Book Review: Orphans of Winter

A little while back, after doing a few book reviews here, a call went out for more. And so arrived Orphans of Winter - quietly, with little fanfare, the modest cover not promising a whole lot - which if it came from a more seasoned fabulist would be plenty good enough to go into the corners against Canadian HockeyLit stars like Paul Quarrington, Bill Gaston and Dave Bidini. But Orphans (Seraphim Editions), by folk musician turned writer Rob Ritchie, is a debut novel, and as such I'd call it pretty astonishing.

Perhaps it's that folk musician's background but Ritchie is a deft storyteller, delivering a barnburner tale that combines hockey, mysticism, religion and Canadian Aboriginal spiritualism. His hero, Stephen Gillis, is a complicated mess, a western Canadian hockey scout for the Toronto Centennials (read, Leafs) whose life-path accelerates when he's tipped on to an unheralded, ignored fourth-line forward by a mysterious stranger one night at the Prince George Arena. Vancouver Island and B.C., Toronto's talk-radio fuelled hockey frenzy, and out to Newfoundland it goes, Gillis and the forward's twinned stories converging.

Whenever the whole thing appears in danger of sliding off the table - and it comes close - Ritchie is able to pull it back:

"He had this theory that what made a specific sport popular was how well it mirrored some part of society that people thought was important. He had lots of examples . . . football was like war, baseball had to do with the industrial revolution, golf was all about manners and etiquette. The thing was, he could never really nail down hockey. The best he ever came up with was that the game represented winter."
"Winter?"
"That's right. Like it was this continuous battle for survival. From start to finish. Game to game. Year to year. Novice to Old-Timers. For best results play angry, like there's this storm inside you. I remember thinking at the time that it didn't really apply. Not with kids today growing up skating on multi-alloyed blades with custom-fit moulded boots, wearing top-of-the-line pads and equipment, shooting with their brand new high-flex graphite sticks and playing their games in state of the art arenas. But then I got watching that young winger Vancouver has on the right side this year. His name's Yvegeny Kaltzov and he's a 19-year-old Russian out of what remains of their national program. Did you know he spent the last two seasons in Moscow living in an unheated apartment with three other players? Two rooms between them, windowpanes cracked or missing, so the snow would pile up on the sill and on the floor below. I used to think guys like that played hard and angry because they were scared shitless of going back to conditions like that."
"And now?"
"Now ...? Now I think they play the way they do because they still know winter."

Don't go into this looking for a homespun, Hockey Sweater kind of read. It's dense going at times. But this season, among a few titles of note, it deserves to be grouped with the best. Nice work here, and well worth it if you're looking for a last-minute present for the literate fan of the world's most "beautiful and cold" game in your life.

Book Review Week: Clemente

Time to wrap up this set of reviews – but first a book note: Next time round, I'm hoping Michael Lewis’s new one, The Blind Side, will be a part of it (if you haven’t read the New York Times excerpt from a few weeks back, check it out).

So here we go, after Messrs. Bidini, Brunt and Skyrme, it’s David Maraniss’s turn with Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero. Maraniss’s tome on Vince Lombardi from a few years back is about the best sports bio I’ve ever read. Clemente is a little different: A story about societal change, and about a life cut short - he had no second act. Just when it seemed like baseball’s first Latin American superstar was winding down his career, he literally disappeared into the ocean while taking supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua on New Year’s Eve, 1972.

Clemente’s baseball bona fides are undisputed and well-documented. But it’s his life in his native Puerto Rico, his desire to help those in need, his love-hate relationship with America, and especially that last flight in a rickety, overloaded, fly-by-night charter airplane (and its aftermath, Clemente’s death plunging his native Puerto Rico, and a Pittsburgh that had come to embrace him, into deep mourning) that Maraniss sketches out with precision that sometimes chills to the bone. Drawing on official documents and investigations from over three decades ago, these read like short sharp daggers unsheathed and pointed, as in this excerpt detailing the negligence of the doomed plane’s owner, after a series of repairs suggested but not ordered by the FAA were due:

“The airplane ought to be ready for a test hop,” one inspector said, after seeing the repair work. But Rivera couldn’t do the test hop himself. He still didn’t know how to taxi his own plane, let alone fly it.

