Introduction

A quick survey of Canadian sport fiction, drama, and poetry illustrates that hockey tends to eclipse other sports in our nation’s literature. This prevalence should surprise nobody, given the iconic status of hockey in the national imagination. That status led to hockey dominating our earlier collection, Writing the Body in Motion: A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature (2018). Yet Canadians obviously participate in, and care deeply about, plenty of other sports. In this new collection, we deliberately chose to highlight literature about sports in Canada other than hockey. Relatively few of the sports represented involve organized team competition. Some are played by individuals in small groups, while others are largely solitary activities, in which participants compete with their own past achievements more than they compete against each other. Some of the sports are well known and have a long history: mountaineering, rodeo, and curling, for example. Others are relatively new and unconventional, including sports of the sort often labelled “extreme”—high-risk sports whose practitioners deliberately embrace potentially lethal danger.

Not Hockey further develops the goals of its predecessor. We have designed it as a valuable resource for sport literature courses in which students have an opportunity to critique sports culture and analyze the role of athletics in today’s society. The essays in this collection will also appeal to scholars and general readers interested in imaginative responses to sport. In our introduction to Writing the Body in Motion, we stressed the way that sport literature uses sport to explore larger issues faced by human beings, and we cited Priscilla Uppal’s claim that sport literature functions as “metaphor, paradigm, a way to experience some of the harsher realities of the world, a place to escape to, an arena from which endless lessons can be learned, passed on, learned again” (2009, xiv). These broader frameworks of understanding still apply.

The title of this collection suggests a bit of a twist, however. What are the implications of labelling the sports represented in this collection as “not hockey”? At first glance, the label might seem to reproduce the hockey bias we indicated above, as if Canadian sport only falls into two categories: “hockey” and “not hockey.” We chose the label, however, as a challenge to the status quo. Canadian sport involves so much more than hockey, just as Canadian identity is so much more diverse than the identity associated with hockey. The sports represented in this collection—and the essays and interviews these sports and their literature have inspired—offer various takes on this diversity.

Each essay takes a critical approach to a work or works of literature in which sport, in one way or another, plays a central role. Interviews with or comments from the authors of these works follow several of the essays, giving readers a chance to see what the authors themselves think of sport and/or their book’s relationship to sport. We have grouped the essays and their companion pieces into three sections, which reflect three central themes in the collection.

The essays in the first section, “Niche Sports and Subcultures: Non-commercial Experiences,” focus on literary works that feature niche sports, that is, unconventional sports that have a relatively narrow appeal and whose practitioners tend to feel a strong sense of group membership. Such sports often (though not necessarily) attract people who are rebelling against normative values and social expectations, particularly young people who are in the process of asserting their independence and defining themselves as individuals. This element of defiance may include the deliberate embrace of physical danger associated with sports commonly labelled “extreme,” three of which—skateboarding, parkour, and ultrarunning—are featured in this part. In the literary works that contributors examine in this section, this defiance manifests itself in the ways certain subcultures associated with niche sports, extreme or not, resist commercialization and commodification, and thereby preserve another, possibly more authentic, experience of sport.

In “‘All Lithe Power and Confidence’: Skateboarding in Michael Christie’s If I Fall, If I Die,” Heidi Tiedemann Darroch explores skateboarding’s potential for fostering reconciliation and allyship, particularly in the way skateboarding offers a less competitive and hierarchical model of sport. Similarly, in “Olympic Athletes Versus Parkour Artists: Sport, Art, and the Critique of Celebrity Culture in Timothy Taylor’s The Blue Light Project,” Angie Abdou posits that Taylor offers parkour-based creative movement as an alternative to the pitfalls of mainstream society, such as consumerism, obsession with celebrity, and fixation on relentless progress. In “Covering Distance, Coming of Age, and Communicating Subculture: David Carroll’s Young Adult Sports Novel Ultra,” ultramarathon runner Fred Mason makes the case that extreme sport can help young people cope with developmental crises and major life obstacles, playing a major role in movement toward adulthood. He explains that Carroll was inspired to write the book through his attempts to explain his sport to his nieces and nephews in a way that truly captured the experience—particularly the sport’s transformative spiritual potential. The fourth essay in this group, Jamie Dopp’s “Out of the Ordinary: Curling in The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon and Men with Brooms,” will seem, at first, an outlier. It begins with curling’s peculiar position in Canada, as both an economically marginal and widely popular sport. Then, through an analysis of two comical texts, it develops into a meditation on the blurred line between the ordinary and the extraordinary (or extreme) in sports.

