2 Cara Hedley

The Myth of Hockey and Identity in Paul Quarrington’s King Leary

In a CBC interview following King Leary’s Canada Reads win in 2008, Paul Quarrington responded to the idea that he and other Canadian writers may “overidentify” with hockey in their writing: “Overidentification with hockey in . . . Canadian literature—it seems kind of a funny thing to be accused of, because why aren’t more people writing about hockey?” (CBC 2008). Quarrington went on to note the rich potential for exploring “obsession” through the lens of hockey, a potential that he mines in his 1987 novel, King Leary.

Quarrington’s novel tells the story of Percival “King” Leary, a septuagenarian on a quest for redemption from the offences he committed in order to become the greatest hockey player of his time, the “King of the Ice.” Even as he sets off on his quest, Leary is terrified that the title of King and the history that he believes moors it in place will somehow slip from his grasp. And so, through story, he rails against the obliterating forces of time and the ephemeral nature of fan loyalty and hockey history. The recounting of his personal “history” takes the form of a patchwork narrative that is part memory, part “blarney,” part elision, peppered with dementia-induced gaps, and strewn with the real-life detritus of hockey history. In his bid to defend his King of the Ice title, then, Leary transforms the material of his life into the stuff of legend, trying to write himself into myth.

Ultimately, the novel suggests important parallels between Leary’s personal story and the story of Canada: the anxiety fuelling Leary’s quest—his fear that the title will get away from him, that his identity will disappear without it, that he’ll be forgotten—is the same psychology as that at the root of Canadian claims to “our national game.” Leary’s story of how he became King of the Ice thus mirrors both the process through which Canada as a nation has come to be named “King of Hockey” and national history-building writ large.

Relatively speaking in the global context, Canada is young, still in the process of accumulating history and the historical legitimacy that comes with age. As Jonathan Kertzer states in Worrying the Nation, “nations are invented not born” (1998, 8). This process of invention is provisional at best, based on uncertainty, experimentation, a perpetual shifting of ground. In other words, our national identity—and the literary “tradition” that reflects it—is ultimately insecure. Enter hockey: the game has been used as a safe and steadfast stake in the nation’s self-development, employed as a kind of Prozac for the bipolar tendencies unearthed during the process. 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.

In their introduction to Now Is the Winter, Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison outline several key values forming the ideological constellation in which the narratives of game and nation intersect:

Canada’s great narrative of its own “northern” character, with its emphasis on the personal virtues of hardiness, self-reliance, and self-sacrifice, and on the social values of small-town life and loyalty to the collective good, all leavened with a touch of ironic humour, has been told so often in the language of hockey that the two stories—of game and nation—can seem like one. (2009, 9)

As Dopp and Harrison suggest, when it comes down to it, any hockey story—fact or fiction—is not about History or Tradition, those capitalized tyrants of narrative; the importance of hockey to Canadian identity is not about our collective domination of the game. Rather, it’s about the stories we tell about ourselves, about who we are as a nation, and, most importantly, about why we need these stories. King Leary is among the best representations of this psychological process that the nation has to offer. Just as hockey gives Leary identity, a national identity, too, is informed by, or given meaning through, the stories we tell about hockey’s importance, as a kind of ice-bound, violent, and graceful representation of who we are. King Leary is a highly personal myth about how a hockey legend invents his own myth and tries to redeem himself from the fallout of this process, but it also reflects the larger structures that bond hockey to nation-building myths: how a nation, in Kertzer’s words, invents itself. And in the process, the narrative reveals the dangers inherent in the process of affixing identity to static or exclusionary narratives.

