Dispatches From the Sporting Life Read online

  Acclaim for Dispatches from the Sporting Life

  “Stylish sports essays from a master…. With economy, wit and flair, Richler shows how it’s done. The man’s style is always evident, whether he’s failing to catch salmon in Scotland or rooting on the hapless Habs.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “Dispatches reflects Richler’s passion for sports…. Richler combines the enthusiasm of a fan with the curiosity and insight of a first-rate reporter. Add to the mix the prose skills of an accomplished novelist with the wry, mordant wit of a satirist and you end up with sports writing of a high order.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “The real appeal of Dispatches from the Sporting Life lies in the previously uncollected pieces. Connoisseurs of Richler’s prose will be pleased to discover hard-to-find items from Signature, Inside Sports, GQ, and The New York Times Sports Magazine together in one tidy place.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “This collection conveys the passion of a lifelong observer and fan holding up the ideals of sport even as he saw those principles being tarnished by people who should have known better…. [Dispatches from the Sporting Life] should be required reading for some of today’s sports poobahs, the ones holding court in the box seats high above the action.”

  —The Toronto Star

  “Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a personal postscript from Richler, a reminder that behind the acerbic wit was a warm family man, a sports fan like many ordinary men whose allegiances were formed in the hot enthusiasms of youth but frayed in old age by the cold realities of the sports business…. And it is as a fan that he wrote these essays.”

  —The Chronicle–Herald (Halifax)

  ALSO BY MORDECAI RICHLER

  NOVELS

  The Acrobats

  Son of a Smaller Hero

  A Choice of Enemies

  The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

  The Incomparable Atuk

  ocksure

  St. Urbain’s Horsema

  Joshua Then and Now

  Solomon Gursky Was Here

  Barney’s Version

  STORIES

  The Street

  ESSAYS

  Hunting Tigers under Glass

  Shovelling Trouble

  Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album

  Broadsides

  Belling the Cat

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang

  Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur

  Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Best of Modern Humor

  Writers on World War II

  NONFICTION

  Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!

  This Year in Jerusalem

  On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It

  Contents

  Foreword Noah Richler

  1. An Incompleat Angler’s Journal

  2. Jews in Sports

  3. A Real Canadian Success Story

  4. With the Trail Smoke Eaters in Stockholm

  5. Safari

  6. You Know Me, Ring

  7. Writers and Sports

  8. Gretzky in Eighty-five

  9. From Satchel, through Hank Greenberg, to El Divino Loco

  10. Eddie Quinn

  11. Cheap Skates

  12. Maxie

  13. Paper Lion

  14. Gordie

  15. Pete Rose

  16. Kiss the Ump!

  17. Soul on Ice

  18. From Gladu, through Kitman, to the Victoire Historique and After

  19. The Fall of the Montreal Canadiens

  20. Playing Ball on Hampstead Heath—An Excerpt from St. Urbain’s Horseman

  Permissions

  Dispatches from the Sporting Life

  Foreword

  NOAH RICHLER

  In 1972, my father brought his family back to Canada after nearly twenty years in England. I learned in no time that his preferred place on Saturday nights from September to May was on the living room couch, watching Hockey Night in Canada.

  We returned to Canada in the country’s prime time, you might say. The Canadian dollar was on par with the American (a detail that matters, when it comes to international leagues), and though Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque were sparring from their federal and provincial party offices, the Parti Québecois had not yet driven a stake through Montreal’s cosmopolitan heart. Montreal was a city on top of the world, rich with memories and history, but an avenir too. There was no question, in my father’s mind, that it was the only city in Canada where he could possibly live: the most sophisticated—which meant, for him, the best restaurants, the most critical and interesting politics and, at the Forum, the chance to watch the Montreal Canadiens—the Habs—playing before the most knowledgeable and demanding hockey crowd in North America.

