Introduction

Much of my early life revolved around hockey. When I was a boy, I played in the Waterloo Minor Hockey League in the winter and all year round on the street. I followed the National Hockey League (NHL) on television and our local Junior A and B teams live and in the papers. I tracked my personal statistics in a notebook. I invented hockey dice games, was the official statistician for a table-top hockey league among my friends, and played solo hockey for hours with makeshift nets and pucks in our basement. I decorated my room with hand-drawn logos of every NHL team at the time, as well as drawings and clippings of my favourite players—Bobby Orr, Gerry Cheevers, and Johnnie McKenzie—all from my favourite team, the Boston Bruins. When I was thirteen, I tried to write a hockey novel.

Each winter, I also built a backyard rink. Some of my most vivid memories of childhood have to do with this rink. I still remember fragments of games my friends and I played there. More than the games themselves, however, I remember the building of this rink. I loved the process of construction: first pack down the snow, then water lightly and shape with your boot, then fill in the cavities in the manner of a linesman patching arena ice mid-game (plug the hole with snow, water lightly, and smooth with something akin to the flat surface of a puck), and finally, water and scrape and water again until a skate-able surface emerges. All this construction took place in the frigid cold, the colder the better, often in the dark of night. I was proud of the fact that my father, after showing me the basics when I was eight or nine, left me to do the work myself. How manly I felt as I tended my ice. At one point I learned the trick of deliberately splashing water on myself. I’d lightly splash my pants and boots, flood the rink’s surface for a while, then splash myself some more. Eventually my boots would have a thick topcoat of ice and my jeans would be white and stiff from the thighs down. To walk I’d have to move stiff-legged—like the Tin Man. The alarmed look my mother gave as I teetered in the back door this way was very gratifying.

The long hours of working on the rink were prime time for daydreaming. In the dark and cold, my body occupied by repetitive physical tasks, my mind would wander. Many of my fantasies, predictably, had to do with hockey. I’d replay games I’d recently played and imagine myself as an NHL star. But many of my fantasies weren’t about hockey. They were about outer space. As I watered my backyard ice, I’d remember the science fiction novels I’d read. From these I’d extrapolate heroic fantasies about aliens and space battles and fortunes lost and recovered again among the stars. Or I’d think about the American Apollo space program, which was in the news at that time, the various missions leading up to Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, which I watched live on television in July of 1969 just a few days before my twelfth birthday. The next winter, as I watered my ice under the stars, I replayed what I’d seen on television and dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

Amid my space fantasies, I’d pretend my backyard rink had become the surface of the moon. There was, in fact, an uncanny resemblance between the two: like the moon, my rink had a gleaming surface, grey-white and contoured, with lighter flat areas and darker areas like the bottoms of craters. Water spread like lava upon it, then hardened into rock. The resemblance was made stronger by the sheen from the work light my father clipped to the laundry line for me, a sheen like the half-light of the moon itself. If the sky were clear, as in my memory it always was, the real moon would appear surrounded by brilliant stars—and my attention would shift back and forth excitedly from the fantasy surface of my rink to the real moon in the sky.

When I look back on my childhood experience with hockey, what strikes me now is how imaginative it was. Not just how intense my response to the game was but how many different kinds of imaginative activity were involved. As someone who grew into a writer and a professor of literature, I am naturally curious about all this imaginative activity. Was it mainly a reflection of the kind of boy I was? Was it typical childlike behaviour? Or were there deeper implications to it, implications that perhaps suggest links between two of the enduring passions of my life—hockey and literature?

As the existence of this book suggests, I believe there are implications to my boyhood responses to hockey that go beyond my own passions. Although my responses reflected my own experiences and interests, they were also common—no different, really, than the behaviour of any number of other hockey fans, younger and older, over the years. The widespread nature of such responses hints at a greater significance. This significance, I would like to suggest, lies in the complex mix of “reality and fantasy” that Michael Oriard argues is fundamental to sport. Here’s the longer passage from which the epigraph to this introduction comes:

[Few] activities so combine reality and fantasy in such paradoxical ways as does sport: the realities of hard work, business practice, discipline, and failure; and the fantasy dreams of freedom, perpetual youth, and heroism. All sports epitomize … dreams, fears, and obsessions; qualities like rugged individualism, teamwork, striving for the pinnacle of one’s profession, self-reliance, fair play, and fear of retirement or failure are as intrinsic to … life as they are to sport. Sport is both a metaphor for … life and an escape from the banality or complexity of life. (Oriard 1982, 8)

Notice how many elements in this passage have to do with the imagination: sport is described as a place of “fantasy dreams,” “fears, and obsessions,” and as a “metaphor for” as well as “an escape from” life. Oriard’s focus in Dreaming of Heroes is on sport in the United States, but his description applies equally well to hockey in Canada. Indeed, I suspect that few sports in the world contain as complex a mix of reality and fantasy as does Canadian hockey. This book is my attempt to understand that mix.

