7 Blarney’s Version The Comic Spirit of Hockey in Paul Quarrington’s King Leary

The Natural

The starting point of mythic representations of hockey, as Gruneau and Whitson have pointed out, is the idea that hockey is “a ‘natural’ adaptation to ice, snow, and open space” (Gruneau and Whitson 1993, 132). King Leary portrays Leary as a true believer in this myth. Early in the novel he responds to a question about the historical origins of hockey by saying he didn’t realize it “originated.” Hockey, to him, was just “always there, like the moon” (Quarrington 1994, 8). Leary’s belief in the natural origins of the game is matched by his belief in the natural origins of his own ability. As Hedley puts it, Leary understands hockey to exist in his body “as a kind of mysterious, natural knowledge without origin” (2018, 30). Leary’s naturalness extends to rejecting scientific coaching and analysis. When it comes to skating, for example, he ridicules how modern coaches use “slide projectors set up to show diagrams of leg muscles and such palaver.” For him skating fast is just “hardstepping,” which is the opposite of science: “Here’s what you do. You puff up your spirit till it won’t fit into your body anymore. You get your feet to dance across the icebelly of the world. You get empty except for life and the winter wind. Then you’re going like hell” (Quarrington 1994, 12). Leary’s beliefs shape the inscription he wants on his grave marker: “PERCIVAL H. LEARY, SOMETHING OF A NATURAL” (40).

That Leary is a true believer in the hockey myth is important to the novel’s comic point of view. Leary’s naïveté, in both word and action, creates a dramatic irony in which the reader knows more than Leary does. For example, Leary ends up in reform school because his friend Clay Clinton convinces him that the two of them “had to defend the honor of [Clinton’s] sister, Horseface” (29). Leary agrees to perform a retaliatory prank, which leads to a house burning down and his own incarceration, while never suspecting ulterior motives on Clinton’s part (29–30). An even more pronounced example is how he keeps referring to his “Indian” nickname, “Loof-weeda,” bestowed upon him by Poppa Rivers, the great-grandfather of another friend, Manny Ozikean. Leary takes the name to be a reference to the near mystical quality of his skating—the literal translation is “windsong”—and hence proof of his status as the “King of the Ice.” His lack of self-awareness makes him blind to the duplicitous quality of the name (of which I will have more to say below).

Leary’s status as a natural sets up an extended satire on core elements of the hockey myth. Much of this satire takes place in the section of the novel having to do with Leary’s education at the hands of the monks at the Bowmanville (Annex) Reformatory. The main strand of this education, it turns out, is muscular Christian. The motto of the reform school plays off the idea that vigorous exercise in the cold northern air will lead to physical hardiness and moral virtue: “TO KEEP A BOY OUT OF HOT WATER, PUT HIM ON ICE” (34). To someone versed in hockey history, the monks who run the school will bring to mind Father David Bauer, the Basilian Priest who was a key developer and coach of the Canadian national team. The reform school itself is a castle and appears to Leary like a picture from a storybook version of The Knights of the Round Table (34). This adds a layer of heroic romance to the muscular Christian identity apparently inculcated by the monks through hockey. Round Table knights are synonymous with the ideal of chivalry—of heroic action combined with high moral character. Sir Percival, Leary’s namesake, is a knight of special virtue; he is one of three knights worthy of the Grail Quest. The implication is that Leary’s time at the reform school is an opportunity for him to acquire what he needs to realize the potential of his name.

Leary’s education suggests that nature—the original outdoor setting of hockey—is not just a physical realm but a spiritual one. Indeed, the nature evoked by the monks, as well as the hockey myth, is Romantic: the natural world embodies a divine truth or unity. This is made explicit by the rink upon which hockey at the reform school is played. “Our rink was a circle,” Leary recalls. “There was a full moon, and it filled the window across from my cot, and for some strange reason I could make out all the mountains and craters. The moon was a strange color, too, a silver like a nickel had been flipped into the sky” (145). The round rink, with its glowing twin in the sky, implies a connection between hockey and the centre of creation—what the Greeks called the omphalos of the world. To play on such a surface is to participate in the wholeness of the world. The purity of the rink is suggested by the fact that its ice is “hard as marble” and “blue-silver” (37). The imagery repeats the description of the ice on the Ottawa canal where Leary learns to skate, which was also “hard as marble” as well as “strong and true” (7).

The monks themselves embody the four classical elements of creation: earth (Simon the ugly, who looked like “what dogs are dreaming about when their back legs start twitching”); fire (Andrew the fireplug, with his “bright red face”); wind (Theodore, who is so “slight” that he was “just barely there”); and water (Isaiah the blind seer, whose eyes “were a strange milky blue color”) (32). Each monk has a special lesson for Percival about some aspects of hockey and life. Brothers Andrew and Simon teach skating techniques: one teaches “Bulldogging” and the other the kind of finesse moves that lead to the “St. Louis Whirlygig,” a signature move of Leary’s later on (38). Brother Theodore teaches Leary to shoot like a Zen master who Aims but does not aim, feeling the puck as if it were part of his body and using his “inner-eye” to put the puck into the back of the net (39).