The fatal flight is the climax of the story, but only a piece of a satisfying whole. This is a portrait of the baseball artist as a noble young trailblazer, and three decades on, Clemente's legacy is as plain as the playing fields of the big leagues, where the likes of Manny Ramirez, Ozzie Guillen and Pedro Hernandez owe a great deal to his figure and his story. Maraniss puts it this way:

The mythic aspects of baseball usually draw on cliches of the innocent past, the nostalgia for how things were. Fields of green. Fathers and sons. But Clemente's myth arcs the other way, to the future, not the past, to what people hope they can become. His memory is kept alive as a symbol of action and passion, not of reflection and longing. He broke racial and language barriers and achieved greatness and died a hero. That word can be used indiscriminately in the world of sports, but the classic definition is of someone who gives his life in the service of others, and that is exactly what Clemente did.

An elegant read from a writer who has already set the bar very high for writing about sports.

Book Review Week: The World Cup, a Verse Chronicle

The limerick: Maligned. Under-appreciated, or not appreciated at all. Tossed off.

Ray Skyrme, a retired University of Toronto professor of modern languages, believes in the lure of the limerick, and in this self-published book that arrived at the Mansion last month, he collects all his five-line rhymers from the summer’s World Cup (and a few from friend and colleague John Kay).

Readers of the blog during its relocation to Germany for the tournament may well recall, a couple of weeks in, the daily hits from Ray that started arriving (somehow I got on his e-mail list) – Sarky Ryme, according to one blog reader who thought the whole thing was a put-on – and here they all are, the prematch previews, the postmatch postmortems, all of them laid out in the familiar aabba scheme.

A labour of love, for sure, but no off-the-cuff production. As Skyrme explains in the introduction, the genesis of the project came during the 2002 Mundial, gathered with his friends watching at his local Toronto pub, and then again for the 2003 Rugby World Cup. This was far more ambitious. There was a fair amount of pre-tournament research to do, including team and players’ names, history, geography and culture:

I tried, especially in the pre-match verses, to built a limerick on a sustained image (the AD 711 Moorish invasion of Spain in KSA vs ESP, or Julius Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul in FRA vs ITA). I also tried, within the limits of general understanding, to inject a foreign flavour into the verse, where the context warranted it and made it comprehensible. (In a few limited cases I felt the need to add an explanatory note). So there are words and expressions in French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Trinidadian patois, and Strine (Australian English), which, I hope, all add spice to the mixture.

Some examples now. Here’s the very first one, written before the draw nearly a year ago:

FIFA World Cup next June in Westphalia,
Match-by-match verse I’ll emailia.
Will Brazil win again?
Or their hope be in vain?
Will Deutscheland once more meet with failia?

Later on, setting up Japan vs Brazil:

Hirohito invades Ipanima.
(For this conflict can I find a rima?)
Though it wasn’t her ball
Brazil may well recall
How the Marines fared at Iwo Jima.

And one more, this little gem recapping the tournament’s roughest match (I'd take you to the last one, but it's not really fair game to give away the ending, is it?):

Second half the Dutch lose Boulahrouz,
Then goes Deco: the game’s a rough house!
That head butt by Figo,
Não é futebol, amigo!
Lisbon wins (with her head in a noose!)

This is a cute and altogether unique way of revisiting the tournament in little bite-sized pieces. Like eating potato chips, it is. You won't find it in any bookstore, though. If you’re interested in getting a copy, let me know and i'll send you along to Ray (and no, if you're wondering, I'm not getting any cut out of this).

