Posts from — March 2007

Here’s a great feature on the history of the Coloured Hockey League done by ESPN for Black History Month in the US. The piece features an interview with George and Darril Fosty, authors of Black Ice.

I’m writing this the day after the NHL trade deadline, the day after Edmonton Oilers fans saw the heart and soul of the team, Ryan Smyth (sometimes referred to as Captain Canada after playing for the Canadian national team on so many occasions), traded to the New York Islanders. The fact that this came on the same day as the Oilers retired the number of the former hometown hero Mark Messier, one of hockey’s greatest players of all time, added further insult to injury. Having lived in Edmonton through the trades of great Canadian heroes like Gretzky, Messier, Coffey, and now Smyth, I can say that one of the things that made these trades hurt even more was not only the realization that our Edmonton team could not afford to keep these great stars of the game but also that the only teams who could were from the United States. Smyth lived, breathed, and bled for the Oilers and I think many of us envisioned him playing out his entire career in Edmonton.

So why does that rub us the wrong way? After all, these are all teams from the same league, the strangely titled National Hockey League that lumps together two countries under one hockey nation. Well, for most Canadians, I’d guess it’s because we still, rightly or wrongly, think of this as our game, a game that’s been played here for as long as anyone can remember and whose reach connects people from coast to coast to coast. More than that, there’s a way that the game is indelibly connected with Canadian identity in ways that no sport in no other country seems able to match. Even baseball or football in the US still doesn’t cut as wide a swath through the collective imagination as hockey does for Canadians. I find this hard to put into words, especially when talking to my students and colleagues here in the US. In fact, this is the only place I’ve ever had to put that into words. If you’re a Canadian and reading this, I don’t need to say anything to persuade you of this.

I do spend a good deal of time talking about this in my freshman seminar on Canadian culture that I teach here each fall. I’m retitling this fall’s class “From Pucks to Parliament: Canada’s Cultural Landscape,” after having called it “The Great White North” for the last couple of years, in part to reflect how much we do seem to wind up talking about hockey. It turns out that none of the students had heard of Bob and Doug MacKenzie and so didn’t really get the joke; I was beginning to worry that most people reading the title without that reference in mind might have been seeing it as boasting about Canada’s greatness or as some reference to a lack of visible minorities in Canada, one of the common misconceptions I routinely come across here about Canada. At any rate, one of the best ways I’ve found to explain some of this connection between national identity and hockey in Canada is by having the students read Richard Harrison’s introductory essay from the tenth anniversary edition of Hero of the Play.

Referring to the debates in Canada over where the game was first played, Harrison contends that “[what’s] important isn’t where the origin of hockey is found in Canada, but how Canada finds at least part of its origin in hockey.” If one searches for a mythic origin of Canadian psyche, hockey may be as good a place as any to look first. “[. . .] perhaps most important, in terms of the intensityof the origin-of-hockey debate, is that creation myth insists that the distinguishing features of a people’s character are things born with them, created when the people were created. Hockey emerges in the Canadian past at the time the Canada we lived in then as separate communities was being made into the Canada we live in now as a people. In mythic terms, hockey is one of the few things that could be said to be ours from before the beginning of Canadian time” (16-17).

Harrison’s work is only one of many examples of the great writing about hockey and hockey players we’ve seen emerge from Canada over the last few years. The non-fiction front ranges from books about the love of playing the game as an adult — Dave Bidini’s The Best Game You Can Name, the great Bill Gaston’s Midnight Hockey, and Tom Allen’s The Gift of the Game are some of the best recent examples — to more reflective books like David Adams Richards’ wonderful Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play, Stephen Brunt’s Searching for Bobby Orr, or Roch Carrier’s Our Life With the Rocket, proving that the world of hockey writing is far more than simply books documenting the careers of particular players or teams. While Canadian fiction and poetry about hockey don’t always spring immediately to mind, books like Harrison’s Hero of the Play, Gaston’s The Good Body, Roy MacGregor’s The Last Season, Stephen Galloway’s Finnie Walsh, and Mark Anthony Jarman’s Salvage King Ya! top the list of the great hockey literature of our day.

Ryan Smyth’s press conference today at the Edmonton Airport, said it all, both about the man and the game. Crying, shaken, and, in Harrison’s words, “smiling ugly” in the way only a hockey player can get away with, Smyth vowed “I’m going to go there and do my best and make the playoffs and win that (Stanley) Cup, so I can bring it down here to Edmonton — because that’s where my heart is.” I can’t imagine another country where this would make all the headlines, and, frankly, I kind of like it that way.

Suggested Reading:

Tom Allen, The Gift of the Game

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0385660790

Dave Bidini, The Best Game You Can Name

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=9780771014604

Stephen Brunt, Searching for Bobby Orr

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0676976514

Roch Carrier, Our Life With The Rocket

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0140280073

Stephen Galloway, Finnie Walsh

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=1551928353

Bill Gaston, The Good Body

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=1551926938

Bill Gaston, Midnight Hockey

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0385661908

Richard Harrison, Hero of the Play: Poems Revised and New. (10th Anniversary Edition)

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0919897959

Dale Jacobs (ed.), ICE: New Writing on Hockey

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0969466544

Mark Anthony Jarman, Salvage King, Ya!

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=1-895636-13-2

Michael P.J. Kennedy, Going Top Shelf: An Anthology of Canadian Hockey Poetry

http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=1894384997

Roy MacGregor, The Last Season

(currently out of print)