  Twelve years old, I received swift instruction in matters Canadian. My father’s love of sports, I quickly saw, was entirely wrapped up in the urban landscape of his childhood: the cold-water flats of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, east of Park and north of Pine, bounded to one side by the well-to-do French Canadians of Outremont and on the other by the francophone working class of the Plateau. Baseball at Delormier Downs and hockey at the Forum were what Montreal Jews and French Canadians had in common. During the summer, Pa showed me what the bleachers were at Jarry Park, and introduced me to baseball’s ritual of the seventh-inning stretch. Then, that September, we watched an overweight Team Canada, fresh off the links, face off against Russia, an opponent the NHL’s professionals famously failed to take seriously. It fast became the most extraordinary international hockey series Canada has ever played. The Cold War still on, the Red Army was what the West feared then, but in Canada we held them in awe for a different reason: soldiers who played crisp, mesmerizing, “amateur” hockey—full-time. All Canadians of my generation can hum the grand Soviet anthem as a consequence. We feel a kinship there. We know where we were when Paul Henderson scored, saving face for Canada, and we remember the shock we felt when, after Team Canada scored the first goal of the series in Montreal, the Russians stormed back to win the game 7–3.

  I was watching the game with my father that evening, all the family in the living room, Pa’s enthrallment palpable. After that series ended, my father took me to the Forum to see the Canadiens, who beat Minnesota 3–0 in an early season NHL game. I was thrilled to be with him, of course, in the building that I knew meant so much to him, but we’d been spoiled by the match with the Soviets: the hockey was somnambulant by comparison.

  The Canadiens, at the time, were on their way to becoming the winningest franchise in professional sports, no mean achievement. By the middle of the eighties, they’d have won more Stanley Cups than the Yankees had World Series, or Liverpool FC had carried football trophies back to Merseyside. They were unquestionably the best—and they belonged to us. Quebeckers many of them, Canadians certainly. The Habs of the 1970s went on to establish themselves as the second most powerful dynasty in the team’s history, losing eight or so games a season—a couple of these out of boredom, surely. The first, setting the bar for my father, had won five Stanley Cups in a row from 1956 to 1960. That was the team Pa got to call Nos Glorieux. The Canadiens, for his generation and mine, were a thrilling, easy team to support.

  My father the fan, however, was also something of a fatalist, inclined to moments of deep foreboding. The team down one or, just occasionally, two goals at the end of the first period, he’d pronounce on their sloppiness from his uncontested position on the couch: “We’re in trouble now,” he’d say—before, more often than not, the Canadiens dug themselves out of it. It was, I suppose, the mark
of the writer in him, someone who did not expect things to go swimmingly for long.

  Come the early nineties, after yet more league expansion, after the owners’ and the players’ greed turned the game into a television spectacle, the play stopping every few minutes for another commercial break, my father lost interest in hockey. He stopped going to games because—he would never have imagined it—he was often bored at the rink. Pa frowned every time a new Canadiens team, its meagre talent stretched too thin, would dump the puck forward and race on in. This was not the game he grew up with, and soon he’d given up on it entirely.

  By then, a string of Péquiste victories had taken its toll, and the dollar was in freefall. Trudeau was no longer a figure in public life, and a huge number of anglophone Montrealers had left the province—though not my father, stubbornly. The Canadiens had been relegated to a shameful box of an arena built by Molson Inc., their indifferent last Canadian proprietors; the Expos had been languishing in the horrid Olympic Stadium for more than two decades, playing to the smallest attendances in the National League.

  Too many Montreal institutions gone.

  Pa’s sports were not, as games are for so many fans these days, vessels for statistics or of contrived corporate competition—a city’s glory purchased by some conglomerate churning money at the gate. Nor was the game, as Pa writes, the place for “intellectual gibberish”—a tableau for some eclectic, European, Umberto Eco–like reduction of philosophical life. It was, instead, a very real matter. It was about getting ahead, about making your way in the world—as a Canadian. No, we can be more specific than that: as a Montrealer, of the non-WASP kind, during the time that city was original and great.

