Dispatches From the Sporting Life Read online

  So you eat, and you sleep.

  So you walk, and you run.

  So you touch, and you hear.

  You lead, and you follow.

  You mate with the chosen.

  But do you live?

  These were stories about talent, determination, and the hunger for a new and better life—a bit of fame, fortune, prowess—but they are also about choosing.

  Pa found his own unlikely way out, though he never did leave his beloved Montreal behind. Not in all those years in Britain, perusing the hockey listings in the Herald Tribune—or, in the sanctity of his loft office, conjuring up the subtext of a crazy expats’ ball game in London’s Hampstead Heath (that chapter from St. Urbain’s Horseman is included here). He never did stray far from home, eventually, in 1972, coming back to it all, to the seat of it—because he felt he was drying up as writer, he told Ma. (He liked to quote V. S. Naipaul, who’d said of his own writer’s relationship with Englishmen that “I don’t know what they do when they go home at night”—an explanation for the family’s move from Britain that Ma did not easily accept.) That summer, he took the kids to see the Expos in Jarry Park frequently. And come winter, he told his friend the longtime Montreal Gazette sports columnist, Dink Caroll, who’d supply us with a pair of his Forum press tickets from time to time, that I was a fleet defenceman. I think he wanted that to be true, and I remember having to keep up the pretence for many years, until Dink died.

  Then, in June 1998, my father telephoned me from Montreal—I was living in London at the time—and told me that he was going into hospital, the Montreal General, to have a cancerous kidney removed. I flew to Montreal, knowing remarkably little about operations and hospitals, thank God, and spent the nights there in his small, gloomy, dilapidated room. (So much of his Montreal felt diminished then.) We rented a television set so that I could watch the World Cup and Pa, I’d expected, the hockey playoffs. Except that he was not interested. He was on morphine—hell for a mind like his—and other thoughts were racing through his unfettered consciousness. It must have been the surgical masks of the doctors who’d leaned over him on the operating table, stemming an unexpected loss of blood, that provided his delirium with a thread of crazy reason. “No!” said Pa, bolt upright, that great head of thick hair a standing tussle, when, a few days after the operation, a nurse tried to put an oxygen mask on his face to help him through his recovery. “No. I won’t—it’s an anti-Semitic machine.” Even the French-Canadian doctors laughed at that. Then, the queue of doctors and nurses abating for a while, Pa would drift in and out of sleep and the topics that were his lifetime’s concerns: Canadian politics, Israel and Palestine—and hockey.

  “Noah?”

  “Yes, Pa?”

  “Where did the U.S. make the speech recognizing Israel? Was it in San Francisco?”

  “I think so, Pa, in May 1948, wasn’t it? Harry Truman sent a cable.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear. Who would have thought it would all end so badly?”

  “It’s not over yet, Pa.”

  What does he mean, I wonder. Israel? Himself? Pa lifts his arm, as if it were a stranger’s, looking at the intravenous feed indignantly. Then he rolls onto his side and lets out a big sigh.

  “What are we going to do in this country? Canada’s in such a mess. Did you get to the Knesset? Did you get to the meeting of the men with masks?”

  “No, Pa. What meeting was that?”

  “That Don Cherry—ha ha!—great guy.”

  And, before giving in to sleep again, he says, “But can you imagine, hockey in June.”

  Three years later, Pa went into hospital again, and this time he died. The family, according to his wishes, buried him in Montreal’s Mount Royal cemetery, in a grave on Rose Hill, overlooking his boyhood home on St. Urbain Street. (The “ghetto” is a much more affluent community now.) We put this notice in the paper.

  Mordecai Richler died from complications related to kidney cancer early Tuesday morning at the Montreal General Hospital. He will be sorely missed by Florence, his beloved wife of forty years; his five devoted children, Daniel, Noah, Emma, Martha and Jacob; their loved ones, Jill, Sarah, Nigel and Leanne; and the young grandchildren, Maximilian, Poppy and Simone. A private funeral will be held today in Montreal. A public memorial will take place in the autumn. The family asks that donations be made to the Canadian Cancer Society, Centrâide, Médecins sans Frontières (or, say, the Montreal Canadiens, a true lost cause).

