1 Stompin’ Tom Versus Big Al Two Imaginative Versions of the Game

Oh the good old hockey game
It’s the best game you could name
And the best game you could name
Is the good old hockey game.
—Stompin’ Tom Connors, “The Hockey Song”
And how do they feel about it
this combination of ballet and murder?
—Al Purdy, “Hockey Players”

Imaginative responses to hockey can be usefully categorized as either more conservative or more critical. By “conservative” I want to invoke both meanings of the word: conservative responses seek to conserve aspects of the game that are understood to be of value, in order to extend or intensify those aspects; and the aspects themselves are defined conservatively—that is to say, by reference to established cultural norms, to tradition, or to what critics have come to define as the “hockey myth.” Critical responses are concerned with the limitations of conservative responses; they interrogate ideas about hockey rooted in established cultural norms, tradition, or the hockey myth. Sometimes critical responses are negative or judgmental, in keeping with the popular meaning of “critical.” More often, they are critical in the manner of the best literary criticism, which works not so much by judging as by asking questions like “how does this work?” and “what further implications does it imply?” and “what does it leave out?” Out of this questioning emerge new possibilities of meaning, but the emergence is tentative, rooted as much in feeling and lived experience as in reason—in keeping with the nature of literature itself.

Another way to think of the conservative/critical distinction is as an expression of two impulses at the heart of human imagination. The American critic J. Hillis Miller suggests that the persistence of stories (and, by extension, other imaginative activities) can be explained by their ability to both reveal and create reality. To say that stories reveal reality is to presuppose “that the world has one kind or another of pre-existing order and that the business of fictions is in one way or another to imitate, copy or represent accurately that order,” whereas to say that stories create reality is to say that fiction can help to bring new ways of acting and knowing into being. Fiction can create reality because stories offer “a relatively safe or innocuous place in which the reigning assumptions of a given culture can be criticized” (Miller 1990, 69).

Although my conservative/critical distinction doesn’t map exactly upon Miller’s reveal/create distinction, there are strong affinities between the two. Like stories that try to reveal the way things are, conservative imaginative responses to hockey are about trying to imitate, copy or represent the pre-existing order of the game. Such responses represent received tradition (the “pre-existing order”) and work to conserve and reinforce that tradition. By contrast, like stories that try to create reality, critical imaginative responses question reigning assumptions about the game; they seek to expose the limitations of the “pre-existing order” and try to imagine new possibilities.

The concept of the hockey myth is important for a cultural study of the game. Before I talk about the hockey myth specifically, let me say a few things about “myth.” “Myth” is an unusually tricky term. It is widely used today in a pejorative sense, as in the phrase “that’s a myth” to indicate a claim that is objectively false or lacking in proof. The pejorative sense reflects competition between belief systems. An adherent of one religious system might denigrate another system, for example, by calling it a “myth,” thereby implying that the adherent’s own system is true. There is also a competition in Western culture between claims for which there is scientific proof and claims for which there is not. As part of this competition, non-scientific claims (like the myriad conspiracy theories that circulate today) are sometimes derided as “myths.”

What’s tricky is that “myth” also refers to ancient stories, often featuring supernatural beings and events, that seem to capture deep, transhistorical truths about ourselves and our world. As Gabor Maté puts it, for eons myth of this kind has been “a fount of knowledge, a portal to spirit, and one of the fundamentals of any healthy culture” (Maté 2022, 478). This kind of myth, for Maté, is “a collective expression of one of the most uniquely human qualities: imagination,” which “allows us to see beyond appearances and tap into core insights into what wholeness and wellness mean” (478–79). As Maté’s words imply, there are strong parallels between mythic thinking and religion. Karen Armstrong, in her excellent A Short History of Myth, explores this parallel in detail. According to Armstrong, ancient myths and religion are both rooted in the human need to come to terms with mortality by imagining a reality beyond everyday experience. “From the very beginning,” she writes, “we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value” (2006, 2).

