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  Twenty years after Henderson’s magical goal, when the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future was racing around the country, Keith Spicer and the other commissioners were astonished to find that ordinary Canadians placed a priority on two Canadian values—health care and hockey—that outstripped all other national passions. And lest anyone think that passion for a simple child’s game has dwindled in recent years, more than ten million Canadians tuned in to watch the men’s hockey team win Olympic gold in Salt Lake City in 2002 and more than six million watched the women’s gold victory three days earlier.

  Even those who cannot bear the game know how deeply hockey permeates the national conversation, from handy metaphors to water cooler chatter to heated discussions over which channel the television will be tuned to Saturday night.

  Decades before the Citizens’ Forum and the various Olympic victories, Bruce Hutchison was aware of the direct connection between the national game and the national culture. He would even say that the very “soul” of Canada could be found here by those who know how and where to look. A student of Canada would need to know about the laws of the land and the politicians who make those laws. It would be necessary to know about those who write the books and those who paint the pictures, but equally necessary to understanding the culture and strength of a country, he claimed, was to know its game: “… let the student not neglect hockey.”

  “Music is culture, business is culture, sport is culture,” Roch Carrier once told me at, yes, a panel discussion on the importance of hockey to Canadian culture. “And if we neglect a huge element of our national fabric we make a mistake.

  “When I was growing up, hockey was our ‘politics.’ We knew there was somebody in Ottawa and somebody in Quebec—but the people who really mattered to us were in hockey.

  “Hockey, to me, is about life.”

  NO ONE REALLY KNOWS exactly how or where the game of hockey began. There are art historians who believe that shinny is being played in a 1565 painting by Pieter Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow, that hangs in Vienna’s famous Kunsthistorisches Museum. I’ve seen it there myself— during, appropriately, an afternoon off from covering the 1996 World Hockey Championships—and saw enough to be convinced.

  I am less taken by the claim that the game dates back to the third millennium b.c.e. in Mesopotamia. Apparently a tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh makes mention of men using curved sticks to propel a wooden ring over the dirt. But as no official scoresheet survived, I prefer to reserve judgment.

  There is evidence that a game quite like hockey was played as early as 1800 in what is now known as Canada. Writings by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who taught at King’s College School near Windsor, Nova Scotia, refer to the schoolboys of the early 1800s “hollerin’ and whoopin’ like mad with pleasure” as they skated on a frozen pond with sticks and a hard, round object.

  The journals of Sir John Franklin say something about his men playing some sort of “hockey” game on a small lake in what is today the Northwest Territories. Kingston, Halifax, Windsor, and Montreal all claim to be the birthplace of the game.

  Whatever. The first actual hockey game with stipulated rules—and, we presume, much bitching and moaning about them—was played on March 3, 1875, by McGill University students in Montreal. And we know, too, that the Stanley Cup was purchased in 1892 for the extraordinary sum of ten guineas by Governor General Lord Stanley and the following year offered up to the best hockey club in the land. Today that fifty-dollar investment is the best-known, most recognizable trophy in North American sports.

  Hockey is, many believe, the perfect Canadian game in that its highest values—teamwork, resourcefulness, tenacity, humility, and triumph—are much how Canadians like to think of themselves on the world stage.

  The Canadian game also has an amusing element of, well, socialism. The game has no James Naismith, the Canadian-born inventor of basketball, or even an Abner Doubleday, who’s often credited, to great debate, as the inventor of baseball. If hockey is a creation of any one thing, it’s the work of an entire country. In the 1950s we invented the game every single winter’s day up on Dufferin Street on Reservoir Hill in Huntsville, and there are still plenty of eyewitnesses and participants around to verify this claim. And as the NHL proved during the 2005–06 season, the first season after professional hockey’s year-long lockout, the game needs reinventing every once in a while.

