Rocket Science

review by Mike Gange

Our Life with the Rocket
by Roch Carrier
(Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman)
Penguin $35, 304 pages

In the popular children’’s book, "The Hockey Sweater," Roch Carrier shows us how the six year old boys in his village idolized the Montreal Canadiens’’ Maurice "Rocket" Richard: they all combed their hair the same way as Rocket Richard; they all wore number 9 on their sweaters like Rocket Richard. When the boy’s hockey sweater was worn out, his mother ordered another Canadiens jersey from the Eaton’s Catalogue, only to have the company send a Maple Leafs sweater instead. Forced by his mother to wear the replacement, the boy in the story was humiliated and ostracised.

In Our Life with the Rocket Roch Carrier relates how he, the little boy in the children’s story, grows up with Rocket Richard over the 18 years the Rocket played with the Canadiens. Using the same disarmingly child-like voice that he used in "The Hockey Sweater" Mr. Carrier shows us how the Rocket is more than just a hockey hero, becoming a symbol of French Canadian determination, spirit and pride.

Richard came from a humble working class background. He trained and worked as a machinist while playing hockey in his neighbourhood before the war. Despite being sidelined two seasons in a row, first with a broken ankle in the Canadiens training camp at age 19 in 1939, and a broken wrist in camp the next year, he returned and made the team in 1941. The pugnacious Richard never backed down from a fight, gave as good as he got along the boards and over 18 years of hockey, scored about 500 goals.

Fourteen thousand fans regularly filled the Forum, while nearly 2 million others in Quebec tuned in to Canadiens games broadcast on the radio, thrilled with Rocket’’s every move, every deke, every elbow taken and delivered, every shot and every goal. The next day, those exploits were repeated and discussed in the school yards and factories across Quebec. Each indignity Rocket withstood and the retaliation he returned made him that much more noble in the eyes of the boy.

As he recounts his memories of some of the highlights of Rocket Richard’’s fabulous 18 year career, Mr. Carrier subtly overlays incidents from life in Quebec during the 1940's and 1950's. He remembers how Quebec became embroiled in one controversy after another. While the war was on, it was the conscription crises. Just after the war, Prime Minister MacKenzie King’’s invitation to debate the constitution raised a furor. Mr. Carrier recalls that later, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis urged French Canadians to stand on their own, but went about arranging a 99 year lease on huge tracts of land in Northern Quebec for mineral exploration and development. Still later Duplessis sent in the police to deal with angry strikers from the Asbestos plant owned by John-Mansville, because he did not want the plant owners to close it and move to Ontario.

At the time, Quebec was finding its own voice through politics and emerging journalists like Pierre Trudeau, but to Mr. Carrier and his contemporaries, all these events were overshadowed by the Rocket’s epic battles. For example, in the boy’s school there was a discussion about the Russian Sputnik being the first in space; one of the classmates said the French Canadians were really first –– they had always had their own Rocket.

Although set in Quebec, this is truly a Canadian story. It involves a hero who lets his actions on the ice say more than he could ever mumble to reporters, a take-charge leader who internalizes every goal against and every loss. Its about the player who was willing to drop his gloves to avenge every verbal and physical attack while corner stores celebrated the birth of his babies with photos clipped from the newspapers and taped to the cash register. And it is told by the unassuming writer who has to be coaxed by the publisher into telling the story.

Mr. Carrier presents a personal view but he typifies Quebeckers of the day. The childlike innocence he uses to tell the story without malice or blame allows him to talk about his hero, his own consciousness, his province’s developing awareness and the unfolding world events as he remembers them. To the boy and to many other Quebeckers, Rocket Richard became the French Canadian revenge on the English Canadian overlords, especially those who supported the Maple Leafs. As a story teller, Mr. Carrier delivers his tale as smoothly as the first skater glides along a freshly flooded rink.

Unfortunately, typically Canadians don’’t sing the praises of our finest writers. Like the dazzling end-to end rushes of Maurice Richard, Our Life with the Rocket is worth standing for and cheering about.

Mike Gange teaches Media Studies and Journalism at Fredericton High.