Complicating the matter further is the development of modern myths. Roland Barthes, in his classic study Mythologies, examines how cultural phenomena as disparate as French wine, wrestling, and striptease, are imbued with mythic meaning. Two characteristics define this meaning. One has to do with how it involves a process of simplification that, in the manner of ancient myths, aims to reflect something essential or transhistorical about its subject. The other has to do with how the meaning is presented as natural and inevitable (a matter of “common sense,” self-evident, innocent, rooted in nature or “the way things are”). Modern myths represent human society as determined by a fixed set of relations that cannot be changed. Myth, according to Barthes, “transforms history into nature” (1972, 129).

The hockey myth in Canada, as it has come to be understood by various scholars, is a modern myth in the sense defined by Barthes, although some of its elements echo patterns found in classical myths (especially myths about heroes). The idea of the myth was first popularized by Richard Gruneau and David Whitson in their groundbreaking Hockey Night in Canada. For Gruneau and Whitson, the hockey myth indicates the set of “deeply rooted themes in Canadian popular culture” that stand at the intersection of “hockey careers, Canadian identity, and dreams” (1993, 131–32). In their introduction to Artificial Ice, they elaborate on these themes as follows:

Hockey is our [Canada’s] game; it expresses something distinctive about how we Canadians have come to terms with our unique northern environment and landscape; it is a graphic expression of “who we are”; the game’s rough masculinity is a testament to the distinctive passion and strength of the Canadian character; we are better at it than anyone else in the world; and the National Hockey League is the pinnacle of the game—as well as a prominent Canadian institution. (2006, 4, original italic removed)

Less important than the specific themes Whitson and Gruneau list here (different people will give slightly different takes on the specifics of the myth) is the idea of a group of beliefs about hockey that coalesced around the game in its early history and have become so deeply associated with Canadian identity and geography that they seem natural. The association of hockey with Canada’s northern geography underpins the idea that hockey embodies something essential about being Canadian. The hockey myth defines Canadian identity as embodied in the characteristics of hockey itself, in the kinds of people who play it or love it, and in the rural or small-town locales in which it has been traditionally played. The myth, as Gruneau and Whitson point out, speaks “a conservative language;” it contains elements that are “static and intransitive,” and, in the manner of the modern myths analysed by Roland Barthes, it represents these elements not as products of the social world but as “natural” and “without a history” (1993, 132).

Before I turn to my analysis, let me offer a few last thoughts about my “conservative/critical” distinction. I’d like to stress at the outset that neither way of responding imaginatively to hockey—the more conservative or the more critical—is categorically better than the other. The more recent texts in this study tend to be critical of the hockey myth, and, since conservative responses tend to reproduce elements of the hockey myth in an uncritical way, it may seem that the overall trajectory of my analysis implies a rejection of conservative responses. In fact, conservative responses persist because they reflect human needs projected onto and received back from the game. The fantasy of becoming a National Hockey League (NHL) star is a good example. Why is the grip of this fantasy so strong? Quite simply, because it seems to answer some key questions of life for certain boys. How to make a name for yourself? To find love? To earn money? To become a man? To be a rich and famous hockey player, the fantasy suggests, answers all these questions. Even when you know the fantasy is only a fantasy, as I did when I was a boy, there remains an imaginary compensation to indulging in it. Like reading a novel in which we fantasize about being a hero we could never be in real life, indulging in the hockey fantasy can be an escape from life’s limits. Perhaps elements from the fantasy may also inspire action in real life.

Another complication is that the distinction between what is critical and what is conservative is not always clear. What are the traditional elements of hockey and who gets to decide? There are also differences in time: what might seem like a critical response to one generation can seem like a conservative response to a later generation. A good example is Scott Young’s (1952) portrayal of mixed ethnicities in Scrubs on Skates. This portrayal challenges the reigning assumption of whiteness in hockey—and in Canada—in the 1950s, and so it seems to be a critical response. But the portrayal itself now seems outdated for the way it reproduces ethnic stereotypes, and so it seems conservative. And, in a final complication, the relationship between the two tendencies is neither entirely complementary nor antagonistic: though there is always a degree of conflict between the two, they are also interdependent in important ways.

