9 Playing with the Hero in Richard Harrison’s Hero of the Play

Playing with Poetry

A good place to start is with the form of the poems. Except for a few additions to 25, these collections are made up of prose poems. Martin explains that Harrison chose to write in this form to create texts that looked a bit like “sports page columns” on the page. His idea was that by making the poems look familiar, instead of too obviously like poetry, sportspeople would “give the poems a chance” (2018, 60). At the same time, to prevent the poems from becoming straight prose, he used a “prose-poem line break,” in which he deliberately chose his line endings for rhythm and to create subtle moments of emphasis (Martin 2018, 60).

Although Harrison chose his form to make his poems more accessible, it’s useful to think about what defines a text as a prose poem, as opposed to straight prose. The distinction has to do with the elements of poetry itself. Prose poems, despite their lack of the more obvious elements of poetry (line breaks, stanzas, and so on), share with other poetry a particular focus on language. Poetry exploits possibilities in language not typically made use of in everyday speech. The musical elements (rhyme and metre) are obviously part of this—but so is the possibility of words to mean more than one thing at a time. Poetic language trades in multiple layers of meaning/effect—as in a metaphor, where comparing one thing to another encourages us to think of a range of similarities and difference between the two things. The logic of poetry also tends to be less rational and more associative or emotional. Poetry is more about felt response, lived experience, and evocative detail, than it is about logical explanation. The result is that the “truth” that emerges from poems tends to be tentative and multilayered, rather like the truths of life itself.

The history of the prose poem is also relevant. Prose poems were first popularized by the nineteenth-century French writers Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Valéry. Edward Hirsch argues that the form was a rejection of “the straightjacket of classical French versification” (1999, 58). Indeed, Baudelaire’s description of his poems in “À Arsène Houssaye” stresses the liberatory quality of the form. His “prose poétique,” he writes, seeks to be “musicale sans rhythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience” [“musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and strong enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the somersaults of conscience”] (Baudelaire 1969, 8 my translation). Quite often, prose poems seem like stream-of-consciousness writing; they follow the twists and turns of the mind, the “undulations of reverie,” and are filled with internal effects not typically found in straight prose.

Harrison brings an awareness of these possibilities to his treatment of hockey in Hero of the Play. A glimpse of the rich possibilities this can lead to is hinted at by the title of the collection itself. Note the different interpretations you can make of this title. A first reading probably brings to mind a hockey player making a key play—like Percival Leary scoring an overtime cup winning goal—and thus becoming a hero. The title, however, also evokes the idea of a hero in a play—that is to say, a stage play, a drama, or the play of language that is poetry itself. This second meaning invites comparisons between a hero in literature and a hero on the ice. Comparisons of this kind are, in fact, a recurring feature of the text.

Another layer of significance is hinted at by the cover art of the first two editions, which is not of players on ice but of a tabletop hockey game (only a trace of this art remains in the design of 25). The tabletop game is an image of childhood play. Perhaps the hero in the title, then, is the one created in a child’s imagination? Perhaps the hero is the child himself (or herself) created by the games of childhood? In a more general way, the image reinforces that Hero of the Play is not just about hockey itself but about make-believe versions of the game. Tabletop hockey is an imitation of hockey played on the ice—a symbolic representation. The symbolic nature of the image is made even more complex if you consider that the cover is not an actual tabletop game but a photograph of a portion of such a game—it’s a representation of a representation of the game.

One last point about the cover. If you look closely, you will see that the uniforms of the tabletop players are in the colours of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens. This echoes the album cover of Stompin’ Tom Connors’s “The Hockey Song” as well as the content and illustrations associated with Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater.” The evocation of the Montreal-Toronto rivalry hints at the Original Six era of the National Hockey League (NHL), an earlier Golden Age; it also hints at the historical significance of the rivalry for acting out English-French tensions within Canadian society, as well as the rivalry between Protestants and Catholics (as we saw in both “The Hockey Sweater” and The Divine Ryans). These associations, it turns out, are developed in some of the poems themselves.

