W E WERE ALL GOING TO make the NHL when I was ten or eleven. In those years — long ago, the weather was always more than it is now. There was more of it — more snow, more ice, more sky — more wind.
More hockey.
We played from just after football season until cricket started sometime after Easter. We played cricket in our little town in the Maritimes or “kick the can” as we alluded to it. After we put away our waterlogged and mud-soaked hockey sticks. Behind us and down over
the bank, the Miramichi River was breaking its ice and freeing itself from another winter. In the piles of disappearing snow, fragments of
sticks and tape could be found. The sun was warm and smoke rested on the fields and grasses. At Easter, in my mind there always seemed to be a funeral. One year, 1961, just after Easter, there was the funeral of a man who was shot in Foley’s Tire Garage, and everyone was excited about it. We were all friends of the Foley boys — there were seven of them. The oldest of them was Paul.
He was the boy who told me that when bigger boys go into the corner after the puck — or after the ball if it was road hockey — always watch and wait patiently just on the outside.
But looking back, half of us playing, half of us who wanted nothing more than to play in the NHL — which was always to Maritimers somewhere else — were going to have at least as much problem as me. Being a Maritimer certainly had a little to do with it.
Another was a huge boy with fresh-pressed pants and the smell of holy water, who believed in Santa Claus until he was thirteen. He carried his books like a girl and was in school plays with my sister. “I am of the thespian family,” he would say, because his mother had once played Catherine of Aragon. The brother of my friend who cautioned me about going into the corner was a diabetic — Stafford Foley.
Stafford wore a Detroit sweater and in his entire life he never got outside Newcastle. He was a fanatical sports fan all his life. Another boy, Michael, had all the talent in the world but did not own a pair of skates until he was twelve. And then only a broken-up, second- hand pair with the blades chipped that he got from a pile in the Foleys’ basement.
That was the year Michael also became a rink rat and swept and shovelled snow from the nets during the big games.
There were others who could play fairly well — one I know had a tryout with Montreal and came home because his girlfriend phoned to tell him she couldn’t stand to be without him. After a month she left him for someone else.
Another — Phillip Luff could skate like the wind and had the brain of a salamander, and ended up playing the bongos.
Another, my brother, could think hockey as well as Don Cherry, but couldn’t skate well enough to make the pros.
As we grew older we all went our various ways with hockey. It was strange to see boys who were on the ice in high school one year giving it all up to grow their hair long and smoke dope the next, saying, “Hey man — what’s happenin’? Get on down, baby.”
Of course some of them took up the puck later to play in the
gentlemen leagues. (Sometimes the gentleman league on our river was enough to give you cardiac arrest.)
I know at least five people who might have made it to the NHL if they had disciplined themselves. Perhaps, too, and I say this without bitterness, if there had been proper scouts from the big teams here, or more credit was given to the Maritimers themselves. There was the OHL and the Quebec Major Junior — in the Maritimes the boys graduated to Senior hockey and played to sell-out crowds for their home towns.
I don’t know how many of us could have made it, but there were some of us who could but didn’t. Perhaps they didn’t have the breaks; perhaps they didn’t have the heart. The real thing the OHL and Quebec Major Junior is, is a journey through hell, at seventeen years old, a thousand miles from home on a snowy road. One only has to talk to anybody who has played in those leagues; billeted in houses, travelling all night by bus or car, suffering the scorn of the coach, if he was just not quite good enough to know.
We never called hockey “shinney” where I came from. I suppose there are a million things to call hockey and none of them right. But I don’t remember ever hearing the word shinney. When, now and then, I hear up-to-the-moment CBC reporters talking about shinney — as if this is the
name that will reduce hockey to its embryonic, to its pleasant and nostalgic centre — it leaves me cold.
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