4 Boys on the Defensive The Hockey Myth in Scott Young

Old School and Immigrant Canadian Identities

As Whitson and Gruneau have suggested, the core element in the hockey myth is its assertion that hockey is Canada’s game, and that, as a consequence, hockey offers a “graphic expression of ‘who we are’ ” (Whitson and Gruneau 2006, 4). Hockey, according to the myth, embodies what it means to be truly Canadian. But what defines the truly Canadian? Young’s trilogy offers two different—though interdependent—answers in the stories of Pete Gordon and Bill Spunska. Indeed, the stories of Bill and Pete can be read as national allegories: two portraits of the Canadian nation as adolescent, but maturing, hockey players.

Scrubs on Skates, the first novel of the trilogy, introduces Pete Gordon, “the best schoolboy centre in Manitoba,” who has to attend a new high school when it is built in his hometown of Winnipeg (Young 1952, 11). The novel follows Pete’s struggles to adjust to this new school—Northwest High—and to play on a team of novice hockey players (“scrubs”) instead of the seasoned championship team he had been on at his old school, Daniel Mac. Counterpointed with Pete’s story is that of the most scrub-like player on the Northwest team, Bill Spunska. Bill is a recent immigrant from Poland who, although a natural athlete, has never skated or played hockey before. After spending most of the season practicing hard, being a supportive teammate, and waiting for his opportunity, Bill is rewarded by the chance to fill in for a suspended teammate in the crucial last game of the season and ends up assisting on the winning goal (by Pete).

Pete begins with all the natural advantages of an established (or establishment) Canadian boy. His family is middle class, his father a lawyer, his mother a stay-at-home mom. The name “Gordon” suggests a Scots-Presbyterian ancestry, which aligns the family with the “enterprising Scot” type that, as Daniel Coleman has argued in White Civility, has played an important role in defining Canadian settler identity (2006, 32–56). The name may also be a subtle homage to the novelist Ralph Connor, whose real name was Charles Gordon. The moral ethos of Young’s trilogy—especially the emphasis on competing hard but fairly—is reminiscent of Glengarry School Days, a book, given his age and background, that Young was likely familiar with.

One of the reasons Pete is upset about having to leave Daniel Mac is that his father had been a star athlete there (Young 1952, 38). His bedroom, decorated with pennants, crests, and photographs, is a miniature of the halls at Daniel Mac, which are filled with the evidence of all the championship sports teams the school has had over the years (5). Daniel Mac works metaphorically to represent established Canadian identity, and, with its subtle hint of an English public school, it links that identity to an even more established (and establishment) British identity.

From the point of view of his hockey career, Pete, born and raised in Canada, has the advantage described by Coach Turner: “Every boy in this country can play hockey, because we all start young and play all winter on corner rinks and vacant lots and on the streets” (13). As the best schoolboy centre in the province, Pete is obviously a skilled player: he scored the winning goal in the championship game the year before and was in line to become captain at Daniel Mac (89). Pete’s challenge, with all these advantages, is to learn how to become a good teammate on a seemingly lesser team.

Two lessons for Pete stand out in particular. The first has to do with how important it is for him to try his hardest. His failure to try in practice has a demoralizing effect on his teammates (30). And during Northwest High’s first game, he learns by painful experience that a bad attitude will lead to a terrible on-ice performance, despite all his natural gifts (64). The second lesson has to do with sacrifice. A key moment in bonding Pete with his teammates occurs when he skates back to save a goal even though his leg has been badly injured (111). His self-sacrifice impresses his teammates—especially the hardnosed captain, Vic DeGruchy—and his rehab of the injury gives him the opportunity to mentor Bill during early morning workouts (123). In combination, these lessons add up to a kind of “noblesse oblige”: Pete learns that the advantages he has come with an equally high level of responsibility.

Bill’s situation is different. His family has been in the country only fifteen months (77). His father was in the Polish underground during the war while he and his mother lived as refugees in England. Bill has an English accent that marks him as a foreigner (12). Once the family had emigrated to Canada, Mr. Spunska, though a professor in Poland, “worked cutting pulpwood in the North,” while Mrs. Spunska worked as a maid (77). Now Mr. Spunska is an instructor of German at the university in Winnipeg and Mrs. Spunska is ill from exhaustion or depression (77).