It’s useful here to corner the meaning of myth as it relates to hockey’s construction in a national consciousness. In the context of hockey, the buttressing of the game with a mythological foundation implies a spiritual connection between the game and nation; “myth” suggests the presence of some greater significance that resists full definition lurking beyond fact and historical context. In his introduction to the 2004 edition of Hero of the Play, Richard Harrison suggests that hockey could be said to offer a “creation myth” underpinning Canadian society:

Perhaps most important, in terms of the intensity of the origin-of-hockey debate, is that creation myth insists that the distinguishing features of a people’s character are things born with them, created when the people were created. . . . In mythic terms, hockey is one of the few things that could be said to be ours from before the beginning of Canadian time. (16–17)

This explanation offers a temporal anchor of sorts for hockey’s unwieldy mythological weight. And yet explanations for hockey’s role in national identity, when examined closely, are full of crevasses and holes—as are any metanarratives that attempt to encompass a country as vast and diverse as Canada. In Hockey Night in Canada, a pivotal investigation into the relationship between hockey and Canadian culture, Richard Gruneau and David Whitson observe that “hockey acts both as myth and allegory in Canadian culture, . . . a story that Canadians tell themselves about what it means to be Canadian” (1993, 13). In their exploration of the machinery of this “collective representation,” they point out that the term “myth” is “most often used to suggest something that is essentially false. It implies a contrast between the world of fable or superstition and a ‘reality’ that the fables often disguise” (132). They invoke instead the Barthesian version of myth as it relates to the role of hockey in constructions of national identity:

Myths are not so much a denial of some actually existing truth as they are a form of cultural discourse—a way of speaking—about the world people live in. The problem is that myths tend to speak a conservative language: their language is static and intransitive; they represent the social world as something “natural,” a fixed set of relations without a history. (132)

In King Leary, Quarrington simultaneously plays into the “fixed set of relations” structuring hockey’s mythology on a national level and shines a light on their faulty construction, exposing—most frequently through the use of irony and humour—the static and intransitive language they speak.

The myth of hockey’s naturalism forms the foundation of Leary’s relationship to the game and his own hockey-playing identity. Quarrington has Leary buy blindly into this myth, as good, red-blooded hockey-playing “lads” are apparently expected to do, but Quarrington also subverts the idea that this myth is static or natural. Citing Barthes’s Mythologies (1972), Gruneau and Whitson state that “the myth of hockey as a ‘natural’ adaptation to ice, snow, and open space is a particularly graphic example of what Barthes is alerting us to—about how history can be confused with nature,” and they note that the myth is spread through Canadian culture “by means of signifiers that continually link hockey to the physical environment” (1993, 132). Quarrington directly engages this complex, tangled relationship between nature and hockey, declaring in a CBC interview that the “obsession” he explores in King Leary has, at its heart, the chill of a Canadian winter. To him, what King Leary is really about is “the winter and . . . our connection with that. And hockey is . . . one of the things we do to make our peace with winter” (CBC 2008). Here, Quarrington taps into the romanticized collective imagining of hockey as an instrument through which to channel winter energies, a way to play with winter rather than hide from it, and large parts of Leary’s narrative deal directly in these “signifiers” that, as Gruneau and Whitson say, “continually link hockey to the physical environment” (1993, 132).

Indeed, some of the most striking, beautiful imagery in this novel depicts the winter landscape and the imagery of water and ice, cast in the glow of Leary’s revisionist nostalgia. In these passages, winter suffuses the landscape with a kind of magic that transfers to the game itself as an expression of the season. Leary describes skating with his old friend Clay Clinton on the canal of their childhood: “One day after school the two of us laced on our skates and flew down to the canal. She was frozen hard and beautiful. The sunset lay across the river bright and heavy” (Quarrington 1987, 12). Racing Clay on the canal, he shifts into “the hardstep”: “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” (12). Quarrington demonstrates in this scene the ideological mechanisms underpinning the myth of naturalism in hockey, with Leary portraying the intersection of winter wind, skating, and “spirit” in a naturalized tableau.

Leary further establishes his blind belief in hockey as a mythical element of the natural world—a “fixed set of relations without a history” (Gruneau and Whitson 1993, 132)—on both a universal and a personal level in his discussions about hockey’s origin. In an anecdote about a seminar on hockey development in North America that he and Clay Clinton attended, Leary describes how another attendee, a young hockey coach from Minnesota, started discussing the origins of hockey, exposing Leary’s false, unexamined beliefs: “And the lad from Minn. went on and on about soccer and lacrosse, English foot soldiers playing baggataway with the Indians, some Scandinavian entertainment called bandy. I bit my tongue, but the truth of the matter is, I never knew that hockey originated. I figured it was just always there, like the moon” (Quarrington 1987, 8).