Brother Isaiah is the “head honcho” monk (41). He combines the characteristics of a Kung Fu master and a blind prophet in the tradition of Tiresias from Greek mythology, with a dash of Yoda from Star Wars thrown in, when he uses something like The Force to stop pucks he cannot see. And, in keeping with his Christian name, he speaks in quotations from the Book of Isaiah. When Leary asks why the rink is round, he replies by quoting Isaiah 40:22: “Have ye not heard? It is he who sitteth upon the circle of the earth that bringeth the princes to nothing” (37). This pronouncement evokes the cryptic prophesies of figures like Tiresias, while also lampooning the sorts of motivational sayings uttered by guru-like hockey coaches: it is easy to imagine such a quotation on the blackboard of Freddie “The Fog” Shero.

Quarrington, then, has a lot of fun with what Whitson and Gruneau call the “happy naturalism” at the core of the hockey myth (Whitson and Gruneau 2006, 1). The fun he has is akin to another text that portrays an athletic natural, Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, The Natural, which became a film in 1984 starring Robert Redford. To appreciate the wider significance of The Natural, I refer you to Oriard’s (1982) excellent analysis in chapter 6 of Dreaming of Heroes. For my purposes, I would like to stress the main point that Oriard makes, which is that “Malamud deals with baseball in The Natural in a consciously mythic way” (1982, 212). He does this by combining in the story of his protagonist, Roy Hobbs, events in baseball history that have been elevated to the status of myth, from “Babe Ruth’s orphan background,” to the “natural” greatness of Shoeless Joe Jackson, to the story of Eddie Waitkus, “mysteriously shot by a woman in a hotel room in 1949” (Oriard 1982, 212). Hobbs himself has an “infantile obsession with the acquisition of fame” that suggests “the juvenility of the athlete-hero” as portrayed in popular sports literature (Oriard 1982, 216).

I’m not sure how conscious Quarrington was about echoing The Natural in King Leary. His characterization of Leary, however, has significant echoes of Roy Hobbs. Not only is Leary also a “natural” who is driven by an “infantile obsession” with fame, but many of the events attributed to him are hockey equivalents of the mythic events attributed by Malamud to Hobbs. Both Hobbs and Leary have magical “weapons,” descendants of King Arthur’s Excalibur: Hobbs has a hand-carved bat named Wonderboy that he keeps in a bassoon case and Leary has a dragon-headed walking stick given to him by Brother Isaiah (Quarrington 1994, 56). When Hobbs says that he wants to have people say “there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game,” it is easy to hear the voice of Leary (Malamud 1963, 34). Leary and Hobbs also begin their careers by deposing a previous “king,” Hobbs striking out the “Whammer” and Leary besting Newsy Lalonde with a play called “The Magic Stone” (Malamud 1963, 32; Quarrington 1994, 98). Most importantly, they each share the belief that by a remarkable feat of athleticism they can solve the problems of their lives. They cling to this belief until the end. In the case of Hobbs, despite his life becoming increasingly hopeless, he imagines that if he can make the winning play in the championship game he’d feel “eight foot tall, and when he got into bed with his wife, [she’d give] it to him the way they do to heroes” (Malamud 1963, 231).

King Leary, like The Natural, stresses the duplicitous quality of the mythic stature conferred by sport. The feat that crowns Leary as the King of the Ice illustrates this particularly well. As I mentioned above, Leary becomes king by dethroning Newsy Lalonde with “The Magic Stone.” According to chapter 18, this play occurs in overtime of the deciding game of the Stanley Cup final of 1919 (Quarrington 1994, 99). The goal Leary scores is akin to other heavily mythologized goals in hockey history: Bill Barilko’s overtime cup winning goal of 1951, Bobby Orr’s overtime cup winning goal of 1970, and Sidney Crosby’s “golden goal” at the 2010 winter Olympics come to mind. Afterward, Leary says “The rest is historical”—meaning that his reputation is made. The irony of Leary’s assertion will be apparent to well-read hockey fans, who will know that nothing about this incident could be “historical,” since there was, in fact, no Stanley Cup awarded in 1919. The finals of that year were cancelled after five games, with the series between the Montreal Canadiens and the Seattle Metropolitans tied, because of the Spanish Flu. This was the only time since 1893 that the Stanley Cup was not awarded, until the NHL lockout of 2004–5 (Marsh 2006). In other words, Leary becomes King of the Ice by scoring a goal in a deciding game that never happened.

The Manly Way

In his consciously mythic treatment of hockey, Quarrington sets up a series of jokey-serious comparisons between hockey heroes, heroes outside of hockey, and manhood. Chapter 10 is a good illustration. The chapter opens in 1916 when Manny and Leary decide they should go fight “the Huns” (Quarrington 1994, 56). They leave the reform school with the blessing of the monks, head to Toronto, and enlist. As they are about to depart with their respective units, the two of them shake hands “in a very manly way” and pretend not to notice that “the other guy was crying” (59).

Leary’s war experience sets up jokey-serious comparisons between soldiers and hockey players. Leary tries to make sense of the war by using the frame of reference he knows best: hockey. He imagines his brigade as “like a winger going up-ice along the boards,” and during the attack he “bulldog[s]” through the mud on all fours (59–60). When soldiers around him are killed, he imagines that “God was handing out Major Penalties” (60). And, in classic hockey player fashion, he downplays his injuries. After being shot in the head, he says “it wasn’t that big a deal. In a few years the famous son of a bitch Sprague Cleghorn would two-hand my bean and split it open like a nut, and this bullet was nothing in comparison” (60).