  The month before, the Canadiens, who’d missed the playoffs for the second year in a row, were sold to an American businessman from Colorado. He promised not to move the team south, but the Expos, it soon became apparent, were likely heading that way. I’m glad Pa did not witness this. It was the end of an era—but not unthinkable. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Love you, Pa.

  Toronto, December 2001

  1

  An Incompleat Angler’s Journal

  September 13, 1988. Wednesday. Montreal’s Mirabel airport. Before boarding our preferred carrier, British Airways, I loiter close by the insurance vending machine, making sure no shifty-eyed bastard, seeing off his beloved wife, is covering her for two million bucks and then rushing off to embrace his bimbo—“It’s done, baby.” Pretending to tie my shoelaces, I listen to unattended carry-on baggage that might go tick-tick-tick. Then, composing my soul, gulping down just one more cognac, I allow my wife to drag me to the plane. Florence and I are bound for a short stay in London and then on to the Scottish Highlands and the islands of Shetland and Orkney, where, in fulfillment of a long-cherished dream, I will fish for salar, the leaper.

  Salmon.

  The first known image of salmon, discovered by a French archaeologist, was carved into a reindeer bone, circa 12,000 B.C. It was Julius Caesar and his men, invaders of Western Europe, who dubbed it salar, the leaper. William the Conqueror and his barons savoured it and so did that swindler John Cabot, when he first sailed to North America in 1497. The first book in English on salmon, published in 1481, The Gentleman’s Recreation, The Boke of St. Alban’s—though possibly a compilation of earlier books on angling—is credited to Dame Juliana Berners, prioress of the Sopwell Nunnery. She went after the fish required for her Friday table with a rod cut from ash and line made from the hair of the horse’s tail. Then, in 1653, there came the essential book for fishermen, The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation: Being a Discourse of Fish & Fishing Not Unworthy of the Perusal of Most Anglers, by Izaak Walton:

  The salmon is accounted the King of fresh-water fish, and is ever bred in rivers relating to the sea, yet so high or far from it as admits no tincture of salt, or brackishness; he is said to breed or cast his spawn in most rivers, in the month of August: some say that then they dig a hole or grave in a safe place in the gravel, and there place their eggs or spawn, after the melter has done his natural office, and then hide it most cunningly, and cover it over with gravel and stones; and then leave it to their Creator’s protection, who by a gentle heat, which he infuses into that cold element, makes it brood and beget life in the spawn, and to become Samlets in the Spring next following.

  Thrusting Izzy’s book aside, I begin to dream about silvery sea-bright salmon rolling in the ripples of the Spey River. Casting with my usual panache, I catch plenty before we’ve even climbed to 33,000 feet, some 32,994 feet too high for London. Following two lap-of-luxury nights at the Ritz, tainted for me only because my wife insisted it would be bad form for me to practice casting in the lobby, we are driven to Euston station by a couple who are old friends: “Remember,” he said, “we’re expecting you for dinner the night of your return.”

  “Should I order a standing roast beef from Harrod’s?” she asks.

  “Nonsense,” I say. “I’ll be bringing fresh salmon.”

  Then we board the overnight train to the Highlands and the fabled Spey, the fastest-flowing river in Europe, thick with salmon, according to legend. Once established on my narrow bunk, I turn to Orkney &
Shetland, by Eric Linklater, wherein I read of a dizzying succession of Norse conquerors:

  But Sigurd, when he got his Earldom…made an alliance with Thorstein the Red, son of Olaf the White … and that famous woman Aud the Deep-Minded who … was the daughter of Katil Flatnose …