By connecting the idea of hockey’s origins to the ever-present, unquestioned entity of the moon, Leary expands the boundaries of the signifiers through which hockey becomes moored in the myth of naturalism. Leary connects the rink to the moon on several other occasions, cementing this symbolism. He describes the magical “moon-washed rink” on which he first spies the monks playing shinny:

The rink that the Brothers of St. Alban the Martyr built was [. . .] a circle. 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.

Then I heard the sounds, the soft windy sweeping of hockey sticks across the ice. [. . .] The moon was so bright that I do believe I squinted up my eyes. I have never seen it like that since. (145)

The twinning of round rink and round moon reinforces how hockey, in Leary’s reconstructed memories, becomes a magical world unto itself, separate from reality. Inside the perfect circle of the rink, the monks’ play defies laws of gravity and physiology: Leary describes Brother Isaiah, the blind monk, “skating around like a madman, stealing pucks, passing and receiving,” with the moonlight “sitting on his dead eyes like it does on the still surface of a lake,” and Brother Simon the Ugly “dancing, jumping into the air [. . .] his monstrous frame silhouetted against the trout silver moon” (146). With the line “I have never seen it like that since” (145), Leary both highlights the childlike wonder of that night and emphasizes the importance of the reformatory as the origin of his creation myth. It is not only a closed-off world, surrounded by a moat, where boys are held to “keep them out of hot water” (34), but also a magical place that defies replication, its memories and mythology accessible only to Leary himself, sealed off from the corrupting potential of the present world.

The oddly circular rink surfaces several times in his memories, offering itself as a potential symbol for Leary’s personal creation myth. Dopp suggests that “Leary’s quest to redress the wrongs of his life is an attempt to recapture the wholeness of life as represented by the round rink, the perfect outdoor ice, of the monks” (2009, 85). The perfect circle is part of what imbues those days and Leary’s magic-laced introduction to hockey with the element of myth: Leary is searching for the innocence and wonder of that time at the reformatory, prior to his obsession with becoming King of the Ice, when hockey was at once just a game played with his friends and a spectacle of magic and myth in which giant men could fly and blind men regain their sight.

As the game of hockey is a natural element in Leary’s life, an unexamined part of the natural world, omnipresent as the moon, so too does hockey exist in Leary’s own body as a kind of mysterious, natural knowledge without origin: he tells his audience, “I can’t remember lacing on blades for the first time. Likewise with hockey. I’ve got no idea when I first heard of, saw, or played the game of hockey” (Quarrington 1987, 7). In this way, Leary not only establishes the mythological status of hockey as it exists in his world, but he also creates the foundation for the process of his own self-mythologization as he seeks to solidify his King of the Ice legacy; without the proof of memories or stories to represent his entry into the world of hockey, he suggests that his identity as hockey player was fixed from the beginning. This physical naturalization of the game as “bred in the bone” allows Leary to represent, in the “hardstepping” scene discussed earlier, the physical manifestation of the game as a mystical transformation of the body that draws its power as much from magic as it does from physiology:

The coaches had slide projectors set up to show diagrams of leg muscles and such palaver, and it made me laugh because it was just hardstepping, which I been doing since I was born. Here’s what you do. You puff up your spirit till it won’t fit in 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. (12)

Here, Leary rejects the dismantlement of play into its constituent parts and corresponding muscle groups, relying instead on the mythology of hockey as a natural marriage of winter and the body, mystical yet elemental, tapping into the spirit and creating a union between physical “life” and the “winter wind.”

The Learyian logic, then, begins to unfold: if hockey has been a part of Leary’s body from the beginning, as natural as breathing, then he must have been born an heir to the King’s throne—and it follows that if hockey is a natural extension of the definitive Canadian winter, then it must represent some element or expression of national identity. From here grows Leary’s quest to establish himself as King of the Ice. And Leary declares this status to anyone who will listen, in an often desperate bid to cement his legacy. First as a player, then as coach and general manager of the Maple Leaves—whose name operates not only as a grammatically corrected surrogate of the Toronto Maple Leafs but also as a metonymic representation of the nation itself—Leary announces himself, with bluster and bravado, as hockey royalty: “I am the King of the Ice!” Leary declares at the outset of the novel. “I am the high-muck-a-muck hockey player! I have an Indian nickname, Loofweeda, which means ‘windsong,’ referring to the fact that I could skate faster than anyone else” (2).