Blurring the lines between hockey hero and hero away from the rink was a feature of the World War One era. Propaganda for the war often appealed to the heroic desires of athletes. For example, Captain James Sutherland, president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, exhorted young Canadian hockey players to take up arms and “play the greatest game of [your] life” (cited in McKinley 2000, 90). This kind of appeal is the background for the moment when Leary describes a fellow soldier getting hit: “He didn’t die right away. He lay there, breathing hard, and tried to pretend he was in a story in a CHUMS book.… Finally all he could get out was, ‘To hell with this,’ and he died pissed off” (Quarrington 1994, 60). In CHUMS, a boys’ magazine published from 1892 to 1941, the language of heroism is used interchangeably to describe the manliness celebrated in sport, adventure, and war. Quarrington uses the reference in the same way as Timothy Findley in his famous First World War novel, The Wars, to signal a primary source for boys trying to understand what it meant to be a man. So when Robert Ross has to perform his first manly deed in The Wars—shoot an injured horse—he summons up a memory “of a cowboy shooting his horse behind the ear” in CHUMS (Findley 2005, 62).

King Leary illustrates the difficulty of translating hockey heroism into heroism beyond the rink in a particularly funny way through its references to a book series called “Leary & Clinton and Their Various Fabulous Adventures” (Quarrington 1994, 10). This series calls to mind CHUMS, or the Boy’s Own Paper, or a series like The Hardy Boys (which began in 1927 and continues to this day). The premise of the series is that Leary and Clinton, as heroes of hockey, can also deal heroically with challenges away from the game. The nature of the books, however, as illustrated by the fictional excerpts within King Leary, points to the flaw in this logic. The excerpts are extremely formulaic; they are identical except for minor changes of phrase and setting. In each one Clinton is in trouble and exclaims a variation on “I’m afraid I’m done for,” while Little Leary, “his Irish blood at a boil,” replies “Don’t be so sure!” and proceeds to effect a rescue (see Quarrington 1994, 10–11, 132–33). The characterizations are obviously stereotypes: Clinton is a stiff-lipped English gentleman; Leary a hot-blooded “Irishter” (53). The increasingly absurd scenarios of the books (Leary & Clinton Fight the Dogstar People) also highlight how out-of-touch with reality the books are, though it is also a sly comment, I think, about the enduring popularity of the old-fashioned manliness they represent.

The fact that the Leary and Clinton books are juvenile fiction, with obviously juvenile protagonists, adds another irony. The hockey myth, as we’ve seen, promises that the game can turn boys into men; but, as we have also seen, playing the game has a way of stunting the development of those same players. There is something persistently childlike about Leary, especially when it comes to sexuality: he views women’s bodies with the mix of puerile desire and squeamishness you’d expect in a fourteen-year-old boy (like Felix Batterinski, he is stuck in a state of arrested development when it comes to relationships). Like the players in Al Purdy’s “Hockey Players,” Leary is trapped in a “permanent childhood” by the game (Purdy 1965, 60)—just as his character is frozen in a permanent childhood by the Leary and Clinton books.

One last point about the books. A key episode in Leary’s early life occurs when he and Clinton are skating on the Ottawa canals as boys. The ice cracks and they fall in. As they are falling, Clinton calls out “Percival, old bean, I’m afraid we’re done like kippers.” This, according to Leary, illustrates how Clinton “was already living in those damn adventure books” (14) as a child, which further underlines the persistence of the formulaic model (Clinton is probably mimicking something he read in CHUMS). More importantly, the real-life rescuer of Clinton is not Leary but Manny Ozikean, who saves Clinton and Leary both. Manny gets no mention in the Leary and Clinton books, which reflects the shabby treatment he receives throughout his life. This shabby treatment, as we shall see, carries heavy symbolic weight.

Loof-weeda

Much of King Leary is about the evil consequences of Leary’s quest to be King of the Ice. Leary is blinded by ambition and stunted by the limited version of manhood he achieves through hockey.

Not surprisingly, given his adolescent attitudes towards sexuality, Leary is a lousy husband. His marriage to Chloe Millson is a result of a puerile deal: Chloe “would have no compunction against stripping off and swimming in my sight in the buff-bare” and in return Leary joined her “in holy wedlock” (Quarrington 1994, 109). Leary’s attitude to Chloe, just as his attitude to women more generally, is shaped by a combination of the hockey world and the era of the 1920s. Hedley sums up this attitude as follows: “Women are either the wives or girlfriends of hockey players or are placed under the spotlight in moments of objectification by men” (Hedley 2018, 37). Indeed, the main role of the female characters in the novel is to be objects of competition for the men. Jane, Chloe’s sister, begins as the girlfriend of Manny, but is taken from Manny by Clay Clinton. Chloe herself is involved with Clinton, who, the novel suggests, is the real father of Leary’s son Clifford. Leary is appalled by both his sons, but especially by Clarence, who is gay and a writer of gay pornography (Quarrington 1994, 47). The irony is that Clarence—or Rance, as he is called—is Leary’s true heir. Not only is Rance biologically Leary’s son, but he is also a brilliant skater and able to perform the St. Louis Whirligig, Leary’s patented move. Both of his sons love him, but Leary, like King Lear with Cordelia, fails to recognize the true love of a child for a parent; Leary rejects Clifford as “gormless” and his stunted views of manhood mean he can’t get past the fact that Rance “skates like a girl” (48).