Book Review Week: Searching for Bobby Orr

Following on yesterday's latest Dave Bidini offering, it's more words on hockey today. It’s been near 30 years since Bobby Orr last strapped on NHL blades, and in the interim precious little has been written of weight about one of the hockey world’s undisputed icons. Now Stephen Brunt has come out with Searching for Bobby Orr, an unauthorized biography in that Orr refused to have anything to do with it.

In the telling, it doesn’t really matter. Brunt’s a fine enough stylist to handle the assignment, getting enough of the little details around the myth of Orr (strippers of the day gave themselves "a Bobby Orr" in honour of the way he taped his stick, for example; and Orr the superstar athlete bachelor in Boston has rarely been explored in this kind of detail). True, Orr’s role in the downfall of Eagleson is never really explained in total - no one has really managed that trick, in fact - but this is the fullest, most human look at Orr presented yet, and immensely readable despite the subject's reticence to get involved (and perhaps to an extent because of it, Orr being an immensely private person).

Brunt succeeds best at sketching a portrait of where Orr came from – Parry Sound in the early 1960s, as if unearthed from a time capsule – and how he got out of there, rink rats like Wren Blair and Bucko McDonald playing key roles in his maturation and, ultimately, his exit (Blair profited handsomely from the transaction, ending up in Minnesota, his big NHL ticket come at last, after signing the prodigy for the Bruins):

Elma Blair was sitting outside in the car waiting for her husband when he bolted out the door of the Orr family home. He had the car started and moving before he said a word. You’d have thought he just robbed a bank. He was breathless.
“How’d you make out?” Elma asked, breaking the silence.
“I finally got him signed.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Huntsville.”
”What’s the hurry?”
“I’m afraid his mother is going to find a car and hunt us down, grab this card away from me if we don’t get the hell out of here right now.”

Moments like these are full of understated comedy in retrospect – a flight to Huntsville! A $10,000 signing bonus that cheapo Boston owner Weston Adams wanted paid in U.S. dollars, because they were slightly below Canadian par at the time (Blair paid it in Canadian, anyway)! And the Leafs owner Stafford Smythe cornering Blair in the Gardens a short time after, telling him he shouldn’t feel all that smart:

“We had him signed long before you did,” Smythe said.
Well, that was interesting. “If that’s the case, Staff,” Blair wondered, “how come Orr isn’t wearing a Leafs uniform right now?”
“Because my people were too goddamn stupid,” Smythe said.

There’s a bigger story at work here, too, that Brunt doesn't miss. Orr’s appearance on the continental stage coincided with hockey’s big bang, which followed on baseball and football in the 1960s - franchises moving into virgin territories, lucrative television deals being signed, and free agency for the hired hands all steps in the process.

One last point: It’s easy to forget just how short Orr’s career really was, from his NHL debut in 1966 to, barely a decade later, a painful final star turn at the ’76 Canada Cup. Orr’s timing, so impeccable on the ice and in a historical context, was just a little off when it came to more modern surgical techniques. Imagine, given the kind of treatment available shortly after he retired, how different it could have been:

There would have been more years, and more good years, and he would have been able to play against the Russians in ’72, and won further Stanley Cups and retired gracefully when the time was right, happy and wealthy and satisfied. But instead, he was the hockey Achilles, and because of that his fate was sealed.

This is not an easy trick, to take a long-ago figure and bring him and his times back to life for the generation that remembers him, and those grown up since who never had the pleasure of watching him at work. Brunt nails it. A fine, fine read.

Tomorrow: FIFA World Cup 2006: A Verse Chronicle.

Book Review Week: The Five Hole Stories

A few books have ended up landing here by accident, it seems, like most visitors to JABS Mansion, and so it's a good time for some mini-reviews on the pick of the litter. Coming up later this week: Bobby Orr, The World Cup of limericks, Roberto Clemente. Not your usual book bag, but it's my bloggy and I'll cry if I want to.