Bill and his family, then, are new Canadians, and Bill’s story works metaphorically as a portrait of Canada as a nation of immigrants. Interestingly, Northwest High itself metaphorically stands in for Canada as a new nation just as Daniel Mac embodied a more established Canada. Northwest lacks the tradition of Daniel Mac but it has greater resources, better sports equipment, and lots of human energy (36). Because the school is so new, the feeling about the hockey team turns out to be “even greater than it had been at Daniel Mac” because all of the students had felt the place “was empty, too new” and now “they had something to hold on to” (164). Hockey at Northwest mirrors the hypothesis Gruneau and Whitson advance about the importance of hockey in Canada more generally. Given the famously unsettled nature of Canadian identity, they argue, hockey has taken on “even greater symbolic currency” as one of those institutions, along with “our system of national government, our public health-care system, and the CBC,” that Canadians cling to as “truly Canadian” (Gruneau and Whitson 1993, 277).

The Northwest hockey team is multicultural. The names of the players are a mix of traditional Scots-Irish-English (Paterson, Lawrence, Jamieson, Gordon), French (Duplessis), First Nations (Big Canoe), Asian (Wong), and European (DeGruchy, Kryschuk, Spunska). Young idealistically portrays the hockey team as a model for how “people of all races could get along when they had something in common” (1952, 23). In this he echoes the post–Second World War shift in Canada away from national definitions stressing Britishness to those stressing multicultural pluralism. Official government policy of the time reflected this shift. As Eva Mackey illustrates in The House of Difference, “cultural policies that centred on maintaining British cultural hegemony” (often to define the nation against the United States) were replaced by the ideas of the “pluralist ‘cultural mosaic’ ” (2002, 50). The Canadian government passed its official policy of “Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework” in 1971.

As a new hockey player, the first thing Bill must do is learn the game. In some ways, this is the easier of his tasks: Scrubs on Skates emphasizes his natural athletic ability and competitive drive. He is first described as “a big dark boy … wide in the shoulders and thick through the rest of his body” (Young 1952, 12) who “tries hard” (16). Coach Turner in Boy on Defense notes that Bill was good at “cricket, soccer, [and] tennis” from his years of growing up and that he had a “terrific competitive spirit” (Young 1953, 10, 42). Bill’s second task is more difficult: he has to remain patient and positive as he waits for his chance. This is a test of character, and the novel stresses that character, as much as hard work and competitiveness, is required for success. As it turns out, Bill has a sterling character. He is polite and has an old-world dignity (Young 1953, 16, 80). He also has a strong sense of responsibility to his family. Because of his character, Bill doesn’t become discouraged by his inability to make the team on his first try; rather, he is the model of a good teammate, working hard on his own, attending all the games, and cheering the other players on.

Ultimately Bill’s success conveys the message that hockey can be a shortcut to acceptance for an immigrant boy in Canada. Mrs. Spunska makes the lesson explicit near the end of Scrubs on Skates: “I know that usually a family must live in a country one generation, or sometimes two or three, before the children are accepted for everything. But it seems to me that sport is different. It is what you are, not what you have been or what your parents have been” (Young 1952, 179). As the trilogy continues, Young emphasizes how Bill becomes Canadian through hockey. Boy on Defense and A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp illustrate the stages of Bill’s development as a player and a Canadian. Boy on Defense tells how Bill becomes an Assistant Captain on the Northwest team and leads the team to the championship. He is then rewarded by a contract to play for the Toronto Maple Leafs (Young 1953, 240). Along the way he loses his accent and learns to speak Canadian slang like the rest of the teammates (Young 1953, 18); he helps his family deal with the financial difficulties of being new Canadians (first with a part-time job, then with a signing bonus from the Leafs); and, with the tacit approval of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, he begins to date Pete’s sister Sarah. In A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp, he learns about becoming a professional player. He impresses his coaches, who proclaim that he has a bright future. Then—in a bit of heavy-handed symbolism, even for Young—he is sent off for further seasoning in the Canadian National Team program (Young 1963, 241).

Interestingly, there is an adult sequel to the juvenile trilogy, That Old Gang of Mine, which came out in 1982. It’s a pretty awful novel in a lot of ways, but it is interesting for the glimpses it gives of how Young imagines his characters in later life. In the case of Bill and Pete, they both end up representing their nation. Not only do they play in the Olympics together (the main plot of the novel), but Bill joins the Canadian diplomatic corps afterwards and Pete gets elected to the House of Commons.