  On arrival in Aviemore, we’re met by a tourist-office flack who drives us over winding country lanes, peasants lurking in the fields of ferns alongside, to Tulchan Lodge, a veritable stone mini-castle, complete with turret, that immediately evokes my boyhood home. The butler who tippled. The saucy second-floor maid. My nanny, a treasure. On the other hand, that delightful lodge, rising in the Tulchan and Cromdale hills above the Spey River, is set in a rolling wooded parkland of no less than twenty-three thousand acres, admittedly a tad larger than my boyhood backyard. Tulchan was built in 1906, an Edwardian fishing and hunting lodge, the private property of one George McCordquodale, Esq., and did not become an albergo until 1976. Handsomely appointed, with oak-panelled drawing and billiards rooms, the lodge can accommodate no more than twenty-four guests in its twelve double bedrooms. A room will set you back $200 a night, but that includes breakfast, afternoon tea, and a four-course dinner, and the fare is first-rate. There are additional charges, however, for deerstalking, shooting grouse, or fishing. A rod, along with the services of a gillie, costs $170 a day. The lodge commands Tulchan Water, eight miles long, with four beats, considered to be the most productive on the Spey, but before we have even unpacked I am told:

  This season the fishing had been the worst in twenty-five years, with only 17 salmon taken in July, whereas the usual catch was 165 or more.

  Water temperature in July was in the seventies, intolerable for salmon.

  The wind is up.

  The water is too low.

  Yes, yes, but I do not put much stock in these gloomy reports, because Mordecai the Deep-Minded, son of Moses the Bald, has been salmon fishing before on some of the best rivers of Quebec and New Brunswick (the Cascapédia, the Restigouche, the Miramichi) and is familiar with the perverse tradition peculiar to salmon camps everywhere. The head guide, greeting newcomers, always complains that the water is too high or too low, and you should have been here last week when horny thirty-pound salmon had to be restrained from leaping into the arms of anglers, never mind taking a fly.

  In the drawing room, Joseph, the menacingly obsequious wine steward (a Pole who had put in thirteen years as a butler), seems to have wandered in off the set of an old-time Hammer horror film; he stoops to kiss my wife’s hand and then asks if we fancy wine with our lunch.

  “A bottle of Puligny-Montrachet.”

  “An excellent choice,” Joseph oozes, dentures gleaming.

  Late in the afternoon a middle-aged American couple arrives, Joseph greeting the lady with a ritual kiss of the hand. “Would you care for wine with your dinner?” he asks.

  “People are so nice in this neck of the woods,” the lady says.

  “Red or white?” her husband asks her.

  “It’s all the same, isn’t it, dear?”

  Husband, consulting the price list, chooses a bottle of Frascati.

  “An excellent choice,” Joseph responds, beaming. Greeted at breakfast by a rowdy group of grouse shooters out of Yorkshire, drinking Champagne, dressed in elegant tweed jackets and plus fours. “You’re not going after salmon this late in the season?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You’re Canadian, did you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  There are no keys for our bedroom doors, but the Fly and Tackle Room is securely locked. Seemingly, the guests can trust each other, but the Tulchan management knows that when it comes to fishing flies, anglers are a notoriously thieving lot.

  The head gillie, wearing a deerstalker cap, outfits me with hip boots and a fifteen-foot, two-handed rod, traditional in Scotland. At home, we use a ten-foot rod, a one-hander, so I will have to make a considerable adjustment. I am driven down to a beat on the Spey, where I am astonished to see manicured lawns, picnic tables, and a fishing “shack” that would rent for $8,000 a summer in the Hamptons. In Canada, of course, we fish in rough country, bush country, blackflies and mosquitoes the unhappy rule. Within a couple of hours I can manage, but have hardly mastered, the two-handed rod and the tricksy Spey double-cast, all to no avail. The only salmon left in the river in mid-September are black salmon, that is to say, derelict scrawny fish that have loitered in the Spey for years and have learned to eschew any fly thrown over their heads.

  Come noon, on Canadian rivers, I would not be surprised to see a moose or a black bear wandering down to the water’s edge. But in the Highlands, at the stroke of twelve o’clock, an appropriately attired waiter is sent down from the lodge with a much-needed bottle of single-malt Scotch, white wine, and a baffling hot lunch: pasta served with a baked potato. Then, casting into a stiff wind, I spend another miserable two hours on the beat without raising a fish.

  The odious Joseph is lying in wait in the drawing room with his carte du vins. “We’ll have a bottle of Château Margaux tonight,” I say, after consulting my wife.

