Canada is the Hockey Ward
One of the biggest surprises I had compiling The Exile Book of Canadian Sport Stories (fall 2009), was that there are, overall, more baseball stories than hockey stories in Canadian Literature. However, hockey stories are a close second, and I predict they will outnumber baseball shortly, as many contemporary writers have latched onto hockey as legitimate literary subject matter, and several writers I know, both male and female, play hockey in their spare time, and aren’t afraid to talk about it (Michael Holmes, Jennifer LoveGrove, and Sharon Harris, among others.)
Perhaps baseball outnumbered hockey for the simple reason that U.S. sports writing is dominated by baseball. Perhaps also because a number of our writers, including George Bowering and Dennis Lee, find the pastoral nature of baseball fitting for the writing of poetry and fiction. Bowering has called baseball the most ‘literary’ of all sports.
However, our most famous short story in Canada is Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater.” It’s so famous, in fact, that a sentence from the story about a little boy who wants a Rocket Richard Montreal Canadiens sweater and to his horror receives a Toronto Maple Leafs one instead, is printed on every Canadian $5 bill. Go ahead, take one out of your pocket. Turn it to the backside and just next to the skaters, in very tiny writing, you will find, in both French and English, the famous opening line. We have hockey fiction in our pockets and wallets at any given time. How Canadian is that?
Very Canadian, I would say. And I have enjoyed pointing this out to people here during the Olympics. Most people know the short story after I read the line, but I have yet to find anyone who knew it was on their money. A bit strange, when one considers how hockey obsessed the country is, especially during the winter Olympics.
When we launched The Exile Book of Canadian Sport Stories in Toronto, Kevin Light, gold medallist 8 Men’s Rowing, Beijing, and Billy Bridges, gold medallist sledge hockey, Torino, each read half the short story out loud, which had us all in stitches. Then two nights ago, I had the great pleasure of reading two hockey poems, one for the men’s team and one for the women’s team, each punning on all the last names of the athletes, to a table of some gold medallist Torino hockey players and a couple of hockey players left off the Olympic roster due to injuries. The poems are both called “Canada is the Hockey Ward,” and the women were so delighted by hearing their friends’ and team mates’ names in the poems that they chanted “Poet! Poet!” when I finished.
I think the playfulness was appreciated, considering we are all a bit worried about the men’s chances at a gold medal, and since the pressure on the women is so high, as nothing less than gold will even be tolerated. A little poetry, a little funny fiction, about the most-loved sport in the nation, can hopefully help put things into perspective, and give us all a little to laugh about.
(Since I posted the hockey poems on CAN Fund’s website, I’d like to post “Ski-Cross Air” here, which I wrote right after Ashleigh McIvor’s great gold medal run.)
Photo: Priscila reading poetry to athletes