That Old Gang of Mine aside, the way Bill eclipses Pete in Boy on Defense and A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp raises some interesting questions. Bill, it turns out, is the only one of the two with real professional potential; Pete is hampered by his lack of size, his “slightly built five feet eight inches” (Young 1952, 9). Does this mean that Bill is actually the better Canadian? From the point of view of national allegory, the overall message of the trilogy is not that Bill is better, I think. Rather it is that the future of the nation requires the combined efforts of characters like Pete and Bill both, just as a hockey team requires the co-operative play of different players in different roles. Still, it is hard not to avoid the implication that Bill represents an especially important aspect of the future of the nation from Young’s point of view. Bill seems to be the new blood needed to revitalize the Canadian body politic, a body politic that, at this point in its history, is understood to possess a lot of skill as well as the remnants of a noble tradition, but that, like Pete Gordon, lacks the raw physical power to reach the highest level.

Snowy Winters and Small Town Rinks

Scrubs on Skates and A Boy on Defense take place in Winnipeg. Winnipeg, on the edge of the prairies, has the kind of cold winter that reinforces the mythic connection between hockey and Canada’s northern environment. It is no accident that the novels are not set in, say, Vancouver; in Vancouver, boys are not going to “play all winter on corner rinks.”

The Winnipeg winter is an important backdrop in the novels. After his first, disastrous game for Northwest in Scrubs on Skates, Pete wakes up to “snow swirling fiercely around his dormer windows” and his room feeling “like thirty below zero” (Young 1952, 63). This is the first mention of weather in the novel, and it sets a pattern; after this, there are numerous references to snow, wind, and cold, but no mention of weather of any other kind. A Boy on Defense takes place against a backdrop of equally snowy conditions. The novel opens on the night before the first game of the hockey season, and when Bill heads out the door, “snow was falling, muffling the noises of the trains in the yards two blocks away” (Young 1953, 32). Clearly, at a basic level, the winter weather reinforces the association between hockey and the northern climate. It’s as if, once the high school hockey season starts in mid to late November (by the timeline in the novels), the weather must, by definition, be snowy. There is also an implied comparison between the harshness of the external environment and the sheltered ice of the hockey rink. One of the longstanding mythic ideas about hockey is that in developing the game Canadians took a bit of winter, domesticated it, and turned it into a source of pleasure. This idea is captured nicely in the title of Michael McKinley’s popular history of the game, Putting a Roof on Winter. In Scrubs on Skates, the long description of the “city’s biggest rink” on high school hockey nights evokes the enclosed, communal, celebratory space in the arena compared to the wildness of the wintery night outside.

The wintery backdrop reinforces the different starting points of Pete and Bill when it comes to Canadian identity. Pete is shown from the outset to be adept at dealing with the winter. When he wakes up to the snow after his disastrous first game, he decides to work off his frustration by going out to shovel the walk and driveway. After breakfast, he dresses appropriately for the job: “[Pete put] on a heavy woolen shirt that he sometimes used for skiing; over it went a thick sweater; his parka jacket and hood were downstairs” (Young 1952, 68). Then he works in a methodical way, clearing snow first away from the garage doors, getting those doors open, and helping his father back the car out of the driveway (70). Pete’s competence in dealing with the snow marks him as a native of Canada and reinforces his association with established Canadian identity.

Bill, by contrast, does not even have a proper winter coat. In Scrubs on Skates, he has only a “cheap, stiff raincoat, the only coat he owned” (53). His lack of proper winter wear is in part a sign of his family’s poverty, but it also signals that he comes from a foreign land. One indicator of Bill’s increasing Canadianness in Boy on Defense is that his parents buy him a coat for Christmas. The coat is “three-quarter-length dark blue wool with a thick quilted wool lining and a big fur collar” and Bill knows “half a dozen boys in school who had coats exactly like this” (Young 1953, 124).

The Young trilogy is uncritical about how the northern climate has been used to define Canadian identity. Instead, the trilogy stresses the character-building qualities of the climate and combines these with the characteristics of a successful hockey player. As we saw in chapter 2, however, when Thomas Chandler Haliburton spoke about the climate creating a “hearty, healthy, virtuous, dominant race,” he had a very specific race in mind (Haliburton in Berger 1997, 86). Canada’s climate, it was thought by people like Haliburton, made it unsuitable for immigration from the weaker “southern” races and prime for immigration from other “Aryan” or “northern” races. Also excluded, of course, were the First Nations. The “white” in “Great White North” is painfully telling when viewed through the lens of Canada’s settler-colonial history.