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Wait. Tell me, Joseph, do you think that’s an excellent choice?”

  “But, of course, sir.”

  The American couple drifts in from their afternoon stroll. “I’d like a gin and tonic, please,” the lady says.

  “Tanqueray?” Joseph asks.

  “I don’t understand,” she replies, appealing to her husband.

  “It’s their accent,” he assures her. “My wife would like a GIN AND TONIC!”

  The grouse shooters are back. Those self-satisfied bastards, preceded by an army of beaters from a neighbouring estate, have taken fourteen birds. I retreat to our room just in time to field a phone call from our friends in London.

  “Well, we’ve ordered the wine, but naturally we’re counting on you for the yummy salmon.”

  Shit. Switching on the bedside radio, I tune in on a convention of the Scottish Nationalist Party. The speaker proclaims, “The Soviet Union treats its ethnic minorities better than England does the Scots,” and harvests wild applause.

  The Highlands Tourist Office, determined to dispel a nasty myth, has issued a pamphlet that claims, “We have wet weather and dry weather, but no bad weather.” All the same, I waken to windowpane-rattling wind. Driving rain. But I’m out on the river immediately after breakfast, casting to no point until my arm throbs and cursing the Highlands Tourist Office for assuring me that mid-September was vintage time on the Spey.

  Compensations. Today we have been invited to lunch at the Macallan distillery, some ten miles from Tulchan Lodge, on the Spey side in the lee of the Grampian Mountains. Kingsley Amis, who certainly ought to know, has pronounced Macallan “about the most delicious malt ever,” and I am inclined to agree, especially as we are being poured the eighteen-year-old stuff. In fact, by the time lunch is ready I have such an agreeable buzz on that I’m even willing to forgive our host for serving us locally caught salmon.

  Chatting with the amiable W. C. H. Phillips, managing director of Macallan, I get some notion of just how much a productive stretch of the Spey is actually worth. In 1954, Phillips tells us, Macallan was offered a two-mile section of the river for $10,000 but, following a directors’ meeting, declined the deal. Then, four years ago, the two-mile stretch of the Spey came up for sale again. Macallan bid $765,000 for one-third of it, and that offer was promptly declined as insultingly inadequate.

  Following a quick breakfast, we say goodbye to our impeccable hosts at the first-class Tulchan Lodge, unaware that we have eaten our last good meal in Scotland. Weather conditions being what they are, our flight to Shetland, via Orkney, is delayed for two hours. The airline clerk is amused when I doublecheck that our luggage is tagged for the right island. “If you’re going to Shetland,” he says cheerily, “all you’ll need is an umbrella.”

  Bouncing high over the North Sea, I calm myself by
trying once more to tackle the history of our ultimate destination, Orkney, this time digging into a real page-turner, Orkneyinga Saga, the history of the earls of Orkney from the ninth century to the thirteenth, translated from the Icelandic by Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards: “Earl Thorfinn had five sons, one called Arnfinn, the next Havard the Fecund, the third Hlodvir, the fourth Ljot, and the fifth Skuli. Ragnhild Eirik’s-Daughter plotted the death of her husband Arnfinn at Murkle in Caithness, then married his brother Havard the Fecund….”

  On first sight, Shetland is absolutely haunting. Not a tree to be seen anywhere. Bare, gaunt hills, rock bursting like bone through the thin topsoil. Seemingly endless rolling fields of rich, dark peat, the fuel cut and stacked to dry here and there. Sheep foraging everywhere. And above, intruding helicopters ferrying workers to and from the North Sea oil rigs. Our taxi driver is quick to point out that nobody speaks Gaelic here or would be caught wearing a kilt. The Shetlanders, honouring their Viking heritage, seem to identify more closely with Iceland and Norway (Bergen is accessible by overnight ferry from Lerwick) than they do with Scotland.

  As we proceed in the wind and rain through the narrow streets of bleak, grey stone Lerwick, I can’t help observing that fishing equipment is being offered at 25 percent off everywhere, a depressing indication that the season is over. I also note that on the island God gave to Calvin, it is illegal to take a salmon or a sea trout on a Sunday.