Hockey Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

us, to the position of the game as related to spheres other than our own. My eyes were being opened not by light so much as by shiners.
    I did not realize at the time that being Canadian was part of the reason why
our game
didn’t exist on American networks. It seemed strange to me even then that so few people recognized this oddity or spoke about it as a major problem in Canadian identity.
    However I was a Maritimer — and though I thought of hockey as our nation’s great sport from the time I was ten — we were as ignored by Canada in the Maritimes, as we ever were by the United States. And it had been a long time since Halifax travelled west to Montreal to challenge for the Stanley Cup in the late 1890s.
    Except for one show I can think of, “Don Messer’s Jubilee,” there was nothing on television in 1961 that had anythingremotely to do with us, except hockey on Saturday nights. (Not that Don and the boys did either — except that my grandmother swore she saw her stolen fiddle being played by Don Messer in the early sixties. “There’s my damn FIDDLE. It’s Don — he stole my fiddle,” she screamed one night. Also a fanatical wrestling fan, my grandmother loved sports in general and hockey in particular. When her husband, my step-grandfather, remarried after her death, he married a woman who loved baseball.)
    But to be a Maritimer was, in hockey as well as in accounts receivable, to feel somehow outside the marketplace. Just as Canada must feel now. From Hamilton to Quebec, Canadians are feeling now what we felt in New Brunswick all along.
    In the Maritimes all our chances with hockey seemed elliptical and remote. Three-quarters of the people I knew who had even a slight chance of making the NHL, never got that chance. Today the personification of this is, I think, Andrew McKim skating his guts out against the Russians in the World Championships in Sweden. I’m glad we have him there — but I know where he would wish to be.
    In the Maritimes there is a province called New Brunswick where I and McKim come from. When I was young it was hardly ever recognized anywhere else, even by other Maritimers.
    As a matter of fact, when I once explained to a person from Nova Scotia that my father owned a business, he burst out laughing. How in the world could anyone
own
a business in New Brunswick?
    It left us in a rather odd place in the Canadian experience. For instance, on CBC celebrations of Canada Day in 1967, the last year the Leafs won the Cup, we were the only province not mentioned. Honest to God, we waited all night to be mentioned. “For God’s sake boys — mention that we exist — Ma did her hair.”
    What does this have to do with hockey? In a way, for my nation, everything. For how my nation views itself, and how it is viewed, is how
our
sport is viewed. Those of us who ignore how our nation is viewed are the ones who ignore how our sport is viewed. Those who ignore how
our
sport is viewed trivialize what is tragic about our nation.
    A recent American documentary about the war in Holland in 1944 forgot that it was the Canadian First Army that the German Fifteenth surrendered to. When
Life
magazine did their 40th anniversary of World War II they forgot to mention that Canada even played a part.
    Canadians on the CBC were upset. I understand the feeling.
    As Canada is sometimes neglected by the States so the Maritimes are neglected by Canada, and New Brunswick is neglected by the Maritimes — and guess what is neglected by New Brunswick? The strange river, the Miramichi.
    Well, that is where my brothers and friends played hockey and lost their teeth, and boys for generations went off to play for the Hardy or Allen or Alexander Cup. With nicknames like the Spitfire, Trapper, and the Mouse.

    The Miramichi had some good hockey players. It even had a few great hockey players. My brother was eventually drafted by the Oakland Seals. (I was proud at the time, even though I felt it was kind of cheating to be