The book itself grew out of research I have undertaken as a professor of Canadian literature at the University of Victoria. After a long period in which hockey was snubbed as a subject for serious writing in Canada, there has been, in the last twenty-five years or so, something of a boom in writing about the game. This has created a rich ground for research.

My method in what follows is to focus on notable examples of Canadian hockey literature, from before and as part of the recent boom, with the aim of revealing how each work illustrates some aspect of the relationship between imagination and hockey. I begin, in chapter 1, by proposing that imaginative responses to the game might be usefully categorized along a continuum from those that are more “conservative” to those that are more “critical.” I try to illustrate this distinction by analyzing two of the most famous texts about hockey, Al Purdy’s 1965 poem “Hockey Players,” and Stompin’ Tom Connors’s 1973 song “The Hockey Song.”

Chapters 2 to 5 examine earlier texts that illustrate how hockey became embedded in Canadian society, as well as the constellations of meanings, called by scholars “the hockey myth,” that became attached to the game. Ralph Connor’s 1902 novel Glengarry School Days, the focus of chapter 2, contains the first extended description of a hockey game in Canadian literature. The novel illustrates how the emergence of hockey was accompanied not just by an evolution of rules of play but by the attachment of particular social—and spiritual—meanings to the game. Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel Two Solitudes, the focus of Chapter 3, illustrates how strongly hockey had become associated with Canadian identity by the mid-twentieth century. The kinds of meanings attached to hockey in Glengarry School Days persist in Two Solitudes but are troubled by differences in French and English Canadian viewpoints as well as by the ascendancy of the professional game.

Chapter 4 explores Scott Young’s juvenile hockey trilogy, Scrubs on Skates, Boy on Defense, and A Boy at the Leafs Camp, which were published between 1952 and 1963. Young’s trilogy is steeped in the sensibility of the so-called Original Six era of the NHL and fleshes out key aspects of the hockey myth. Chapter 5 explores another text often associated with the hockey myth, Roch Carrier’s 1979 story “The Hockey Sweater.” “The Hockey Sweater” rivals “The Hockey Song” as the best-known imaginative response to hockey in Canada. At first glance, the story reinforces the hockey myth in a Québécois context. A closer examination, however, reveals historical traces in the story that cast doubt on key aspects of the myth and that suggest fissures in Canadian and Québécois society that the myth, even at its most powerful, cannot smooth over.

Chapters 6 and 7 explore two texts that form the literary gateway for the hockey writing boom that began in the 1990s. The Last Season, Roy McGregor’s 1983 novel, is the first literary novel in Canada about hockey. It follows the career of Felix Batterinski, who begins life in a small northern Ontario town, becomes a successful NHL “goon” on the Philadelphia Flyers of the 1970s, and dies tragically as his career winds down. Tellingly, Batterinski’s background has an uncanny resemblance to that of Bill Spunska, one of the protagonists in Young’s trilogy, which invites some telling comparisons to that earlier ideal of a hockey player. Paul Quarrington’s 1987 novel King Leary, the focus of Chapter 7, also subjects the hockey myth to critical treatment, but this time in a comic mode. Quarrington’s novel tells the story of Percival “King” Leary, who starts out as a little Irish Canadian boy in early Ottawa and ends up as The King of the Ice (at least in his own mind). Rather than deliver the benefits that it seems to promise, however, Leary’s quest to be the greatest player of all time comes at a huge cost to his family, friends, and ultimately, himself.

Chapters 8 and 9 focus on two of the most celebrated works from the beginning of the hockey writing boom of the 1990s. Wayne Johnson’s novel The Divine Ryans, the focus of chapter 9, appeared in 1990 and offers another take on the relationship between hockey and myth. Allusions to Homer’s Aeneid in The Divine Ryans contribute to a series of jokey but serious comparisons between the hero of classical mythology and the hockey hero. Ultimately, hockey provides a gateway through which the novel’s protagonist, nine-year-old Draper Doyle, makes a hero’s descent into the underworld of his own unconscious to discover the terrible secret of his father’s death. Richard Harrison’s Hero of the Play is a 1994 collection of poems that plays with the idea of a hockey hero, sometimes championing mythic notions of the hero and sometimes criticizing or undermining these notions. The collection pays special attention to Bobby Hull, whose real-life troubles challenge his mythic identity as The Golden Jet.