By the time of the Young juvenile trilogy, the racism in arguments like those of Haliburton had been exposed by history. It was hard to maintain a Canadian identification with the Aryan races after two wars against Germany. Still, residual racism remained. Young’s novels are explicitly anti-racist. The Northwest team, as I mentioned above, is multicultural, and in fact, what leads to Jamieson’s suspension at the end of Scrubs on Skates (thus giving Bill a chance to get in the lineup) is a fight he has in order to defend Benny Wong from being called “a yellow Chink” (Young 1952, 185). The liberal idealism of the novels’ anti-racism is, however, undermined by the stereotypical nature of the “ethnic” characters. Benny is a stereotypically feminized Asian man, a quiet kid who “wouldn’t say boo to a goose” (183). Rosario Duplessis talks in French dialect and has a stereotypical temper. Horatio Big Canoe is a large, mysterious First Nations boy who says virtually nothing and stickhandles in an otherworldly fashion, as if “the puck was taped to the end of his stick” (23). Just as importantly, the identities of all the ethnic characters, including Bill, are defined against the “norm” of Pete’s established (Scots British) Canadian identity. And Bill himself conforms to the right type of immigrant as dictated by people like Haliburton. Though he is described as having dark hair and dark eyes, he comes from Poland, decidedly in the northern part of Europe. He does not come from, say, Nigeria; neither the myth of hockey nor the definition of Canada by its northern climate could envision such a player in 1952.

Another aspect of the setting is also important. This is the fact that Winnipeg is a small city—not a small town, exactly, but with many small town attributes. Young’s evocation of corner rinks, train whistles, and an overall cozy sense of community are all small town–like, not to mention the fact that high school hockey is what is played at “the city’s biggest rink” (44). The identification of Canadian values with the small town is so long-standing that it was already ripe for lampooning when, in 1912, Stephen Leacock published his famous Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. For Leacock, the small town retains a powerful hold on the Canadian imagination precisely because it evokes a simpler, more innocent time, a time that involves a romanticized version of our own childhoods. The parallel to the hockey myth’s evocation of “apple-cheeked boys on frozen ponds” is not an accident. Literary interrogations of the small town since Leacock (Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence come immediately to mind) have focused on how the surface idyll of the small town hides a darker reality of class struggle, religious intolerance, violence, and loss. Yet the romantic version of the small town, and the association of Canadian values with the virtues of small town folk, retain powerful holds on the popular Canadian imagination, not least because of the small town’s association with hockey.

The setting of the trilogy shifts in A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp. To attend his first professional training camp, Bill must travel east and—more crucial from a symbolic point of view—south to Peterborough. Peterborough in the early 1960s was only about one-fifth the size of Winnipeg, with a population of 47,185, compared to Winnipeg’s 265,429 (Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics 1962, Table 9, 9–17 and 9–26). The description of what Bill encounters when he steps off the bus, however, has a big city feel: “There was the smell of diesel fumes and a dusty hurried atmosphere, full of people—sitting, standing, walking, reading, talking” (Young 1963, 7). When he walks into town to find the hotel he will be staying at he discovers that “[the] streets were crowded with full cars—weekenders coming here, or heading for Toronto or other cities” (9). It is September; the weather is sunny and clear and remains that way throughout Bill’s stay. Just before the inter-squad game that contains the climax of the novel, Bill reflects on the strangeness of playing hockey in such a place and in such weather: “It seemed strange to be going to play hockey on Tuesday night. The temperature had gone into the eighties during the day” (180).

Young’s choice of location for his fictional training camp was dictated by the fact that the Toronto Maple Leafs held their training camps in Peterborough in the early 1960s. The selection of details Young uses to create the Peterborough setting, however, are straight out of the myth of hockey. The setting works to reinforce the differences between this place and Winnipeg, just as the focus of the novel is about Bill learning the differences between the hockey here and at home. Literally and metaphorically, Peterborough is only one stop away from Toronto, and the hockey here is only one stop away from the big time, big city hockey played at Maple Leafs Gardens.

