tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42296002209907416032024-02-21T08:25:48.436-08:00Cold-cocked: On Hockey and the Literature of SportLornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-91394799812522514912008-10-28T19:20:00.000-07:002008-10-28T19:26:42.209-07:00Next Chapter: The Man GameI’m delighted to join the fine folks on CBC’s new book show, “The Next Chapter,” to yak about books with a sporty angle. I recorded an episode last week with the so-literate and lovely host, Shelagh Rogers. We mused about two novels that explore sport and identity in very different ways. The hope is that I’ll contribute semi-regularly.<br /><br />Why me? Well apart from my obvious interest in writing about sports, a couple of years ago I became a member of the Sport Literature Association, an international org devoted to the study of sport in literature and culture. Initiated in the 1980s, the organization now has several hundred members around the world and sponsors an annual conference in a different North American location each summer. I attended the Saratoga Springs edition and had a fantastic time with folks who study the literature of sport from a variety of angles and nations. (The spring 2009 gathering will be at Western in Ontario.)<br /><br />In the wake of that stimulating weekend, I began planning a graduate seminar I’ll teach in the Writing Department at UVic in Spring 2010 (coinciding with the Olympics). “Moving Writing: The Body at Play” will explore the creative strategies writers use when they imagine the body—including the disabled body—in competition, in recreation and otherwise at play in and with the world. Smart and sporty writer and Manitoba Moose zealot, Aaron Shepard, is currently helping me design the course and narrow down the potentially mountainous reading list.<br /><br />When I started reading and researching <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Cold-cocked</span>, I became infatuated with the puzzle of how writers are able to capture in words what it is we enjoy about watching and playing games. Like, how do writers take what is essentially very fast visually—a face-off in hockey, or a swimmer’s flutter kick, or a left hook—and then slow it down, and interpret it so that readers can contemplate and consider meaning, not just watch the action.<br /><br />Why am I still interested in the writing that uses sport to express meaning, and what do readers gain from this stuff? As I explain on “The Next Chapter,” many pleasures of watching sport are similar to reading:<br /><ul><li>Because our lives are relatively repetitive and work-worn, one theory goes, we want to identify with players and characters, especially when they do superhuman things;<br /></li><li>We want to connect with a community of spectators and readers and so feel less isolated, hence also the success of the fantasy pool;<br /></li><li>And we understand the rules and structure of the game—whether that’s curling or the short story—and are excited when the improbable or incongruous happens: the Hail Mary pass in the last minute, or the heroic and handsome canoist finishing last in a race he was meant to win, or when a historical novel messes with the facts or with our understanding of how we came to live the sorts of lives we do.<br /></li></ul> Lee Henderson’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Man Gam</span>e (Viking Canada) is stunning, a vast and complex novel set mostly in and around Vancouver in the late 1800s, and partly in contemporary East Vancouver. The historical thread explores a culture under the great pressure of the history of the West: dangerous and relentless physical labour involving logs and railways; brothels and other addictions; resistance to multiculturalism; class divisions; police corruption; the problem of weather. (It’s the kind of book that may, if you’re a writer, either inspire you to write or make you give up cause you’ll never match its brilliance. Whatever. Suck it up.)<br /><br />Into this social chaos arrives the angelic Molly Erwagen (her bookkeeper husband is a paraplegic), and Molly’s an ex-vaudeville performer who recognizes the potential for profit if she coaches men to play and perform a new sport—Henderson calls it “A bizarre, cartoonish competition that combines ballroom dancing, ultimate fighting, wire-work kung fu and bare-knuckle boxing in a gracefully brutal show of, essentially, two men beating the hell out of each other.” It’s a sort of naked wrestling with modern dance and martial arts moves—a sport that all members of this new society can become addicted to playing, watching and betting on. The sport enacts violence, but it also prevents the society from spiraling into non-stop violence. It essentially changes the course of history. Most compellingly, for me, the book demonstrates the human desire to witness competition and to be seduced by the beautiful and the erotic in sport.<br /><br />(Sport is sometimes called the “opiate of the masses.” In this book, opium is the opiate of the masses, and the man game is successful, in part, because citizens are bored and stoned.)<br /><br />The novel includes ink-brush sketches that depict and describe—in the lovely words of the town’s supreme pastry chef—the holds and flips of the sport. The contemporary thread follows a group of folks who have rediscovered and idealized the sport and, with the help of those sketches and also naked, are endeavouring to revive an extreme, counter-culture, backyard version of the man game.<br /><br />In some sports literature, or literature that uses sport as a dominant motif, the metaphorical possibilities are wide and deep and that’s part of the pleasure of reading: making connections and understanding the body and competition in a new way, why it all matters to identity and so on.<br /><br />The man game is like that: Henderson’s said that it’s a metaphor for engagement with the capital O Other that marked Chinese and First Nations tensions when the west was being settled. For me, the game says a lot about masculinity and the role of women in the physical lives of men; it presents violence as both brutal and beautiful which is, it seems to me, also what the settling of the west was, especially if you’re a forest.<br /><br />And then there’s the erotic component: these men become infatuated with the beautiful Molly; the game exists because of men’s obsession with her; and the players train and perform naked. For me, the sporting body is always erotic, and this book depicts sport as primal, or elemental and also elegant. Put this beside the image of Molly’s husband in his wheelchair—a man who is all brain and no body—and the novel becomes very powerful in its wisdom about how we define men and women and even love. Everything about the game in 1886—all the metaphorical nuances—also apply to contemporary culture (the move toward extreme sports, for example), and that’s only one of the ways Henderson has done something remarkable and very moving.<br /><br />With Henderson, the thrills come in many forms—the writing itself is breathtaking—and the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat are very complex ideas.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-44684799070777982162008-10-07T15:37:00.000-07:002008-10-07T15:48:42.603-07:00Allegory O' the RoomThis time of the season: the slap and tickle of the live fantasy draft gives way to deep bitterness over picks scooped by others; 4 games played in far-off lands on big ice with intriguing new lines and match-ups (Jarkko! Cookie! Marc Crawford’s colour!); an endless pause stretches out before the season’s North American debut when those fantasy points will start to determine good-day or bad-day at work; plans to plant Salt Spring Island garlic between periods, between games come the weekend.<br /><br />Post-equinox, the signs are good. Who scores the season’s very first goal? My former pretend boyfriend, Markus Naslund, looking a little tractor-like in the acceleration department, but the wrist shot (another spring surgery on that Moore-busted elbow) seems epic. Who’s leading, after—okay—four games those goofs who Live-Draft mocked me when I picked the once and future Nazzie? Team LoJack, yes.<br /><br />And over at my other pool—which formed the real structural backbone of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Cold-cocked</span>—team names and players have really stepped up. Last year, Bill Gaston (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Midnight Hockey</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Good Body</span>) who was BESTASS became BLESTASS and this year dresses Team OBAMASS. Joaner MacLeod has for years been known as TALLON, in honour of our Vancouver girlhood pretend boyfriend, Dale; this year she’s gone all ManU and is Team BIG GIRL’S BLOUSE. We finally convinced poet/hockey scholar Tim Lilburn to join. The team name he really wanted had too many letters, so it’s been shortened to Team ALLEGORY O’ CAVE. This prompted another newbie—our uber-grad student, Aaron—to go with Team WHEN IS A MAN?<br /><br />Speaking of poets, I hung out with Randall Maggs a couple of weeks back at the wonderful Winnipeg International Writers Festival (Cara Hedley, author of the chick-hockey novel, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Twenty Miles</span>, was with us, too, a good gal guide for our Splash and Dash ride on the Assinaboine and Red Rivers). Randall may be the current best-selling poet in North America with his <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems</span>. Over breakfast on Sunday, he posed a new theory as to why I would feel such energy and excitement in the Canucks dressing room, why along with the fear and silly self-consciousness I meditated on in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Cold-cocked</span>, I would feel also renewed and alive, aroused in the usual and unusual ways.<br /><br />Elsewhere in the book, in honour of my fighter-pilot father, I try to dispose of the prevailing and ridiculous comparison between hockey players and warriors. But Randall thinks I might have been tapping into some deep vein of battlelust when the sight of B Mo’s bare feet got me going. Warrior/players, he proposes, are healthy and strong and happy to be fighting and really pleased with themselves because they’re protecting the womenfolk and the whole society. Pride, arrogance, super-charged ego: we need them to be this way and like it when they are. The sexual component is natural, too. Once the community is defended and the ramparts hosed down, we can all celebrate, relax and breed more warriors. Happy players, happy fans, and especially happy civilians who get to hang out for twenty minutes, post-wargames, in the room. Maybe.<br /><br />Our Prime Minister, on national television, explains that he appreciates the arts, really likes the cultural component of this country, totally gets it, because after all, his son is taking guitar lessons. Our Prime Minister doesn’t know the difference between a hobby and a profession, a calling, or what it costs artists to contribute to society in the way they believe most meaningful, textured and efficient. Count the books mentioned in this blog and appreciate the ways authors influence and improve the way we see ourselves, how they aspire to lead us out o’ the cave and into the light (block that metaphor). Consider the vast territory we cover and the not-always quantifiable investment return we provide. To paraphrase Francine Prose in a recent <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Harper’s</span> review, the Prime Minister could express contempt and loathing for a vast list (updated on the hour) of liars, cheats, millionaires, hockey teams and infidels, all of whom “access” public funds, but chooses to condemn and ridicule Canada’s cultural community. Why?