In a certain way, you could say that Hero of the Play treats hockey not only in poetry but as poetry. To explain what I mean by this, consider the poem that most directly echoes the collection’s cover. This is “All-Time Game,” which describes two brothers picking teams for an “all-time game” of tabletop hockey (Harrison 2004, 49). The dramatic situation brings to mind the old tabletop games containing metal players in the likeness of NHL stars; as the poem goes on, however, it becomes clear that the literal existence of the metal players is not the point. Every choice the brothers make is heavy with symbolism. Early on they argue about the greatest English players versus “Lemieux, Robitaille and The Rocket”—a reference to English-French conflict acted out through hockey. When they up the ante to “the ultimate game” they choose more violent players, including Eddie Shore “because he nearly killed a man.” By this point it is clear that the brothers are acting out their own conflict through their choices (choosing Eddie Shore is like saying “I’d like to do to you what Eddie Shore did to that guy!”). The precise nature of the conflict between the brothers remains unexplained but there is a wonderful hint about the tangled-up complexity of it in the line “the language inflated and gross the way men talk when they mean it pretending they don’t”—a line that also, in a subtly self-reflexive way, highlights the heightened attention to language that is characteristic of poetry. All of this contributes to an ending heavy with symbolism: “huge pucks in the tiny nets, the anger of 30 years, everything out of proportion.”

The double-meaning evoked by the ending of “All-Time Game” is a classic poetic device: the tabletop hockey pucks, which are literally out of proportion to the size of the tabletop hockey nets, become symbolic of the disproportionate anger of the brothers at whatever grievances they had in the past. In keeping with a common effect in poetry, the last line also reopens the meaning of the title: what “game” does the title end up referring to? Note also how the two brothers ultimately create a text—a symbolic representation—with their choices of players for table-top hockey. In a sense, the brothers co-author a poem that expresses the fraught relationship between them. Such poem-like creations, Hero of the Play suggests, are found in other forms of hockey as well.

The Naked Man Beneath the Flag-Bright Colours of the Team

Hero of the Play is the third of Harrison’s six books of poetry. The first two, Fathers Never Leave You and Recovering the Naked Man, appeared in 1987 and 1991. Though it might not seem so at first glance, these books offer valuable context for Hero of the Play. A key issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s was how men should respond to feminism. By this time feminism (especially the so-called “second wave” that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in conjunction with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States) had had a significant impact on North American society, and many men were trying to understand the implication of the changes for their own identity. Scores of books and articles were published on the subject. I think of the 1987 collections Men in Feminism, edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, and Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power, and Change, edited by Michael Kaufmann—among many others. This was also the beginning of the so-called “men’s movement,” which, depending on your point of view, was a reactionary attempt by men to recover their traditional privileges, or an attempt by men to positively redefine masculinity in the light of cultural changes. The founding text of the men’s movement, Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men, was published in 1990 and was a massive best-seller.

Fathers Never Leave You and Recovering the Naked Man inhabit this environment. In these collections, Harrison offers a remarkably candid exploration of his identity as a man in light of feminist critiques of patriarchy. Many of the poems centre on his love-hate relationship with his father, an ex-British soldier and athlete, who comes to represent not just biological but cultural paternity. In a later essay, Harrison describes his father like this: “Dad was old school. He lived by the virtue of a man’s given word, the principles of discipline and duty and the necessary violence to see duty done. He’d been through war, fought with machines and hand-to-hand. He was, by all accounts, good at his job” (Easton and Harrison 2010, 118).

In his poems, Harrison details how his youthful adulation for his father gave way to feelings of disappointment and betrayal. “Summer Garden,” for instance, opens with his father as a traditional masculine hero, who tells stories about the sound of bullets and his own first parachute jump, but who also poisons family life in the present: there is “death in my father’s skin / as he speaks / even of joys,” and there are “dying men in his eyes / where my sons play / before him” (Harrison 1987, 13–14). The implication is that the same characteristics that allow the father to be a traditional hero make it difficult for him to be a good husband and father.

