King Leary

The title suggests tragedy, and indeed lives are ruined and the book ends in blood and death, but the allusion to King Lear is somewhat misleading, for the book was awarded the 1988 Leacock Medal for Humour.

The title is more firmly a reference to Francis Michael Clancy, to whom the book is dedicated, and whose life and nickname (King Clancy) provided a rough template for the character of Percy Leary, a slightly-built professional hockey player known for his speed and grit. Like Clancy, Leary played for Ottawa, was involved in a game during which he played all positions (including goal), and ended up in management with Toronto.

Yet according to the author, King Leary is not about hockey. It's "ultimately about winter, that thing that defines us most eloquently as Canadians." This sentiment is reflected in the epigraph from A Winter's Tale:

A sad tale's best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins.

The book's humour comes from Leary himself, who has a distinctive grammatically-challenged way of expressing himself: "I amn't sure," he says, and "my peepers is shut." People are "mooks" and "goomers." Toronto's team is the "Maple Leaves."

One of the best things about the book are the magical hockey-playing monks -- the epigraph's "sprites and goblins." And there are plenty of great lines:

Mrs. Ames gives us a look that could crack nuts. His eyes looked like stones left over from digging a grave. I twist him around so good his socks end up on different feet. I was so full of ginger I could make a horse sneeze at thirty paces.

Tretiak: The Legend

I've wanted to read this book by Tretiak for a long time, and was particularly interested in getting a Soviet perspective on Canadian hockey. However, the English version of this book appeared in 1987 when the Soviet Union was still intact, so in many places the book reads like propaganda. Advice given by coaches is often trite or couched in language that reeks of ideology.

When the Soviet team fell behind in a game against the Canadiens, "the coaches suggested that our players skate faster and be more accurate with their passing."

In another game they said, "Lock up your opponents in their zone, force the goalie to make mistakes, fool the defensemen, and most importantly, show your character."

I assume the book was vetted by Soviet censors, making it impossible to know how accurately it reflects Tretiak's views. I have no doubt he is patriotic, so it is possible his words are genuine.

After retiring, he became a political worker with the Central Red Army Sports Club. And though he dismisses as "ridiculous" the suggestion that Soviet athletes were engaged in subversive indoctrination, he also says:

Athletes are, in fact, on the main line of the ideological fight of two social systems. Our athletes have to prove constantly that they are not only the strongest and most talented, but, more importantly, they must let the world know that behind them is the strength of Communist ideals, the all-triumphant truth of Soviet morality.

Hockey Thuggery

A number of Tretiak's complaints while playing in North America are similar to those made by Dryden, Esposito, and others while in Moscow during the 1972 Summit Series -- complaints about food, officiating, and accommodation. But Tretiak's harshest words are reserved for the "gladiator psychology" of NHLers.

The dirty tricks, punches, threats to the referees, and after-the-whistle hits were all tactics that the Canadians demonstrated without any trace of shame. They employ their tested weapon -- dishonest, dirty hockey. [They have] malicious, twisted faces, foaming at the mouth.

Tretiak overstates his case, but there is some truth in what he says. In The Game, Ken Dryden provides a careful analysis of the differences between the Russian and the Canadian styles. Because Russian hockey developed differently, it was able to avoid the limitations of the North American game, where (Dryden says) "violence had been allowed to make sense."

Compliments

Tretiak has many gracious things to say about us. He's particularly complimentary about Bobby Hull: "The legends about him are told for a reason. What a shot!"

Gerry Cheevers is "fearless, skillful and calm."

Bobby Clarke: "To look at him, you'd swear that Bobby was a wanted murderer, but once you got to know him, you realized what a very friendly and kind fellow he was."

Phil Esposito: "...his superb ability to control the puck, his powerful game in front of the net, and his astounding intuition were, as always, distinct Esposito trademarks."

He refers to the Montreal Forum as "a great hockey citadel" and suggests that Russians "could learn from the Canadiens everything that concerns respect for fans and players."

Trivia

Tretiak, like all the Russians, did an incredible amount of dryland training. This included having someone hit tennis balls at him with a racket. During games he watched the eyes of incoming players so intently that he was accused of hypnotizing them.

Before the first game of the Summit Series, Jacques Plante made a surprise visit to give him tips on how to play the Canadian forwards.

He was fascinated by Gerry Cheevers, who smoked a cigar before games, and had a clause in his contract permitting him to drink beer between periods.

He addresses Ken Dryden directly, responding to comments made in Dryden's first book, Face-Off at the Summit. "You're right, Ken. We all had the same feelings..."

The Stanley Cup: "a huge, paunchy, glittering trophy that looks like a Russian samovar."

Retirement

"Vladik" retired in 1984, stating that he never wanted to play in the NHL. "It wouldn't suit me, as an officer and Soviet citizen..." This may or may not be the truth.

The Wikipedia entry on him indicates he may have retired because he was not allowed to go to the NHL, and also because he no longer wanted to play for Tikhonov. It was Tikhonov who pulled Tretiak during an Olympic match against the Americans in Lake Placid (the "Miracle on Ice"), after Tretiak had let in a weak goal at the end of the first period.

In 1987 there was a reunion of the Summit Series players. Tretiak writes:

Now there was no trace of the old antagonism. We had become wise and kind. We looked at one another's aging faces and couldn't hold back the laughter, thinking about what bullies we had been in 1972.

Tretiak is one of the most admired and respected hockey players in the world. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989.