The second part, “Colonialism and Nature,” groups together essays on sports that allow their participants to immerse themselves in nature, often in isolation. Such sports provide a temporary escape from the trials of everyday, routine existence, as well as space for reflection and self-grounding that cannot be found in a culture that rewards constant action. However, in Western cultural and literary traditions, this approach to nature often begins from an assumption that the land is “empty” of history, culture, and Indigenous Peoples—that is, that it is a mere vessel for non-Indigenous individuals’ self-fulfillment. The chapters in this part, and the literature they discuss, acknowledge and explore this colonial lens in different ways.

In “Sporting Mountain Voices: Alpinism and (Neo)colonial Discourse in Thomas Wharton’s Icefields and Angie Abdou’s The Canterbury Trail,” Eva-Maria Müller explores two texts that take ecocritical approaches to sports that use nature for human recreation. Each of these texts, Müller argues, offers an important take on the ethical responsibility humans have towards nature, even during such seemingly benign activities as skiing, snowboarding, and mountain climbing. In the next essay, “Getting Away from It All, or Breathing It All In: Decolonizing Wilderness Adventure Stories,” Gyllian Phillips encourages readers to reconsider the relationship between humans and land by comparing trekking stories Into the Wild, by Jon Krakaur, and Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, to Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk. Wagamese’s novel, Phillips argues, challenges the settler notion that people become “one with the land” through personal journeys by offering the counter-example of a journey of healing by an Indigenous boy and his dying father. Misao Dean presents a slightly different look at the sportsperson’s relationship to nature in her “A ‘Most Enthusiastic Sportsman Explorer’: Warburton Pike in The Barren Ground,” an early-twentieth-century memoir of a settler engaged in hunting for sport. Pike’s account, according to Dean, offers a remarkable portrait of a sport with many extreme elements. Although the account is dated in some telling ways, it also contains forward-thinking ideas about the relationship of humans to nature and between Indigenous people and settlers in Canada.

Although issues of equity and relative privilege surface throughout this collection, some essays deal more explicitly with social hierarchies and the uneven distribution of power than others. These essays are grouped together in the third section, “Gender, Race, and Class.”

In “‘Maggie’s Own Sphere’: Fly Fishing and Ecofeminism in Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel,” Cory Willard discusses a novel from the 1950s that takes a unique approach to stories about characters journeying into nature to discover themselves. Swamp Angel deals with a strong woman who escapes an abusive husband by her mastery of a conventionally male sport: fly fishing. The novel also explores the kinds of healing, even spiritual, power that nature can retain in the modern world. Veronika Schuchter’s “‘Don’t Expect Rodeo to Be a Sweet Sport’: Ambiguity, Spectacle, and Cowgirls in Aritha van Herk’s Stampede and the Westness of West” focuses attention on the Calgary Stampede and its main sporting event, rodeo. Both the Stampede and rodeo are shaped by histories involving colonialism, sexism, and racism. Van Herk’s prose poem collection, Schuchter argues, takes an ambiguous position toward this history, sometimes acknowledging it, other times suggesting that Stampede and rodeo have an openness of definition that mirrors the openness of the West itself. In “Immigration, Masculinity, and Olympic-Style Weightlifting in David Bezmozgis’s ‘The Second Strongest Man’,” Jason Blake considers the immigrant experience of dislocation, the transitory nature of fame, and expressions of masculinity through the lens of a sport long dominated by the Soviet Union. Adrian Markle explores the ramifications of social class in “‘It All Gets Beaten Out of You’: Poverty, Boxing, and Writing in Steven Heighton’s The Shadow Boxer.” And finally, in “Turn It Upside Down: Race and Representation in Sport, Sport Literature, and Sport Lit Scholarship,” Jael Richardson talks about The Stone Thrower, her memoir about her father Chuck Ealey, Canada’s first Black quarterback to win a Grey Cup, and the impact of racism on his career. Drawing on her experience as the founder and executive director of Canada’s Festival of Literary Diversity, she reflects on the lack of racial diversity in sport literature and among those who study it. Recognizing the urgent need for change, she offers suggestions about how writers, scholars, and sport literature associations can draw attention to this problem, work to improve diversity, and include a wider range of voices in the field.