The Peterborough setting of Boy at the Leafs’ Camp emphasizes how moving up through the hockey ranks involves a journey away from the small town rink and what it stands for. At the same time, Bill’s story stresses the importance of maintaining a connection to this rink. Pete, as a born and raised Canadian, knows this instinctively: when things go badly for him in Scrubs on Skates, he wishes “that he were five years younger and could go out to the corner rink and work [it] off” (Young 1952, 71). By the time of Boy on Defense, Bill has embraced the corner rink himself, and the novel offers a long romantic evocation of him skating there—an indication of his increasing Canadianness (Young 1953, 157–58). The implication is that, although the quest for hockey success involves a journey into strange and challenging new places, the corner rink remains, in a sense, the source, and it is essential for players on the quest to go back now and then to be spiritually renewed.

Overall, the settings of Young’s trilogy reflect assumptions about small towns, the northern climate, and Canadian identity that are embodied in the hockey myth. Small towns and the northern climate stand in metonymically for Canada, just as hockey stands in for Canada and at the same time is evoked as a product of small towns and the northern climate. As I discussed in chapter 2, the northern climate in Canada has been promoted historically as a training ground for muscular Christian manliness. The physical hardiness, humility, and personal virtue of the muscular Christian man has been promoted, in turn, as an ideal of Canadian manhood, which in turn has been projected as an ideal onto the Canadian hockey player (and vice versa). Much the same could be said about small town virtues, with an added emphasis on community spirit and that ultimate Canadian characteristic, being “nice.”

Benevolent Patriarchs and Moral Cheerleaders

As you might expect, Young’s trilogy is rich with mid-century clichés about gender. Girls and women have no direct role in the hockey. When Red Turner ponders the mysteries of the competitive spirit, only boys and men are part of his pondering: “what is it that makes us, men and boys, want so much to win a game?” (Young 1953, 42). Females, on the other hand, are restricted to traditional feminine roles. Sarah Gordon, for example, plays the roles of moral cheerleader and love interest. She attends all the hockey games and cheers passionately for the Northwest team. When things go badly for Pete, she calls him out for not trying, but also insists, on his behalf, that he will not abandon the team. When Mr. Gordon asks Pete if he would like to “quit hockey, altogether,” she jumps in and cries, “That’s our school now and Pete wants to play for it. And he’ll get used to Buchannan and Bell pretty soon and try just as hard as … as …” (Young 1952, 62, ellipses in original). At this point Sarah is described as having a “brightness in her eyes that meant that with one more word, if she couldn’t stop herself, she’d bounce out of the room crying” (62). Her defense of the Northwest team contributes to Pete’s recognition of the advantages of attending a new school.

As a love interest, Sarah has conventional physical virtues: she is blond and attractive, with “her mother’s lissome figure and father’s fair hair and complexion” (Young 1952, 4). She is the kind of teenaged girl teenaged boys develop crushes on. Pete’s friend Ron Maclean comes around the Gordon house a lot, but “sometimes lately Pete hadn’t been sure whether Ron would come quite so often if it wasn’t for the coincidence that Sarah was usually around, too” (40). Sarah also has conventional feminine interests. One of her passions is acting, and she plans to major in “home economics” at university. When Mr. Spunska jokes that majoring in home economics will help her “be a good wife,” he is not joking (126). Sarah and Bill are attracted to one another. They sit together during games before Bill starts to play, and eventually, part way through Boy on Defense, they go on a date. Before the date, Bill puts on his new (Canadian) coat, and it fits “perfectly” (Young 1953, 130). The date is a success. Sarah compliments Bill on what a gentleman he is: “You seem to know exactly what you’re doing all the time. You don’t get flustered. It must be that Continental poise” (131). Thus the text advances Bill’s old-world politeness as a model for how a good Canadian girl should be treated, while at the same time presenting the role of love interest to an up and coming hockey player as a desirable occupation for a good Canadian girl.

The mothers in the trilogy, Mrs. Gordon and Mrs. Spunska, also have very limited roles. Mrs. Gordon is a Victorian domestic angel. Her role in Scrubs on Skates is to be quietly supportive of Pete and the rest of the family and to make sandwiches. The most significant words she speaks in the novel are: “Some parcels in the car, dear.… Would you mind getting them in?” (Young 1952, 42).