The portrayals of hockey in Hero of the Play and The Divine Ryans reveal connections between the imaginative dimensions of the game, myth, and religion. These connections are further developed in Bill Gaston’s 2000 novel The Good Body, the focus of Chapter 10, but with a twist: the religious aspects emerge from a set of associations between hockey and Buddhism.

The last three chapters focus on texts with strongly critical responses to the hockey myth. Cara Hedley’s 2007 novel, Twenty Miles, the focus of Chapter 11, tells the story of a female player confronted by the gender stereotypes of hockey. Hedley’s protagonist, Isabel “Iz” Norris, struggles with her motivations for playing hockey: she has played all her life in the shadow of her late father, a Junior hockey star, whose influence represents a patriarchal inheritance for her that is both personal and mythic. In the end, Iz has to find another motivation if she is to continue playing hockey.

Chapter 12 examines Randall Maggs’ 2008 collection of poetry, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems. In Night Work, Maggs uses a version of the documentary poem to explore the life of perhaps the greatest goaltender of all time, Terry Sawchuk. Sawchuk’s tragic death raises a perennial question: does greatness at hockey always involve a Faustian bargain? Maggs’s remarkably thoughtful and compassionate portrait explores this question without settling on an easy answer.

Finally, Chapter 13 deals with Richard Wagamese’s acclaimed 2012 novel, Indian Horse. Indian Horse tells the story of an Ojibwe boy, Saul Indian Horse, who suffers great horrors at a residential school and yet appears to find solace there—and perhaps even salvation—in hockey. Indian Horse turns a key tenet of the hockey myth on its head. The hockey myth claims that success at hockey can be a shortcut to becoming Canadian because hockey offers an imaginative connection to the northern land that defines the nation. But what happens to this Canadianizing effect when the game is played by an Indigenous person—someone with a prior claim to the land? The answer the novel offers to this question is richly nuanced—and even, perhaps, surprising. Suffice it to say that the imaginative dimensions of hockey play a key part. These imaginative dimensions become associated not only with Saul’s personal journey of healing, but with a larger process of reimagining the Canadian nation.

Two last thoughts before I turn to the literature.

The first is about my focus on literary texts. This may seem like a limited approach in a study purporting to examine the relationship between hockey and imagination. As my opening anecdote illustrates, imaginative responses to hockey are by no means restricted to the reading and writing of literary texts. Yet there is a logic to my approach that goes beyond the self-serving one of giving myself an excuse to write about some wonderful stories, novels, and poems (though this is also true). As it turns out, a recurring feature of Canadian hockey literature is that the texts themselves tend to focus on the imaginative dimensions of the game; that is, they are more about the meanings invested in hockey, and the fantasies people engage in by playing or watching it, than they are about goals and assists and penalty minutes. Just as importantly, to explore these texts properly requires an interdisciplinary approach. To understand the intersections of hockey and imagination in the texts, I’ve had to draw on not just my knowledge of literary history and methods, but what I’ve been able to find out about such broader topics as the role of imagination in humans, the significance of play, the evolution of sport in Canada and elsewhere, the history of Canada, and, of course, the history and social significance of hockey itself. I hope my readings of the texts, then, will cast light beyond the usual boundaries of the literary.

The second is about my boyhood fantasies of hockey on the moon. My fantasies, I think, resonate with various elements in the literature I explore in the chapters ahead. It is not my intention to dwell much on these resonances; I’d like the focus of the analysis to remain on the texts. Let me offer just one big takeaway at this point, which is to say that the leap I made to fantasies of outer space hints at how vital, but also unpredictable, the imagination can be. There is something at once exciting and humbling about studying literary texts, since those texts—like all works of the imagination—inevitably exceed our attempts to understand them. John Fowles once wrote that the goal of literature is “to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is,” and that since the world itself is unpredictable—“an organism, not a machine”—a successful literary work always exceeds the plans of its creator. A fully planned-out world, Fowles writes, is “a dead world,” and it is only “when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live” (Fowles 1969, 96).

Something similar, I believe, exists in sports—including hockey. Despite all the emphasis on tradition in hockey, and the persistence of the hockey myth in Canada, there is something within the game that “disobeys” attempts to project specific meanings upon it. There is something within hockey that allows for, even gives energy to, new meanings. By the end of this study, I hope to have illustrated something of how this inner vitality works, along with the new meanings it gives energy to in Canada today.