Leary repeats such claims about his own greatness throughout the novel. This repetition is a key strategy to construct and maintain the naturalness of his self-made, mythologized status as King of the Ice. If myths are a form of “cultural discourse,” a mode of representing the world, the myth of King of the Ice can be viewed as a discourse both created and perpetuated by Leary himself, a “complex semiotic system” used to invent his relation to the world, then make it appear “natural” (Buma 2012, 72). In recounting his hockey-playing days, Leary outlines the process whereby he establishes his heroic hockey-playing persona and then adopts this fictional persona as his naturalized identity through performance and repetition. He recalls the early days of his professional hockey career:

It was in those days that I perfected my swagger, the dragon-head cane flipping. The tykes would call out to me, “Hi there, Little Leary!” this predating when I became the King of the Ice.

“Ho, there, young pups!” I’d call back, tipping my cap. “Eat yer veggies and you’ll grow up like me.” (Quarrington 1987, 73)

Here, we are given a glimpse behind the curtain, complete with the props (“the dragon-head cane”) and dialogue (“Eat yer veggies and you’ll grow up like me”) that Leary invents, then repeats to “perfection” as he constructs the myth out of the man. Leary repeats variations of “Eat yer veggies” to children throughout his reign as King of the Ice, not because he believes it but because he thinks it is what a hockey hero would say to adoring young fans.

While Quarrington allows Leary this airtime to construct and defend his King of the Ice mythology, the author also includes ironic slippages and holes in Leary’s story that allow the reader to step back from the inflated, mythologized version of himself given to us by an unreliable narrator and view the unstable structures of both the personal myth of King of the Ice and the larger myth of hockey. Jamie Dopp cautions that King Leary

does offer a similar complexity in its treatment of the national myths intertwined with hockey lore. This complexity emerges in part because Leary is an unreliable narrator, prone to “the blarney” as well as to the mental contortions of one engaged in an exercise of self-justification; thus, any time Leary waxes poetic about his own background or the meaning of the game the reader is well-advised to look for irony. (2009, 89)

Leary, as narrator, attempts to convince the reader that his title, King of the Ice, is a pre-existing designation that he both earned and successfully defended through innate talent and hard work. However, Quarrington, as author, gives the reader greater agency than that, allowing us to recognize that we are in the hands of an unreliable and often deluded narrator. Despite Leary’s best attempts to exert absolute control of his own story, the narrative slips out of his grasp. It is in these moments of slippage that Quarrington not only displays his comedic chops but also allows readers glimpses of the ironies, omissions, and bits of blarney, large and small, embedded in Leary’s telling.

Perhaps the most contradictory counter-story that manages to get past Leary is the origin story of the name “King of the Ice,” as told by Blue Hermann. When Hermann says to Iain, their nursing home aide and sidekick, “It’s rather interesting about Leary’s nickname, ‘The King,’” Leary jumps in not as a speaker in conversation with Blue and Iain but as the narrator (Quarrington 1987, 115). “Don’t listen to him,” Leary tells his readerly audience. “They’ve given him some very nasty drugs at the home.” The back and forth continues, with Leary in narrative asides rebutting or supplementing Hermann’s dialogue with his own flourishes of glory. Eventually, Hermann describes the scene in which Leary’s nickname was born: “And they take the puck down the ice. Leary applies the St. Louis Whirlygig to his cover and poof, he’s in the clear.” Leary interjects again to add his own self-aggrandizing commentary: “One of the great wonders of the world, the St. Louis Whirlygig! It’s a spit in the eye of gravity and sundry physical laws!” Hermann then, despite Leary’s best efforts to steer the story in a different direction, completes his version: “And Leary starts pounding his stick on the ice, you see, so that his teammates will pass the puck. [. . .] But they ignore [. . .] him. Leary throws down his stick in disgust and marches off the ice. [. . .] And Richie Reagan says, ‘Well, who the hell does he think he is—the King of the Ice?’” (116). In this story, despite Leary’s attempts to divert the reader, we are given a counter-narrative to Leary’s mythologized version of the King of the Ice story that uncovers the title’s ironic core—an irony that is apparently “lost” on Percival, as is the Shakespeare allusion.

