Free Dispatches from the Sporting Life by Mordecai Richler

everyone had come to see humiliated was our own peppery but far from incomparable Trail Smoke Eaters.
    “No nations can form ties of friendship without there being personal contact between the peoples. In these respects sports builds on principles of long standing,” Helge Berglund, president of the Swedish Hockey Association, wrote warmly in the world hockey tournament’s 1963 program. Berglund’s bubbly letter of greeting continued, “I do hope the ice hockey players will feel at home here and that you will take advantage of your leisure to study Swedish culture and Swedish life. Welcome to our country.”
    Yes, indeed; but on the day I arrived in Stockholm a poster advertising a sports magazineon kiosks everywhere announced “THE CANADIANS WANT TO SEE BLOOD.” Only a few days later a headline in the
Toronto Daily Star
read “UGLY ROW IN SWEDEN OVER OUR HOCKEY TEAM.”
    I checked into the Hotel Continental, a well-lit teak-ridden place where well on a hundred other reporters, radio and television men, referees, a hockey priest, and a contingent of twenty-seven Russians were staying and immediately sought out Jim Proudfoot of the
Toronto Daily Star.
Proudfoot had just returned from a cocktail party at the Canadian embassy. “What did the players have to say?” I asked.
    “The players weren’t invited.”
    The next morning things began to sizzle. On Saturday night, according to the most colourful Swedish newspapers, a substitute player with the Canadian team, Russ Kowalchuk, tried to smuggle a girl into his room and was knocked senseless by an outraged hall porter. Kowalchuk, enthusiastically described as a “star” in one Swedish newspaper and “a philandering hoodlum” in another, was not flattered: he denied that there had been a girl involved in the incident and claimed he had been flattened by a sneak punch.
    Two things worried me about this essentially commonplace story. While it seemed credible that a hotel porter might be shocked if a hockey player tried to sneak a stuffed rabbit into the elevator, it did seem absurd that he would be shaken to his roots if a man, invited by Helge Berglund to study Swedish life, tried to take a girl to his room. And if the Canadians were such a rough-and-ready lot, if theywere determined to crush Swedish bones in Friday night’s game, wasn’t it deflating that one of their defencemen could be knocked out by a mere porter? More important, mightn’t it even hurt the gate?
    The Trail Smoke Eaters, as well as the Czech, Russian, and American players, were staying at the Malmen—not, to put it mildly, the most elegant of hotels, a feeling, I might add, obviously shared by the amateur hockey officials associated with the Smoke Eaters, which group sagaciously put up at the much more commodious Grand Hotel.
    When I finally got to the Malmen at noon on Sunday, I found the sidewalk outside all but impassable. Kids clutching autograph books, older boys in black leather jackets, and fetching girls who didn’t look as if they’d need much encouragement to come in out of the cold, jostled each other by the entrance. An American player emerged from the hotel and was quickly engulfed by a group of autograph-hungry kids. “Shove off,” he said, leading with his elbows; and if the kids (who, incidentally, learn to speak three languages at school) didn’t grasp the colloquialism immediately, then the player’s message, I must say, was implicit in his tone. The kids scattered. The American player, however, stopped a little farther down the street for three girls and signed his name for them. I knew he
could
sign too, for, unlike the amateurs of other nations, he was neither a reinstated pro, army officer, or sports equipment manufacturer but a bona fide student. Possibly, he could sign
very well.
    In the lobby of the Malmen, Bobby Kromm, the truculent coach of the Smoke Eaters, was shoutingat a Swedish journalist. Other players, reporters, camp followers, cops,
agents