Manny Ozikean, as King Leary makes clear, is the strongest and most gifted player of the era. He is the true “natural.” He is also a spiritual being who has a special connection with the hockey playing monks (99). His lack of ambition is shown when Clay Clinton demands to know how he expects “to get anywhere in the world.” Manny replies: “I’m already somewhere in the world” (95). Despite his lack of ambition, Manny outperforms Leary in every hockey event they are in together. Most telling is Leary’s feat of playing all the positions in a game in 1923. After one of Leary’s boasts about this feat, in which he characteristically fails to mention Manny, Blue Herman, a reporter who has followed Leary’s career step-by-step, points out that “Manny got seven goals that game” (36). Playing every position is a rather gimmicky accomplishment, like hitting for the cycle in baseball; scoring seven goals, however, is an extraordinary personal achievement. Manny’s seven goals would make him the co-holder of the NHL record for most goals in a game, tied with Joe Malone, who performed the feat in 1920. No NHL player has matched this record since.

Because of his own ambition, Leary downplays or makes invisible the role of Manny in his own career, as well as Manny’s own accomplishments. Worse, he betrays Manny as a friend. Two aspects of this betrayal particularly stand out. One is Leary’s failure to intervene on Manny’s behalf to help him stop drinking. The other is Leary’s complicity in a trade of Manny from Ottawa to New York. As described in chapter 36 of the novel, Clay Clinton, as general manager of the Ottawa Patriots, decides to trade Manny to clear his own path to Jane Millson. By this point Leary’s career has ended. Clinton hires him as coach in Ottawa, then runs the trade by him. Leary recognizes how New York will lead Manny back to drink and will likely destroy him. But he is intent on retaining the title of King, despite the end of his playing days, and Manny is his main rival. So he gives his okay—thus sharing Clinton’s guilt in Manny’s demise (189).

The evil consequences of Leary’s quest are comically embodied by the “Indian” nickname that he receives. “Loof-weeda” is bestowed upon him by Poppa Rivers in the following exchange:

“What is this loof-weeda business?” [Leary asks].

“It is what I have decided to call you,” [replies Poppa Rivers].

“An Indian name, huh?”

“Right.”

“What does it mean?”

“Oh, a literal translation would be something like ‘windmusic’ or ‘windsong.’ ”

“Because of the way I skate?”

“For sure.… The way you fucking skate.”

“Loof-weeda.”

Then there was a hint of that smell again. (138)

The smell is described as “like someone had made a stew with potatoes, death, and cow dung” (136). The context makes clear that Poppa Rivers intends the name as an insult. He tags Leary with it because of his refusal to tell Manny, in a loving way, to stop drinking. Leary avoids making a commitment to do so and Poppa Rivers knows what this means. “You won’t do it, you loof-weeda” he says (138).

Loof-weeda embodies the two main features of Leary’s character—his obsession with achieving mythic status through hockey, and his blindness about the evil by-products of this ambition. Only late in life does Leary come to understand the stink that surrounds his claim to be King of the Ice.

The Loof-weeda references in King Leary are part of a pattern of jokes about farting and belching. These jokes, in turn, satirize the male culture of drinking, boasting, bullshitting, and entitlement that the novel identifies with hockey. Belching has a similar kind of duplicity as Loof-weeda. The first time Leary drinks ginger ale, for example, it make him want to “start fights, but only the good fights, fights with thugs, monsters and dragons” (53). But then it causes belching. When Leary belches, it turns out to be “like a dragon about to eat a maiden” (3). So, despite his noble intentions, he ends up aligning himself with the monstrous.

Aggressive masculinity of the kind often associated with hockey is about the projection of power and the hiding of weakness. Flagrant belching and farting can be read as displays of potency in men; they are rather like the playground taunts we engaged in as boys, where you’d bare your armpit at another boy and yell “Smell this!” Yet, like all such aggressive gestures, they are also defensive—a way to ward off feelings of vulnerability and impotence. Flagrantly farting or belching represents the classic defensive function of making a loud display to disguise the underlying reality of your powerlessness (see Dopp 1999, 50).

Human powerlessness is most revealed in the fact that we die. Fear of death has haunted human beings since we first attained self-awareness, and we have created various ways to cope with this fear. Sport is one of those ways. Michael Novak suggests that athletes—young, bursting with vitality, capable of acts that seem beautiful, heroic, even transcendent—are ritual actors, and that their accomplishments can be read as “ritual triumphs of grace, agility, perfection, beauty over death” (Novak 1988, 48). There is indeed something about great athletic achievements that defies time; they seem to involve, as Novak suggests, a “momentary attainment of perfect form—as though there were, hidden away from mortal eyes, a perfect way to execute a play, and suddenly a player or a team has found it and sneaked a demonstration down to earth” (5). For this reason, the euphoria of winning is accompanied by “the sense of one’s inflation by a power not one’s own” (48). To win “is to have destiny blowing out one’s sails” (49); or, to put it in religious terms, to win is to be a favourite of the gods—chosen.