Humour is perhaps the true King of this novel, and, as Don Morrow suggests, Quarrington uses it as a vehicle to “de-mystif[y] the heroic in hockey” (2002, 114). Perhaps the best representation of this style of “demystification” is in the Loofweeda origin story. To garner legitimacy for his title, Leary often refers to a second nickname, Loofweeda, which, he tells us, is an “Indian nickname” given to him by Manny’s Aboriginal grandfather, Poppa Rivers. Skirting the subject of Loofweeda’s true meaning when he first calls Leary by that name, Poppa Rivers says, “Oh, a literal translation would be something like ‘wind music’ or ‘windsong’” (Quarrington 1987, 138). Leary flaunts this nickname given to him by the Aboriginal grandfather who appears to Leary as a wise elder or shaman-like figure in his dreams, using it as an affirmation of his elevated status. Through this name, he claims, Poppa Rivers has declared him a kind of mystical athlete with a rare ability to “skate like the wind,” as he explains to his audience. However, in another moment of ironic slippage later in the novel, the reader learns that Poppa Rivers never did assign Leary an Aboriginal name and that Loofweeda actually means “breaking wind”; Poppa Rivers used the word around Leary, and Leary mistakenly adopted it as his nickname, ascribing to it his own significance in the service of his King of the Ice mythology. As Dopp notes:

The joke on Leary suggests how credulous he has been in his quest for the kind of “immortality” that such mythic-style names seem to offer. It also hints at all he has repressed or elided in his quest to maintain his “immortal” status. Like his Shakespearean namesake, Leary’s hubris has made him cling destructively to his crown, blind to those who truly love him. (2009, 90)

With both accidental and willful blindness, Leary recreates the world around him in the image of King, and it is through Quarrington’s frequently comic depiction of these blind spots that the reader is able to identify Leary’s tragic flaws.

Perhaps the strongest method of demystifying the heroic through humour is in Quarrington’s tragicomic representations of aging and the aged body. While Leary is ruthless in his portrayal of Blue Hermann’s failing body, these descriptions also act as a kind of mirror on the aged King himself. Leary and Hermann are, to a certain extent, twinned in the novel, not only forced into the childlike domestic situation of room-sharing but also operating as memory surrogates for each other at times: they are contemporaries, having risen to their respective reigns—Hermann as a journalist, Leary as King of the Ice—in the same hockey world, during the same time period. As such, Leary’s farcical representations of Hermann’s failing body and the distance between Hermann’s elevated status of the past and his current frail, broken-down state in the nursing home operate as a reflection of Leary’s own decline, vulnerability, and mortality, showing how far the King himself has fallen. When describing one of the many indignities of old age that Blue Hermann faces, Leary offers a word of caution: “Blue has to wear this underwear gear that resembles diapers, due to his problem with incontinence. But unless you know exactly what God’s got in store for you, don’t laugh” (Quarrington 1987, 194). In this admonition to the audience, he implicates himself in the same dignity-robbing process of aging that Hermann is experiencing; Leary, too, is a victim of this particular jest of God. He warns us not to laugh, and yet laugh we do as Quarrington serves up uncomfortable but chuckleworthy descriptions of the tragicomic minutiae of Blue Hermann’s physical decrepitude.