So—as always with terminology—it is important to be cautious. Still, I believe that the conservative/critical distinction helps to illuminate some significant patterns in imaginative responses to hockey.

For the rest of this chapter, I’d like to illustrate some features of conservative and critical responses by looking at two of the most famous imaginative responses to hockey: Stompin’ Tom Connors’s “The Hockey Song” and Al Purdy’s “Hockey Players.” “The Hockey Song” is a good example of a conservative imaginative response, whereas “Hockey Players,” despite the fact that it was the first to be published, offers a revealing critical response to the view of hockey evoked by Connors’s song.

Stompin’ Tom and the Innocent Game

“The Hockey Song” originally appeared on Stompin’ Tom Connors’s 1973 album Stompin’ Tom and the Hockey Song. It has been a staple of Canadian popular culture ever since. As Sandra Martin puts it in her 2013 Globe and Mail obituary of Connors, “The Hockey Song” connected with “the quintessential Canadian audience: hockey fans” to the point where the song “became an unofficial anthem for the Ottawa Senators and, later, the Toronto Maple Leafs” (2013, 3). So iconic has “The Hockey Song” become that it is the first text in Michael Kennedy’s widely used anthology of hockey poetry, Going Top Shelf (from which I cite in what follows), just as it is often the lead text in university courses on hockey literature. Not everyone loves the song, of course. John MacFarlane, in his “Editor’s Note” for the special issue of The Walrus devoted to hockey, refers to it as “Stompin’ Tom Connors’ moronic musical paean to the sport” (MacFarlane 2010, 15). Yet the elements that make “The Hockey Song” seem moronic to MacFarlane—the simple lyrics and old-style country music—are at the root of the song’s popularity. And this popularity, in turn, illustrates the persistence of conservative imaginative responses to the game.

“The Hockey Song” seems to define something like the timeless essence of hockey. That this is the aim of the song is hinted at by the title. There is something humble about Connors’s title; this is just “The Hockey Song,” it implies, not some fancy composition worthy of a metaphoric or more literary title. Yet the definite article also carries a suggestion of “the one and only.” This is “The Hockey Song” not just “A Hockey Song.” Despite having a certain aw-shucks quality to it, then, the title implies that this is the definitive song about hockey—the song that encapsulates what is most valuable and worth conserving about the game.

The body of “The Hockey Song” is divided into three verses, each of which enacts one period of a hockey game. The first verse conveys the excitement of the game’s beginning, leading up to a goal scored by “Bobby.” The second describes how the home team falls behind but fights back to tie the score 1–1. The third focuses on the third period and is also described, in the spoken introduction on the recording, as “the last game of the playoffs.” In the final verse the home team scores and wins the Stanley Cup. Between the three verses there is the chorus, which I quote as the first epigraph to this chapter.

The story told by “The Hockey Song” is the one found over and over again in popular representations of sport. The three verses replicate what is typically found on highlight reels, what Iz, the protagonist of Cara Hedley’s Twenty Miles, calls the “Coles Notes” of a hockey game (Hedley 2007, 146). The climax in the third verse is typical of sport films and literature in North America, in which the hero makes a deciding play—the ninth inning home run (or strike out), the last second touchdown (or interception), and, of course, the overtime goal. Michael Oriard argues that this plot pattern was established by the vast juvenile sports literature in the United States of the early twentieth century: “Every juvenile sports novel concludes with a big game (traditional rivalry or championship game) or its equivalent in which the hero achieves his greatest triumph. Generally this big game is further reduced to an heroic moment.… The hero’s triumph makes him the premier citizen of his community—praised, admired, and immortalized” (1982, 35).

The narrative pattern in which a final sport triumph crowns a hero reflects popular ideas about sport itself. For this reason, there is often a mutually reinforcing relationship between sports literature and the heroes created by sport: “Sport exists, in a sense, to create heroes, and sports fiction can be viewed from one perspective as a genre that defines exactly who the representative … hero is” (Oriard 1982, 25).