  The lore of early hockey is rich—“One-eyed” Frank McGee scoring fourteen goals one Stanley Cup match; the Dawson City Klondikers coming to Ottawa by dogsled, steamer, and train to challenge, and lose; “Cyclone” Taylor predicting and then scoring a goal by skating the length of the ice backward—yet the early game was played entirely differently: an extra forward called the “rover,” players on for the entire sixty minutes, goaltenders penalized for going down.…

  What remains the same is the enthusiasm Canadians have for their game. So alive does it make them feel that, in many instances, hockey takes over their lives. It helps to be Canadian to understand what humorist Eric Nicol was getting at when he wrote, “For any God-fearing young Canadian, the ultimate reward is to be chosen for the NHL All-Star Game. If he later goes to Heaven, that is so much gravy.”

  The great heroes of this young country have almost invariably been hockey players, Morenz and Richard being only two among them. Richard’s torch would be taken up by Gordie Howe, Jean Béliveau, Bobby Orr, Guy Lafleur, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby—since, of course, the greatest player in the game should be not only Canadian but suitably humble, as the country demands of its heroes. Richard’s reserve and Howie’s shyness are, in fact, the real torch that is passed down, to Béliveau, to Orr, to Lafleur, to Gretzky, to Lemieux, to Crosby. All exhibit the outward Canadian personality; all burn inside with a flame that all Canadians believe, imagined or not, burns within them.

  “Hockey is Canada’s game,” Ken Dryden and I wrote in Home Game. “It may also be Canada’s national theatre.… It is a place where the monumental themes of Canadian life are played out—English and French, East and West, Canada and the U.S., Canada and the world, the timeless tensions of commerce and culture, our struggle to survive and civilize winter.”

  Toronto novelist Morley Callaghan once tried to underline the significance of the winter game to Canadians by calling it “our own national drama.” Callaghan’s contemporary, Montreal novelist Hugh MacLennan, attempted to explain the game to an American magazine audience by saying that hockey is the counterpart of the Canadian self-restraint. “To spectator and player alike, hockey gives the release that strong liquor gives a repressed man.”

  I would also dare suggest that hockey has a direct connection to the Canadian sense of humour. Not from anything comical that happens on the ice—though Phil Esposito’s trip on a rose during the 1972 Summit Series was pretty fair slapstick—but for the attitude found in the dressing room. There, nothing is sacred and, in truth, nothing seems even praiseworthy. It’s all about taking shots and bringing everyone, especially those who stand out, down to size. The star’s only defence is self-deprecation or ironic bragging—the essence of so much of Canadian humour.

  Only a fool would claim that Canada’s national game is all smiles and chuckles, a sport without flaws. Those flaws would fill and have filled another book, and other books beyond that. There are sad tales of greed, as there are in all professional sports. There are horrific tales of abuse— physical, psychological, and sexual—as there are periodically, but still too often, in any structure where positions of power are held over powerless youth eager to please and succeed.

  And, in hockey more than in any other team sport, there is the continuing issue of violence.

  There’s nothing new here. When Lawrence Scanlan was researching his book on hockey violence, Grace Under Fire: The State of Our Sweet and Savage Game, he found sportswriters in the 1890s complaining about the tripping and slashing—at a time when players had hardly any protection—as well as the players and fans abusin
g officials. There were early incidents of players dying after being clubbed by sticks, but despite legal charges and dire warnings nothing ever came of them.

  Around the same time equivalent concerns were expressed about American college football. Tactics such as the flying wedge and gang tackles were leading to career-ending injuries and even deaths. Some colleges had already banned the sport, others were talking about it, and there were even those who believed football itself must be outlawed. It took presidential intervention to make things right. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt convened two conferences at the White House—at a time, incidentally, when war was threatening in Russia and the Far East— and basically told college presidents to clean up or else. The warning worked. Sweeping new rules were enacted, ensuring the survival of a game that would eventually transform itself into North America’s most popular and profitable sport.

  None of this weak-kneed backtracking for hockey.