  Pa was serious in his allegiances: hockey in winter, and baseball in summer. Snooker, year-round, was something he could relax to—playing, or watching the sport on television, after his working day was done. Fishing, a pastime he undertook later in life, was, I suspect, a pursuit that had more to do with a feeling of having arrived—as well as his love of the Canadian outdoors, an attribute of my father’s writing that is often underestimated. It’s there in Barney’s Version, and in the a mari usque ad mare romp of Solomon Gursky Was Here—and, of course, in Duddy Kravitz’s dream of purchasing all the properties bordering a Laurentian lake. The love of sports had, most of all, to do with home. In all those years in London, cricket, soccer, rugby—they just didn’t figure. Hockey and baseball were part of the patrimony in ways those sports could never be. What the journalism offered, those forays into Gordie Howe’s garage or to a bodybuilding convention, was the chance to get away from the typewriter and drop in on lives other than his own. One of the unusual complaints my father would sometimes make is that his literary success had come too soon. He’d not had to work in an office or hold down a factory job to get by, so he’d lost out on the material those experiences might have supplied him. The sports assignments helped satisfy that necessary, writer’s curiosity.

  Morning in the Richler house, before my father set to work: a hard-boiled egg rolls in a puddle of steaming water on the chopping board. “I made you breakfast,” he tells my younger brother, Jacob, his fishing companion of choice (that’s him on the cover), who’s used to this routine. Pa prepares my mother’s loving tray—hot black coffee with the froth still riding on it, a glass of orange juice freshly squeezed, and my mother’s seaweed and garlic pills—and carries it to the bedroom at the back of the apartment. No one else goes there, unless summoned. In a moment he’s back at the table, for sliced tomatoes and toast, and a look at the sports section of the Montreal Gazette.

  “Here,” he says, handing one of his five children the Business or the Classified pages—chortle, chortle—“you want a piece of the paper?” Then it’s off to the loo to catch up on the Expos or the NHL.

  “Richard Nixon,” he says, “always read the sports pages first.”

  Hockey was his Canadian writer’s trump card, my father capable of using sports as a vehicle for just about anything—as a way of applauding the virtuosity of Frank Augustyn, the premier danseur son of a steel worker from Hamilton, or, in St. Urbain’s Horseman, Jake Hersh’s fantasy of a life of greater moral rectitude. Try this passage, for instance, imagined as only a Montreal lad could, the reverie of someone who, as a boy, watched the likes of black Jackie Robinson play for the Montreal Royals, the farm team for Branch Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers. Leo Durocher was the coach:

  …even though he went twelve innings in the series opener the day before yesterday, allowing only two cheap hits, Leo looks at the loaded bases, Mantle coming up, their one-run lead, and he asks Jake to step in again.

  Jake says, “On one condition only.”

  “Name it.”

  “You’ve got to tell Branch I want him to give the Negroes a chance in the big leagues.”

  Originals, and rogues, in the Nixon vein, were something else sports had to offer. Iffy characters who’d made a success of themselves against the odds: Gordie Howe, “a child of prairie penury,” the wild-eyed Maurice Richard, or the Jewish baseball player Kermit Kitman, “one of ours,” a scholar who later went into the shmatte trade. And let’s not forget Don Cherry, an affectionate target of my father’s pen. Once the Boston Bruins coach, now a television commentator, he is known in Canada not least for his outrageous, over-the-top plaid suits—and, in my father’s words, for having been hockey’s patriotic xenophobe, forever railing against “chickenshit foreign commies taking away hockey jobs that rightfully belong to our own slash-and-grab Canadian thugs.” These European players, in Cherry’s view, insisted on wearing masks, protecting their teeth and otherwise dragging down the game’s fine traditions. My father later suggested that Cherry should be Canada’s next governor general, as his flamboyant dress sense would satisfy the demands of the oifice, and appeal to jocks and homosexuals alike. “What do you expect the guy to say,” said Cherry, clearly miffed, “I mean, with a name like Mordecai?”

  Looking over these essays, I wondered why, as a boy, I’d never asked my father if he could skate—even as he praised his great friend Jack Clayton, the English director of Room at the Top (with whom he worked on the screenplay of John Braine’s novel, which won an Oscar) for being good on skates. I found the answer in these pages: he couldn’t afford a pair—though it’s also true that observing, and not playing, is the writer’s game. Amazing, that I never asked him.