Although King Leary deals with existential issues only in a light-handed way, there is a definite sense that Leary, in the winter of his life, must face the ultimate questions he has previously avoided by his pursuit of being the King. Leary’s quest for mythic status is, at root, a bid for immortality. Loof-weeda wonderfully embodies the duplicity of such status. On the one hand, the nickname seems to imply, through its literal translation, “windsong,” that Leary possesses an indigenous spiritual power rooted in the land, as if he is, himself, a spiritual rather than a physical person. On the other hand, the nickname directly indicates his physicality. Few things emphasize the physicality of the human body more than a fart. A fart is a literal byproduct of decay, of the body’s physical functioning, which is why it smells, among other things, like death. Loof-weeda, then, not only embodies the byproducts of Leary’s quest to be King, but the impossibility of overcoming death through mythic status.

Canada’s Hero

King Leary, as Cara Hedley has written, “suggests important parallels between Leary’s personal story and the story of Canada” (Hedley 2018, 25). The equation is jokingly signaled by Leary’s favourite drink: Canada Dry ginger ale. Leary’s teetotaling implies, at first glance, a wholesomeness in line with the social values of a small town. His education by the monks, with its muscular Christian overtones, parallels the ideals of manhood and nation that we saw in Glengarry School Days. His career takes him from the small town environment of early Ottawa to the big cities of the NHL, a journey that parallels the growth of the country. And his character on the ice—the small player who succeeds by hardiness, determination, and creativity—mirrors the self-definition of Canada, especially in the early years of its history.

The equation between Leary and Canada is further emphasized by Leary’s war experiences. In chapter 10, Leary participates in Vimy Ridge, the most mythologized battle in Canadian history. The Canadian War Museum’s account is typical: “For the first time all four Canadian divisions attacked together: men from all regions of Canada were present at the battle. Brigadier-General A. E. Ross declared after the war, ‘in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation’ ” (Cook n.d.). The success of the Canadians at Vimy Ridge is traditionally attributed to their toughness, teamwork, and ability to adapt to the rapid changes of the modern battlefield. Not coincidentally, these are also the characteristics often attributed to successful hockey teams.

One characteristic of Leary’s that may seem unCanadian is his boastfulness. Leary’s bombastic egoism seems the opposite of the niceness and humility Canadians are famous for (if only in their own minds). Hedley, however, makes the point that the one thing Canadians are not known to be “humble and nice” about is hockey. Canadians brag about hockey, and various hockey events (like the 1972 Summit Series or the 2010 Olympics) have shown how invested many Canadians are in the idea of Canada being the best at the game. For Hedley, one way to explain this is that hockey operates as a “kind of Prozac” to relieve national tensions (Hedley 2018, 26). Boasting about hockey fights off doubts about the legitimacy of the nation: “With the sport declared a ‘possession’ of Canada, hockey victories may be regarded as promoting national legitimacy. The scoreboard never lies; as long as Canadian hockey teams and hockey players are winning, the nation reigns, in some small way, supreme” (26).

The identification of Leary with Canada allows Quarrington to make fun of some sacred cows of Canadian identity. Leary’s love of ginger ale, for example, works by inversion to satirize the idea of Canadians as moderate people. Unlike other hockey players, or sports writers like Blue Hermann, Leary does not engage in the alcoholic debauchery common in the professional sports culture of the time. The irony is that he drinks ginger ale because “it makes me pissed!” (Quarrington 1994, 3, 207). The fact that Leary’s favourite drink is so apparently benign only makes more starkly apparent how much he has indulged himself.

That hockey players embody small town values is also satirized. To explain the debauchery of Canadian hockey players in New York, Leary explains that “back then hockey players were young Canucks from small towns, if they happened to be from towns at all” (154). He goes on to say that the players came from places like “Swastika, Ontario … East Braintree, Manitoba … and St. Louis-de-Ha! Ha! … in Quebec” (155). On one level, the implication of this passage is that the players are simpletons unequipped to deal with the temptations of Big City Life, but below the surface are ironies that, like Stephen Leacock’s famous horseman, ride off in all directions. The names of the towns (“Swastika” especially) hint that there is a darker underbelly already in a small town that has nothing to do with being corrupted by the Big City. The Québec place name, which is of a real town, hints at a connection to myths about Crazy Frenchmen while blurring the distinction between “blarney” and “reality.” If St. Louis-de-Ha!-Ha! is a real Canadian name, how can you tell what is a real place and/or what is not in the country?

The biggest question hanging over the Canadian nation, of course, has to do with First Nations people. The hockey myth answers this question by promising a Canadian identity rooted in the land—an indigenization for non-Indigenous residents of Canada. As I argued in chapter 2, the amateur ideal of early hockey excluded First Nations people. One of the most Canadian aspects of King Leary, then, has to do with Leary’s betrayal of Manny, who, even with his red hair, is “mostly … an Indian” (Quarrington 1994, 75). The betrayal replays the historical treatment of First Nations people by settlers. Leary owes a great deal to Manny, including his life (which Manny saves twice), and his response could be said to mirror the European settlers in Canada who avoided their debt to the First Nations and instead claimed to be the rightful heirs to the land.

Complicating Everything

Another layer is added to the novel’s portrait of Canada by Clay Clinton. As Jane Millson puts it, “Clay Clinton complicates everything. That’s what he’s best at …” (Quarrington 1994, 112). What is most complicating about Clinton is that his story is also the story of Canada.