  Tex Rickard, who owned the New York Americans of the National Hockey League during the Depression years, used to hire ambulances to park outside Madison Square Garden to attract fans. Conn Smythe, owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, bragged that “If you can’t beat ’em in the alley you can’t beat ’em on the ice.” Owners believed the fisticuffs actually sold the game for them. As Smythe once responded in reference to yet another outcry against the violence, “If we don’t put a stop to it, we’ll have to start printing more tickets.”

  There were periodic attempts to clean up the game, but all failed. There were arrests and charges and dropped charges and even a few hours in jail cells, to no avail. There were royal commissions that recommended, futilely, a cleanup. In 1975, at a Queen’s University symposium on the game, Clarence Campbell, still president of the NHL, pronounced that “Hockey is a game of violence. This will never change. What we do in the NHL is control the level of violence at an acceptable level. I’m not saying that we condone violence, but it’s there. We set a level and control it at that point.”

  This will never change, Campbell believed. It can be argued he was right and remains right. Don Cherry, the most powerful public voice the game has, celebrates the fighters on national television, bemoans any new rules brought in to restrict the brawlers and, for years, sold an annual video compilation of the best fights and hits of the season.

  “The aspect of violence has caused us grief,” Brian O’Neill told a Montreal audience in 1993 when he stepped down as the league disciplinarian. “We can change our image. We can’t do it via public relations. We have to do it on the ice.” But the ice hasn’t seen any change at all, two infamous examples being Boston Bruins defenceman Marty McSorley’s clubbing of Vancouver Canucks forward Donald Brashear in February 2000 and Vancouver Canucks forward Todd Bertuzzi’s hunting down and sucker-punching Colorado Avalanche forward Steve Moore in March 2004.

  Ottawa-area writer Roy MacSkimming, a former editor who’s written a biography on Gordie Howe, Rocket Richard’s great Anglo rival, says it’s naive for Canadians to pretend the game they so love is all about backyard rinks and fuzzy feelings. He cites the contrast between Henderson’s famous winning goal during the 1972 series and the pivotal moment during that series when Canada’s Bobby Clarke deliberately slashed and broke the ankle of the best of the Russian players, Valery Kharlamov. “Canada won that extraordinary series,” says MacSkimming, “not only by one game and one goal … [but] by another margin as well—one broken ankle.”

  He adds that “If you make a really concerted attempt to find out who you really are you will find some dark things. There’s a shadow side to the collective psyche that comes out. If we’re going to treat hockey as a Canadian paradigm, we’re going to have to accept the bad with the good.”

  THE BEST THING that ever happened to professional hockey may have been the owners’ lockout in 2004 that led to the loss of the 2004–05 NHL season. It was the first time the Stanley Cup hadn’t been contested since the Swine Flu epidemic of 1919, when the death of Montreal Canadiens player “Bad” Joe Hall forced cancellation of the final series.

  The lockout also imposed time for reflection. Salaries had increased at such a pace—the average was then US$1.7 million—that the madness had filtered down even into minor hockey circles. So anxious were parents for their hockey-playing children to reach for, and grasp, the golden ring that the absurdities were showing up virtually weekly. A father in Bathurst, New Brunswick, sued the provincial minor hockey association for $300,000, claiming his sixteen-year-old boy had suffered extreme psychological trauma when the league’s Most Valuable Player award had been given to a rival. He also wanted the trophy taken from the winner and given to his son. In Mississauga, Ontario, a player’s parents sued an opposing coach for $10,000, claiming he’d been heard talking about putting a bounty on their son’s head after an on-ice incident. The players involved were all of nine years of age. And the madness wasn’t confined to Canada: in Massachusetts a 270-pound trucker beat to death a 156-pound assistant coach in front of his peewee team because, believe it or not, the trucker thought the coach was running too “physical” a practice.

  None of this made the slightest sense. Dave King, one of the game’s best thinkers and a coach in both NHL and Olympic hockey, once produced research that showed exactly what the odds were for kids “making it,” as their parents so fervently hoped. He took thirty thousand kids born in 1975, all of whom had, at ages five to eight, signed up for the Great Canadian Dream.