Many of the poems use Harrison’s father as an object lesson for what is wrong, from the son’s post-feminist point of view, with the norms of masculinity. Poems like “Fathers,” “My Father’s Body,” and “My Father’s Goodbye,” illustrate how the father’s power depends upon emotional detachment, an implied (or explicit) threat of violence, and a self-defeating denial of the body. Harrison’s attempt to redefine his own identity sometimes takes the form of confessing and attempting to excise the tendencies he has inherited. In “I Wanted to be a Soldier,” he admits that he too has loved like a soldier, and come “from a woman’s bed / as ignorant of beauty / as a pornographer,” and in “My Father’s Goodbye,” he admits that he too has been “a man glancing at his watch / inventing important, stupid things / to keep himself away” (Harrison 1991, 45–46). A poem along these lines that anticipates Hero of the Play is “Confessions of a Sensitive Post-Feminist Male,” which includes in Harrison’s list of inherited male tendencies his love of combat sports:

I like football helmets

and body checks,

the way muscular men in the flag-bright

colours of the team

divide the world on a playing field, or

the plane of the rink

(Harrison 1991, 13)

The avowed goal of Harrison’s early poetry is, as the title of the second collection suggests, to recover the naked man. The imagery of nakedness implies a stripping away of the masks of masculinity, of the rituals and disguises that support male privilege, in order for a more positive masculine identity to emerge. The foundation of this new identity, as “Out of Costume” suggests, is the naked body: “just myself / naked with you” (Harrison 1991, 68). Nakedness, for Harrison, is associated with honesty as well as vulnerability. In poems like “Out of Costume,” he attempts to name—and hence recover—the fragile male body hidden by the costumes of masculinity, to undo the aggression and violence enabled by the denial of that fragility, and so to make a tentative step towards a healthier male identity.

Interestingly, the most positive male role model in Recovering the Naked Man is a fully costumed one: Batman. In the poem of the same name, Harrison describes this cartoonish figure from his youth (not to be mistaken for the hardboiled hero of the more recent films) as a man “sheathed” and “pure,” whose cock and testicles “lie dormant in his hero suit, bound / not painfully, but adequately for his true / action which is to save / and not to want.” Batman has all the power of the father with none of the violence. There is “nothing weak” about him, yet he is a man “women feel safe around.” How to square this costumed role model with the goal of recovering the naked man? Perhaps it has to do with how Batman’s costume brings out the essence of the man, getting rid of “the awkward protuberances” while presenting him as “poured from the idea of himself” (Harrison 1991, 35). This would be consistent with Harrison’s later writing on superheroes, in his critical book Secret Identity Reader: Essays on Sex, Death and the Superhero, in which he argues that, for all their seemingly cartoon-like qualities, figures like Batman represent “ideas and ideals” (Easton and Harrison 2010, 23). Perhaps, though, it is also a recognition of the impossibility of true nakedness with regard to heroes. Heroes always appear, to a degree, in costume. For Harrison, this is “nothing to make fun of,” and yet, the last line of “Batman”—“He says only enough to fill a word balloon”—plays with the strong silent type in a way that may or may not be ironic (Harrison 1991, 35). Is the strong silent type an ideal to aspire to or a stereotype to be mocked?

Hockey Superheroes

Hero of the Play takes as its main subject those other costumed heroes of Harrison’s youth: hockey players. The collection contains poems about NHL stars (Paul Coffey, Eric Lindros, Jaromir Jagr, Bobby Orr, Bernie Federko, and others), players with tragic stories (John Kordic, Brian Fogarty), famous personalities (Don Cherry), the Stanley Cup, the Russians, and a few poems about women (Manon Rhéaume, the Hockey Mom). The 2004 edition contains tribute poems to Jean Béliveau, Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, and Maurice Richard—whom Harrison refers to as his “fantasy four,” an echo of the “Fantastic Four” of comic book fame (Harrison 2004, 13)—commissioned for a fundraiser hosted by the Calgary Booster Club. Overall, as Paul Martin puts it, the poems explore “the complex tensions among masculinity, violence, and identity” embodied in the game (Martin 2018, 63). Harrison deals with issues similar to what we’ve seen in earlier texts: the cost of success, the limitations of the masculinity associated with hockey, and the complex relationship between the game and the world outside.