The identification between Clinton and Canada is suggested by the echoes in his story of the lives of two famous hockey businessmen, Conn Smythe and Harold Ballard, both of whom, in turn, are Canadian icons. Smythe became co-owner of the Toronto St. Patricks team in 1927 and renamed it the Toronto Maple Leafs, using for the logo the leaf on the shoulder patches of Canadian soldiers in World War One (McKinley 2000, 198). By jettisoning the original Irish Catholic name and rebranding with the shoulder patch, Smythe created a team that billed itself as a representative of Canada—minus French Québec, of course, towards whom Smythe had a “democratic bigotry” (McKinley 2000, 199). Smythe, like the fictional Clinton, was an astute businessman and a gambler. One of the famous stories about him is that he used the winnings from a long-shot bet on a horse to buy King Clancy for the Maple Leafs in 1930 (Hockey Hall of Fame n.d.). Unlike the fictional Clinton, the historical Smythe was a true war hero, who raised battalions of sportsmen to fight in both wars, and whose nickname “Major” was derived from the rank he achieved in the army. He was widely admired and is in the Hockey Hall of Fame in the Builders category.

Conn Smythe, however, also had a darker side. He promoted violence in hockey as good for business. “We’ve got to stamp out that kind of thing,” he famously said after a fight between Rocket Richard and Bob Bailey, “or people are going to keep on buying tickets!” (Smythe and Young 1981, 195). He was also part of the cabal of owners who crushed attempts by players to achieve better working conditions. In response to Ted Lindsay’s 1956–57 attempt to form a bargaining association, Smythe, according to Cruise and Griffiths, “favoured a scorched-earth policy. He was obsessed with crushing the association, immediately” (Cruise and Griffiths 1991, 97). The ruthless side of Smythe is suggested in King Leary by its account of the building of the Toronto Gardens, the fictional version of Maple Leaf Gardens. Smythe’s historical arena was built in 1931. A heavily mythologized fact about the construction is its completion in only five months—a feat sometimes said to constitute “a world record” for buildings of this sort. In King Leary, Clinton builds his arena in 1947 (to conform to the timeline of the novel) and—in what seems, at first, an allusion to the history of the original—the construction is said to have “set some sort of record.” The record set, however, turns out to be for lack of safety: “There were scores of injuries and no less than seventeen workers died” (Quarrington 1994, 131).

The darker side of Clinton’s character is made more explicit in allusions to the historical Harold Ballard, who won control of the Toronto Maple Leafs from the heirs of Conn Smythe after a bitter battle in 1971. Like Ballard, Clinton is born rich, is involved in shady dealings, including shady dealings with women, and ends up living like the Phantom of the Opera in an apartment specially constructed in the upper reaches of the arena. The friendship between Leary and Clinton mirrors the friendship between Ballard and King Clancy, who were famous in their later years for sitting together at games in a specially built corner box. Ballard also presided over the dismantling of the Leafs franchise, making destructive trades out of personal animus, and, in general, being the archetype of the “very rich ‘hands-on’ owner, who is himself part of the show and is accustomed to running things” (Whitson and Gruneau 2006, 126)—just like Clay Clinton.

In King Leary, Clinton dies in 1967 and is laid in state at the Toronto Gardens. “Four thousand people,” according to the novel, come “to see his bloated body” (Quarrington 1994, 10). The account of Clinton’s death reinforces his connection to Canada: 1967 is the year of the Centennial, a peak year of Canadian nationalism, and the last year of the Original Six era, as well as the last year the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. That Clinton’s body is displayed in the Gardens echoes the funeral of Howie Morenz in 1937. The echo is deeply ironic. Morenz was a superstar of his era who, at the age of 34, suffered a broken leg in a game and died of complications afterwards. The popular view of his death is that he died of a broken heart when he realized he couldn’t play any more (McKinley 2000, 140–41). That Clinton should arrange such a grandiose funeral for himself suggests the extent of his vanity. That only four thousand people came to see his body, compared to the fifty thousand who walked past Morenz’s coffin, suggests his true place in the hearts of hockey fans.

One other echo reinforces the connection between Clinton and Canada. Clinton bears resemblance to perhaps the most famous “frenemy” in Canadian literature, Percy Boyd “Boy” Staunton, who is described as Dunstan Ramsay’s “lifelong friend and enemy” in Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business (Davies 1970, 1). Resemblance between the two begins with their names: Clinton’s full name is Clay Bors Clinton (Quarrington 1994, 1). “Bors” links by sound to “Boyd” and also alludes to the Arthurian cycle: Sir Bors is a companion of Sir Percival on the Grail Quest. Unlike the Grail knights, Boy and Clay are morally suspect and egocentric individuals whose behaviour demonstrates the self-serving unscrupulousness of the moneyed class in Canada. Clinton’s war profiteering and exaggeration of his war record are direct echoes of Boy Staunton in Fifth Business.