  Of that original thirty thousand, twenty-two thousand were still playing at bantam age fourteen.

  Of that twenty-two thousand, only 232 were drafted by junior clubs.

  Of the 232, less than half, 105, played a single game or more in junior.

  Of the 105 who got onto junior ice, 48 were drafted by NHL clubs and 2 others signed later as free agents, meaning 50 had a shot at the dream.

  Of the 50, 38 were offered contracts they signed.

  Twenty-two played at least one game in the NHL.

  In 1989, when they were twenty-four years old and in their hockey prime, 11 were playing at some level in the NHL.

  The odds, then, were approximately one in three thousand for children signing up in what has traditionally been professional hockey’s most fertile training ground.

  Something for hockey parents to consider.

  Where the greatest reflection took place, however, was at the NHL itself. What began as a lockout over “economic certainty” soon evolved into a shutdown where Canadian fans loudly and clearly expressed their displeasure with the owners, with the players, and with the game. And so, once the owners and the players’ association began working together to fix the economics of the game, they also began looking at the game itself.

  For years critics had decried not only the fisticuffs but the second level of violence—the hooking and holding and slashing. Ken Dryden, a former goaltender and Hockey Hall of Famer, called for hockey to find its next “forward pass,” a move that would revolutionize the game much as the introduction of the forward pass had back in December 1929.

  An answer was found in, of all places, the rulebook. The powers that be simply decided to start calling the rules as they had long been written down, and in the 2005–06 season it seemed the game had been entirely reinvented, with speed and skill now rewarded instead of hooking and holding. None of this ended the fights, but it did dramatically reduce their number and all but put an end to the brawler role. Toughness was still admired, but toughness alone was happily rendered meaningless. You’d have to be able to play, too.

  Instead of the post-lockout lack of interest so many had predicted, Canadian fans were delighted to see the game played on the ice as it had been played for years only in their imaginations. The very ones who’d told pollsters a year earlier that they couldn’t care less about the professional game now seemed, at the drop of a puck, to care as much as they had in the glory days of Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe, Orr and Lafleur, Gretzky and Messier. American fans were slow to come back and,
in some markets, didn’t bother coming back at all.

  That Canadians did rush back shows why Calgary poet Richard Harrison calls hockey “the national id.”

  CURIOUSLY, the game of hockey hasn’t attracted nearly as much academic attention as might be expected of something so integral to the Canadian personality. Richard Gruneau, who teaches communications at Simon Fraser University, says that for decades Canadian intellectuals denied that something as basic as hockey could have a “cultural” facet. Gruneau, who co-wrote Hockey Night in Canada: Sports, Identities, and Cultural Politics with the University of Alberta’s David Whitson, theorizes that perhaps “hockey’s physicality has always seemed too far removed from the world of the mind.”

  Matters began to change slightly in the 1980s when, suddenly, serious—if largely ignored—novels with hockey themes were published. Hockey became substance for movies, for poetry, for songs—even, finally, for a certain dash of academia. “By the late 1980s,” says Gruneau, “it was perfectly acceptable to write doctoral dissertations on Madonna, and, in this environment, academic writing on sport—even hockey—became more widely accepted in Canadian intellectual life.”

  In the years since, the game has sometimes seemed everywhere, and not just on the ice surface. Numerous television series—the most recent being CBC’s Hockey: A People’s History—have covered the game’s roots to its economics to its many problems. Hardly a fall goes by without at least one hockey book on the bestseller lists; some, like Ken Dryden’s The Game and Peter Gzowski’s The Game of Our Lives, spending months at the very top. It’s been the theme for hundreds of children’s books. Even toques, of all things, became a must-have item following the Heritage Classic, where the old-timers wore them to ward off the cold and, in the NHL part of the event, Montreal Canadiens netminder Jose Theodore tucked one under his mask–helmet.