The following year he became the goaltending coach for the Chicago Blackhawks. Among those he tutored are Ed Belfour, Martin Brodeur, and Dominic Hasek. Any goalie wearing number 20 does so as a tribute to Tretiak.

In 2006 he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal by the Governor General.

He runs the Vladislav Tretiak Elite School of Goaltending in Toronto.

The translation is by Sam and Maria Budman.

The Game

You know what people say about goalies -- they're "different." Ken Dryden certainly is. Imagine the way his teammates saw him. Aloof and introspective, brainy (he's got a law degree!), unusually tall for a player in the 1970s (at 6'4" he was taller than just about everyone else in the league).

He's the only person to win the Conn Smythe trophy (as playoff MVP) before winning the Calder (rookie of the year). After playing two full seasons with the Canadiens, he rejected the contract he was offered and sat out a year. (Players just didn't do that then.) He abruptly retired after a short but brilliant career (seven and a half seasons), during which he backstopped the team to six championships.

He went on to become an Member of Parliament, and made a bid for the leadership of the Liberal party. Think of it, a goalie as PM!

Like its author, The Game is "different." One might have expected a book that recaps at least some of those Stanley Cup wins. But no, it's structured around a week near the end of his final season, when he's made his decision to retire, and takes us through several routine league games.

The book is a couch on which Dryden analyzes himself, his teammates, and the state of the game. He reflects on practices and warmups, pregame chatter ("Gotta play it, might as well win it") and dressing-room gibes ("Hey, you're the guy Plager scored on from the parking lot...").

He muses upon officiating ("like doing spot-checks on New Year's Eve"), and the "NHL theory of violence," and how Gretzky and the Soviets contributed to obstruction and the "dump-and-chase" style.

But he's best when fixing his gaze on those around him: the prankster Lapointe, Shutt "a perfect Shakespearian fool," Phil Esposito a "volume shooter," Don Cherry coaching the Bruins with "a tiny permanent grin on his face, like a ten-year-old kid holding a stink bomb behind his back."

And the brilliant but unlikeable Scotty Bowman whose playing career ended during a breakaway, his skull fractured by the stick of Jean-Guy Talbot, who was chasing him. How ironic that Bowman later coached Talbot, or that a typical pregame harangue by Bowman went like this:

...and that Woods, is there some reason we can't touch that guy? Is there? For crissake, I see Lupien pattin' him on the ass. And Mondou, sniffin' around, 'Hiya Woodsie. How are ya, Woodsie?' You're not playin' with him.

And Dryden's analysis of Larry Robinson:

More skillful with each year, doing more things, stretching himself wider, he has stretched himself thinner. Working hard, he is making more good plays; but, overextending himself, his stride now chopping, his invincibility in question, he is making more bad plays as well. The numbers are still hugely in his favour, but now it is a game of numbers, concrete and measurable, as for everyone else. By exchanging a game he dominated for a larger, more demanding one he cannot dominate, Robinson is no longer a presence.

The Game is earnest and rambling, often insightful, sometimes windy. It's been hailed as the best book about hockey ever written, and is lauded on the back cover by no less a personage than Mordecai Richler. It's one of only two hockey books listed in Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Books of All Time. (The other is Game Misconduct by Russ Conway, about Alan Eagleson.)

First published in 1993, it was reissued in 2003 as a "20th Anniversary Edition" with an additional chapter. The cover photo and most of the 16 pages of photos were taken by Denis Brodeur, father of another famous goalie. One of them shows Dryden sitting in the dressing room with a serene look on his face, cradling the Stanley Cup like a teddy bear.

Midnight Hockey

No one in Canada is better at the combined tasks of writing and hockey than Bill Gaston. Not Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje. Certainly not David Adams Richards, whose memoir Hockey Dreams is subtitled Memories of a Man Who Couldn't Play.

Gaston on the other hand can play -- Junior hockey for the Vancouver Centennials, university hockey for the UBC Thunderbirds, and pro in Europe for a year. He's had his nose split open by Steve Shutt, and his bell rung by Denis Potvin.

He's also been short-listed for the Giller, the G-G, the Ethel Wilson Award; and he's won the Timothy Findley Award and the CBC/Canadian Literary Award.

In other words he's a ringer, a guy who can go top shelf with a puck or a well-crafted sentence.

The book's title refers to the late-night time slots that rec and oldtimer hockey games are given, the earlier times being reserved for kids. In hockey terms an "oldtimer" is someone who's reached the lofty age of 35.

Gaston has played a lot of rec and oldtimer hockey. Some of the teams he's played for are the Stinkhorns, the Old Goats, the Hurry-Kings. The names of these and other teams -- the Fogduckers, the Vasectomites, the Well Hungarians, the Flapping Dondalingers -- provide a clue to the nature of the book.

Humour is paramount. I laughed until tears ran down my face.

Sure, it's guy humour, but even my wife laughed when I read bits to her. But then she's a good sport. We spent our honeymoon in Florida, along with everyone else on my team. We were playing in a tournament.

Hockey has an almost mystical status in this land. The instinct to throw one's arms in the air after scoring a goal is something that Canadians are born with. But there's much more to hockey than scoring and winning. There's the camaraderie off the ice, the dressing room goofiness, the beer, the road trips, the nicknames, the goalies ("men from a distant galaxie").

For me, this was the perfect book to start off the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge -- and not just because it's such a darn good read. Once, as part of Canada Book Day, me and Bill took part in a progressive short story that travelled through each province and territory, with each writer tacking on a section. Sorta like the flip side of the Canadian Book Challenge.

Synchronicity or what?