Mrs. Spunska is more complicated—though not by much. The backstory of the Spunska family suggests that she had the strength and resourcefulness to care for herself and Bill, first for eight years in England when Mr. Spunska was in the Polish underground, then for another year in Canada when Mr. Spunska was assigned by the government to cut pulpwood up north (Young 1952, 77). By the time of the novel, however, she has become a damsel-in-distress. The first description of her suggests that she has suffered nervous exhaustion or depression as a result of overexerting herself when her husband was away (124). Over the course of the novel, Sarah and Pete and other members of the Northwest hockey team go to visit her. This cheers her because it suggests that Bill is making friends. The biggest improvement in her health, however, occurs when Bill gets into a hockey game. As Bill jokes afterwards, “The doctor said I should have got into the game before, it was better than his medicine!” (217).

The limited female characters occupy one side of the benevolent patriarchy that characterizes the mid-twentieth century nuclear family idealized by Young in the novels. The other side is occupied by male heads of household. True to type, both of the Gordon and Spunska families are led by cigar/pipe-smoking, gently authoritative patriarchs. Mr. Gordon, a former star athlete who went on to become a lawyer, husband, father, and pillar of the community, is studiously not overbearing with his son, in keeping with a man who is comfortable with his own authority and who is teaching his son to be his own man. At a couple of key moments in the text, however, he intervenes to give Pete sage advice. After Pete is hurt by the bad press he receives after his unsuccessful first game, Mr. Gordon explains “dryly” that an athlete is “really a sort of public servant” and “the public feels cheated” when he doesn’t measure up, an observation that Pete finds has “a wisdom to it that was almost cynical, but … [also] sharp and clear” (Young 1952, 68–69). When Pete admits, after he achieves his first successes at Northwest, that he had wondered earlier if he would ever feel good about hockey again, Mr. Gordon responds “dryly” again: “Young people feel that way quite often before they get enough sense to know that every trouble passes eventually” (145). To round off the picture of the learned but not overly didactic elder, Mr. Gordon quotes Shakespeare: “To thine own self be true” (81). Mr. Gordon, the text makes clear, leads by word and example, but mostly by example, in keeping with the traditional model of masculinity he represents (a man of few, but well-chosen, words, who mainly lets his deeds do the talking for him).

Like Mr. Gordon, Mr. Spunska is a benevolent patriarch, whose “rule wasn’t hard, but it was law” (Young 1953, 9). Mr. Spunska, unlike his wife, has been made only stronger by his experiences during the war. When Pete asks Bill if it was tough for him to cut wood when he first came to Canada, Bill shrugs and replies: “[My father] has done harder things than chopping down trees” (Young 1952, 77). Mr. Spunska’s sense of duty to his family is reproduced in Bill’s sense of duty to both team and family; and, indeed, much of the drama of Boy on Defense is a result of Bill trying to deal properly with all his responsibilities. Finally, Mr. Spunska sets an example to Bill of appropriate national integration. Once he is settled into his new job at the university, the professor begins to read up on Canadian history. At one point he recalls a date from Canadian history that other—Canadian—professors couldn’t, which occasions “great laughter at a Pole’s telling Canadians their history!” (Young 1953, 165).

The maturation of Bill and Pete is described explicitly as them becoming more like their role model fathers. On the ice, Pete learns about leading by example and the team first attitude of a successful leader. Bill, on the other hand, applies the same sense of duty, humility, and commitment as his father. Interestingly, Bill, like Pete, is shown to value academics as well as sports—a direct product of the professional stature of their fathers. On this point the role model fathers embody a message worthy of one of Don Cherry’s more sensible refrains: play the game you love kids, but also stay in school!

One last point about family in the trilogy. Clearly, the trilogy idealizes the traditional nuclear family that is a stereotype of fifties popular culture. At the same time, it suggests that players with character issues are more likely to come from bad family situations. The villain/rival characters in the second and third novels, Cliff Armstrong and Benny Moore, both come from dysfunctional families. Cliff’s selfishness on the ice is attributed to his pushy parents (Young 1953, 21); Benny’s goonish violence is linked to the fact that his father is a violent drunk, and that he was raised “partly by grandparents and partly in foster homes” (Young 1963, 21).