Leading off is the return of versatile Dave Bidini: Soon to be retired Rheostatics co-founder (they're playing a farewell gig at Massey Hall in March), sports chronicler, hockey nomad and now, another departure. The Five Hole Stories has Bidini delving into fiction (and theatre - more on that below), a slim but filling (and funny) half dozen short stories that combine national and universal passions: Hockey and sex, of course.

A 1940s hooker and a visiting Maple Leaf, a slumping sniper from the '60s looking to regain his mojo, an '80s role player who plays a deep-in-the-closet Gay One to the Great One, but my own favourite is Cortina - a career minor leaguer one concussion short of oblivion and gone to his last stop in the Italian Hockey League, told by a sportswriter who's stumbled across the player's diary during his research:

Stephen played on Dollar-Beer Night, Four-for-One Corn Dog Night, Clown Wrestling Night, and Party 'Til You Pee Night, where three contestants were required to sit at a little table at centre ice drinking beer during the second intermission, and the last to urinate won a month of free lanes at Tempe Bowlerama. After being traded to Skookum of the WCHL in 2003, Jackson told writer William Gaston that he'd "worn ever kind of sweater: purple, teal, mauve, grey-brown, raspberry, and seventeen different shades of red. I've skated with more guys from countries ending with (the suffix) '-istan' that anybody should have to remember, guys whose last names practically slik off their shoulder down their sleeve. I've spat teeth and cracked bones and pulled ligaments in seventeen states and eight provinces over this humfrickin' planet of ice, which I discoverd the first time I lifted my eyes long enough from my train set to see Glenn Anderson swoop like a heron through four defenders and flick the puck into the net like a guy tossing a coin off the end of his thumb. I was hooked, you know, and that was that.

Flipping between the dry, clueless sportswriter's voice and the foggy confusion of poor, doomed Stephen Jackson, drowning in pills, 40-course meals and love at last, Bidini hits here as good as the best bits from Tropic of Hockey or On a Cold Road. One more excerpt:

Former Columbus Blue Jacket and Dallas Star John Skeeton - whom this writer tried to contact during his time in Renfrew Detention Centre (I was denied access, but a few letters were exchanged) - wrote to me, cryptically: "We all had the clap. We all got the slap. We schwapped and schwapped 'til it all went splat."

Not all of it works quite as well as this, but when it does it's as knowing and biting (literally, at times) as anything ever written about our game, even if it'll never end up on Hockey Night in Canada, witness this back-and-forth between two NHLers, one of them hopelessly smitten with their new, unprecedented goalie:

-She was beautiful! She is beautiful!
-Dude, that nose. I mean, it's not for everyone.
-A nose-bent-by-screaming-puck is very alluring, John. She's a female Patrick Roy with nipples like frosted cherries.
-That's weird.
-What's weird is when trades happen in the NHL, I doubt that very many guys wonder what their new teammate is going to look like naked. I mean, I doubt that it's high on their list of questions.

It's headed for a treatment outside the printed page, too, Bidini and Blake Brooker combining on a theatrical adaptation that's scheduled for Calgary in January.

Tomorrow: Searching for Bobby Orr, by Stephen Brunt. 

The e-mailbag cometh

So here we are again, a week's worth of e-mails going into the hopper for your consumption and comment.

Start with John Richardson, his interest piqued by the Dec. 12, 1938 Star sports page (pdf file) I linked to in the Red Storey post:

Read the Pages of the Past article on the game plus other articles on the page, including an account of a Leafs/Hawks game. When did this style of writing fade out? Post war? Fifties? If you've seen Good Night and Good Luck, you see how formal (and what seems stilted now) TV news broadcasts were.

