Hockey days are here again

David Sherman

Long ago and far away, I spent a handful of years in my parents’ dream home, across the bridge from Montreal, in the suburbs of Laval, then a decrepit collection of neglected hamlets turned to suburban Nirvana.

It’s where I learned to play my version of ice hockey – skating into the boards and falling down, then going home to toast frozen feet on a radiator.

For the adults, the traffic for those toiling in Montreal spread across an island separated by eternally clogged bridges caused ulcers and baldness but a unionized working man could buy his castle – single family detached $9,995; duplex with fieldstone façade and two-car garage $26,500. Mortgages were 30 years locked in at six per cent.

My parents had the same tenants the entire time they owned the home and their rent, $130 a month, paid the mortgage. They were originally from the East Coast, visited for coffee from time to time, admitted they had always thought Jewish people had horns. They had never met any and our relative normalcy surprised them. Little did they know.

My father’s salary for standing eight hours a day cutting dresses paid for the new General Motors tin can he had to have every three years.

It was status. It was necessity. Waiting in traffic before and after his shift was my father’s cross to bear, along with a few others no need to mention here.

The house in the wilds of Laval was surrounded by nearly identical duplexes and split levels and streets with more of the same that wound to nowhere, bracketed by swamp and forests and construction sites.

It was bought “for the kids” who had no say in the matter and hated it. As soon as we had drivers’ licences and access to the family wheels, we spent evenings in the city. Films, food, females and music. Life.

But those homes came with “finished basements,” meaning industrial strength carpet laid over concrete floors, imitation wood wallboard paneling and a tiny water closet later converted to a darkroom.

If you slipped a lounge chair in there and locked the door, photographs were not the only thing developing in the dark when the wonders of young women were first discovered as your parents watched TV upstairs.

But at this time of year, in this province, the memories most persistent are those of the rites that came with being a Québécois or Québécoise – the Montreal Canadiens.

To my mother, a life-long baseball fan, hockey was about “schlobs with sticks,” basic Yiddish for slobs, and hockey addicts were consigned to the basement and an old black and white TV to watch the Bleu, Blanc, Rouge decimate any and all. It was a Saturday night ritual, the theme song to Esso and its happy motoring sign an eternal ear worm.

Hockey was a working-class sport. Even the wondrous Maurice Rocket Richard, known for once scoring five goals while concussed and barely conscious and many other miracles on ice, worked summers to make a few extra bucks. Players smoked, drank, womanized and still played like hell.

There were no hockey player factories or elite hockey schools at $30,000 plus a year that churned out talent destined to grab the green ring --$6 to $20 million a year not counting endorsements.

Rightly or wrongly, the heroes on the black and white screen had grown up like many of us except they lived to skate and shoot.

Montreal at one time had hundreds and hundreds of outdoor rinks and winter, before climate change entered our consciousness, kept the rinks frozen usually from December till March. Rinks had shovels for us to clean the ice ourselves. The guys on the screen, schlobs or not, grew up like us, but maybe had backyard rinks, found lake or rivers to skate on, or simply spent every waking hour not in class but on the ice. Maybe classrooms didn’t enter into it. There were semi-pro minor hockey leagues to mold kids into pros. Some made it, most didn’t.

More importantly, Montreal won. Flying Frenchmen were our boyhood and adolescent heroes. Most spoke French, making for lousy sound bites: “I shoot the puck along the ice and it go in,” but these sweating, toothless heroes were our reward for being Quebecers and Montrealers and members of the “distinct society.” And they took no shit. Sharp elbows, scarred knuckles, fearless hearts.

Being banished to the basement by the matriarch who had Dean Martin or a sitcom to watch, we happily indulged our cultural heritage – winning endless championships. Celebrating “The Rocket,” “Big Jean” and “Boom Boom” Geoffrion was worth the sacrifice and almost as wondrous as the pleasures that awaited on the lounge chair a few years later.

Mail boxes were blowing up, moving vans were moving friends and neighbours, the U.S. was enmeshed in one upheaval or another but down in the basement and in the newspaper the next day, the world outside the old Forum, the Yankee Stadium of hockey, was irrelevant.

The world stopped for a beat or two when the Beatles sang for a few minutes on Ed Sullivan’s “really big shew,” but for Montreal hockey fans the world stopped every Saturday night during the season and for the playoffs, the end never in doubt. The Canadiens, and therefore us, were the stars and real life was contained on a 200-feet sheet of ice for as long as the season and playoffs lasted.

Too long for my beleaguered mother but never long enough for a Canadiens’ fan.

Somehow, after decades in the wilderness, the magic has been recaptured and people here are talking about and reading about and watching the Canadiens with a familiar if greying reverence.

The wealthy young men of winter are back. They’re bigger, faster, stronger, more skilled than their forefathers. They come from all over the world though the Canadiens are making an effort to load the lineup with as many Québécois as possible.

Be you a Demidov or a Caufield or a Slafkovsky, you’re a Canadien. And your job is to score goals, “go hit a few people,” win a championship, put a smile on fans’ faces and make the rest of the world go away.

The Canadiens are again winning. It’s Hockey Night in Canada almost every second night.

Their exploits have the media and friends buzzing, people chanting in the streets, dinners simplified or postponed. The Canadiens have again given us a break from reality, needed now more than ever, appreciated now more than ever. The Stanley Cup is our oyster.

Pass the Tabasco.