Free Hockey Dreams by David Adams Richards Page A

the way Michael wished me to think he felt.
    He was there that night, helping with the ice, when the whole town suffered, when even the streetlights flicking on in the brutal darkness flicked a Morse code message of defeat.
    Yet he told Stafford that the game didn’t matter to him,or the subsequent games the Bantam As won because he, as perhaps the best, wasn’t in on it.
    We were going to have our own games, he said, and start our own league.
    Long after we all were in bed for the night Michael was still out, downtown, walking about on slicked shoes, his hair already slicked back in the way he would keep it for the remainder of his life, cleaning up at the taxi stand for a dollar or, over at the rink sweeping the ice and under the benches. He would bring a senior’s broken stick home, to mend for a game the next afternoon.
    Later when in my old stupid head I finally realized that hockey at some level or perhaps all levels was a fraternity, that there were insiders and outsiders, I thought of Michael taping up a busted stick down near the fire that he lit in the middle of a January night.
    At that same time, back in 1961, Mr. Norris was thinking of hockey in England’s Wembley Stadium, and was thinking along with others in Detroit and New York, in Chicago and Boston, of hockey in the millions and millions of dollars. They had to get it out of and away from the hands of the Canadians first — and they knew this.
    I suppose we all have different motives when it comes to hockey. As Michael worked at ten o’clock at night to get his hands on a busted stick, in what seemed to be the remotest corner of a remote country, others were thinking of multimillion dollar television syndication rights.
    The only dream Michael had was to get enough hockey sticks for us to play. He would lie down at night thinking of how to smooth out a bump on our river.
    Our river. My cousin didn’t believe me when I told him that we did not have a swimming pool in our town. I did not tell him that our river, miles long and a mile wide would suffice, without chlorine, to dip your toe in.
    I think our river back then was somewhat like our Canadian hockey talent pool; it
seemed
deep and endless. It had farm teams in its tributaries. It was “unlike” other rivers. It was still non-generic. That is, hockey was not like football, or baseball. Now it is more like these sports, or at least the owners want to
display
hockey as such.
    And now my river is like other rivers. It is still a mystic river, but it is no longer endless. Its great pools have been cut down, and overfished. It has changed with the times, and swimming pools dot our landscape too.
    Michael’s hockey sticks, all collected over January of 1961, doled out to us all taped and glued, sawed down for small people by the master of improvisation, are as forgotten now in his generosity as the water that passed under our boots.
    Some of us never told him we didn’t need his kindness, we had our own sticks, for this kindness was all that he could afford.
    I asked Paul years later about this. About the expansion, about hockey, about what hockey meant to him. Paul had becomemore philosophical. It no longer mattered to him as it once did. The fire burned not as bright. Like some of us he hardly watched a game any more. He was often out of the country. Yet he said hockey was now a
media event
. The game no longer had a mythology that the media
knew
. It had media that tried to
exclude
the mythology. And this had gone on since the late sixties.
    Anything the owners did
not
want the game to say the game did
not
say. And the main thing the owners did not want the game to say was that it was
Canadian
.
    They were trying to resuscitate it in the States and so media, or what the media said about it, mattered much more than mythology. The mythology of so much of the NHL, was a Canadian one foreign to both the owners and the media.
    Any mythology was cheapened to accommodate the media. When hockey was