Review By Mike Gange

Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man who Couldn’t Play

By David Adams Richards

Doubleday $19.95, 238 pages

There are only a few guys, besides my immediate friends, I mean, that I would love to see appear at my door, just as the game is beginning. Very rarely would I say, “C’mon in, don’t mind the mess, the games on. Want a cold one?” I would do that for David Adams Richards.

Richards understand hockey. He understands heart, and he understands how hockey is life itself. Richards understands how hockey is bigger than Canada, too.

Richards is a New Brunswick writer, winner of a Governor General’s Award for his fiction and non fiction. He’s won some other fine awards too, but I doubt if we would dwell on his awards if he came over. I think we would talk about hockey. The state of hockey. The problems with hockey. The way hockey is changing. The Americanization of hockey, which is not exactly the same thing as the commercialization of hockey, but pretty close. We would talk about Montreal Canadiens, and wonder if they can ever have another dynasty. We would talk about New Jersey, and the neutral zone trap, which was just updated from Montreal’s “Kitty-bar-the-door” style, when they had a lead in any game. We would talk about the hockey games we played as kids, an imaginary announcer calling our names as we deked, shot and scored.

Hockey is about playing on the frozen river, when it is so cold outside the tips of your fingers, your toes and your ears get frostbitten. As kids, we would shake it off, laugh it off, even though it might mean a life-long arthritis affliction. Richards’ river was the mighty Miramichi, in the north-east of New Brunswick, frozen solid most of the winter, until, as he says, the smell of sulphur came up river from the paper mill, and you knew spring was on its way. Richards’ river was the kind all of us have skated on, at sometime, and some of us have maybe broken through, a little bit. Maybe enough to wet a skate, or get a soaker. In Hockey Dreams, Richards’ best friend fell right through the ice. He had to be pulled out by his friends, who reached into the freezing water to grab his hair and his ears to get his head above the ice level.

But Richards’ river is also the metaphorical river, in every town, city and county. It is the river that you can never fall into twice. Like life itself, it always changes. And it is our lives, winding slowly, freezing with the seasons, opening again in time for baseball season.

And it is this river, both real and symbolic, that Richards writes about in Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play. This is Richards growing up in the 1960’s, moving away, coming home again, only its never the same, as he describes standing on the spot where his friend’s old house had been torn down. “I went back to that spot, as if to examine my youth. Cattails and thorned alders grew against the pale November sky. In the tatters of the house, graced with the smell of longing and November smoke, the coat that Michael had bought Tobias with the Bingo money sat crumpled up in a hole in one of the fallen walls. As if it was at one point, years before, used by someone to stop some unstoppable draft,” he writes.

Richards is so good as a witness and a writer, that sometimes you can just smell those wood fires burning behind the old outdoor rinks. And he tells such wonderful tales that you just have to laugh right out loud. Like this one: on a hockey trip to Boston, with his father suffering from narcolepsy, and the car going 60 miles an hour, the boys shout at their father to wake up, and go for a run. And he stops the car, runs 2 miles and comes back, and keeps driving. Only his own two sons knew he had been driving, and sleeping, and they did not tell the other kids in the car.

This is Richards’ personal story, but it applies to me and my kids on another river, only 100 miles away. And it applies to kids from Newfoundland to British Columbia. It is funny, its sad, its carefree and its very touching.

And for Canadians, like life itself, hockey runs through it.