<br /><br />Randall is due to tour the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Sawchuk Poems</span> in all the American cities that have teams for which Terry Sawchuk played, thanks to the genius of his publisher, the small and lovely and low-overhead Brick Books, and the cooperation of the Canadian consuls in those cities. He spent almost a decade researching and writing his book—obsessed, passionate, and determined to tell the story, through art—poetry!—of a complex and tortured hockey player. He will receive royalties only in the form of copies of his own book. Cara Hedley has written the first novel about women playing the national game and is now a PhD student at the University of Calgary. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Cold-cocked</span> attempts to disassemble the simplistic, Don Cherrified, over-determined version of the sport and to rekindle and re-frame a nation’s love of its beauty, to de-centralize our preoccupations. I received no Canada Council or BC Arts Council funding for the book, nor did I ask for any. I paid two editors (my employer, UVic, helped here), a photographer, and a publicist; I paid for a flight to Toronto, one to Vancouver, and hockey tickets to 15 games in Vancouver. I will long be in debt to the book, and my publisher will not become wealthy through its proceeds, though he took a huge risk in publishing a book that is so counter-culture and which central Canada booksellers deemed to be “regional” (egads!) and therefore not worthy of prime shelf space. We all deserve better, no doubt, but we accept the terms.</div>Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-34951685650596775052008-09-23T12:10:00.000-07:002008-09-23T12:21:57.852-07:00Thin Air (Go Moose!)I’ll be talking hockey with a dandy bunch of writers at this week’s Winnipeg International Writers Festival, Thin Air (go Moose!).<br /><br />Friday September 26 I’ll be at Selkirk Library @ 2:00 with Cara Hedley, author of the women’s hockey novel, <i>Twenty Miles</i> (Coachhouse). Here’s a bit of the <i>Twenty Miles<i> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">blurb:</span><br /><br />Iz has a long, fraught relationship with her sport. Her dad was a hockey star, and her grandfather made a rink for her as soon as she could stand. But when she leaves her grandmother behind to play for the university team, she can’t quite find her own place in the game.<br /> From the rowdy hilarity of the Scarlets’ dressing room to a quiet reticence toward first love—and with a little beer-bonging and a lot of hockey along the way—Iz tries to navigate the ways loss is played out on the ice.<br /> Both fast-paced and hesitant, Twenty Miles celebrates women’s hockey and offers an uncompromising look at the ways in which the sport haunts the women who play it.<br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Then on Saturday the 27th @ 2:00 on the Mainstage, Cara and I will be joined by poet Randall Maggs, whose amazing, </span><i>Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> (Brick) was called by Stephen Brunt possibly “the truest hockey book ever written. It reaches a level untouched by conventional sports literature.”<br /><br />I read with Cara in Toronto last fall and she was not only smart and charming and sporty, she brought along a few members of the Canadian women’s Olympic hockey team. Randall was a huge success at the international conference on hockey held here in Victoria a couple of years back. He’s a fantastic reader and a swell dude.<br /><br />Not only them: the recently Giller-longlisted Paul Quarrington is also on the Saturday bill. His hockey novel, </span><i>King Leary<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, was last year’s Canada Reads selection, defended and championed by the suddenly magisterial Dave Bidini.<br /><br />We’ll be reading and then yakking about the game. Question for Winnipeggers and Manitoba Moose fans: should Nolan Baumgartner play the fourth line in Vancouver or top line for the Moose?<br /><br />More info on Thin Air can be found here: www.thinairwinnipeg.ca<br /><br />Though I’m still suffering from summer Olympics hangover and can’t shake the gripe that pro athletes are snarky over-paid lazyboys, here are my three pre-season wishes to make the story of this season more engaging:<br /><br /><ul><li>Nazzie—after yet another elbow surgery in April—finally gets to rip it up with Scott “The Alaska Passer” Gomez in New York.</li><li>Chicago makes the playoffs led by a healthy Jonathan Toews and then goes way deep and we see Dale Tallon’s big face light the arena like a mile of LEED-certified solar panels.</li><li>Eric Cole gets his body back from the broken neck and, along with Luby Visnovsky, gives Craig MacTavish’s chest a reason to fill out those snazzy suits.<br /></li></ul></span></i></i></i></i></i></i><div><i><i><i><i><i><i><br /></i></i></i></i></i></i></div>Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-38802811519780226342008-06-09T21:36:00.000-07:002008-06-09T22:20:04.827-07:00Buy Now, Pay LaterI've said before that the bad thing about blogging is it makes you feel like having an opinion when having one isn't the only option. I could watch soccer, lament Federer's whoopsie, groom Max the dog with that fancy comb. I could do something about the ants on the counter. Or I could share my thoughts on the Hockey Night in Canada theme. <br /><br />At first, I thought it was all about the music. The composer, of course, wanted to be fairly compensated for all the air time. She wanted lots of money because there was lots of air time. Fair enough. Her agent seemed a little slimy, but whatever.<br /><br />Then it became, for me, about CBC deciding they didn't need to pay a real musician--the composer--because they could just, you know, do an American Idol kinda thing: have a game, let The People choose. That way, no real musicians have to be paid (just that hundred grand flat fee they're gonna offer as prize), or revered, and after all, anybody can write an anthem, come on: power chords, James Bond horns, judicious use of bells, sprint-march tempo, kettle drums, smarmy swing part, modulations galore, and lotsa tom-toms (I listened on Limewire; sue this, TSN). And The People know good tunes when they hear 'em, right? We know what we like. We'll pick.<br /><br />Then I tried to imagine how much CBC pays Elton John and Nickelback every Saturday night when they play their hockey-rockin' "Saturday Night's All Right" before the game and wondered how that compared to what they pay that nice lady composer. Couldn't imagine.<br /><br />Today, I'm thinkin': Well, 3 million's a lotta benjamins to pay for a song when you're the national public broadcaster and you just canned your in-house symphony cause you couldn't afford 'em any more. Real musicians: who needs 'em, who can afford 'em? If it's my song, I cut a CanCon good deal with the Mother Ship and cut back on the Perrier and red grapes. But that's me.<br /><br />Also: I think CTV/TSN has miscalculated the depth and breadth of that brand/song and the need for its CBC affiliation in order for it to work/excite/inspire. The song aint worth much without the history, the context. Say "Let it Be" came out in the 50s and it was, I dunno, Pat Boone who sang it. See? Not the same. No hit. No getting charged up. Likewise, the theme without Ron MacLean et al.<br /><br />Please: forget the contest. Recycle. I'm just brainstorming now, but what about Glenn Gould, "Goldberg Variations"; do we still have to pay for that? Would Stompin' Tom donate something? Or that old Bobby Gimby track, the one from the Centennial? Or we could go for a more interesting, incongruous emotion to start the games on those lonely Saturday nights when your daughter's out with her boyfriend, and the winds are southwest gusting to 80K, and the dog needs combing, and the ants are coming down the wall again, and the world still doesn't care about the stuff you care about, and your team still doesn't have a centreman for handsome Nazzie, and Trevor's now a smarmy real estate developer interested only in, say, granite countertops and glass tiles: Joni Mitchell's "River."Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-45007752748349834492008-05-31T23:16:00.000-07:002008-05-31T23:22:03.228-07:00Guitar HeroIn Cold-cocked, I explored the permeable border between fantasy and reality that fans cross when compelled by sports heroes. Self-mockery in mind, I admitted the make-believe and fleeting relationships I’ve courted with Markus Naslund and Trevor Linden, among fleeting others. If little boys pretend to be Sidney Crosby when they play road hockey, I figure, if they naturally imagine it’s Game 7 overtime and the puck’s on their stick and then floating over the star goalie’s glove into the net, and if that’s how they bond life-long with the game—studies suggest this—then why not pretend something a little less intimate than actually being a player: why not imagine Markus in my garden, or Trevor admiring my middle-aged hands? <br /><br />I’m interested in how we place ourselves in relationships with cultural icons. It’s a strange intimacy. In Vancouver, fans my age have watched Linden go from teenage gangle-and-grit, to statesman grey-and-gone. For those who’ve never met him, he is son, brother, lover, and kind father-figure. They’ve seen him gleeful and heartbroken, bloodied, humiliated, heroic. The narrative of Linden’s career in this city—its rising and falling action, its secondary characters, drama, infrequent subtext—has seduced us into believing we have a stake in its outcome, even that we have some control over its outcome. We don’t know him, but of course we do. We’ve shared so much of his life, so many nights.<br /><br />With Luc Bourdon’s death, I’ve wondered again about the relative intimacy of our links to players. My narrative of Bourdon began with the under-18 tournament before he was drafted by Vancouver. He was fantastic in those games, easily the best defenceman, often the best player. Then I forgot about him until the draft. Next scene, he’s this close to making the team in the pre-season, and radio colour-man, the excitable Tom Larscheid, is infatuated with Bourdon, begging the team to sign him, to give the kid a chance. One day after pre-season practice, Larscheid spots Bourdon standing in the rain on a street corner outside GM Place and offers him a ride to his hotel. He loves the kid. Loves him. And so we started to. Enter: imagination.