Harrison is particularly interested in mythic elements. As he explains in Secret Identity Reader, myths, to him, are like folk tales, “a culture’s way of encoding its wisdom for the young” (Easton and Harrison 2010, 36). In Hero of the Play, Harrison connects stories about hockey to a long heroic tradition that goes back at least to Homer. Various classical and literary allusions reinforce this connection. “African Hockey Poem #2,” for example, imagines the townspeople in the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan staring at his hockey stick “just as the inland farmers who had never seen the sea stared at Ulysses with his oar” (2004, 32). “Driving Through the Night, the Station on Sports Talk Radio” imagines the dial of the radio “lit up with the glow of a peephole in the fence around Olympus” (88). A particularly intriguing literary allusion occurs in “The View from the Top,” in which the mythic potential of the Stanley Cup, raised by Scott Niedermayer on a mountain near Cranbrook, BC, is described as “no jar on a hill in Tennessee ever stopped time and stuffed all the eye can behold into the barrel of itself better than this Cup” (93). The phrase “no jar on a hill in Tennessee” is an allusion to “Anecdote of the Jar,” a 1919 poem by Wallace Stevens, in which a jar placed in a landscape “made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill” (Stevens 1980, 76). The jar illustrates the myth-making power of the imagination. A self-conscious act of imagination like placing the jar makes the “slovenly wilderness” acquire order and, potentially, meaning; and although this order is only fictional, to create it is a profoundly human—and necessary—act. By associating the Stanley Cup with Stevens’ jar, Harrison implies that it shares a similar myth-making power.

Other poems in Hero of the Play treat players in a self-consciously mythic way, by focusing on elements that seem to “leave recorded time behind” (Harrison 2004, 16). The poems about great players tend to focus on an exceptional ability that defines that player—his or her meaning in the pantheon of hockey gods and heroes. The poem about Jean Béliveau, for example, stresses Béliveau’s legendary hockey sense, how he was always made the right play, but quietly, with an almost Zen-like grace, and without violence. All of this is implied by the poem’s last line: “[Béliveau] teaches me The puck going into the net is silent” (86). The poems about Maurice Richard, on the other hand, stress Richard’s legendary competitiveness, as embodied in his black-eyed stare. One of the most famous examples of Richard’s competitiveness is the time he seemed to carry a 200-plus pound defenseman, Earl Siebert, on his back, as he drove to the net to score—an incident recounted in Harrison’s “Maurice” (87) and also alluded to in The Divine Ryans when Mary performs the ritual of “the final rush” (as we saw in the last chapter). The fiery spirit of Richard sets up the moving poem that ends Hero of the Play, “Elegy for the Rocket,” in which the legend of the Rocket becomes Maurice Richard the dying old man, whose “famous eyes” now show “a humble fire at the end of [their] use” (95). This poem captures very well the pathos of the aging / dying athlete, which reminds us that someone who seems immortal, so favoured by the gods, ultimately is only human.

The four poems about Gordie Howe point to the larger significance of heroes. Two images recur in these poems: one is of Howe flicking rink chaff over the head of a guy looking for an autograph, and one is of him telling Wayne Gretzky to “work on your backhand” (46, 70, 85). The effortless flicking of the chaff is a reminder of the physical virtuosity of Howe, as well as a form of intimidation—the two traits for which Howe was known for as a player. Telling Gretzky to “work on your backhand” hints at Howe’s all-round game (he was ambidextrous) and his role, later in life, as a mentor to the next generation.

The larger significance of Howe is suggested by “Acts of Worship.” This poem takes the form of advice to a young player. The poem presumes that the player will worship someone like Gordie Howe but that “If you’re too much in awe, you’ll never love this game.” “Sooner or later,” the poem goes on to say, “you’ve got to hit Gordie and flatten him,” even though this is an impossible task, given Gordie’s mythical strength. The consolation for your failed attempt is that “if you’re lucky, he’ll give you an elbow behind the ref’s back and you’ll see what a bastard he is,” which will “cure you” of your worship (71).

Before and after “Acts of Worship” are poems about the relationship between fathers and sons. This is not, I think, an accident. What happens between Gordie and the young player is reminiscent of the relationship between a son and a father. “The Greats,” from which I drew the epigraph to this chapter, makes the connection explicit (75). What “The Greats” emphasizes is that hockey heroes—like superheroes—are father-substitutes. For Harrison, this leads to an ambivalent reaction: on the one hand, such heroes allow him an imaginative escape from his biological father; on the other hand, they embody a similar, perhaps even more idealized, masculinity—the strong, silent, sometimes angry, often absent, man of action. “My Father’s Face” begins “To begin (always beginning) to speak of my father’s face uncovered at last”—an echo of Harrison’s ongoing desire to “recover the naked man” (78). In the determined look of hockey players, the poem goes on to say, is the look of other men defined by anger, including Harrison’s father, and, sometimes, despite his own best efforts, Harrison himself. “This Is My Hockey” stresses how the idealized image of fathers and hockey heroes depends on absence: “This is the lie that keeps us looking into the faces of worshipped men: if only you were there, then everything would have been OK.” The father, like the hockey hero, is “perfect in the highlight film”—a line that could have read “only perfect in the highlight film,” since it is clear that the closer you get, the more imperfect such figures become (78).

