Hockey Dreams by David Adams Richards Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Adams Richards
they are a formidable force. On the ice, no one ever has to tell us why we are playing the Russians or the Swedes.
Hockey is where we’ve gotten it right.
Our country hosts the Olympics in 1976 in Montreal. We are the only country with the distinction of hosting the event and not winning a Gold Medal. Later in a movie starring Michael Douglas about the dreams of a long-distance runner who is looked upon as a loser until he finishes the race at Montreal,we are given in the movie what we did not actually win in real life. The Gold Medal. For once a movie that lies about us works in our favour.
Things are like that in our country.
We come 22nd in cross-country skiing. Or maybe 23rd. Snow doesn’t seem to do us much good here. It just forces us into using anti-freeze.
Though we could beat the world at snowshoeing — even my mother-in-law at 70 could snowshoe rings around a rabbit — it is not an event in the Olympics. It won’t be an event until some European can beat some European rabbit at it also. That seems to be the way it goes with us. Toboggan racing would be just as exciting as the luge and not as explicit. Crunch five of us all together wearing toques and mittens. I could sit in the middle.
Even I can throw an axe, but axe throwing and fly casting and kettle boiling are out at the summer games.
Somehow we permit ourselves the luxury of being a country without a face and allow others to tell us what face we should wear. Somehow we want it that way.
Hockey’s where we finally got it right, but we’re not allowed to tell anyone that we have. So what do we do within the National Hockey League, and within the international hockey community — we tilt the mirror until we are out of focus again. The camera angle always slightly belittles us. For years we sent to the Olympics or World Championships those who could not do what those we couldn’t send could.
It is also strange that we have not made a movie about hockey where the camera angle gets us in focus. Perhaps it is the art form. Perhaps movies about sports like hockey and baseball, show them not to be childlike, but childish —
Slapshot
is a good example. And perhaps that is where the focus is turned. The TV movies made in Canada about hockey usually tend to want to show that hockey is a game without any fun; like our weather, it is dour. They seem to be written with an explanation that we too know the life here is horrible. That most find a hollow log as soon as we see a snowflake.
So most of us switch the channel. And watch movies about American sports heroes instead. American heroes, in whatever discipline, protest, demonstrate, and sign autographs for the world. They always, always go out to win. Their victories carry a moral authority. Their defeats, a lesson to us all.
Ali beats a Canadian on the road back into our hearts.
The old Mongoose defends the Light Heavyweight Championship by knocking out a boy from my river. If they are going to win, to be our heroes as well, they have to beat us in order to do it. They become the metaphor for what life can attain, and how the human spirit longs to attain it. To cheer against them is almost blasphemous at times.
In 1980 my first publisher phones to tell me that he is glad we received payment for my first novel from Russia before we beat them in hockey at the Olympics.
I tell him that we didn’t beat them, the Americans did.
He tells me it is the same thing.
I tell him that it isn’t and if he thinks for one second it is he should tell Mike Erusoni this.
He says that they did it for us.
Canada too shelters itself in the mythology.
At that same moment in Las Vegas a friend of mine is in a friendly argument with some sports fans who are telling him that America is the best hockey nation in the entire world. They have the Olympics to prove it. They have never heard of Lafleur. They have yet to hear of Gretzky. They yawn at the NHL. They have not heard a word about 1972, or the Canada Cup. In
Hockey is where we’ve gotten it right.
Our country hosts the Olympics in 1976 in Montreal. We are the only country with the distinction of hosting the event and not winning a Gold Medal. Later in a movie starring Michael Douglas about the dreams of a long-distance runner who is looked upon as a loser until he finishes the race at Montreal,we are given in the movie what we did not actually win in real life. The Gold Medal. For once a movie that lies about us works in our favour.
Things are like that in our country.
We come 22nd in cross-country skiing. Or maybe 23rd. Snow doesn’t seem to do us much good here. It just forces us into using anti-freeze.
Though we could beat the world at snowshoeing — even my mother-in-law at 70 could snowshoe rings around a rabbit — it is not an event in the Olympics. It won’t be an event until some European can beat some European rabbit at it also. That seems to be the way it goes with us. Toboggan racing would be just as exciting as the luge and not as explicit. Crunch five of us all together wearing toques and mittens. I could sit in the middle.
Even I can throw an axe, but axe throwing and fly casting and kettle boiling are out at the summer games.
Somehow we permit ourselves the luxury of being a country without a face and allow others to tell us what face we should wear. Somehow we want it that way.
Hockey’s where we finally got it right, but we’re not allowed to tell anyone that we have. So what do we do within the National Hockey League, and within the international hockey community — we tilt the mirror until we are out of focus again. The camera angle always slightly belittles us. For years we sent to the Olympics or World Championships those who could not do what those we couldn’t send could.
It is also strange that we have not made a movie about hockey where the camera angle gets us in focus. Perhaps it is the art form. Perhaps movies about sports like hockey and baseball, show them not to be childlike, but childish —
Slapshot
is a good example. And perhaps that is where the focus is turned. The TV movies made in Canada about hockey usually tend to want to show that hockey is a game without any fun; like our weather, it is dour. They seem to be written with an explanation that we too know the life here is horrible. That most find a hollow log as soon as we see a snowflake.
So most of us switch the channel. And watch movies about American sports heroes instead. American heroes, in whatever discipline, protest, demonstrate, and sign autographs for the world. They always, always go out to win. Their victories carry a moral authority. Their defeats, a lesson to us all.
Ali beats a Canadian on the road back into our hearts.
The old Mongoose defends the Light Heavyweight Championship by knocking out a boy from my river. If they are going to win, to be our heroes as well, they have to beat us in order to do it. They become the metaphor for what life can attain, and how the human spirit longs to attain it. To cheer against them is almost blasphemous at times.
In 1980 my first publisher phones to tell me that he is glad we received payment for my first novel from Russia before we beat them in hockey at the Olympics.
I tell him that we didn’t beat them, the Americans did.
He tells me it is the same thing.
I tell him that it isn’t and if he thinks for one second it is he should tell Mike Erusoni this.
He says that they did it for us.
Canada too shelters itself in the mythology.
At that same moment in Las Vegas a friend of mine is in a friendly argument with some sports fans who are telling him that America is the best hockey nation in the entire world. They have the Olympics to prove it. They have never heard of Lafleur. They have yet to hear of Gretzky. They yawn at the NHL. They have not heard a word about 1972, or the Canada Cup. In
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