That Quarrington intended the allusions to Boy Staunton is suggested by the snowball scenes at the beginning and end of King Leary. These directly echo Fifth Business. The opening of Davies’s novel has Dunstan and Percy (before he grew up and, ironically, became Boy) competing over who has the better sleigh. Despite the fact that Percy’s sleigh cost a lot of money, it goes more slowly, and this makes Percy “vindictive” (Davies 1970, 2). As a result, he throws snowballs at Dunstan on the way home and, in a gesture that anticipates his ruthless side, makes one up with a stone in it (3). This stone-containing snowball sets in motion the plot to follow and haunts the lives of both men, until the stone reappears mysteriously in the mouth of Boy at his death (296). In the same way, Clay tries to win the skating race at the beginning of King Leary by pelting young Leary with snowballs, one of which has “a quarter inch of ice formed around it” (Quarrington 1994, 13). The doctored snowball returns near the end thrown by the ghost of Clay Clinton (188). By this point, the snowball is not just a reminder of Clay’s dubious character but of his lifelong connection, as friend and enemy, to Leary. The original snowball scene ends with the rescue of Leary and Clinton by Manny. Tellingly, the snowball’s reappearance is followed by the revelation of how the two of them traded Manny to New York (189).

Fifth Business, like Two Solitudes, is famous for its definition of Canada. Though the drama term “fifth business” is too specialized to have entered popular discourse like “two solitudes,” the term (helpfully defined by Davies in a fictional epigraph to the novel) captures a prominent strain of Canadian self-definition: “Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement were called the Fifth Business” (Davies epigraph). The implication is that, although Canada doesn’t play a role on the world stage equivalent to the great powers, the country does play a part in helping to bring about “the denouement” of historical events. Dunstan Ramsay’s own story resembles the role of fifth business, and thereby embodies one version of the nation. Indeed, Ramsay’s small town Scots-Presbyterian background reflects an influential version of Canadian identity. His upbringing, however, is more negative than Hughie Murray’s in Glengarry School Days. Davies stresses the drab, unheroic, repressed environment of Ramsay’s home town of Deptford and its stunting effect on those who grow up there. Though Staunton and Ramsay come from different ends of Deptford society, they share the quality—signaled by Staunton’s nickname—of having been hindered by their backgrounds from attaining full manhood.

Despite Dunstan’s identification with fifth business, the definition of Canada in Fifth Business is not restricted to him. Instead, the definition emerges from the interaction of the characters, each of whom represents a different aspect of the nation. This is an important lesson for King Leary, for despite Leary’s identification with the myth of hockey and the story of Canada, the portraits of hockey and Canada emerge from the interaction of the characters. Clinton and Leary, as main characters, have main roles in this, but other characters are also involved. The female characters embody the limited choices available for women within the historically dominant identity of the country. And Manny, of course, points to the problematic treatment of First Nations people.

There is one reference to a First Nations character in Fifth Business. This occurs when Ramsay and other soldiers are given a hero’s welcome upon their return home. A local First Nations veteran, however, is not included in the welcome ceremony. As Ramsay explains, George Muskrat is an “Indian sniper, who had picked off Germans just as he used to pick off squirrels,” but he is excluded from the ceremony because he “was not a very respectable fellow” (Davies 1970, 109). The exclusion of George Muskrat, and the discrimination it implies, anticipates a key plot point in King Leary, for what motivates Leary’s journey to the new Sports Hall of Fame is the exclusion of Manny from that Hall. Manny is the greatest hockey player of his generation. He is excluded from the Hall, however, because of his manner of death, drunk in a New York hotel room, and, of course, because he is “mostly … an Indian.” In atonement for his part in the wrongs done to his childhood friend, Leary decides to sneak into the Hall and place a token of Manny—a crucifix—in the Hockey Section of the new Hall.

The Comic Spirit of Hockey

Stories of aging athletes are rich for tragedy. Aging athletes, in a sense, die twice—once at the end of their careers and again at the end of life. The end of an athletic career, then, carries a heavy existential weight. Michael Novak describes this weight as follows: “In the aging athlete, the ultimate reality of sports breaks through the symbol, becomes explicit. Death advances on us all. Not even our vitality, not even our beauty of form, not even our heroic acts can hold it back” (Novak 1988, 48). The Natural and The Last Season both take on this tragic potential directly. Malamud’s novel ends with Roy Hobbs striking out on three pitches, which inflicts the same defeat on him that he inflicted on the Whammer. This illustrates the inevitable rise and fall that is part of life and underscores the chimerical quality of the glory Hobbs had been seeking. In the end, we all “strike out.” MacGregor’s novel ends with not just the metaphorical but literal death of its protagonist, and although the immediate circumstances of Felix Batterinski’s death are accidental there is a sense of inevitability about it. The poisoned caul, as I mentioned in the last chapter, symbolizes the history that will return despite Batterinski’s attempts to erase it.

King Leary takes a different approach. Although there are tragic events in Leary’s life, and although his story raises moral and existential issues, Quarrington’s approach is a comic one. Leary comes close to embodying the spirit of comedy itself. Tragedy stresses that humans are doomed to suffer and die, either through our failures and weaknesses, or simply because we are mortal. Comedy, on the other hand, stresses our resilience. As Robert W. Corrigan puts it, “The constant in comedy is the comic view of life or the comic spirit: the sense that no matter how many times man is knocked down he somehow manages to pull himself up and keep on going” (1965, 3). This brings to mind Leary’s summary of his first professional hockey training camp: “They kept knocking me down. I kept getting up” (Quarrington 1994, 64).