In keeping with the representations of aging in the novel, the nursing home assumes the role of a halfway house between life and death, with Leary travelling alongside Hermann toward the inevitable in their shared rooms—both at the nursing home and at the hotel during their ill-fated trip to Toronto. At one point, Leary describes Hermann’s appearance while sleeping as a person “suffering the torments of hell” (84), and when a maid accidentally opens their hotel room door in Toronto, then flees in terror upon seeing him and Hermann, Leary says, “I can’t blame her. Over there is Blue Hermann. He lies on top of the bed sheets (but somehow knotted in them), naked to the world. As he snores, his mouth falls open, his maw both darkly gray and red as blood” (190). In this juxtaposition of the dark gray and blood-red of Hermann’s “maw,” Leary portrays him as both succumbing to and defying mortality, his body assuming a post-mortem pallor, while the “red as blood” parts announce his stubbornly persistent life. Through Leary’s tragicomic representations of old age—the winter of both his life and Hermann’s—the audience participates in the demystification of the hero, staring with Leary into the dark gray and blood-red maw of his own imminent death, with Hermann operating as a kind of emissary of this message, a comic curtain behind which Leary finally cannot hide his own mortality. Death, eventually, will get in.

Quarrington ultimately subverts Leary’s romanticization of winter, then, dissolving the nostalgic gloss that characterizes the narrator’s depiction of the shinny-filled winters of his youth. Not only is the winter of Leary’s life not what he imagined he had in store, but winter itself has become an enemy, those beautiful winter landscapes in which he used to shine now treacherous, a battlefield possessing latent danger at every turn. Winter in Canada is not for the elderly or the infirm, as evidenced by this malevolent transformation of a parking lot: “It is a treacherous undertaking, the crossing of the parking lot. The sun and wind are staging a major coup, trying to replace the stubborn winter with fragile spring, and the ground is now half-water, half-ice, slick as bacon fat” (217). In another scene, Leary views the winter landscape through the lens of old age, describing the forests as “dead, drowned in snow” (84). Rather than representing the promise of play, the white slate onto which young boys and men can project their dreams, winter has taken on the symbolism of death.

Through these present-day depictions, Leary inadvertently proves that, through old age, he has become shut out of his own youth-centric mythology, thus demonstrating the larger risk that hockey holds for providing a model of nation-building and national identity that is exclusionary, defined as much by who and what is left out as by what is included. In her analysis of women’s shinny hockey in Toronto parks, Anne Hartman notes the sociopolitical significance in notions of sport as an expression of nationalism and shared history:

Other scholars studying the development of nationalisms have also paid attention to the growth of organized sports. For example, following Eric Hobsbawm’s work on sports as “invented traditions,” we may argue that constructions of history and memory are not about inert pasts, but are very much about relations of power in the present. (2009, 133)

In this way, we can examine Leary’s reconstruction—or reinvention—of his hockey glory days and his reign as King of the Ice for the “relations of power” ingrained in the narrative, reflecting not only his individual experiences but also the larger power structures inculcated in the positioning of hockey as invented tradition, or “our national game.”

One early signifier that sets the framework for this exclusionary narrative is the narrator’s address to the audience as male. Toward the beginning of the novel, after describing his first encounter with Clay Clinton, Leary states, “Now sir, after an introduction like that, it probably seems strange that Clay and I became friends at all” (Quarrington 1987, 10). This address is reiterated near the end of the novel when Leary admires Duane Killbrew’s girlfriend, addressing the reader as “brother”: “This lady’s got bubs, brother, but I don’t have the time to tell you about it” (223). These addresses—so small and brief they could easily be missed—can be read as containing a seed of hockey’s exclusionary mythology: the hockey world that Leary describes is a boys’ only club. These narrow parameters of inclusion also extend to the version of masculinity defining the population of this world. Michael Buma parses the significance of the description of Killebrew’s girlfriend:

Leary’s address to the reader as “brother” is particularly informative, extending the fraternity basis of hockey belonging on the basis of shared appreciation of a woman’s body. This throwaway moment, of course, also works to referee the terms of hockey masculinity and team belonging, not only excluding men who wouldn’t appreciate the female body (i.e. homosexuals) but also those who would be troubled or offended by this sort of objectification. (2012, 250)