A Man’s Game

The place of violence in hockey has been a subject of debate since the earliest days of the game. As Colin Howell explains, early newspaper accounts often reported on “the serious injuries and even deaths that occurred in hotly contested matches” (2001, 45). Stacey Lorenz and Geraint Osborne offer a case study in this early reporting in “ ‘Talk About Strenuous Hockey’: Violence, Manhood, and the 1907 Ottawa Silver Seven-Montreal Wanderer Rivalry,” which gives ample evidence of the extremely violent nature of some early hockey games, as well as the public fascination with this violence. The violent quality of hockey has given rise to perennial questions. What level of violence is appropriate to preserve the essential nature of the game? What level of violence is justifiable in pursuit of winning? And perhaps most crucially: how to distinguish the manly athlete from the violent brute?

Bill Spunska, in many ways, is the archetype of the aggressive masculinity celebrated in the myth of hockey. His game combines dynamic offensive rushes with hard-hitting defense. Coach Turner in Boy On Defense says that Bill’s game is similar to that of “Eddie Shore” (Young 1953, 73). The first two novels each contain key scenes in which Bill lays some other player out with a violent body check. In Scrubs on Skates, Bill flattens Pete in practice even before he has learned to skate—a wake up call for Pete and a hint of Bill’s potential (Young 1952, 26). In Boy on Defense, Bill lays out Cliff Armstrong, the selfish prima donna forward, and immediately doubts his own motives: “he hadn’t wanted to hit him so hard … or had he?” (Young 1953, 97).

A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp further explores the questions about violence raised in the first two novels. In this novel, as I suggested above, Bill is challenged to learn what it takes to be successful at the highest level of hockey. The biggest issue he faces is how to deal with the more intense quality of the competition, which includes a higher risk of violence and injury.

Much of what Bill has to learn in A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp is embodied in his interactions with Benny Moore. Benny is, in many ways, a more aggressive version of Bill himself (if the novel didn’t take place in 1962, you’d want to say that Benny was Bill on steroids). Both are big, dark-haired, square-jawed boys, though Benny, tellingly, is said to be the bigger (Young 1963, 15). Like Bill, Benny is an up-and-coming defenseman. Unlike Bill, however, he is willing to go to any length to succeed. This includes a willingness to push the limits of violence. Benny’s reputation for goon-like behaviour is emphasized at the beginning of the novel; among other things, he is suspended from Junior hockey at the time training camp opens because of an assault on a referee (Young 1963, 20).

A significant part of A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp is devoted to the rivalry that develops between Benny and Bill. Before they even get on the ice, they exchange words: “[Keep] your head up,” says Benny, “I hit pretty hard.” “I hit pretty hard myself,” Bill replies (Young 1963, 19). Then, in practice, they battle. At one point Bill makes one of his headlong rushes and pinballs into Benny, flattening him (69). Benny retaliates by taking a run at Bill (74). The rivalry culminates in two violent incidents during a split-squad exhibition game. In the first incident, Benny charges at Bill, but Bill stops hard to avoid him—and Benny crashes headlong into the boards (191). Then, as the last meaningless seconds of the game run down, Benny tries to run Bill again. This time Bill lowers his shoulder, and Benny is caught by surprise; he is thrown back, hits his head on the ice, and collapses (192). In this second incident, Benny suffers a near-fatal brain injury. He ends up in the hospital, in a coma, for days.

Benny’s injury causes Bill to question his own motives as a player. Though people reassure him that his check was clean, he wonders if he had actually tried to hurt Benny (199). He had similar thoughts after his hit on Cliff Armstrong. This time, however, the thoughts go beyond the recognition that his competitive drive means he has a “lower boiling point” than other players (Young 1953, 101) to the idea that, if he played as hard as he needed to succeed, even if he played a clean game, he could truly hurt someone. As a result, he becomes tentative on the ice and his play suffers (Young 1963, 242–43).

The self-doubt Bill suffers becomes, for Young, a teaching opportunity. In the pages that follow Benny’s injury, Young uses the voices of the wise old defenseman Otto Tihane and the Punch Imlach-like coach Pokesy Ware to offer Bill (and his wider juvenile audience) the classic defenses for hockey’s violence. Ware takes Bill aside to give him this pep talk:

I’ll tell you, kid. You can’t afford to think about things like [the incident with Benny Moore] and play this game. A guy goes by you with his head down some night, carrying the puck, your job is to hit him as hard as you can. You want to do it cleanly, but checking is part of the game.… If you’re going to be afraid every time you hit somebody you’re going to hurt him, you’re not going to be the kind of a hockey player … you might become. (Young 1963, 228–29)

Even more telling is Otto Tihane’s story about a real-life incident involving Gordie Howe and Ted Kennedy. As Tihane tells it, Kennedy checked Howe and Howe “wound up with a fractured skull,” which led to outrage among the Detroit faithful (205). After he had recovered, however, Howe was asked about “the rough aspects of the game” and gave what Tihane considers to be the “definitive comment” about professional hockey. “I like [hockey] the way it is,” said Howe (according to Tihane and the historical record). “Sure, it’s sometimes tough, but why not? It’s a man’s game” (206).