The Not-So-Golden Jet

The contrast between the hockey hero as “idea or ideal” and the reality of the man is most dramatically embodied in Harrison’s poems about Bobby Hull. Seven poems in Hero of the Play reference Hull. Before these poems, Harrison published “Bobby Hull” in Recovering the Naked Man. This earlier poem sets the table for what is to follow.

“Bobby Hull” begins with an assertion of likeness between the persona of the poem (Harrison) and the player, even though Hull “is The Greatest / Player Of All Time, / and I play the tabletop version of his game” (Harrison 1991, 66). Then the poem elaborates upon the on-ice abilities and matinee good looks that earned Hull the nickname “The Golden Jet”: “the power of his legs,” a shot that “could push a man off his skates / and back into his own goal,” and a Greek godlike beauty, as captured in the famous photograph of him “pitching hay, topless … / on his farm in Pointe Anne, Ontario” (66–67). The photograph appeared originally in a profile by Trent Frayne in MacLean’s magazine in 1966. Frayne’s profile is an example of the myth-making power of sports journalism. It begins with Hull’s status as “the most dashing and attractive player in hockey” and goes on to describe his small town character and perfect home life, with an adoring wife, and three sons “all with light-blue eyes and great thatches of hair so blond as to be almost platinum” (Frayne 1966).

The second half of “Bobby Hull” alludes to a 1972 event that shocked many fans: Bobby Hull, at the height of his success, left the NHL “and the record books” for a rival league, the World Hockey Association, and “a million bucks” (Harrison 1991, 67). Hull, at the time, was 33 years old, had just come off his fifth fifty-goal season, and had already scored 604 goals in the NHL. He was on track to retire as the highest NHL goal scorer of all time. To many fans—especially young ones, like Harrison at the time—his decision to leave the NHL was a betrayal. Not only did it damage his legacy, but it offered a glimpse of the underbelly of the hockey business that many fans were not interested in seeing. Hull’s decision led to his exclusion from the 1972 Summit Series despite the fact that he was, arguably, Canada’s best winger. Harrison’s disappointment is captured in the last lines of “Bobby Hull”:

the stick figure that represents him on my game

fills me with the dread I will not live up to him,

yet he has failed me already;

he is everything that does not live up

to its promise. (67)

Hull’s decision to leave the NHL was only the beginning of a decade long fall from grace. He had moments of on-ice glory during the 1970s—most notably his performance in the 1976 Canada Cup tournament, when he reunited with some of his old NHL colleagues—but his personal reputation deteriorated. Rumours of his drinking, philandering, spousal violence, and cruelty to his children began to circulate. When his wife, Joanne, filed for divorce, Hull’s personal flaws were exposed in excruciating detail. Gare Joyce, in The Devil and Bobby Hull: How Hockey’s Million-Dollar Man Became Hockey’s Lost Legend, summarizes the effect of Hull’s 1980 divorce trial as follows:

When Bobby Hull broke into the NHL [in 1957] the media portrayed all its stars as solid family men, upright heroes like you’d find in an old-fashioned boys’ novel. Hull embraced the image of faithful husband and good father. He made public appearances with Joanne, an arm trophy inevitably cast as the dutiful and worshipful spouse. He worked their sons into commercials to buff that image. It was all a patent lie. (2011, 178)

As described in the divorce proceedings, the Hull marriage had been rocky since the 1960s. Joanne Hull filed for divorce the first time in 1970 after Hull beat her during a trip to Hawaii (188). The couple subsequently reconciled and tried to maintain Hull’s image as a family man. So fake was this image, however, that even the image of the three blond-headed boys was fake: son Blake, it turns out, had dark hair, but his hair was dyed blond as a child “so that he was a neater fit at appearances and in commercials” (55).