<br /><br />The best hockey stories don’t catalogue the precipitous rise, the predictable accolades, trophies. Sidney Crosby is one brand of thrilling, sure, but our regard for him seems superficial and easy. Bourdon didn’t freak us out with his talent or poise or ease with media. He tried, didn’t measure up, tried, nope, came closer, not yet, try again. Some nights he looked like Ed Jovanovski and had Jovo’s temperament: part boisterous black Lab, part hair-trigger Rottweiler. At the rookie camp here this fall, Bourdon seemed winded, a little slow, but maybe that was because Alex Edler was busting his butt, trying to claim what might have been the only spot left to fill. Edler resembled Nicklas Lidstrom’s calm little brother; Bourdon looked like himself, only more worried. <br /><br />Like many here, I was beginning to wonder whether Bourdon would be able to stop thinking so much and just let his heart take over the way I’d seen it do in those under-18 games. Trade crossed my mind, I confess. But a month ago, after the mustard gas of another season had cleared, my daughter called me upstairs one night to watch a clip from the team’s annual Ice and Dice charity gala. My handsome former pretend boyfriend, Naslund, was emceeing a dance contest in front of a crowd of 700 fancy folk. Kevin Bieksa and Ryan Kesler were judging three rookies chick-a-booming with a naughty-looking long-limbed brunette on stage. Alex Edler was stiff and blushing and an awful dancer—part shy blueliner, part bad Abba. Rockin’ Lucky Luc Bourdon, though, quit thinking: off came the belt, out came the shirt, and his body moved like he’d been dancing with the stars all his life; up went the leg of the danseuse draped across his lap, and he Guitar-Heroed up and down her toned and tanned gam; up he jumped to twirl his partner and gyrate some more. Perfect 10s from the judges. Amazing. Everybody on stage looked gob-smacked: Luc?. Okay, I thought, Bourdon stays. He’s musical; he wants to be fun, not just have it; imagination; fearless. That list of qualities won’t appear in any “How to Be a Pro Scout” handbook, but they showed me Bourdon would be my kind of player.<br /><br />Loss is at the heart, on the surface, in the bones and between the lines of much of what interests me. I come back to it in writing even when I don’t realize I am. Until this week, I didn’t know about his arthritis and the wheelchair, or about the mother who raised him on her own, or just how small and far from here his hometown is; the worrying must have been ingrained. These have added to the narrative and make his story more moving, and its abrupt end harder to fathom. Can we really feel raw, sincere anguish over the death of a young man we didn’t know? I think so. And it isn’t because he represents all the boys we do know who have died in fast cars, or those we fear will finish high school next week and enter this summer—and the future beyond it—at top speed regardless of risk. It isn’t because something’s missing from our lives and we must replace it with contrived feelings for a stranger. Grief is grief, however small: bewildering, embarrassing, somewhat maudlin, but true.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-90042811440992916192008-03-28T12:23:00.000-07:002008-03-28T13:03:59.727-07:00tuff enuffFor me, coach Marc Crawford's most onerous and enduring crime is his inability to win Game 7 versus Calgary in overtime, for putting Marek Malik on the ice for the first short-handed and doomed minute after Matt Cooke and Markus Naslund had conjured (presto!) arguably the most thrilling goal in Canucks' history. Scotty Bowman would have won that game. Darryl Sutter did because he was wiley enough to put greybeard and former Canuck, Martin Gelinas, incongruously in front of the net on the most important power play of the season.<br /><br />But in the aftermath years since the Bertuzzi/Moore disaster, Crawford--if you don't count the purgatory he's in in LA, notwithstanding Antje Kopitar--has seemed pretty unstained. (Tony Granato, then coach of the Avalanche and presumably the nutsy honcho who put Moore on the ice in such a stupid game, was demoted to Assistant the next season.) Reports today suggest Bertuzzi is suing Crawford. <br /><br />Note that this week coach Patrick Roy received a suspension alongside the player, his son, whom he reportedly directed to attack an opposing player. Hockey Night in Canada's P.J. Stock and Ron MacLean giggled, glowed and marvelled nostalgically on Saturday night when they replayed the unprovoked and brutal beating Roy's son laid on another goalie ("He even throws punches like his dad!!"). Why didn't they see what I did: the young Roy's big fist comes back, high, and slams into the side of the other player's head--again and again--while the boy falls to the ice, undefended, face down. <br /><br />The fighting needs to go from the game, but it won't. What can go and should: the testo-delight and ecstasy expressed when it happens, especially those wearing the dark suits on Saturday night, lounging in their leather chairs atop their slick and shiny set, the pornographic big screen on endless slo-mo repeat behind them. Last week, on the Canucks radio broadcast during a "lively tilt," the usually delightful and ageing colour man, Tom Larscheid, screeched, "I hope he knocks his block off!" Must we? It wasn't so long ago--35 years maybe--when CBC would go to a commercial whenever things got rough and fists flew. <br /><br />I was in the middle of writing Cold-cocked during those awful days, and I thought long and hard about who was really to blame when Bertuzzi's heart and mind were disintegrating under the weight of guilt and so few others seemed willing to shoulder a young man's burden. Complicity is an intriguing concept; guilt is better measured on a continuum or a sliding scale. Until we look away from the glorification of violence, and the idealization of uncontrolled male aggression, we are all complicit.<br /><br /><br />-from Cold-cocked: On Hockey (Biblioasis 2007):<br /><br />Two nights later, the game was a cryptic puzzle: how could Colorado score so high when they’d been beaten likewise a few nights before; why was Brad May unhinged and maniacal, so into Aebescher’s face and goalie-space; why was Steve Moore on the ice without appropriate back-up; could a run-up score really send a man like Bertuzzi over so steep a cliff; where were the heroic, smooth-faced captains in this game—Naslund and gentleman Joe Sakic, their All-Star Game hat trick (Bert helped, too) only weeks old—and why didn’t they stop it; why was Bert on the ice without Naslund; what is it coaches do for young men, if not get them safely through these land-mined years. <br /><br />Either the bull will kill you in Madrid or the crowd will. The pre-game circus was gross. In August 2005, veteran columnist Cam Cole will write that Bertuzzi is only 50% to blame for what happens; the league and its officials and coaches are responsible for the other 50%. Missing from his equation: media and fan complicity. Airwaves and print—welcomed the engorgement of revenge, couldn’t wait for this game, thirsty for more conflict, more drama, more dimensions, to hear themselves faux-analyze and smirk in that awful insider way, on pin-striped panels of hockey hasbeens. There was the pornography of the phone-in show, “the church of athletic self-opinion,” where it all gets said and the appetite for more extreme opinions is whetted. Since when did democracy mean everyone’s an expert?<br /><br />Moore didn’t see the hit coming, we’re told by the same pundits over the next weeks, and that’s what made it so dishonorable and also so dangerous, you see. But they imagined the violence so many times, placed it in the realm of possibilities, saw it coming and even called for it, dialed it up, defined and reinforced the code that would make such an act honorable. <br /><br />We are all complicit. Duh. <br /><br />But if he didn’t see it coming, he certainly heard the freight train of Bertuzzi, the clanging warnings around the ice, the blast of the horn to pull over, pal, if you know what’s good for you. At 8:41 of the third period, Moore decided to drive on. Bertuzzi did a bad and stupid thing and the pile-up was awful to see. May carries the puck, drops it like a clingy girlfriend, and begins his extraneous and automatic punch-up nearby. Hedberg gestures pathetically like a North American traffic cop to Aebescher: come over to my place, let’s throw goalie punches. Meanwhile, Moore was the worst version of horizontal we’ve seen. The game was no longer a metaphor for war, to borrow from Joyce Carol Oates; it was the thing itself.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-4572717263815238552008-03-27T20:26:00.000-07:002008-03-27T20:29:08.735-07:00Baby-lou, Where are You?Sportsnet Pacific runs a post-game panel show this season that usually features Iain MacIntyre of the Vancouver Sun and Ed Willes from the Province. The opinions are predictable, the insights not very insightful, especially if you’ve watched the game and can spot bad penalties called and/or taken, or Swedish twins doing the opposite of the cycle. MacIntyre has incredibly long legs, though, and is rarely silly. So I try to watch. Last week, the panel included another warm body from the Province (Editor? Publisher? Who knows). <br /><br />Trevor Linden—prior to his first game in eons—had reportedly gone all “I Have a Dream” in the room and inspired his mates to suck it up and get it on. They won. Roberto Luongo credited Saint Trev. The Province dude went ultra-blue collar and claimed to speak for fans (I paraphrase): “when players make that kind of money, losing shouldn’t be a psychological problem and at this point in the season, they better not need to be inspired by anybody, let alone a guy who most nights isn’t fast enough to keep up.” Burp.<br /><br />After seventy-five games and only a handful left—their bodies running on empty or ready for the junk yard—players, it seems to me, are all about psychology. To suggest that a high salary means they should turn off the head and crank up the body is a strange and awful sort of objectification that limits the game. I want the story of what a pro athlete’s body and mind—both—endure over a long season. The game is better when the formula for success includes the abstract: determination, creativity, heart, fear, regret.<br /><br />Roy MacGregor had a great story on Alex Kovalev in the Globe and Mail last weekend. It’s been thrilling to watch the ageing Hab do Fred Astaires through the neutral zone and tuck in goals wherever. Skill meets will. MacGregor writes, “He was remarkably gifted as a child: bright in school, exceptionally musical and a champion swimmer.” Then came the heart condition. Then came the hockey prowess and the consequent ill-will from other players and parents. Followed by shyness. MacGregor cites a list of things that have broken Kovalev’s spirit and also motivated him to try again: “He tore himself apart and rebuilt from scratch,” says MacGregor, to describe the difference between last year’s model and this one. “He tracked down old game tapes of how he had played in his prime and he studied the tapes, took notes and then set out to put what he had learned into practice.” Kovalev’s psychology has inspired the young dudes fuelling the eastern conference’s top squad.<br /><br />In a sport that seems, here in Vigneault’s Vancouver, mechanical, formulaic, predictable and doomed, a creative and heady player like Markus Naslund can look pretty sad most nights. Kovalev, MacGregor says, “considers himself a freelancer, a player so creative he delights in having nothing in mind until the precise moment when something happens. He is at his happiest when he is surprising even himself.” Even at this time of the season, I’m compelled more by the abstract details of a player’s psychology than I am by endless faux-debate about the relative fairness of skate-stomp suspensions. <br /><br />The look on Brendan Morrison’s face when he knew, before his one-legged hobble off the Colorado ice, that his season was, yet again, toast; his teammates’ faces crumpling as he left the game; the game, yet again, leaving them; the handsome all-star goalie playing a mile-high stinker at such a key time; his huge heart about to swell even bigger with the birth of his first (ill-timed) baby (What’s that tightening around his neck? It’s Scott Niedermayer’s goal in last year’s playoffs, the one that closed it down.): these have nothing to do with salaries and stats, and I’d rather be moved by them than simply feel the season crash down. When they stop being interesting in the ways all human beings are, I stop watching.