Free Dispatches from the Sporting Life by Mordecai Richler Page A

provocateurs,
and strong-armed hotel staff milled about, seemingly bored. Outside, kids with their noses flattened against the windows tried to attract the attention of the players who slouched in leather chairs. Suddenly the Russian team, off to a game, emerged from the elevators, already in playing uniforms and carrying sticks. A Canadian journalist whispered to me, “Don’t they look sinister?” As a matter of fact, if you overlooked the absence of facial stitches, they closely resembled the many Canadians of Ukrainian origin who play in the National Hockey League.
    Bobby Kromm and his assistant manager, Don Freer, were also off to the game, but they agreed to meet me at eight o’clock.
    When I returned to the Malmen that evening, I saw a car parked by the entrance, three girls waiting in the backseat. Kids, also hoping to attract the players’ attention, were banging coins against the lobby windows. The players ignored them, sucking on matchsticks. Kromm, Freer, and I went into the dining room, and while I ordered a cognac I was gratified to see that the reputedly terrifying Smoke Eaters, those behemoths who struck fear into the hearts of both Swedish mothers and Russian defencemen, stuck to coffee and pie.
    Kromm, assuming our elderly waiter could understand English, barked his order at him and was somewhat put out—in fact, he complained in a voice trained to carry out to centre ice—when the waiter got his order wrong. The waiter began to mutter. “You see,” Kromm said, “they just don’t like Canadians here.”
    I nodded sympathetically.
    “Why do they serve us pork chops,
cold
pork chops,
for breakfast?”
    “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you check out and move right into another hotel?”
    This wasn’t possible, Kromm explained. Their stay at the Malmen was prepaid. It had been arranged by John Ahearne, European president of the International Ice Hockey Federation, who, as it turned out, also ran a travel agency. “If they’d treat us good here,” Kromm said, “we’d treat them good.”
    Freer explained that the Smoke Eaters had nothing against the Swedes, but they felt the press had used them badly.
    “They called me a slum,” Kromm said. “Am I a slum?”
    “No. But what,” I asked, “is your big complaint here?”
    Bobby Kromm pondered briefly. “We’ve got nothing to do at night. Why couldn’t they give us a Ping-Pong table?”
    Were these men the terror of Stockholm? On the contrary. It seemed to me they would have delighted the heart of any YMCA athletic director. Freer told me proudly that nine of the twenty-one players on the team had been born and raised in Trail and that ten of them worked for the CM and S.
    “What does that stand for?” I asked.
    “I dunno,” he said.
    It stands for Consolidated Mining and Smelting, and Bobby Kromm is employed as a glassblower by the company. All of them would be compensated for lost pay.
    Kromm said, “We can’t step out of the hotel without feeling like monkeys in a cage. People point you out on the streets and laugh.”
    “It might help if you didn’t wear those blazing red coats everywhere.”
    “We haven’t any other coats.”
    I asked Kromm why European players didn’t go in for body checking.
    “They condone it,” he said, “that’s why.”
    I must have looked baffled.
    “They condone it. Don’t you understand?”
    I did, once I remembered that when Kromm had been asked by another reporter for his version of the girl-in-the-lobby incident, he had said, “Okay, I’ll give you my impersonation of it.”
    Kromm and Freer were clear about one thing. “We’d never come back here again.”
    Jackie McLeod, the only player on the team with National Hockey League experience, didn’t want to come back again either. I asked him if he had, as reported, been wakened by hostile telephone calls. He had been wakened, he said, but the calls weren’t hostile. “Just guys in nightclubs wanting us to come out and have a