The collapse of Hull’s reputation haunts the poems in Hero of the Play. The first of these, “African Hockey Poem #1,” describes how Harrison, while in the Ivory Coast, forges an unlikely bond with a hotel manager because of Bobby Hull’s name. The manager is a hockey fan; he knows about the winger. After exchanging a manly handshake with the manager, Harrison skates on the hotel rink and feels elated: “I touched the ice and I could be any boy in love” (2004, 31). Who or what is the boy in love with? It could be the game, or a girl, or himself. Whatever the object of the boy’s affections, the constant is the sense of wholeness and euphoria associated with love. These last words of the poem subtly recall the twin features of Hull’s reputation: how he was not only a great player, but, as Frayne put it, “dashing and attractive.” The skater feels elated because the hotel manager’s recognition allows him to bask in the reflected glow of Hull in his glory.

For the tribute to Bobby Hull that was part of the “fantasy four” celebration, Harrison rewrote “African Hockey Poem #1” as “Bobby in Africa.” This version appears in the “Overtime” section of Hero of the Play and is almost identical to the original, except that the last line now reads “I will be like Bobby Hull—each time he touched the ice, he was every boy in love” (2004, 84). The new last line shifts focus away from Harrison to Hull. That Hull was “every boy in love” hints at his grace on the ice and also at how boys, throughout the ages, have projected their desires to be “dashing and attractive” onto such figures.

“African Hockey Poem #1” and “Bobby in Africa” foreground The Golden Jet version of Hull. This mythic version, however, is haunted by the history of Bobby Hull the man. To suggest that Hull represents “every boy in love” is, of course, deeply ironic, given the history of Hull’s behaviour in love.

Other poems in Hero of the Play make clear that Harrison is aware of the troubled history behind the image of The Golden Jet. “Reunion, or Grieving” opens with Harrison pasting his own face over Brett Hull’s in a photo of Brett and his father. This, Harrison writes, is “further proof that I practiced with Bobby in ’76 when I was scouted by the Jets for goal”—a claim first made in “Bobby Hull” (2004, 33). The claim—like its proof—is patently fictional, the kind of claim a young fan would manufacture to impress his friends. This anticipates Harrison’s description of the photograph of Bobby and Brett as also fictional: “Bobby is proud of his son.… [They] are perfectly again husband and child together.” The word “perfectly” here resonates with “perfect in the highlight film” from “This is My Hockey”: both suggest that the image is only perfect from a distance. The next line underlines the point. As a boy, Brett waited “for Bobby to appear in the almost-empty stands of junior” (33). In other words, Bobby wasn’t there for key moments in Brett’s growing up. The separation of the Hulls took place when Brett was twelve or thirteen, and after the divorce in 1980, fifteen-year-old Brett remained with his mother and two younger siblings in Vancouver—and saw even less of his father than before.

“My Favourites (The National Game)” further dramatizes the distance between father and son. In this poem, Harrison’s own father calls from Victoria to say that he has acquired a Bobby Hull hockey card (perhaps knowing that Hull is Harrison’s favourite player). Harrison then contrasts this early card of “Bobby at his peak” with a later one of “Bobby as a Jet—after the divorce … [scoring] goals no one counts except in brackets” (2004, 34). Finally, at the end, Harrison receives a card of Brett Hull “poised, intent, waiting for the pass.” This closing image resonates with the line about Brett waiting for “Bobby to appear” in “Reunion, or Grieving.” In both cases there is a sense of incomplete legacy, a lack of paternal regard, the son waiting for and not receiving what is “passed” down from father to son.

The significance of this troubled history is most apparent in “The Hero in Overtime,” the title poem of the section added to the Tenth Anniversary edition of Hero of the Play. This poem describes the aftermath of the most famous goal of Brett Hull’s career, his triple overtime Stanley Cup winner for the Dallas Stars in 1999. In the dressing room, a TV commentator goes to interview Hull and, first thing, “reminds him again he’s from a great hockey family” (Harrison 2004, 83). The commentator is prompting Hull to make some comment about “his famous father,” but, instead, he “does what no other player has done tonight—he thanked his children” (83). That Brett Hull thanks his children is a reminder of the lack of connection between himself and Bobby, despite the many “like father, like son” stories that accompanied Brett’s career. It is also a reminder of what the true priority of a father should be—the implication being that Brett is trying, despite the challenges of being a professional athlete, to be a good father.

