, the Olympics – he shouldn't have to make. What do you call those birds?

—Those are cormorants.

—In Sweden, we have them. No: push. Relax those shoulders.

—Do you and Forsberg talk World Cup strategy off-season? Do you call each other on your cells and say, “Hey, Peter, when we play Canada, Mats gets the draw off Burnaby Joe and I'll outskate the old tractor Mario up the gut while you make your move down low on Jovo and then find me on the half-boards so I can scoot a wrister into Brodeur's slow spot”?

—We talk, but not like you. No. We'll keep it vanilla.

—Which means?

—Simple. Plain hockey. Honest hockey.

—You said once – before The Troubles – that Colorado plays honest hockey. Hey: don't look at me like that, not when the sun's bright and not too high yet and the water's dark and glittery and you can smell the Strait of Juan de Fuca on your hands already. The Bertuzzi glower. You didn't have it before. Two years ago, you're back from the broken tibia and fibia, the leg's healed and your hockey spirit soars, you're Mr. Honest Congeniality. You had time and sincerity for every locker room lens and cartoon-haired geek's mic even mid-slump. At the end of the season, trying to find more goals than anyone in the league but also trying to captain the team, you confessed – the smudges under your eyes, the sad red-knuckled hand through wet hair – that you'd hit bottom. No wizard can conjure optimism from anguish every time. But you knew buoyancy would lift you, trusted the physics. You'd hit bottom, apparently, but were coming back up. “I've been there, man,” we all whispered to our late-night sportscast, “I've been there.” That year, even in times of trouble, you wanted real communication. You wanted us all to chat and share woes and have a few laughs and then get on with the job. Celebrity did not yet gleam on your skin.