“The Hockey Song” deviates from the pattern described by Oriard by not having an individual hero who is celebrated for scoring the winning goal. This is in keeping with the song’s emphasis on hockey as a ritual of communal identity. The connection between cheering for a home team and feelings of local pride, identity, and belonging can be seen in fan culture across sports. In Canada, hockey has often been celebrated as a way of building community in the face of the specific challenges of Canadian geography and climate. Ken Dryden and Roy MacGregor (1989) make this explicit in their aptly titled Home Game: Hockey and Life and Canada, which opens with an account of hardy Saskatchewan residents braving deadly cold to get to the relative shelter of a local arena for a Junior hockey game. In the context of the overwhelming immensity of the land, MacGregor and Dryden argue, the emotional bond between people has to come from communal rituals, and one of the most important of these is hockey: “Hockey helps us express what we feel about Canada, and ourselves. It is a giant point of contact, in a place, in a time, where we need every one we have—East and West, French and English, young and old, past and present. The winter, the land, the sound of children’s voices, a frozen river, a game—all are part of our collective imaginations. Hockey makes Canada feel more Canadian” (19).

Although the word “Canada” does not occur in “The Hockey Song,” the Canadian identity of the community described is implied. The opening words of the song—“Hello out there”—echo Foster Hewitt’s iconic opening from the original radio broadcasts of Hockey Night in Canada: “Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland” (Hockey Hall of Fame n.d.-a). The fact that Tom Connors was a well-known Canadian folksinger implies a Canadian context, as does the cover of the album from which the song comes, which shows a hockey game between players with uniforms recognizable, despite the whited-out logos, as those of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens. The goalie on the album cover is identifiable by his mask as Ken Dryden.

One of the fascinating things about “The Hockey Song” is the way it evokes a small town atmosphere even as the game it describes is clearly at the professional level (the game is broadcast and the prize is the Stanley Cup). A number of aspects of the song contribute to this effect. The familiarity of the references to “Bobby” and the “home team” have a part to play, as does the homey country music to which the song is set. The aura of innocence about the game portrayed also contributes: this is a professional game with no mention of money and in which the only violence is when the players “bump.” Also significant is the song’s use of the colloquial “ole” in the chorus, which evokes nostalgia, tradition, and folksy authenticity all at once—values that are traditionally associated with small towns. “The Hockey Game” champions “the good ole hockey game” in much the same way as “The Grand Ole Opry” promotes a small town and rural version of the United States.

A sport song that performs a similar imaginative sleight of hand—describing a professional game but evoking a small town atmosphere—is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” the 1908 Tin Pan Alley song by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, which is the unofficial anthem of North American baseball. “The Hockey Song,” in fact, echoes “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in key places. Though they are rarely sung, the verses of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” tell of a baseball mad young woman named Katie Casey who insists that her beau take her to a game instead of the movies so that she can root for her “home town crew” and “cheer up the boys she knew” (Norworth and Von Tilzer 1908). At the end of the second verse, the score is tied, and Katie makes the crowd sing the chorus of the song to cheer the home team to victory—a storyline reminiscent of “The Hockey Song.” There are two other important parallels between the songs. The opening of the third verse of “The Hockey Song,” “Oh take me where the hockey players,” is an echo of the chorus (and title) of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and Connors’s “good ole hockey game” directly echoes “the old ball game” of Norworth and Tilzer.

Connors likely knew “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” when he wrote “The Hockey Song.” Whether he did or not, however, is less important than how the echoes reinforce the conservative version of the game: the action distilled to highlights; an ending that makes a hero; cheering for the home team as a ritual of communal identity; identity defined in small town terms; and an innocent aura about the game itself, perhaps best captured by how, despite the big league surroundings, the players are characterized as boys (the diminutive “Bobby” in “The Hockey Song” is a more subtle way of evoking the “boys” of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”). In this way, “The Hockey Song” hints at a spiritual affinity between the game in the song and the game played by apple-cheeked boys on frozen ponds, in much the same fashion that “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” implies a spiritual connection between professional baseball and the game played by similarly apple-cheeked boys on small town sandlots.