Indeed, the fraternity portrayed in this novel is extremely limited in scope. Women are either the wives or girlfriends of hockey players or are placed under the spotlight in moments of objectification by men, beginning early for Leary when, as a boy, he spies on Clay Clinton’s sister “Horseface” having a bath (Quarrington 1987, 12). This is a world in which women are frequently judged by their “bubs” and are perceived as weak. Leary’s wife, Chloe, has a heart flutter, which causes her to give “the impression that her poor heart was like a canary in a coal mine, a breath away from death” (134), and she spends much of her limited page-space in the novel in a state of fragile mental and physical health, weak and vulnerable. In contrast, Chloe’s sister, Jane, the bold romantic interest of both Manfred and Clay, announces to Leary when she first meets him, “I’m sweating like a stuck pig” (74). She is the strongest female figure in the book, and yet she is still relegated to the stands, becoming a kind of pawn in a romantic tug-of-war between the two men. Had this narrative taken place a few decades later, Jane might have been cast as a hockey player herself (although she is tiny in stature, as are most of the women in this novel), but despite the layered history of women’s hockey in Canada, this is not the reality in representations of hockey’s “tradition” in this country, which has traditionally excluded women, as well as men who might not subscribe to the limited style of “fraternity” represented in this novel, as Buma points out.

Under these strict limitations, Leary’s own sons also fall well short of making the cut. The “gormless” younger son, Clifford, while a huge hockey fan, is spoken of in disparaging tones by Leary; childlike and overweight, Clifford, try as he might, does not fit into his father’s exclusionary hockey mythology, nor does he fit into the discourse of masculinity dictated by this world. Likewise, Leary paints Clarence, his deceased eldest son, as a disappointment, a family outcast. Although Leary never states it outright, he suggests through references to Clarence’s “queer stuff” and “pornographic” poetry that he is gay (210). As a child, when he is allowed into Leary’s hockey world during a Maple Leaves’ family event at the arena, Clarence shows up in figure skates and “skates like a girl” (48). However, in this scene, Quarrington also takes a subtly adaptable, subversive approach to representations of the “terms of hockey masculinity” (Buma 250), describing, alongside Leary’s initial embarrassment at Clarence’s figure skating moves, his grudging admiration—as well as that of his teammates—of his son’s graceful and complicated manoeuvres. In part, this reaction can be traced back to the fact that Leary’s own signature hockey move, “the Whirligig,” is inspired by another player’s “figure skating move” (37). Referring to this scene and other figure skating references in the novel, Sarah Jameson suggests that “recent analysis of masculinity and styles of movement in figure skating sheds light on how the novel’s representations of skating and dance work to question the narrow conception of masculinity dominant in hockey” (2014, 184). But this is not enough for Clarence to be granted entrance into Leary’s exclusive King of the Ice mythology, except in his seldom-spoken-of, yet central role as the villainous child who left out the toy truck (or so Leary believes for most of his adult life) that caused Leary’s career-ending knee injury.

These sociopolitical tensions play out in the realm of race as well. As Jameson points out, the fact that Manfred is Aboriginal “suggests the broader historical and political significance of Leary’s paranoid bid for hockey supremacy”; she asserts that “Leary can be read as representative of a Canadian, White, male, settler identity whose dominance is founded upon the suppression and expulsion of the Aboriginal” (2014, 186). Citing the trope of the “postcolonial gothic” in Manfred’s appearance to Leary as a ghost throughout the narrative, Jameson suggests that “Leary’s mistreatment of Manfred . . . draws a direct link between the version of masculinity still celebrated in the game [Canadian hockey] and the violence of colonial history” (186). In this reading, then, Leary’s quest for redemption inculcates a larger, national paradigm of reconciliation, suggesting a broader national mythology at work beneath the surface of the narrative.

In order to counter the “static and intransitive” language typifying myths, Gruneau and Whitson, following Barthes (1972), counsel that “it is necessary to develop a way of representing the world that has a more active character—a discourse that depicts human beings as makers of a world that can be continually changed” (1993, 132). Toward the end of the novel, when Leary is facing the ghosts of his past head on, he discovers the ability to change the discourse he has clung to at many a great personal cost, recognizing both that his time as King of the Ice is gone and that the measures he took to preserve the title—specifically, his betrayals of Manny—were not worth it. He tells Duane Killebrew, the hockey star du jour, “I was the King for many years. But now I am an old, old man, and undeserving, what’s more. You may be the best there ever was—although I would have loved to have gone toe-to-toe with you in my prime—and you are the King. That’s all there is to it” (Quarrington 1987, 218). This admission that he is “unworthy” marks how far our hero has come in his emotional development over the course of this late-life coming-of-age tale. The conversation between Leary and Killebrew continues, with Leary returning one last time to his King of the Ice performance and lines:

“But now, hey, you’re still a pup. Keep eating yer veggies, and try to have a good time now and again.”