The allusion to the Kennedy-Howe incident would have had a strong effect on Young’s English-speaking readers in 1963. The historical incident, which happened during the first game of the playoffs in 1950, was likely the most famous example of hockey violence for these readers, comparable to the events associated with the Richard Riot for French-speaking Canadians. So important was the incident in hockey history that seventeen years later Sports Illustrated devoted a long article by Stan Fischler to it. Fischler’s article, called “The Greatly Exaggerated Death of Mr. Howe,” describes the events of 1950 in minute detail. Interestingly, the description suggests that Young modeled the climactic confrontation between Bill and Benny on what happened between Kennedy and Howe. As Fischler describes it, the historical incident occurred in the dying seconds of a 4-0 game, when it seemed that Toronto, in the lead, was just running out the clock. Kennedy came out across the Leaf blue line about six feet from the boards and Howe swept in from the right and “attempted to crash Kennedy amidships” (Fischler 1967). From there, two conflicting accounts evolved that are much like the two incidents between Bill and Benny. One version, favoured by Toronto fans, had Kennedy stopping short as Howe tried to hit him and Howe flying past to crash into the boards; the other version, favoured by Detroit fans, had Kennedy somehow surprising Howe, either with his shoulder or stick, maybe with an outright spear, and sending him down (Fischler 1967). Afterward, Howe’s injuries were so severe that he required brain surgery. So grave was his condition that a call was put through to Saskatchewan urging his mother to get to her son’s bedside (Fischler 1967).

By invoking the real-life incident between Howe and Kennedy, followed by Howe’s historical defense of “the rough aspects” of the game, A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp reinforces its justification of hockey violence by reference to real world authority. Who is going to gainsay Mr. Hockey himself about what hockey is? The lesson is accompanied by an explicit articulation, on the part of Bill, of the right balance to strike between the “rough aspects” of the game and the possibility of injuring someone. Bill recognizes that part of what has troubled him about the Benny Moore hit is that he couldn’t be absolutely sure of his own motives. Now, he vows that he will know himself and that “From now on … I not only won’t hurt anybody on purpose in this game—but I’ll try, on purpose, not to hurt them” (Young 1963, 246; italics original). He decides that he will model his game after Tim Merrill, who plays “hard, strong, forceful, but never dirty” and that, for as long as he plays, he wants people to think of him “as a clean player” (246).

Despite its defense of hockey violence, A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp leaves certain issues unresolved. The professional game, the novel makes clear, is defined by an intensification of violence even in “clean” play. Benny’s recovery defers the issue about hockey’s violence potentially leading to a fatal accident, but it does not address the wider issue. Similarly, although Benny’s admission that he had intended “to knock Bill right through the boards” absolves Bill of wrongdoing on the original hit, it doesn’t address the issue of Bill’s temper. Is a short temper a necessary part of the competitive drive needed to succeed in hockey?

The unresolved issues, I think, suggest a lingering anxiety on the part of Young about the nature of the professional game. A Boy at the Leafs’ Camp, just as Scrubs on Skates and Boy on Defense, idealizes junior and high school amateur hockey as, in many ways, the best of the game—with just the right balance of competitiveness and lack of corruption by the more violent and sordid aspects of professional hockey. Lee Vincent, the sportswriter stand-in for Young, makes this preference explicit in Scrubs on Skates:

[Lee Vincent] enjoyed a good professional game, or a good senior amateur game, but the feeling of these kids always got him hardest. A couple of times in his life, when he had been offered advancement on his own paper or more money from another paper, the thought of leaving junior and high school sports had been the one obstacle he couldn’t overcome. (Young 1952, 47)

Such a preference fits in well with the intended audience of a juvenile novel, of course, but it also hints at some of the underlying tensions in the myth of hockey that even Young, in his didactic treatment, cannot simply paper over.

Works Cited