There is one last point to be made about the conservative version of hockey evoked by “The Hockey Song.” What is most valuable about the game is evoked in quasi-religious terms. The ritual quality of the song, with its formal regularity and implied communal performance (it is very much a “singalong song”), is reminiscent of religious liturgy. Religious feeling becomes most explicit in the chorus, with its claim about hockey as “the best game you could name,” which not only has a highly ritual-like form but insists on an act of faith to be believed. Note that the logic of the chorus is circular. Why is hockey “the best game you could name”? Because the best game you could name “is the good ole hockey game.” Combined with the aggressive tribalism implied by this circularity (“our game is the best because it is!”) there is something in it of the “either you get it or you don’t” of religious faith. Michael Novak stresses this aspect when he writes about the parallels between sports and religion: “Why do I love sports? How can I explain it to myself, let alone to others, especially to those who are skeptical unbelievers? … You either see or you don’t see what the excitement is” (1988, xi).

Big Al and the Kid Who Couldn’t Skate

The aura of innocence about “The Hockey Song” is an effect not only of what is in the song but of what isn’t. Not only does the song imply a spiritual affinity with apple-cheeked children playing on a frozen pond, but it is silent about the harsher realities of the game. This is characteristic of conservative—or mythic—imaginative responses. Such responses, remember, tend to portray the virtues of the game as if they exist outside of history. One way to think of critical responses is that they aim to expose the historical conditions excluded from conservative responses. A good example of such a response is Al Purdy’s “Hockey Players.”

“Hockey Players” appeared originally in 1965 in The Cariboo Horses, Purdy’s first great collection, at a time when the country was nearing the heights of nationalistic fervour brought on by the flag debate and the approach of the 1967 Centennial. The poem has been often anthologized and reprinted since its original publication, probably because of how it reinforces the narrative of Purdy as the quintessentially Canadian poet—Canada’s Whitman, as it were—and because it stood virtually alone, for a number of years, as a serious poetic treatment of Canada’s national game. You could say that in a certain fashion “Hockey Players” is the text that begins “hockey literature” in Canada (though there are a few earlier texts that deal, in part, with hockey, as the next chapters will show). Even as it operates as a founding text for hockey literature, however, the poem sets in motion an intense questioning of what hockey represents.

“Hockey Players,” like “The Hockey Song,” describes a hockey game from the point of view of someone watching. Unlike “The Hockey Song,” however, “Hockey Players” does not contain a story arc in which the home team triumphs at the end. Instead, the persona describes fragments of play interspersed with observations about what is made invisible by the bright spectacle on the ice. The historical conditions exposed by the persona’s observations undermine various aspects of the mythic version of the game and lead to an anti-heroic conclusion.

The undermining of the mythic version of hockey begins in the opening lines, which, despite the poem’s title, do not evoke dominant tropes about hockey players. Instead, these lines offer a description of what the players fear:

What they worry about most is injuries
broken arms and legs and
fractured skulls opening so doctors
can see such bloody beautiful things almost
not quite happening in the bone rooms
as they happen outside
(Purdy 1996, 23)

To open a poem about hockey by describing the fears of the players is a subversive gesture: hockey players are not traditionally defined by fear. That the greatest worry of the players is said to be injuries is even more subversive. Injuries are, as the cliché goes, part of the game, and hockey culture tends to celebrate the battle scars acquired by players while playing. One of the enduring images of hockey players is that of the happy warrior, the smiling gap-toothed competitor captured in photographs of Bobby Clark from the 1970s or Alex Ovechkin or Brent Burns today.