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-41033535270970999162008-03-19T15:58:00.000-07:002008-03-19T16:03:39.318-07:00Seasonal DisorderJanuary to March: worst time to blog. Across the land, you can find posts from those apologizing for going so long off-post, for losing their knack and need for words, for being lazy and sloppy, for no longer caring if folks find their thoughts riveting. <br /><br />It’s also the dead zone for hockey fans. All-star break, trade deadline, mean-nothing low-scoring groaners, superstar injuries and redundant groin pulls. But March is here, and like the pure and lovely fawn lily, bloggers and optimists once again upturn their pimply, pale faces to the sunlight of the playoff run. (Jan-March: terrible metaphors happen.)<br /><br />The standings are too tight for me to fully commit to anything, plus I have tendonitis in my shoulder so can’t mow the lawn and fume about coaching decisions and inane eastern broadcasters, and so I am unable to reveal my true feelings about the Canucks (Trev: chin up), but until I do, I’m envious of those hockey bloggers who kept beating even through the dead zone. I’m also grateful. A number of them kindly read and reviewed Cold-cocked and not only did they say nice things, but they said smart and interesting and funny things, too. <br /><br />The book biz is mighty tight and testy, and it offers writers plenty of ways to feel ignored or undervalued (“Ya ya: boo hoo. Suck it up, you filthy Swede,” snarls my Cherry-esque alter-ego). Sometimes the best that can happen is if somebody in a far off land lets you know they got a kick out of your work. Correction: that’s always the best that can happen. Some night recently, a Washington Capitals blogger stopped watching Ovechkin take over the world long enough to blog that he was reading Cold-cocked and liked it. I’m honored.<br /><br />Publisher Dan over at Biblioasis.com posted a list of them that I’ll rerun here:<br /><br />On Frozen Blog: http://www.onfrozenblog.com/2008/02/25/cold-cocked-is-a-hot-read/<br /><br />Hockey Blog in Canada: http://hockey-blog-in-canada.blogspot.com/2008/02/tbc-cold-cocked-on-hockey.html <br /><br />Scarlett Ice: scarlettice.blogspot.com/2008/02/scarlett-ice-library-cold-cocked-on.html<br /><br />Untypical Girls: /untypicalgirls.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/book-review-cold-cocked-on-hockey/<br /><br />Women's Sports Blog: ftlouie.typepad.com/womensports/2008/02/le-book-review.html<br /><br />Caps Web Forum: http://www.network54.com/Forum/186043/thread/Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-47582780962740123232007-12-27T15:39:00.000-08:002007-12-27T15:41:47.341-08:00John Burns Dekes, ScoresThe winter solstice brings back the light, sure, and not a moment too soon. It also brings lots of salt and butter and crabbiness and, phew, World Junior Hockey from far away lands.<br /><br />Yesterday against the Czechs and this morning versus Slovakia—the wee nation that has already given us Hossas, two magic Marians, a pre-concussion Richard Zednik—the Canadians were snoozy and robotic. Great (fascistic) coaching is one thing, and “yay, we win again!” but must our junior tourny teams all play the same way and look like table hockey on big ice? Positionally sound, okay, but also predictable and machine-steady. Blame the salt and butter, but I nodded off—this was before 8 o’clock in BC, home of Kyle Turris—during the first two periods.<br /><br />Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht teaches the aesthetics of sport at Stanford and is the author of the neat little book, In Praise of Athletic Beauty. He's an egghead, sure, but Gumbrecht talks about how the greatest pleasure in sport (or in art), why we watch and cheer, is when the unexpected happens. Seems kinda duh put that way, but I like how it explains that faster heartbeat and instant call to attention when a mistake happens on ice, or a spasm of uncontrolled creativity. This morning, Drew Doughty (great name for a Canadian, or in the case of westcoasters, Self-Doughty) decided to spinorama in the neutral zone when we all thought (cause we know the game's usual rhythms and patterns) he was going to retreat and regroup. He’s long practised that move and apparently had been told by coaches to tone down such hotdoggery for this tournament, to take fewer chances. Even before the move led to the Turris goal, it was thrilling to see the game stop in its tracks and to watch imagination and spark—things we value in all teenagers—squeeze the game off those tracks and send it bumping and grinding toward the net. <br /><br />So far, things seem controlled and interesting and maybe we’ve moved beyond this as a nation (since the Super Series last year and the ’72 series before it) but: please. I don’t want to see the Canadians headshot the other team’s best forward so he can’t play, possibly ever again. <br /><br />And speaking of spinoramas: anyone remotely interested in Canadian sports writing should be sad that John Burns has announced he will soon be leaving the Georgia Straight. Over the last ten years, Burnsie has always let me review the sports books I wanted to, has always given sports writing a place to be considered and criticized as legitimate cultural commentary and as literature. During the writing of Cold-cocked: On Hockey (and also my forthcoming book, Flirt: The Interviews), he listened, cared, encouraged and let me read and review many of the books that informed my take on hockey and how we feel, read and write the game. Let’s hope he’s not feeling too Self-Doughty and knows that extreme change (aka “the old spinorama”) is truly the only way to become better and more.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-7608995145434602862007-12-19T23:01:00.000-08:002007-12-19T23:03:22.774-08:00Captain Emo's WristerHockey gets us worked up, sure. But at this time of the season, when no one’s yet running and gunning for the Cup and flu weakens road-ravaged teams of young men with germy preschoolers at home, sports coverage still suggests we should have opinions, should care about a player’s plus-minus, should review a slo-mo porn shot of a skate blade stomping a mouthy Finn’s ankle a million times to be sure our opinion matches everybody else’s.<br /><br />Likewise, coverage of Todd Bertuzzi. The sports headline in this morning’s Vancouver Sun: “‘Let’s go,’ new court papers reveal Bertuzzi wanted to fight Moore before sucker punch.” This is news? At the risk of having an opinion about something unknowable and past its best-before date as stories go, here are a few things about this so-called new information. <br /><br />Watch the tape of the March 8th game even once, and you will see Bertuzzi invite Steve Moore to fight again and again; if you are a practised lip reader, you will even see Big Bert toothlessly use the naughty language he was reluctant to repeat when recalling the events during discovery hearings because, he said “There’s two women in here.” (The Sun reporter refers to Bertuzzi as “sheepish” for this avoidance; must reporters speculate via the editorializing adjective?) We are informed—newsflash—that certain players even told management that coach Marc Crawford suggested they go after Colorado’s star players, Joe Sakic and Milan Hejduk. Really, news?<br /><br />Many interesting questions about that terrible night in Vancouver persist, but nothing media have passed on from these new documents should be considered newsworthy, or interesting. The Sun’s Cam Cole reported at the time of the sucker punch on Moore that Bertuzzi was only 50% to blame and that officials, the league and coaches were to blame for the other 50%. Tellingly absent from his equation were complicit media and fans, those who called for retribution, made a circus of the games following Moore’s own slo-mo porn hit on Captain Emo, Markus Naslund, those who wanted to see something happen and then were outraged and suddenly blameless when something did. <br /><br />Watch the tape even once and you’ll wonder: how did Dan Cloutier play so badly—in March, against a division rival, the playoffs a month away—that the score raced so high; why did Brad May come out of the second intermission so crazy, crazy enough to score on David Aebescher and then take a penalty for what he said and did to the goalie, not just once; why was Bertuzzi on the ice without Naslund; why did Moore’s coach, the soon-to-be demoted Tony Granato, have him on the ice in the third period in a one-sided game without any protection and why did Granato allow the score to rise in a perpendicular way (final: 9-2); why wasn’t the Cooke fight with Moore in the first period enough; why didn’t Captain Emo and Colorado’s captain Sakic engage in some act of diplomacy so that necks weren’t broken and careers and seasons forever screwed. But mostly, why was anyone surprised by any of it, given what we know about the brotherhood of the game, the secret society of players and coaches and management, the money and power involved. And why be surprised now?<br /><br />The surprise came back then because we had, once again confused professional sports with entertainment. They are not one and the same (well, David Beckham). That season, Bert and Nazzie and Mo were incredible to watch, on and off the ice. The story of that season was uplifting and exciting, and the team was winning with a brilliant first line that was getting a ton of press across the continent. Even their post-game smirks were heart-stopping. We were heading to the climax—A Cup win! Cue the cops downtown on horseback!—and the boys were so happy, the coach was letting them be creative (except when Bert wouldn’t backcheck and then Crawford benched him on Saturday night national tv), and the city was silly with optimism. We thought the team reflected us—fun, spirited, socially responsible and willing to visit the sick kids and cheer them up, to wear our hair in interesting Eurostyles—and that we would all be winners in a fine way. <br /><br />We got caught up in a really realistic fairy tale—a delightful bit of entertainment—and allowed ourselves to forget that professional sports is, okay, entertaining, but not necessarily entertainment. Hockey is not Celine in Vegas, or even the Beckhams in Hollywood: skinny, melodramatic and bland. It’s unpredictable. It goes where it wants, regardless, and the players—and the testocrats—are in charge. The story’s subtext belongs to them, the engine driving the story is theirs and fans will never really get it. And players don’t care if we don’t.<br /><br />Sucker punch, retribution, skate blade as weapon: all outrageous, okay, duh. But it was lovely and more interesting last night to watch Captain Emo beat Martin Brodeur—twice.