“King—Percy—there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What’s that, son?”

“I hate fucking veggies!”

The sunlight is playing on the road, dancing in the melted snow. “So do I, Duane. So do I.” (219)

In this admission, Leary reveals the underlying hypocrisies embedded in his King of the Ice persona. Here, we finally begin to see the cleaving of Leary the man from his mythologized King of the Ice identity. It is a moment of illumination, both literal and metaphoric, the outer world reflecting the freedom that Leary experiences once he is released from the burden of defending his title, with all of its inherent contradictions and falseness; when he passes it on, the sunlight comes out to “play [. . .] on the road,” penetrating the mythical weight of winter that has influenced so much of his story, melting the snow, then “dancing” in it. This moment reveals the burden of carrying and perpetuating static mythologies. Not only have Leary’s fervent attempts to reinforce his King of the Ice title resulted in the betrayal of his best friend; they have also produced an inflexibility of character, an inability to change and grow. Leary becomes locked in an extended adolescence of sorts, trapped in a loop, attempting to recapture the grandeur of his long-gone glory days. Quarrington not only illustrates the destructive effects of an obsessive adherence to a fixed identity like King of the Ice; he also illuminates the dangers of attaching larger concepts of identity to a particular ideology or story. If we attach national identity to the mythology of hockey—our national game, our national religion—we are investing in a story that is, like Leary’s King of the Ice mythology, limited in scope, prone to fantasy, and resistant to change. In the end, Leary experiences relief from the burdens of this static mythology, but he also finds final comfort in hockey when he returns to the core hockey memories and images that retain their spiritual significance for him: in his final moments, he comes full circle, returning to the perfectly round rink at the reformatory, where the monks are still at play. “I join them in the circle,” Percival “King” Leary tells us.

WORKS CITED

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.

Buma, Michael. 2012. Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). 2008. “King Leary’s Author and Advocate Savour 2008 Canada Reads Victory.” CBC Digital Archives, CBC Radio, 4 March. http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/king-learys-author-and-advocate-savour-victory.

Dopp, Jamie. 2009. “Win Orr Lose: Searching for the Good Canadian Kid in Canadian Hockey Fiction.” In Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity, edited by Andrew Holman, 81–97. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Dopp, Jamie, and Richard Harrison. 2009. “Introduction.” In Now Is the Winter: Thinking About Hockey, edited by Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison, 7–18. Hamilton, ON: Wolsak and Wynn.

Gruneau, Richard, and David Whitson. 1993. Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics. Toronto: Garamond Press.

Harrison, Richard. 2004. “Ten Years with the Hero: On Hockey and Poetry.” In Hero of the Play: Poems Revised and New, 10th Anniversary Edition, 13–27. Hamilton, ON: Wolsak and Wynn.

Hartman, Anne. 2009. “‘Here for a Little Pickup?’: Notes on Women’s Shinny Hockey in Toronto Public Parks.” In Now Is the Winter: Thinking About Hockey, edited by Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison, 123–44. Hamilton, ON: Wolsak and Wynn.

Jameson, Sarah. 2014. “Reading the ‘St. Louis Whirlygig’: Hockey, Masculinity, and Aging in Paul Quarrington’s King Leary.” Journal of Canadian Studies 48, no. 3: 181–99.

Kertzer, Jonathan. 1998. Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Morrow, Don. 2002. “Quarrington’s Hockey Shtick: A Literary Analysis.” In Putting It on Ice: Hockey and Cultural Identities, vol. 1 of Putting It on Ice, edited by Colin D. Howell, 111–18. Halifax: Gorsebrook Research Institute, St. Mary’s University.

Quarrington, Paul. 1987. King Leary. New York: Random House.