“Hockey Players” suggests that there is a darker aspect to the happy warrior image. This darker aspect has to do, in the first instance, with the physical risk involved in hockey’s violent nature. The opening lines leave open whether the injuries feared are a product of regular physical contact or one of the periodic outbreaks of extreme violence that have plagued hockey from its beginnings. It could be either. The lines about “fractured skulls opening so doctors / can see such bloody beautiful things” would have resonated strongly with readers in 1965 who remembered the near fatal injury of Gordie Howe in 1950 and the stick-swinging prelude to the Richard Riot in 1955. The lines, unfortunately, were also prescient: less than three years later, Bill Masterton became the only NHL player to die of injuries suffered in a game. The Hockey Hall of Fame website has this account of what happened:

Masterton toiled patiently in the minors for six years, mostly in the USHL before getting a shot at the NHL when the league expanded to 12 teams for the 1967–68 campaign.… But, after just 38 games in the league, tragedy struck. During a North Stars’ game against another expansion team, the California Seals, on January 13, 1968, Masterton fell awkwardly to the ice, hitting his head. He died two days later of massive head injuries. (Hockey Hall of Fame n.d.-b)

The phrase “bloody beautiful” is particularly important for the poem’s portrayal of hockey. It anticipates the more famous line quoted as the second epigraph to this chapter. Throughout “Hockey Players” there is a back-and-forth account of the contradictory quality of this game that is at once so beautiful and so bloody—a combination of “ballet and murder” (25).

The bloody side of hockey raises an important question for players (and, to an extent, fans). Are the rewards of the game worth the physical risks? Purdy—through his persona—seems genuinely uncertain about this. At times “Hockey Players” seems cynical about the rewards of the game. What really motivates the professional game, the poem implies, is money; and if you are a player “stretched on the rubbing table,” you are probably “thinking of money in owners’ pockets that might be yours” (25). Later, the poem undercuts the mythic version of hockey’s emphasis on victory with a heavily ironic mention of money:

sing the song of winning all together
sing the song of money all together.
(25)

Other traditional rewards are also treated ironically. The idea that success at hockey might make a man of you is mocked by a clever twist on the often-asserted link between the professional game and childhood. Instead of channeling a spiritual connection to the old corner rink, the poem suggests, professional players have simply failed to grow up; they are “Boys playing a boy’s game in a permanent childhood” (25). Fans suffer from arrested development as well, since the game is played for “passionate stockbrokers / children wearing business suits” (24). A logical consequence of this undercutting of the manhood associated with hockey is that becoming a hero through the game becomes a “self-indulgence”:

the butt-slapping camaraderie and the self-indulgence
of allowing yourself to be a hero and knowing
everything ends in a pot-belly.
(25)

The phrase “allowing yourself to be a hero” implies something phoney about the label, as if “hero” is imposed from without, a projection upon the player from fans or the league marketing apparatus. The truth, these lines imply, is that hockey is a way to avoid the reality of aging. What’s more, the players do their avoiding despite knowing full well that it is self-indulgent.

Yet “Hockey Players” does not only criticize the traditional attractions of the game. What is tricky about the poem—and what makes it so rich to study—is that, although the persona is very critical at times, there are moments in which he is genuinely moved. For example, he describes himself to be in a group “up there in the blues / bored and sleepy” until “three men / break down the ice in roaring feverish speed,” which causes the group to “stand up in our seats with such a rapid pouring / of delight exploding out of self” (24). It’s as if the spectacle on the ice is so captivating that the persona is compelled to delight. This other side of the persona—the skeptical observer transformed, seemingly against his better judgment, into a fan—adds a fascinating countercurrent to the poem’s questioning of the mythic version of the game. Take these very important lines:

On a breakaway
the centreman carrying the puck
his wings trailing a little
on both sides why
I’ve seen the aching glory of a resurrection
in their eyes
if they score
but crucifixion’s agony to lose
—the game?
(24)

Read from the point of view of the persona’s skepticism, this passage seems to mock the mythic elevation of hockey into a religion and to ridicule the players for caring so much about what is, after all, only a game. In this case, the question mark at the end of the passage lands with a heavy irony. Yet the question mark could be read quite differently. From the point of view of the persona as a fan, it could express a genuine sense of questioning or, even, wonder. “Why do players and fans have such extreme reactions to the game?” it might ask. “What powerful—even spiritual—forces are contained in hockey that it could do such a thing?” Given that the persona is himself a fan and is shown elsewhere in the poem to have his own extreme reactions, there is also a hint in the question mark of him trying to make sense of something within himself.