Bobby Hull also appears, briefly, in “African Hockey Poem #3” and “Stanley Cup.” The first of these picks up on the image of Harrison walking through the streets of Abidjan with a hockey stick. This time, however, Harrison is reminded of how he used his stick as a boy to play ball hockey. In Bobby Hull’s hands, he remembers, such a stick led to “a million-dollar shot, the birth of the mask, thousands in the stands” (2004, 40). The reference to the “million-dollar shot” evokes Hull’s legendary slap-shot—a rare and valuable talent—but also Hull’s abandonment of his NHL career for the WHA, which he did for a signing bonus of a million dollars.

The reference to Hull in “Stanley Cup” is particularly poignant. The poem stresses the mystique of the Stanley Cup, the hardest trophy in sports to win, and how the players yearn for it so strongly that it is a kind of love. Yet, the poem goes on, “Bobby Hull passed on his chance to drink champagne from its lip when the Hawks won it [in] ’61 because he thought there’d be so many in his life” (Harrison 2004, 62). This line hints at Hull’s early brilliance (leading the Hawks to their first championship in twenty-seven years at the age of 22), but also the hubris that contributed to Hull’s fall. The line implies that Bobby Hull’s story is ultimately one of unfulfilled potential—a powerful irony when it comes to a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame whom some will argue was the greatest winger of all time.

The Other Father

Harrison often describes Bobby Hull as if he were a son describing his father. This suggests that Harrison has an internalized image of Hull rather like the internalized image of his own father: both are attractive as masculine ideals but also deeply flawed.

In Secret Identity Reader, Harrison writes that although the conclusions of Iron John “are largely dismissed today as an embarrassing fad,” Robert Bly did make an important point: “most men’s fathers are a mystery to them” (Easton and Harrison 2010, 119). In poem after poem throughout his career, right up to his Governor General’s Award winning 2016 collection, On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, Harrison has shown how important it is to him to explore the mystery of his father. His writings about his cultural fathers—hockey heroes and superheroes—are part of this exploration, and allow him to explore, through metaphor and imagination, issues about masculine identity that are embodied by his biological father.

Another father is at play in Hero of the Play, however: Harrison himself. Exploring the mystery of his father—or of cultural fathers—is often accompanied in Harrison’s writing by questions about himself. To what extent is he or isn’t he like his father? To what extent has he reproduced the negative aspects of his father—despite all his post-feminist efforts? This self-questioning continues in Hero of the Play. “Reunion, or Grieving,” for example, ends with the admission that Harrison missed his stepson’s wedding. “How could you?” he asks himself (33). The unspoken context behind this self-accusation is the breakup of Harrison’s first marriage, after which he did not attend the wedding of his stepson. The lines themselves appear after the image of Brett Hull waiting for his father to appear in the “almost-empty stands” of junior. Was Harrison’s absence at the wedding comparable to Bobby Hull’s absence from the life of Brett? The poem suggests that this is so through a richly complex image. The self-accusation comes from the face of Harrison whose lips are moved by a “face beneath.” The full final line is “How could you? the face beneath my face moves my mouth and asks me” (33). The context associates the face beneath with Brett Hull, whose place, as the son of the mythic hockey star, Harrison imaginatively supplants with his fantasies about Bobby Hull. Brett’s accusation points to the history elided in the elevation of Bobby Hull to a mythic hero: he interrupts Harrison’s childlike fantasy with a reminder of the flaws of the actual man who was his father, while simultaneously reminding Harrison of his own flaws.

Details from Harrison’s personal life are scattered throughout Hero of the Play. I’ve already mentioned poems about his father, his brother, and himself. “Love and the Hockey Pool” has some disguised references to the beginning of the relationship that led to his second marriage. “R loves L” in part 4, “Ice,” is probably a reference to “Richard” and “Lisa,” and the “you” throughout “Love and The Hockey Pool” is probably “L”. Harrison’s identification with Bobby Hull is itself as much personal as mythic. A popular joke in hockey circles applies here. “If you want to know when a guy thinks the Golden Age of hockey was,” the joke goes, “find out when he was eleven years old.” Harrison was born in 1957. In 1968–69, Bobby Hull scored 58 goals to shatter the NHL record for most goals in a season, and to reinforce his status as “the most dashing and attractive player in hockey.”

Works Cited