  So Pa would be off to the bleachers at Delormier Downs, to take in a ball game with the Montreal Royals—or, more often than not, to the poolrooms of Park Avenue. Pa, as I knew him, was a man who bought himself few treats. (One Christmas he was given a bottle of Remy Martin V.S.O.P., his favourite brand of cognac, by each of his five children—we couldn’t think of anything else he would like more, and he was delighted). There was a motorboat for the country house on the lake in the Eastern Townships, the place where he preferred to write, and when the childrens’ educations had all been paid for, he bought himself a snooker table, a throwback to his youth. Ma housed it in a beautiful, airy, cedar-and-glass addition on a terrace overlooking the water—and in winter, the frozen lake. An old chisel that my father’s father had used is pinned to one wall of the snooker room. On it are written, in yellow chalk, the words “Moses Isaac Richler—No Success!” On Boxing Day, we’d host a tournament, Pa inviting Sweetpea and his other local drinking pals, Eastern Townships descendants of United Empire Loyalists who’d been not much transformed as characters in Solomon Gursky Was Here. Ma would cook up a pot of her wonderful chili, safely removed from the boozy action, various of her children and their friends joining the day-long party, playing, at $20 each, for a pot of maybe $200 or $300.

  The Richler kids didn’t do very well. No success, I’m afraid, letting their father down—in public. Pa would usually make it to the final rounds, as would my brother, Daniel, but any of us was hard put to sink three balls in a row. Pa, seeking to improve our play, taught the kids a couple of hustling tricks: how to distract your opponent by standing behind the
pocket he is aiming at, tossing the cue from hand to hand as a Catskills entertainer might a microphone, subtly putting off his aim. A bit of cheating, I gathered, is acceptable in sports—as long as you are not caught, that is. The lesson was not so much that crime pays (which it probably did, for a couple of his poolroom pals), but that you need to be vigilant if you’re going to play a good game. As Max Kravitz writes to Duddy—but affectionately, note—“Remember, the world is full of shits.” Or, as Jake Hersh is told by his father, Izzy, in St. Urbain’s Horseman, “You want me to be proud? Earn a living. Stand on your own two feet.” That was the kind of advice he liked to give.

  For my pa, sports were also about escape. When I was in my early teens, I remember—I think we were watching some old Pathé Joe Louis newsreel, or could it have been a James Cagney movie?—he told me that boxing and baseball were easy ways out of the ghetto, for blacks and Jews especially. It is interesting to me that Pa writes of the NHL athletes of his day that they were “the progeny of miners and railway shop workers and welders,” and that in the summer they were “driving beer trucks or working on construction sites” to get by. If it’s an idea that is repeated, in subtle variations, it’s because it is one of the most important ones. My father was a ghetto boy. He did not forget where he came from. (That was a favourite bit of his writer’s advice.)

  For these reasons, he did not care much for modern players, earning big bucks yet unwilling to go into the corners. By and large, they were athletes schooled by hectoring parents on covered rinks at 5:00 a.m., and not on some frozen backyard or river. They did not appeal much to the storyteller in him. In their smart Gucci suits, with PR flacks to stand between them and the kind of clumsy—but poetic—Ring Lardner utterances he so enjoyed, they struck him as men without character, too specifically trained. Wayne Gretzky, I suppose, put to work by his father, Walt, from an early age, was the beginning of that sea-change. Pa preferred the struggle: the striving Pete Rose, grittily singling his way into the record books, every hit a determined grunt; the heroic obduracy of Jackie Robinson, enduring the abuse ordered on him deliberately by Branch Rickey, who was readying his brilliant shortstop to break the colour barrier in baseball’s National League. Or, consider it, the unknowing certainty of young Gordie Howe: “pre-paring for what he knew lay ahead, he sat at the kitchen table night after night, practising his autograph”—and long after that, amazingly, at the age of fifty-two, playing on the same line as his children, Mark and Marty. It interests me, as his son, that Pa quotes— unmockingly—this poem of the third Howe boy, Murray, a pre-med student.