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-42234981120598505162007-12-05T10:21:00.000-08:002007-12-05T10:23:17.874-08:00St. Trev in No Man's LandCoach Vigneault won’t let Trev play. Trev who is skating like a happy stallion this year, who is often the only Canuck finishing checks and causing turnovers, who is bigger than 80% of the team, who was dangerous always versus Chicago the night I went, who looks unbelievable without a helmet in the warm-up skate, who resembles Christ—or a real human being—in the new pics from Children’s Hospital. I’m not saying he’s got what Selanne or Modano or Kariya still have—he’s not a miracle vet—but the games are no fun to watch without him. <br /><br />I’m feeling shunned by the game and I’m so cranky I’ve gone back to the essays of Jean-Marie Brohm in Sport: A Prison of Measured Time, a dandy little anti-capitalist, anti-organized sport tirade from seventies post-Vietnam France. <br /><br />Here’s a sip of its Red Bull elixir. According to Monsieur Brohm, <br /><br />Sport is a concentrated form, an officially promoted microcosm, of all the ideological prejudices of bureaucratic, bourgeois society:<br /><br />--the cult of the champion and star-system;<br />--the cult of promotion, social advancement, and the hierarchy;<br />--the myth of transcending one’s own limitations through effort;<br />--character building;<br />--sexual repression, the healthy life etc;<br />--the brotherhood of man, everyone united on the sports field;<br />--nationalism and chauvinism<br /><br />Sport is also, for example, a type of opiate of the people and a means of militarizing and regimenting youth and repressing sexuality and reinforcing the commodity spectacle. <br /><br />Trev, in other words, doesn’t have a chance in today’s NHL and neither do Canucks fans. <br /><br />We’re told that our kids should play sports in order to build character, confidence, fitness. But studies—and Brohm—also suggest what every nine-year-old picked last for field hockey knows: sports can breed and reward aggression, selfishness, arbitrary hierarchies; it can destroy self-esteem and permanently injure pride and knees. The ideology of sports celebrates discipline, competition, self-abnegation and chauvinism. It is bureaucratic and hierarchical. Those don’t always help kids be kids or grow up to be kind, helpful, and healthy adults. Like Trev.<br /><br />Superstitious or just faithful? Addicted or merely loyal? Obsessed or just really focussed? Sports fans are clever justifiers. Scoring is down in the league and so fans are upset because the game isn’t thrilling. Oh please. Scoring is down and fans are upset because every morning when they look at their fantasy pools and they’re still not winning their own little game, they think it’s the fault of players, or the neutral zone trap, or the schedule, or the refs. There is nothing aesthetically or psychologically bad about a 2-1 game, unless the guys who scored and assisted on the 3 goals are 4th liners and not in your pool, and you’ve got the goalie who coulda hadda shutout.<br /> (Derek Roy, I beg you: Get. It. On.) <br /><br />Lack of scoring will not kill hockey in Vancouver. Violence and headshots won’t. Never winning the Cup, no. In Vancouver, hockey will fizzle to its pre-Bert and Nazzie lukewarm insignificance if <br /><br />a) zealots can’t see this many games because Pay Per View is the only way to get them and we refuse to give the greedy and infatuated cable companies any more of our paycheques and <br /><br />b) gritty no-name call-ups become the face of the team and we have to watch Trev look spiffy but sad up in the press box. <br /><br />Linden says he has faith that he can “make a difference” for the team by staying ready and being positive around the guys. It isn’t reasonable for fans to prefer the positionally sound Linden to the scrappy little terriers who have replaced him and who might Alpha-dog their way to the playoffs. The difference he makes is not reasonable, or statistical. It is sentimental. Of course, we can’t win if we give in to emotion. But some of us don’t want to win without it and we will, once again, turn away from the game.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-77368772513764660482007-12-01T15:37:00.000-08:002007-12-05T10:24:49.787-08:00No Leafs, No Sens: Go Coastal~TSN’s Darren “The Dregs” Dreger guesses out loud that Ryan Kesler is due to be traded to Philadelphia and pretends to be reporting an inside scoop, which makes me throw a pillow at the set and also sends my daughter to bed early from woe: “First Jovo, now him,” she says. Kesler is a Canucks-Hockey specialist—defensive, surly, big, mobile, Lindenian—and won’t be going anywhere so we can afford a slow-developing and intermittent Jeff Carter. Dregger also suggests that Alex Edler could sweeten the deal. Edler is now playing in every key situation—offensive, defensive, up one, down two, shutout (or three) to protect—and most nights looks like Nick Lidstrom as a much younger man. He’ll stay, too. But remember: All the TSN boys predicted at the start of the season that Vancouver would miss the playoffs and practically guffawed in glee at the possibility. This was before surly bright boy, Kevin Bieksa, had most of his leg cut off and Sami Salo got a full-metal face.<br /><br />~Todd Bertuzzi returns to oppose for the first time as a Duck. He looks great during the press conference: slim, bright-eyed, mocking and yet semi-respectful. He gets some cheering from the few thousand who attend the warm-up at 6:30 and then gets nothing else from the fans. Game broadcaster TSN repeatedly reports that the fan response to him is lukewarm and muted, his return a non-event, and implies that Bertuzzi doesn’t interest fans here. I left GM Place the Sunday night before, after the game versus Chicago, and the young mouthy guys striding up Dunsmuir St. behind me were all, “Ya, I hope Bert scores a goal—I do—but I hope we score more” and “I totally wish him well.” The absence of booing or cheering or responding whenever Bert touched the puck was the highest form of flattery and respect from very smart and still wrecked Vancouver fans; it was the only way to show him the sort of deep and enduring feelings they have: we love you and so we’ll let you be.<br /><br />~The morning after that game I attended versus Chicago, I caught a floatplane home from Vancouver harbour at 7:30 a.m. And there’s Brendan Morrison sipping a coffee, big legs stretched out, off to do some fishin’ before tomorrow’s game, and the sky’s not yet bright. Game-winning goal the night before, a cheery-faced and lisping coastal fun-lover the next morning. <br /><br />~Versus Anaheim: Ryan Kesler chest-to-chest with Ryan Getzlaf: provoking, challenging, mocking. Kesler scored twice that night despite a rib-cracking post-goal crosscheck by Chris Pronger. My friend Hoggwild suggests that Colin Campbell is likewise afraid of Pronger’s wife.<br /><br />~Coyote Jovo’s suspended a game for bonking Marian Gaborik on the head with only seconds to play. Is it possible this was a cross-fertilizing retaliation for Gaborik’s elbow to the head of Ryan Kesler, the game in which Mattias Ohlund was suspended four for a bone-breaking whack on Mikko Koivu’s ankle after the Finn’s elbow somehow found Ohlie’s noggin? Nope, but my daughter would like to think Jovo still has feelings for us all.<br /><br />~The unbelievable Pinky and the Brain live and in person. <br /><br />~Last night, I attended a local ECHL game and watched the Victoria Salmon Kings (and super-dancer Marty the Marmot) get down 4-1 in the first period versus the Phoenix Roadrunners and come back to win 5-4 in overtime after losing their starting goalie. <br /><br />~All I want for Christmas: the Derek Sanderson nude which sold this week in Boston: http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/gallery/hockey_paintings?pg=5Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-28773599835715930842007-11-02T19:05:00.000-07:002007-11-02T19:06:30.830-07:00Not a Winning GameI’m delighted that Cold-cocked: On Hockey was named last week to the longlist of the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-fiction. It’s the award’s fourth year, given by the BC Achievement Foundation in recognition of worthy literary non-fiction nationwide. The value went up this year from 25k to 40k making it the most generous non-fiction prize in Canada. (That would buy a lot of deer fence, I’m just saying.)<br /><br />For writers, it feels better to be on a list than off. And when you’re shunned by prize lists—my books, plenty of times—the typical response is both fight and flight: “Screw the bad jury, anti-creativity culture, youth-centric publishers, all the dirty capitalists,” and then in the resulting midnight bubblebath, “I’m a fat old ugly stupid loser.” So what I have to say is, of course, influenced by the intoxicating fumes of semi-formal recognition.<br /><br />The fine 31-year-old writer, Stephen Marche, has recently criticized the state of CanLit, specifically the shortlist for the Giller Prize. In an urbane and punchy—and erratic—article in the Toronto Star, and today on CBC Radio’s hip afternoon show, Q, Marche suggests that the Giller list represents all that’s wrong with Canadian writing: the writers are too old, the lit too oatmealy, too reliant on a literary style he believes came into vogue in some bad past decade, too establishment. He wonders, Where on the list are the young edgy writers, the CanLit equivalent of those he saw in Brooklyn where he was working recently? We call it a novel, he says, because it’s supposed to be just that. And he was mean to John Metcalf and Martin Levin, assuming that these men are more problem than solution. (Seems an undeserving nest to shit it: Metcalf has long edited and consoled unconventional writers like me who seem to fit Marche’s preferred formula, and Levin is likely the reason Canada’s newspaper still has a Books section at all and gives writers something to do Saturday morning while scarfing the day’s first tea and apple fritter.) <br /><br />What’s old? For Marche, 40 might be the cut-off, but then he says, really, it’s more to do with a writer’s sensibility and willingness to ride a skateboard to work. What’s good? Well, the good CanLit is that which is endorsed by Americans before being accepted here. In other words, the Yanks know their art, we don’t because we’re messed up still by pesky post-colonial blah blah. See, the writers of ours the Yanks love—Douglas Copeland, Sheila Heti, etc—haven’t made it to the Gillers. Marche’s logical fallacies are dizzying, his assumptions about excellence and hierarchies worrying, his essentializing and generalizing and prescribing seem cranky and old-fashioned. Cue the bubblebath.<br /><br />The Giller shortlist may be tepid, and we can and should debate the relative merits of the books on it, but to discover all those boxes he wants to check, Marche need only have looked at the 15 titles on the Giller longlist: young writers and their first books; innovators in form, technique and plot; small presses taking chances (Oops, wait. He didn’t complain about the major publishers taking over the industry and foregoing creative risk-taking because their marketers are making editorial decisions. That was me. Marche is a Penguin man, lucky duck.) <br /><br />The jury system is the democratic way to decide these things—and come on: it’s now the Scotiabank Giller Prize; it’s not all about art—and as with any other democratic dance, missteps happen. And as in any cultural or social endeavor when elders, based on their lifelong commitment to a mostly thankless pursuit, earn the honor and privilege of mentoring and adjudicating their peers, mistakes are made, or we think they are and then realize, twenty years later, that we didn’t understand as much as we thought we did. Any book reviewer (me, for example) knows how flittery aesthetic judgement can be. But we keep reading and judging because we believe the debate matters, that writers deserve our considered attention, our hardest thinking. Silly old fools.<br /><br />I feel very lucky to be included on such a great longlist. Many worthy books are not on it (the bad part of longlists: more statistical reasons for self-doubt in those left off). The jury has selected 5 men and 5 women from diverse geographies; some small presses (Goose Lane, Biblioasis, Nightwood), some medium (Anansi, Thomas Allen) some big (Viking, M&S, Knopf); a couple of poets (Tim Bowling and Lorna Goodison) and a rock star (Naomi Klein); literary non-fiction has been allowed a wonderfully broad definition that includes history, biography, religion, memoir. And, yippee, sports.