There are times when Leary has qualities like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Both the Little Tramp and Little Leary are small and weak, but both are resilient. The Little Tramp exposes to ridicule the police officers and other authority figures who try to oppress him. This is a key aspect of comedy—so much comedy is about subverting falsely dignified or pretentious authority (which all authority, in certain circumstances, has the potential to be). Figures of authority in comedy are revealed to be not all powerful but fallible, and the social order they represent not timeless but open to change. Sigmund Freud, in his classic Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, points out that comedy often works to “unmask” people who have “seized dignity and authority” by “directing attention to the frailties which they share with all humanity, but in particular the dependence of their mental functions on bodily needs” (Freud 1960, 201–02). Such unmasking points out that “such and such a person, who is admired as a demigod, is after all only human like you and me” (202).

What’s tricky about Leary is that, although his resilience brings to mind comic heroes like the Little Tramp, he denies his own humanity in his quest to be King. Leary, in fact, claims to be a hockey demigod and thus aligns himself with a false authority. Leary’s resilience—which aligns him with the spirit of comedy—suggests that he can bounce back one last time to redeem his life, but to do so he has to become aware of, and to make atonement for, all his humanity-denying acts.

A key figure in this process is Iain, the male nurse from the South Grouse Nursing Home, who accompanies Leary and Blue Hermann on their journey to the Sports Hall of Fame. If Blue Hermann is an ironic version of the loyal Kent in King Lear, who accompanies Lear into the wilderness, Iain is the Fool. Various details in King Leary identify Iain with Shakespeare’s Fool. Early on Leary points out that Iain speaks in voices, doing impressions of various characters, and that he has a strange appearance, with “nappy hair,” “thirty or forty” pairs of glasses, and a tattoo of a bird on his right forearm (Quarrington 1994, 17–18). Like a court jester, Iain’s role is to entertain and minister to the king. He jollies Leary along at various points with cheerful banter and plays cards with him on the train (84). He calls Leary “my liege” (50, 80) and refers to him as “royalty” (79), and when things are looking grim, addresses him in a consoling singsong that sounds like it could be lifted out of Shakespeare: “King, King, O mighty King” (163).

Court jesters are important for understanding the deeper meaning of comedy. Jesters are powerless, in one sense, and are often used as scapegoats; yet they also get to behave in ways that others cannot—as long as they keep the king amused. The jester’s greatest power is his ability to mock the king. There is a serious purpose behind this mocking: it is designed to remind the king that, despite his exalted status, he is still human, with human weaknesses, and so protect him from the sin of pride. Pride in the Middle Ages was thought to make one vulnerable to demonic possession. Which is why, as Fisher and Fisher write, the jester’s mocking was an act of spiritual protection designed to guard the king from “the evil eye” (Fisher and Fisher 1981, 51).

Iain, in King Leary, protects Leary both physically and spiritually during the journey to the Sports Hall of Fame. Twice he saves Leary from falling (Quarrington 1994, 80). When Leary gets deluded by fantasies of grandeur, he wraps his arms around him and counsels him to come back “to the real world” (20). And when Leary complains that he is not properly taking care of him, Iain replies—correctly—that he is “looking after [Leary’s] spiritual self” (164).

Accompanied by Iain, Leary undergoes a series of revelations on the way to the Hall of Fame. He is confronted by the wrongs he has committed against Chloe, Jane, Clarence, and Clifford, and makes partial amends. The last atonement, for Manny, involves Iain. By this point Iain is identified with Manny. His ambiguous racial identity (his “nappy” hair and references to African American culture) and his descent into an alcoholic stupor echo Manny. When he takes his first drink on the train, for example, claiming that one beer won’t hurt him, Leary points out that “Manny used to make a similar grand production” (92). Iain’s sexuality is also ambiguous, which creates a secondary identification with Rance. In any case, Leary’s last words in the novel are spoken to him. “Because you love me,” Leary says, “I’m asking you for this promise, that you will stop drinking the liquor that hurts you so badly” (231). These are the exact words that Poppa Rivers had wanted Leary to speak to Manny. By speaking them to Iain, Leary acknowledges his earlier failure and seeks atonement. He also, in that moment, assumes the role of Fool on behalf of Iain, attempting to minister to Iain’s bodily and spiritual selves.

Comedy, as Fisher and Fisher have written, has a way of “reminding us that all humans, no matter what airs they put on, are made of ‘body stuff’ ” (Fisher and Fisher 1981, xi). The weakness of human beings, as revealed by their bodily nature, comes with an upside: it means that any social order made by human beings is not timeless and absolute but fallible and changeable. Hence the reversals that are the stuff of comedy: a fool becomes the King becomes the Fool. Leary senses this comic quality when he tries to undo the trade of Manny by invoking his gift of the gab and connection to the Blarney Stone, in the quote that is my first epigraph above. Though history cannot be undone in this simple fashion, the spirit of comedy stresses that as long as life goes on, there is always the possibility of a happier ending.

King Leary, in keeping with the spirit of comedy, allows its protagonist a happy ending. Despite his own vanity and weakness, and all the awful things he has done to become and remain the King, Leary achieves a measure of redemption at the end, represented by his return, after death, to the hockey game of the reform school monks. Leary’s return suggests that, although myth and blarney can obscure the wholeness promised by the game, there is value in the quest to achieve this wholeness. After his last act of atonement, then, Leary rejoins “the circle” of monks on their round rink under “the big silver moon” (Quarrington 1994, 232).

Works Cited