THE TRAIL SMOKE EATERS were mentioned in the House of Commons. In those days Ottawa seemed as far away from me as Prague.
Hockey was mentioned in the House of Commons again in ’72. It was mentioned in 1987 when our World Juniors were involved in the fight with the Russians.
However the most famous occasion it was mentioned in our House of Commons — in recent times — was when Gretzky was going to L.A. That Mr. Gretzky’s going to L.A. was mentioned in the House of Commons was picked up by American television. It was also big news in the Soviet Union. The idea that Canadians were concerned that a great Canadian hockey player was going to play in the States was newsworthy.
“Why should he go there if he is a Canadian?” one Russian hockey fan asked on a CBC news program.
Such interest was a very strange thing to me. It was as if we suddenly decided to stop a grain of sand in an hourglass. It was a great grain to try to stop — perhaps the greatest. But my God — Orr, Hull, Howe, Savard, Izerman, Coffey, Messier — one can conceivably go on for hours.
To mention Gretzky was, in fact, an insult to Canadians. Nothing more. For if no one thought about the great Bobby Orr going to Boston, no one thought of Canadian hockey as heritage we were content to piss away.
Christ, who was the greater player — Orr or Gretzky? But it also allowed a misconception to be reinforced — that we, in Canada, were actually concerned about our hockey players, and that Gretzky was somehow the exception rather than the rule. That our players played for Edmonton — and their players played for L.A.
Perhaps it should have been mentioned in the House of Commons, but it goes to show that sometimes in Canada, even when you win, you are bound to lose.
It was in mid-March of 1961 when Stafford gave up on Lloyd Percival. I remember passing him one night as he stood in a phone booth, talking,with his big, brown earmuffs sideways on his head. He turned and looked my way briefly and turned back. The sky was cold, the long King George Highway stretched forever. I was walking down to the store.
I had already been to the curling club four or five times and I had asked him to come with me. The curling club ice was pebbled; the stones looked too huge to lift. And I really thought I was not going to be able to curl either — that I was doomed. I couldn’t follow the scoreboard.
Besides this, it was a game that people older than my father played. “Yes, yes — I remember your grandmother playing here a few years ago,” a man said to me.
I learned later on that, as with hockey, curling was our game, and we hated when we were beaten at it. I learned also that the same things about hockey applied to curling.
1. That it was part of our national consciousness and we couldn’t separate ourselves from it.
2. The Europeans and now and again the Americans, would become much better.
3. That we were abundantly generous with our time and our coaches and our clinics, to help other nations.
4. As long as we were the very best, we would never have it as an Olympic game. Only when the Europeans felt that they could match us in prestige would they allow us, and therefore themselves, this.
5. Once again, as in Bunny Ahearne’s day, countries such as Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, would get a vote on Canadian sport.
Curling was so closely linked to hockey in the winter in small towns that they became almost interchangeable. In our town, as in most, the rinks are next door to one another. But at this point in life Stafford did not think much about curling.
Often at nine at night his father would be driving about the neighbourhood looking for him. He began to hang about with a guynamed Jimmy J. Jimmy J. was nineteen then. I think he still hangs about with boys and girls about puberty age.
Jimmy J. was married at this time. He had a step-son of seven or eight who he used to hang about with. His wife was a hair dresser. At this point in his life he drove a milk truck. He always had a dozen kids of puberty age or younger in his milk truck driving them somewhere. His marriage did not last that long — about a year.
He was very tall and thin, with cowboy boots, and a sandy coloured brushcut. Anything kids were interested in, he would get — he had his own go-cart.
I remember Stafford and Jimmy J. sitting in the milk truck. Jimmy J. had a cigarette behind each ear and one in his mouth. He had a rabbit paw on his keys. Stafford had a cigarette in his mouth too.
I saw them in at White’s Pharmacy as I walked home. “Trail won,” I said to Stafford, “Trail won — we won, we won — TRAIL — we won.” Stafford looked at me as if he were bored, blinked and said nothing.
He held a cigarette in his left hand, down near the stickshift so I wouldn’t see it. I was angered by this. Jimmy J. laughed and Stafford too, half-heartedly. But the idea why they were laughing only became evident when I got home and looked into the mirror. There was my mouth, all wobbly and twisted sideways. I hated the dentist at that moment, even though I had won 50 cents.
It was the only time Stafford ever laughed at me. Yet for a time everything was Jimmy J. The Foley kids had a huge fort built near their rink — with windows and small tunnels leading under the snow towards the house. One night as I walked by I saw Jimmy J.’s head poking out a window.
“Go way, go way,” he said to me, and he ducked his head back in, and then out another window, and laughed.
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