Big Bert in Britain

The 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:

“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.”

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.

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?

Sermon on Bear Mountain

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I did not worship, no. But I really liked Dan Gendur, Shaun Heshka and Taylor Ellington.

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.

Ufa, then Omsk

Gripe #465: Kenya Airways over-booked my daughter’s flight and made her spend another night in Nairobi. NOW where is she?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After Toro

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

These elements—and the wisdom, patience and cash to explore them at some length—also make for great sports writing in magazines.

In which Markus the Swede encounters Juan de Fuca the Greek and concerning Max the dog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

O Brothers

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)?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

St. Trev in the Dolomites

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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?