<br /><br />After listening to Marche this afternoon, I looked at the many Governor General’s Award non-fiction lists over the years, and only three times, I think, has a sports book made that shortlist. Dave Bidini’s brilliant and beautiful Baseballissimo? Nope. In 1983, Ken Dryden’s The Game lost out to a biography of Lord Byng. Aside from really really wanting deer fence, I hope my book’s inclusion on the BC Award list will offer reassurance, consolation and maybe inspiration: keep at it long enough, write how and what thrills you, work so hard your brain smokes, and eventually you may be read a little by nice people, even if you’re a woman with bad knees in her fifties writing about hockey, sheep, Vancouver Island, and war, even if you wrote a book that the medium and large presses ignored, shunned, refused to risk.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-40170760692481599552007-10-23T07:47:00.000-07:002007-10-23T07:51:29.696-07:00Desperatefrom InsideHockey.com<br /><br />It usually happens to me early October, Hockey Night in Canada on the little television upstairs, Maple Leafs home to Tampa Bay maybe. Colour man Don Cherry pitches his first mega-snit of the year, tells the kids at home that hockey players should be manly warriors and not visor-wearing Franco-sissies, and my teenaged daughter leaves the room because I’m shouting and shaking so much she can’t enjoy Vincent Lecavalier’s post-goal hug with Martin St. Louis. This year, though, my first rage came late, and Dandy Don didn’t start it. <br /><br />Another network—the usually relevant TSN—recently commissioned a poll to track Sidney Crosby’s relative celebrity status in Canada. He’s likely the best hockey player in the world, they figured, but does that make him a cultural icon? Quiet the irritated voice in your head shrieking why why why would anyone waste the time of 1000 (500 men, 500 women) busy folks. On a list of Can-stars of all ilk—actors, musicians, celebs—Sid finished #6, between Avril Lavigne and Nelly Furtado and a couple behind Wayne Gretzky. (Even though they didn’t ask anybody in Quebec—huh?—Celine Dion was still #1.) On its own, the poll seems a silly and undignified way to treat athletes, but not enough to make me shout and shake. <br /><br />But then: “In a game dominated by male fans,” says the report’s voice-over, and my mad-o-meter starts to rise, “it’s no surprise that men appreciate Crosby’s play with the Pittsburgh Penguins.” Men, ya see, know what it takes to finesse circus-assists from your knees while demon d-men hack your Nova Scotian face with sharp sticks, or to use your impossible quadriceps to power through a surly Slovakian centre’s desperation backcheck. Because men get it. They know stuff. They dominate the game with their amazing hockey sense.<br /><br />And women? They who make up close to half of ticket buyers, depending on where you find your stat? “Crosby’s popularity is surprisingly high among women.” Cue the cute blonde on the street: “He’s young, he’s hot, he’s got tons of money…” she says. And cue the pretty gossip girl-slash-cultural critic from Entertainment Television: “You know what?” she sporty-spouts, “Youth and wealth are powerful aphrodisiacs.” <br /><br />Back to HNIC. The Canadian public broadcaster is doing fine work to respect female fans and to acknowledge that women watch the game, understand it, are passionate about NHL hockey and its players, and get it from the inside, too: women play. Cassie Campbell—of the gold-medal-winning 2002 Olympic team—interviews players rinkside and gets them to seem personable; between periods, we get on-ice lessons with a veteran player/coach drilling pre-teen co-ed players. The goalie usually has her hair ponytailed. For a league desperate to woo new fans and re-stoke its old ones, this approach to broadcasting seems not only sensible, but strategic. There’s plenty of game for everybody.<br /><br />Do women enjoy the next-door handsomeness of hockey players? Do men see in Crosby the boy they couldn’t be or the son they never had? Of course, and vice versa. Fans choose athletes not only for talent and competitive star-power, for their ability to bring home the Cup. They also align themselves with character. In Vancouver, veteran Trevor Linden sets the standard for civic duty and humanitarianism, and men admire him as a gentleman and a saint who raises his game for the playoffs. He’s also the one guy women from 14 to 90 would marry in a minute, providing he quarterbacks the 5-on-3 kill, wins every draw from Joe Sakic, and doesn’t stiffen those curls with too much gel. Drafted into the city at 18, Linden has grown up in front of fans for almost two decades and has shown skill, grit and heart on the ice. His hand-eye may be on the downslide, but his appeal is still complex and important. <br /><br />One day, Crosby’s appeal will be, too. In the meantime, those who profit from the game and its #1 draw are a little too desperate to assign legendary status to a kid so young his whiskers droop.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-74642839502124552112007-10-07T18:07:00.001-07:002007-10-07T18:07:54.494-07:00New Game, Same OldAn interview I did a few weeks ago with www.thetyee.ca reveals the startling revelation that I did not pick Markus Naslund in my hockey pool this year and tells why. But so guilty and disloyal did I feel after that interview, I joined another pool and chose Naslund while others scoffed. I’m glad I did. <br /><br />Last night versus Calgary Flame Mikka Kiprusoff, he picked up the puck in his own end, powered Swedishly—teamless and bleak like an Ingmar Bergman character—down the wing and wristed a quick, off-balance and screened shot between goalie and post. Jim Hughson—congenial, articulate and smooth Hockey Night in Canada play-by-play dude—has said Naslund-of-old could shoot into a teacup, but this retro-Nazzie goal drew only excuses and justifications: Kiprusoff, as they say in the latest and lamest of hockey cliches, “would like to have that one back”; it was a softy, a fluke. Seriously?<br /><br />In overtime, a handful of seconds to go, Hughson was already mid-chewout—he believed that had Naslund not left the point to dig for a scrambled draw he would have been in position to grab it and shoot—when Naslund found the puck anyhoo, muscled around a defender, passed improbably to Mattias Ohlund who shot hard and clean high-slottishly. Daniel Sedin, as always, tucked the wee rebound across the line. <br /><br />Fave moment of the game: third period and amazing hulk, Calgary’s Dion Phaneuf, chases down the puck in his own end thinking icing call; Naslund goes after him on the boards, believing no-call. Phaneuf is about 6’3” and 210 pounds. Naslund is 5’11” and 195 and 12 years older than the gifted 22-year-old. The whistle to signal icing comes late, just as Naslund bumps him as he should. And we catch young Phaneuf outraged and shouting at Naslund like a cranky kid up past his bedtime, “That was fucking late!” as Vancouver’s captain does his familiar fed-up and testy removal of mouth guard, reasons tilty-headed with the ref, and stutters off to the penalty box for so-called roughing. <br /><br />So the Canucks win the game with seconds to go. Daniel: goal and assist. Naslund: same. Ohlund, too. Alex Burrows was a wizard on the penalty kill, five-on-three a couple of times. And who gets picked for the 3 stars (remember: a couple of nights ago analyst Kelly Hrudey referred to Calgary as “we”)? First: a Flame. Second: a Flame. <br /><br />In the earlier televised game—Montreal and Toronto—what last year was the Mastercard 3-star selection is now sponsored by Steelback beer, which host Ron MacLean suggested should make sidekick Don Cherry happy. Steelback, we recall, acquired naming rights to the new home of the Sault St. Marie Greyhounds, and so what used to be the Sault Memorial Gardens became the Steelback Centre, yet another hockey arena named to erase the ghosts of veterans in favour of the false god of commerce. (Here in Victoria, the new arena for the Salmon Kings was to be called Save-On Foods Arena until veterans and their families lobbied to restore the Memorial from the original Memorial Arena.) Later, the Steelback beer commercial comes on: gorgeous blonde shimmies her estimable cleavage up to the bar, asks for her beer in a can, and then a double-entendred flirt about size ensues with the bartender. The punchline: “size matters.” Beer, blondes, boobs and boytalk: if this is the new NHL, axe the shootout and sign me up for the old game. Saturday night shouldn’t be so confusing, or so adolescent. <br /><br />It was an evening of mixed messages. I love the new instructional breaks. Former players get host MacLean on the ice to run drills with a bunch of hotshot kids and they learn a new skill. Smart, clear, fun: hockey. But then, later in the broadcast, MacLean and Colin Campbell (Senior VP and Director of Hockey Operations for the NHL) and retired winger Scott Mellanby, sit suited and handsome in their sleek leather club chairs, and they watch a pornographically large flat screen play and replay and play again and again—slower this time—young (and now ultra-suspended) Steve Downie’s headshot on veteran Dean McAmmond. We watch them watch. We have all seen this hit many times. And Mellanby’s expertise is welcome, but the three men look at the screen and so do we, and none of us is given the option to look away. Over and over, Downie leaves his feet, launches himself to attack another man’s head, and we are expected to watch. <br /><br />Once—the night it happened—was enough. Why must we see it so often and so slow? Cherry tells the kids it was a dirty hit and wags his don’t-do-it finger at his implied audience. But any kid still awake and paying attention can see that if you do that kind of thing, the world makes it look big and important, watches and seems to enjoy watching. <br /><br />We’re told that over the summer, the League sent teams instructional DVDs in order to qualify and quantify the criteria by which to judge a shot to the head not only illegal but punishable by suspension. Players were warned; it didn’t sink in for Downie. Instead of watching MacLean watch the hit last night, I’d like to hear those criteria and hear the pundits apply them to certain hits that have stained my imagination. Kyle MacLaren’s playoff clothesline of Richard Zednik a few years back. Should Chris Pronger’s elbow to the same concussed head of Dean McAmmond in last year’s playoff have gotten more than that measly one-game suspension? Would the outcomes of Steve Moore’s unpenalized hit to the head of the reaching and vulnerable Markus Naslund—the concussion, the bone chips vacuumed from his elbow, the missing wrist shot, Moore’s own broken neck—been different had the League made Moore sit for a few games?Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-14059430614244784232007-09-30T18:19:00.000-07:002007-09-30T18:20:55.108-07:00Big Bert in BritainThe Best American Sports Writing series collects some of the year’s finest North American writing about sports into one hugely entertaining and inspiring volume. I’m into 2006 and, as usual, some are profound—young and determined wrestling champ without arms and legs—and a few ultra-quirky—poaching bass on golf courses. But the writing is always good, the angles often unexpected. I remember a few years ago a piece that explored that form of extreme fighting boys did in backyards: if they fell, they fell onto nails poking up from the ring’s floor. “Sports” gets a wide definition in these anthologies, as it should. Editor Michael Lewis writes:<br /><br />“At any given time, it seems, there are a surprising number of writers of serious literary ability who are out there beating the bushes and scaring up moving and delightful stories—even when higher literary culture has no particular interest in them. They are doing the important work of explaining us to ourselves. What’s reassuring about great sports writing is what’s reassuring about great sports performances: facing opposition, and often against the odds, someone, at last, did something right.”<br /><br />Big Bert in Britain. It seemed like a wacky road movie—Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and Bob Hope do Piccadilly Circus—to see Brian Burke, Brad May, and Todd Bertuzzi in the NHL’s first game of the season on Saturday morning. Or maybe I’m thinking of that Monkees movie, Head. Much will be made, no doubt, of the crowd’s extreme pleasure when gloves were dropped and punches attempted. Yes, they stood and the cheering was hooligan loud, Parros on Thornton. But it seemed folks were simply trying to take part in the game according to a script. They boo-ed Chris Pronger, too, in what seemed a parody of North American fans. <br /><br />Bert, though. He has slimmed and toned and healed. He looks less like a Hummer, now, and more like a stretch limo. His number has shed half its weight, too: he seems dignified and demure in the number 4, whereas he was arrogant and overloaded in 44. We’re told the Ducks want him to play a north-south game, as opposed to the east-west he perfected on the big line here with Naslund and Morrison. I’m worried. North-south is for young gods like Getzlaf and Perry, those with a good, strong compass and quadriceps the size of pumpkins. (Lest we forget what happened to another #4 who loved north-south so much his knees came apart like rotten jack-o-lanterns.) Bertuzzi appeared limber at last this weekend, but how many times can that new long and lean torso survive the physics of Willie Mitchell at the blue line?Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-62888808333670241972007-09-09T14:19:00.000-07:002007-09-09T14:23:22.552-07:00Sermon on Bear Mountain<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdp2TMMBU3b3LnXQ_JhfhKGNHCY5MYFAc_bjIe3KG_OdM3Gzzfm6x2dyPgaDXzfVTlKJuTGEChyphenhyphenaO7afSwF_SuhbXVoc_chKdugTs47obHb5GnU6k49_uHraMRVO-8TfZSqatgxi5QQqUT/s1600-h/800px-St_Marys_Kerrisdale.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdp2TMMBU3b3LnXQ_JhfhKGNHCY5MYFAc_bjIe3KG_OdM3Gzzfm6x2dyPgaDXzfVTlKJuTGEChyphenhyphenaO7afSwF_SuhbXVoc_chKdugTs47obHb5GnU6k49_uHraMRVO-8TfZSqatgxi5QQqUT/s320/800px-St_Marys_Kerrisdale.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108317595922876770" /></a><br />Scoot down the list of Canadian hockey clichés and you’ll get to “hockey is our religion,” a slick little sound bite masquerading as a truism. Since I haven’t been to church since they left me off the Sunday school picnic roster (St. Mary’s Anglican), it’ll do. But come on: different quality of worship, depth of contemplation, spiritual dimension. Plus, no need for shiny shoes. <br /><br />Let’s get tautological and just make religion our religion. I did not get up, dress nice, and go to church this sunny Sunday morning. I got up, dressed warm, and watched Canucks prospects while Canada geese ripped up the nearby soccer pitch, silverhairs chortled over on the Par 3, and no one yet guzzled sports drinks seductively on the beach volleyball court. <br /><br />Bear Mountain Arena didn’t smell of century-old Douglas fir floors and the choir’s crop-dusted Evening in Paris this morning. The French fries already promised transfat paradise and the thongsters c-phoning in front of me—Britney/Chelsea/Tiffany—wore such fragrant unguents in their hair I had to move seats or tempt migraine.<br /><br />I didn’t sing high and warbly, but I did gasp and say “Holy shit” to no one when big Swedish-Iranian Daniel Rahini refused to back off his check.<br /><br />I didn’t pray at all, but I did hope hard that our terrier du jour, Mason Raymond—who the Canucks vets good-dogged last week—continues to root out and chew up loose pucks. But even a terrier has to back check, right? And how many of these fast little buggers have we tried (Brandon Reid et al) only to watch them skate snout-first into Alpha-dog Chris Pronger’s big ugly knee?<br /><br />Sunlight didn’t stream through stained glass and fall colourfully across the shoulders of a chosen one, but I must say defenceman Alex Edler—6’3” and 194 pounds—resembles the second coming of a skinnier Mattias Ohlund, or a taller Nick Lidstrom. Bless the Swedes for they will become us.<br /><br />I did not worship, no. But I really liked Dan Gendur, Shaun Heshka and Taylor Ellington.<br /><br />And, lo, I didn’t regret my trespasses or vow to improve myself, but I really wanted to explain the Protestant work ethic to Luc Bourdon—(as mediocre David Foster once said to under-achieving Michael Buble, “Good is the enemy of great, kid.”)—and also eyeball the stats he put up in last week’s fitness tests. He’s looking a little New Testament for my liking.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-70222717930684084912007-08-28T17:38:00.000-07:002007-08-29T19:28:07.082-07:00Ufa, then Omsk<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFAm6b_LLDRWFjLjbyz1yTIM5tFPa01WhrRMN73rCkAl6-LEnc0Litofbc7DNA8CX1ji_IPwrKuBAxq1xl-wx-PanLBf8GC5FkR9I9mPSYQ_uIuVCgf2NjWVOmaZzsHGAOG6CgYjVojuMp/s1600-h/s801425036_1121481_9867.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFAm6b_LLDRWFjLjbyz1yTIM5tFPa01WhrRMN73rCkAl6-LEnc0Litofbc7DNA8CX1ji_IPwrKuBAxq1xl-wx-PanLBf8GC5FkR9I9mPSYQ_uIuVCgf2NjWVOmaZzsHGAOG6CgYjVojuMp/s200/s801425036_1121481_9867.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104314578006031458" /></a><br /><br />Gripe #465: Kenya Airways over-booked my daughter’s flight and made her spend another night in Nairobi. NOW where is she?<br /><br />Gripe #466: A huge bloated grey squirrel is snatching plums off my tree, skittering along the veggie patch snake fence, up the arbutus, and then in through the attic window above my office. <br /><br />Gripe #467: Read almost any book on hockey from the last 50 years, and you’ll be told that a) we all grew up wanting to play in the NHL; b) hockey matters because we’re a nation of ice-dwellers in a land of non-stop winter; c) Leafs and Habs matter most. <br /><br />By 6 a.m. yesterday morning, I sat puffy-eyed on the couch with a pot of Murchie’s Library tea, multigrain (organic) toast heaped with blackberry jam (my berries), two dogs, two cats (zero daughters). Later, I’d mow lawns, harvest basil, hang wet towels on the line, but for a couple of hours while the sun got high, I was in Ufa, Russia with the boys and their Super Series.<br /><br />Not a moment too soon. Sure: go Mariners! (someone please help Ichiro get underpants that fit). Sure: woo-hoo! to a Federer-Djokovic final (see p. 631 of Sept. Vogue Magazine). Sure: will Dave Dickenson ever get his brain back? But I can’t tell you how relieved, happy and calm I felt settling in to watch hockey yesterday morning. And listen: I didn’t dream of the NHL growing up in Vancouver; in Victoria, primroses bloom in February, Matt Pettinger trains on the beach, and the Courtnalls still hold court; here, we’re not that into Leafs, Habs, or Sens.<br /><br />There’s little that’s more pleasurable, even at 6 a.m. at the end of summer, than panicking when a Canadian hockey team blows the first ten minutes of a game (or the first game of a tournament), then watching the coaches tinker with systems and combos, and the players adjust their hearts and minds to turn it around.<br /><br />If yesterday’s kind of win is thanks to the backyard rink, then explain my pride when Milan Lucic was named captain of Team Canada, a boy whose Serbian parents met and married in Vancouver, who after years as a Vancouver Giants punisher will captain the Memorial Cup defenders next year. <br /><br />Explain wee Kyle Turris, he who deked and kicked and head-faked his way through big-stage pressure to score on that penalty shot, who grew up near the Fraser River in temperate New Westminster, played for the Burnaby Express in the BCHL, Junior A Player of the Year, drafted 3rd overall by Wayne “Backyard” Gretzky. <br /><br />Hockey doesn’t have to rely on the familiar patterns and standard storylines. It doesn’t belong to men, or easterners, or athletes, or North Americans. The game is big; we can share. Tomorrow morning, Omsk. But Sept. 9, they’ll be home to play in Vancouver.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-1730926965003692992007-08-17T19:05:00.001-07:002007-08-17T19:06:28.189-07:00After Toro<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnHZ0jW2ITJ-Vif9Wicc5uDUz07uOVaK_t4ZmkzoV-2psiwEgTVt1fQ3dYERQ1awqgiS45i6fHlVqcZWmrofZhHmt8kyKO_5r7dY4ysqGKiAPYukxC2AXz-ho0yfa_011HpC3kf0Gt5-B-/s1600-h/b6.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnHZ0jW2ITJ-Vif9Wicc5uDUz07uOVaK_t4ZmkzoV-2psiwEgTVt1fQ3dYERQ1awqgiS45i6fHlVqcZWmrofZhHmt8kyKO_5r7dY4ysqGKiAPYukxC2AXz-ho0yfa_011HpC3kf0Gt5-B-/s200/b6.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5099855920916446274" /></a><br />It gave us the world according to Toronto’s penis. It unforgivably Photoshopped Steve Nash’s acne scars. But each year Toro also gave us The Sports Issue. Now that it’s gassed, where to find magazine writers getting paid by the word to think hard and write smart about the cultures of sport?<br /><br />Newspapers have stars and I admire them—Iain MacIntyre on hockey at the Vancouver Sun for his courage to take a metaphor and bend it like …um…okay, just bend it; Stephen Brunt on boxing at the Globe for knowledge that is wide and deep. But I want glossy paper, many words and a great photo. I want to make a fat mug of milky tea, wedge the good cushion at the small of my back, welcome the two dogs to lie at my feet, and know I’ve got a ways to go before I’m done reading. And I want to feel as much on that couch as I do watching the best minutes of sports (at midnight, Frank Dancevic’s first set versus Rafi’s left bicep).<br /><br />See Adam Gopnick’s “Last of the Metrozoids” (originally in the New Yorker and collected in Through the Children’s Gate). Try not blubbering at the end. It’s a stunning pastiche of art history, pedagogy, and football that depicts the final year of art historian, Kirk Varnedoe. One minute he’s explaining Stella and Cezanne to SRO crowds in Washington, and the next he’s teaching the ol’ flea flicker to eight-year-old boys on a small field in New York after yet another round of chemotherapy. <br /><br />Or Bruce Grierson’s profile of squash antihero, Jonathan Power—“Court Jester”—originally in Saturday Night and collected in Brunt’s The Way it Looks from Here. <br /><br />John McPhee’s in his seventies now and gets to write about anything he wants—plate tectonics and contemporary rail transport, for example. His father was physician to U.S. Olympic teams for more than a decade and for forty years treated college athletes. Some of McPhee’s most wonderful writing is about athletes. The books A Sense of Where You Are—about Bill Bradley as a college basketball player—and Levels of the Game—a deconstruction of one of Arthur Ashe’s early matches—are classics. Read Dave Bidini’s The Best Game You Can Name and certain chapters of Brunt’s Searching for Bobby Orr, and witness the McPhee model celebrated and emulated to perfection. <br /><br />In the August 6 issue of the New Yorker, McPhee writes about this year’s U.S. Open golf tourney in Oakmont, Pennsylvania and all the great McPhee moves are there. The present-tense description of icons with a weird verb and a suggestive comparison—“Woods stands motionless, feet together, his gaze levelled on the fairway, his posture as perpendicular as military attention.” The bit of personal history expressed in witty restrospect—“…aged twenty-four, clearly, if not for the first time, I envisioned golf as a psychological Sing Sing in which I was an inmate.” And the lovely bits of hand-polished research—“Oakmont greens are not covered with bent grass, as greens are on most Eastern courses. Oakmont uses a Poa annua of its own creation which bears few seeds and therefore results in what golfers describe as a ‘less pebbly’ surface.”