That the persona of “Hockey Players” is both a skeptic and a fan complicates the passage in the poem that treats the hockey myth most explicitly. This occurs about halfway through, just after the persona describes himself and other fans standing to follow the feverish rush. What follows next is surreal: the rushing players skate “thru the smoky end boards out / of sight” and into the Canadian landscape, where they continue to play against a series of rugged northern backdrops—“the appalachian highlands,” “laurentian barrens,” and “treeless tundra”—until the vision collapses (24). At the point of collapse, the focus shifts back to the persona and the other fans:

we have to
laugh because we must and
stop to look at self and one another but
our opponent’s never geography
or distant why
it’s men
—just men?
(24–5)

The question mark at the end of this passage lands with the same ambiguity as in “—the game?” From the skeptical point of view, the mark signals ironic deflation, a debunking of the hockey myth’s claims about connection to the northern landscape and the larger-than-life heroes of the game who set the standard for Canadian identity. These are not god-like figures striding across the landscape, the mark says, they are just men. Yet the mythic version of the game is not unambiguously discredited. The question mark—reinforced by the parallel use in the earlier “—the game?”—hints again at genuine questioning, as in: How is it that mere men can assume such stature? It is also important that any deflation takes place only after an extended passage in which the myth is acted out, and only after the persona and other fans (and readers of the poem) are swept up by it. The debunking, then, is accompanied by a display of the lasting allure of the myth.

“Hockey Players” does give the last word to criticism of the hockey myth. After “sing the song of money all together” (25) are these final lines:

(and out in the suburbs
there’s the six-year-old kid
whose reflexes were all wrong
who always fell down and hurt himself and cried
and never learned to skate
with his friends)
(26)

This is a pretty heavy-handed ending—especially for a poem whose persona turns out to be both a skeptic and a fan. Perhaps, after treating various other aspects of the hockey myth ironically, Purdy felt a need to mar the game’s most sacred shrine: the corner rink. Despite the claims of the hockey myth, the ending implies, not everyone can or will want to play hockey, not everyone will “see what the excitement is”—and if hockey is such an important part of what unifies you as a community, what then?

The Game?

The ambiguous position of the persona in “Hockey Players”—skeptical of what he is seeing but swept up in the spectacle nevertheless—anticipates the position assumed by many of the literary texts about hockey that appear after Purdy. So often these texts present a complicated mix of homage to the traditional elements of the game and critical interrogation of these elements. This is probably, in part, because the writers of the texts tend to have backgrounds like my own: they began life as lovers and players of the game and, as writers in later life, tend to be both skeptics (as writers are wont to be) and fans. The mix also hints at the interconnectedness of the two tendencies in imaginative responses to the game. For contemporary writers, the way conservative responses reflect the hockey myth—with its tendency to be static and ahistorical—calls out for critical interrogation. To interrogate conservative responses properly, however, requires an appreciation for their persistent attraction. It is not enough to simply dismiss “The Hockey Song” as a “moronic musical paean;” you have to recognize that the song is popular because it speaks to deeply rooted desires in people projected onto and reflected back by the game.

What is ultimately implied by the conservative/critical distinction, then, is a conversation. Like the question marks in Purdy’s poem, the distinction suggests the complicated co-existence of different responses to the game—responses that are antagonistic to one another but also, in important ways, intertwined. Before we can examine the intertwining of conservative and critical responses, however, we need to examine the origins and defining features of the hockey myth in more detail. This will be the focus of the next four chapters.

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2. The Fighting Soul of Hockey in Ralph Connor’s Glengarry School Days