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Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
You see, I cooked up this idea a couple of years ago to take a trip across Canada, my homeland, with an American friend and write about how shinny seeps into every cranny of our lives, about how we are the game and Americans aren’t. My book would be the dessert to the entrée known as the World Cup of Hockey, which Canada would surely win, and the momentum would be carried right into the NHL season. Hockey would whet the appetite for my book.
My cooked-up idea turned out to be half-baked.
Now, with the NHL players locked out, the cupboards of our cultural kitchen are bare, and Baptism by Ice: How Hockey Taught an American to Love Canada is sitting on bookshelves, a snack for puckheads starving for hockey.
Sadly, I’m accustomed to hockey being put on the back burner. As the managing editor of hockey at the Sporting News, based in jungle-humid
St. Louis, I’ve become familiar with having to work hard for my game. One labour war later, Canadians are now feeling the same hunger pains I’ve endured for years.
Do Americans miss hockey? Yeah, right. No one in the States pays attention to the grand game at this time of the year anyway. Everybody is too inflamed by various strains of NFL, NASCAR, college, NBA, and pennant fever. The NHL? Who has the time?
Even though it’s been years since I lived there, I know Canadians are missing hockey, as I am right now. As you read this, someone is pining for the game in a bar on Yonge Street, in a café along Ste. Catherine, in a tree in Stanley Park, in a mall in Edmonton, in a concrete-drab subcommittee in Ottawa, in a cattle pen near Calgary.
This is where my plan becomes more, uh, palatable. At its essence, Baptism is a love letter to Canada from afar, but with the absence of the NHL, it has become a love letter to the game as well. But Canadians still have the luxury of being able to stop by a local arena and watch a bit of pickup, whether it’s played by youngsters, flubsters, or players who are still dreaming about getting a callback from CBC’s Making the Cut. Whatever you do, dear reader, don’t take the ice for granted.
These days, the game has been taken for granted by the players and the owners, which has brought us to where we are today. Attorneys, agents, and argent now run the game.
Still, we as Canadians will hold onto it. We’ll continue to play on sub-zero winter days, skates grinding over an icy meadow pond, the low sun a casual observer. We’ll play in the earliest hours of the morning. We’ll play on the street in front of our houses, if we have to. We’ll play the game. No matter how many money-first businessmen and lawyers try to ruin it, the game will always be ours. Our past dictates it. Come to think of it, even without our beloved NHL, Canadians will always have hockey. Not even a labour dispute will take that away from us.
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