<br /><br />A couple of years ago, I griped to writer Arley McNeney about how hard it is to make sports writing as interesting and artful as a good short story or a perfect pop song. Arley was working on her first novel, Post, and still soured by only a bronze medal at the Athens Olympics playing for Canada’s wheelchair basketball squad. “Somebody wins, somebody loses. That’s sports,” she simplified. “How interesting can it be?” Her novel, of course, is about much more than that: the body and its betrayals; the heart’s great short stories and stupid pop songs; about New Westminster, spirituality, determination; the brain’s connection to a body with a mind of its own. <br /><br />These elements—and the wisdom, patience and cash to explore them at some length—also make for great sports writing in magazines.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-62799052185561097132007-08-09T15:42:00.000-07:002007-08-09T15:49:19.241-07:00In which Markus the Swede encounters Juan de Fuca the Greek and concerning Max the dog<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqEdXw1ghVRhOt3PR57rz7UEnVTTmzEtaZ-fGRgI0Mi8MJwBnIe8-tGplY4FbMLPUrwvBjA3JrcgAiNYwPPOw6iTTU8zD6ngTl8fsqS5V2Afp22waND9p_3ZuVN5TBptq7eEfVtepCEhek/s1600-h/n801425036_814505_7496.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqEdXw1ghVRhOt3PR57rz7UEnVTTmzEtaZ-fGRgI0Mi8MJwBnIe8-tGplY4FbMLPUrwvBjA3JrcgAiNYwPPOw6iTTU8zD6ngTl8fsqS5V2Afp22waND9p_3ZuVN5TBptq7eEfVtepCEhek/s200/n801425036_814505_7496.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5096835495334115810" /></a><br />When I moved to Metchosin on the southern tip of Vancouver Island fourteen years ago, we—there are five—were called the Western Communities. I like the sound of that: a hint of cowboys and agrarians, of gentler enterprise and neighbourliness. Enter big-box everything, then 1200-acre Westin Bear Mountain golf resort—“a true lifestyle experience”—and now we are called West Shore. <br /><br />The shore belongs to Juan de Fuca Strait. From where I’m sitting—well, if I stand tall and the wind blows from the south—I can glimpse across the strait to where Raymond Carver wrote “Cathedral” late in life. Turn around and look past the trunk of the balsam that crushed my car in December (demon wind from the west), there’s where Emily Carr set up late in life to escape the city and paint forest. Metchosin is still pretty rural. For weeks I’ve been trying to outsmart a huge and clever white-tailed buck that sleeps on my septic field, rises to dismantle my gate, and clearcuts the romano bean plants. Bats hang in the attic above my office. Rats, mink, owls, turkey vultures. <br /><br />Cold-cocked: On Hockey is mostly a meditation on the game and a recap of the Big Line seasons of the Vancouver Canucks. By writing it, I wanted to answer the hockey questions, “Why me, why now, why them?” and figure out why many were so drawn to the game again after the Salt Lake Olympics. In part, too, the book is about the difference between Vancouver, where I grew up, and Metchosin where I grow now. While I wanted to know why a man like Todd Bertuzzi could turn so violent and ruin the fun we were having, the book also says this is simply a violent world: from the cougar that killed my sheep, to the wind that wrecked my car, to citizens who deny the dignity of their neighbours. A violent and also beautiful world thanks to its violence.<br /><br />For one season, I travelled a dozen times to games in Vancouver and weathered the undignified half-hour interview window the NHL allows media after practices and games. A few weeks from now, it was announced yesterday, many of those players will arrive on Vancouver Island’s West Shore, check into their swank suites at Langford’s Bear Mountain resort (thanks to former NHLer and now-CEO land developer/philanthropist, Len Barrie, and a bunch of co-investors including Rob Niedermayer and Ryan Smith), and then shuttle down to Colwood to Bear Mountain arena for training camp. <br /><br />Cold-cocked is also about my right knee and how its rehabbing—and the muscley renaissance of my sporty self—became symbolic of the reasons I left and came back to hockey. My gym is at the Juan de Fuca Rec centre, a short hike up the hill from Bear Mountain Arena where the team will attempt to re-gel after last season’s surprising successes and chemistry. <br /><br />I spent so much time and energy and brain cells trying to enter and understand their turf. It seems apt that just as Cold-cocked comes out, the lads will skate on mine.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-25098166301453859932007-08-01T21:36:00.000-07:002007-08-01T21:59:52.334-07:00O Brothers<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggr1ZGGwRbMSaVi65BQrEmrAtXZMf-Hq2gl5Y7GvYAwfOPIRz1St8w30FOnD5i-iTA9nIoGFfraNnia8kAAkOf0GG0thuDv5lDEbYQEm0K4oIrTSDfci5Knr0dl2KjhkjVwTtd2k1KV-bk/s1600-h/DSC_0123.edit+4.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggr1ZGGwRbMSaVi65BQrEmrAtXZMf-Hq2gl5Y7GvYAwfOPIRz1St8w30FOnD5i-iTA9nIoGFfraNnia8kAAkOf0GG0thuDv5lDEbYQEm0K4oIrTSDfci5Knr0dl2KjhkjVwTtd2k1KV-bk/s200/DSC_0123.edit+4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5093963321854261714" /></a><br />Pro basketball has point spread manipulation by a gambling referee. The highest-paid player in the NFL is implicated in a dog-fighting ring that reportedly executed passive pit bulls by hanging, drowning, shooting, slamming, and electrocuting. There’s the Tour de France and whatever those skinny dudes take to get so oxygenated. And the big batters of baseball: who’s born with a neck like that (besides pit bulls)? <br /><br />Hockey scandal: a couple of naughty redheaded brothers—Eric and Jordan Staal—get busted for noisiness after a bachelor party at a swank resort in Minnesota. We’re not appalled. We feel for the nice parents (turf farmers). Male fans chortle, shake their summer-shaggy heads, and skyhook another t-bone onto the grill. Women just know bachelor parties are stupid, but still: their poor mother. <br /><br />Brother stories tickle and delight us (maybe not Hamlet/The Lion King). In hockey, brothers make for great characters in a story that can be light on subplot. But real brothers don’t interest me. The Sedin twins are amazing, sure, and I’m glad they play on my team. But they’re more circus act than brother act. It’s shocking when a Henrik slap pass through the crease doesn’t find a millimeter of Daniel’s stick and scoot behind the whiplashed goalie. They lived inside the same person together for almost a year; of course they think alike. And the Staal brothers—all 4 of them—might as well be twins, given their hairdos and chin cleavage. Skill City, but Dullsville.<br /><br />Players who develop bro-chem and rip it up a deux make for great stories in hockey. With Vincent Lecavalier and Martin St. Louis, you get the brotherly hijinx, the circus, and also ironies and incongruities that make a better story: Vinnie’s the long lean slickster, the Swimsuit Edition hunk whom supermodels covet, the first overall. Marty’s the monster-thighed family man, the college boy who did gymnastics, the small forward no team would draft. On different lines, they seem distracted. Put them together on the power play and the dance gets smoother, fancier. Yes, they score plenty at key moments. But it’s more than that: the embrace when they do, the brotherly bliss, a bunk beds and GI Joe camaraderie that’s unexpected and familiar. <br /><br />Joe Thornton and Jonathan Cheechoo, same thing. Consider the NHL’s last TV ad campaign: Ontario Joe, the GQ-handsome needle-voiced city boy, burns toast in his little kitchen; Moose Factory’s black-eyed and smirking Jonathan paddles a surfboard on calm open water, a sexy nature boy in the great outdoors. They’re such different characters, and yet their rapport—their mutual ribbing off-ice and their Thornton-to-Cheechoo-shoot-score on it—could only be described as fraternal. The goals are the product of brotherly love and Sedinian prescience. How can that be?<br /><br />It still hurts to remember the glory days of Bert and Nazzie. The dark-haired naughty outlaw Todd and the golden-haired Nordic god Markus: best friends, brilliant line mates, excitement personified on the ice and adolescent glee off it. And more compelling because these brothers were undone by a loyalty so scandalous and Shakespearean it could only happen to brothers.Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4229600220990741603.post-59127301715830613092007-07-26T21:47:00.000-07:002007-07-26T22:29:48.333-07:00St. Trev in the Dolomites<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmCB8tZMyeK3GQQJEzjvkM3I8mh4SVBeoDKy4TwnFdcGEzLDoEEWUYlnSN53AJ3om6GeD8iCB7FE5oolov205X-Tgcvp06AHeFMCSDo79ddISV7LhMswzOzjUyAFDpebVHrfNeMNubuvLm/s1600-h/cold-cocked+cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmCB8tZMyeK3GQQJEzjvkM3I8mh4SVBeoDKy4TwnFdcGEzLDoEEWUYlnSN53AJ3om6GeD8iCB7FE5oolov205X-Tgcvp06AHeFMCSDo79ddISV7LhMswzOzjUyAFDpebVHrfNeMNubuvLm/s200/cold-cocked+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5091744515979344290" /></a><br />Maybe training camp. Maybe pre-season. I was going to wait to start writing, but then shots of Trevor Linden snugged into spandex in Europe surfaced—shell-shocked, jubilant, shirtless by a cold river in Italy, dehydrated and schnitzelling in Germany.<br /><br />When I finished writing Cold-cocked: On Hockey, I wondered if I’d ever be that hell-bent drawn to the game again. Would players still inspire, thrill, disgust, delight and bore me? I guess so, starting now.<br /><br />Linden’s lately been the topic of fan snits and on-air sport-gripes. Canuck fans are choked with management for not re-signing St. Trev the minute he scraped off his (grey) playoff beard. Fan favourite. Heart and soul. Great playoff stats (for a team that couldn’t cut-and-paste a goal post-season). “Beg him to stay! Pay him double!”<br /><br />Last week’s 2007 JEANTEX Bike Transalp was 725K through the German and Austrian Alps and Italian Dolomites in 8 stages. Vertical gain: 20,836M. The winners took 27 hours; Linden and his partner went 40 and finished a stunning 48th in the Masters category. His partner’s blog describes Linden’s harrowing cartoon careen—hey! no brakes!—down a perpendicular hill and it’s clear to me the team would be nuts to sign the naughty daredevil before he passes his next physical.<br /><br />Also clear: Linden is not a guy who’ll be lost without hockey. Let’s see: relax—tanned, handsome, beery—in an icy river in Predazzo after an epic 12-hour bike ride, or get 20 minutes of penalty-kill ice time 5-on-3 playing against this year’s Edmonton Oilers for 8 hours?Lornahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15914070801349526619noreply@blogger.com1