Good question. I haven't seen that movie yet, but my guess would be that very television played a role in changing sportswriting (all of a sudden you could see what these guys were writing about, and painting word pictures wasn't quite so paramount, and even seemed silly and overdone). That, and Ernest Hemingway:

"My prose style. You bastards have stolen my prose style. Every shithead sportswriter in America has stolen my style and then gone and fucked it up so bad that I can't even use it anymore without becoming sick to my stomach."
"Put down the pistol, Papa. I've been writing that way all my life and you know it." (Philip Roth, The Great American Novel)

The a-bomb probably had a role too (I'm serious. Just check out Don DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall novella, which became the prologue to Underworld.)

But there's more from John. To add to the stories sent in by Karim and Les Couchie in the comments from that post, he begins with a memory of taking his son to an oldtimers game refereed by Storey and it leads to this gem:

Speaking of old timers, one of my favorite possessions is a bio of The Rocket by former Tely writer Andy O'Brien. It was published in '59 or 60 and I got it for Christmas that year -- I was 10 or 11.
At the time my best friend Roddy McLeod's dad was President of the Burlington Minor Hockey Association and was organizing the year-end banquet. I came home from school one day and my mom said, "Phone Roddy. He says it's important".
So I phoned Roddy and he says, "Guess who's in my living room? Rocket Richard. Wanna come down and meet him?"
For some reason I grabbed my book, tore down the street, walked in the front door (no one knocked back then) and there he was. God was in front of me.
I mean, I was dumbstruck. He was wearing a suit and tie and his hair was slicked back of course. He looked at me (geez, I still remember this), and said, "What position do you play?" When I said, "Goalie", he stared at me with those eyes and said, "Oh you guys give me all sorts of trouble". And then he signed, in meticulous handwriting, "To John, Best Wishes, Maurice "Rocket" Richard."
The book has survived numerous moves, two marriages, and is still one of my prized possessions--and this coming from a guy who has signed first editions of Atwood, Davies, John Irving, Alice Munro, et al.
Sorry to ramble. That Red Storey piece was a Proustian moment.

Proustian moments are all right by me, John. The world needs more of 'em.

*Tissue break*

Moving right along from that beginning, Chris Flynn weighed in on the Awards We'll Never See. He wasn't alone, but he happened to have the most articulate response (as opposed to the "You idiot!" variety, that is):

JFJ is the league's worst GM? I do not think so. Milbury gets the lifetime achievement award, and maybe Kevin Lowe, thinking that Roloson is a number one guy.
Why has Quinn coached game #1,300? Because, if you may have forgot, he is a great regular season coach, and I think I might have seen you cheering along the last 6 years in a row we have been in the playoffs. I am not defending him much, because he hasn't won us a Cup, but let's not forget the good times, and take them with the bad.
I think we both know, or at least I do, that you do not judge a defensive defenceman like Richardson and Berg on points. Judge Berg on his giveaways, but don't say he doesn't score enough, that isn't his job. And, lastly, I assume that the link about the strange timing of Eddie's back (that did not work for me) is ... just the Toronto media making stuff up to cause conflict.  Whatever the Leafs do, it is never good enough for the Toronto media.  It would be nice if there was some support in the papers for this team.

Agreed on the D-men, but as for "support in the papers" and "cheering along the last six year" I believe former e-mailbagger Roger Wilcox put it best last week: Golf Leafs Golf!

Here's another view from one Bocro, who lives somewhere well outside the 416-905 axis -- at least, that's my wild guess:

It is getting downright embarrassing. What would the Leafs do without the plethora of on ice officials coming from Southern Ontario? It is so obvious now that whenever they get behind in a game or are floundering as they tend to do, they are suddenly awarded with a 5 on 3 situation. It happened against Boston yesterday & recent games against Tampa Bay & Montreal were no exception.

Finally, the folks up at York University media relations send this one in to finish off this week's edition (for the full release, click here):

All those early mornings at the rink or the gymnasium won’t necessarily benefit your child in the long run, says a new study by a York University researcher.
The study found that athletes who train in one area as kids don’t necessarily get a jump-start on a long life of physical activity – in fact, it’s just the opposite.