Dispatches From the Sporting Life Page 7

  The affable Helge Berglund claims there are more than a hundred thousand active players and about seven thousand hockey teams in Sweden. How fitting, he reflects, that the Johanneshov isstadion should be the scene of the world championship competition. “The stadium’s fame as the Mecca of ice hockey,” he continues in his own bouncy style, “is once more sustained.”

  My trouble was I couldn’t get into Mecca.

  “You say that you have just come from London for the Maclean’s,” the official said warily, “but how do I know you are not a… chancer?”

  With the help of the Canadian embassy, I was able to establish that I was an honest reporter.

  “I could tell you were not a chancer,” the official said, smiling now. “A man doesn’t flow all the way from London just for a free ticket.”

  “You’re very perceptive,” I said.

  “They think here I am a fool that I do everybody favours—even the Russians. But if I now go to Moscow, they do me a favour and if I come to London,” he said menacingly, “you are happy to do me a favour too.”

  Inside the isstadion, the Finns were playing the West Germans. A sloppy, lacklustre affair. Very little body contact. If a Finn and a West German collided, they didn’t exactly say excuse me; neither did any of them come on in rough National Hockey League style.

  I returned the same night, Monday, to watch the Smoke Eaters play the exhausted, dispirited Americans. Down four goals to begin with, the Canadians easily rallied to win 10–4. The game, a dull one, was not altogether uninstructive. I had been placed in the press section and in the seats below me agitated agency men, reporters from Associated Press, United Press International, Canadian Press, and other news organizations, sat with pads on their knees and telephones clapped to their ears. There was a scramble around the American nets and a goal was scored.

  “Um, it looked like number 10 to me,” one of the agency men ventured.

  “No, no—it was number 6.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’m with Harry,” the man from another agency said. “I think it was number 10.”

  A troubled pause.

  “Maybe we ought to wait for the official scorer?”

  “Tell you what, as long as we all agree it was number 10—”

  “Done.”

  All at once, the agency men began to talk urgently into their telephones.

  “… and the Smoke Eaters add yet another tally. The second counter of the series for…”

  The next game I saw—Canada vs. Czechoslovakia—was what the sporting writers of my Montreal boyhood used to call the big one, a four pointer. Whoever lost this one was unlikely to emerge world champion. Sensing the excitement, maybe even hoping for a show of violence, some fifteen thousand people turned up for the match. Most of them were obliged to stand for the entire game, maybe two hours.

  This was an exciting contest, the lead seesawing back and forth throughout. The Czech amateurs are not only better paid than ours but play with infinitely more elegance. Superb stickhandlers and accurate passers, they skated circles around the Smoke Eaters, overlooking only one thing: in order to score frequently, it is necessary to shoot on the nets. While the Czechs seemed loath to part with the puck, the more primitive Canadians couldn’t get rid of it quickly enough. Their approach was to wind up and belt the puck in the general direction of the Czech zone, all five players digging in after it.

  The spectators—except for one hoarse and lonely voice that seemed to come from the farthest reaches of Helge Berglund’s Mecca—delighted in every Canadian pratfall. From time to time, the isolated Canadian supporter called out in a mournful voice, “Come on, Canada.”

  The Czechs had a built-in cheering section behind their bench. Each time one of their players put stick and puck together, a banner was unfurled and at least a hundred chunky broad-shouldered men began to leap up and down and shout something that sounded like “Umpa-Umpa-Czechoslovakia!”

  Whenever a Czech player scored, their bench would empty, everybody spilling out on the ice to embrace, leap in the air, and shout joyously. The Canadian team, made of cooler stuff, would confine their scoring celebration to players already out on the ice. With admirable unselfconsciousness, I thought, the boys would skate up and down poking each other on the behind with their hockey sticks.

  The game, incidentally, ended in a 4–4 tie.

  The Canadians wanted to see blood, the posters said. Hoodlums, one newspaper said. The red jackets go hunting at night, another claimed. George Gross, the Toronto Telegram’s outraged reporter, wrote, “Anti-Canadian feeling is so strong here it has become impossible to wear a maple leaf on your lapel without being branded ruffian, hooligan and—since yesterday—sex maniac.”

  A man, that is to say, a Canadian man, couldn’t help walking taller in such a heady atmosphere, absorbing some of the fabled Smoke Eaters’ virility by osmosis. But I must confess that no window shutters were drawn as I walked down the streets. Mothers did not lock up their daughters. I was not called ruffian, hooligan, or anything even mildly deprecating. Possibly, the trouble was I wore no maple leaf in my lapel.

  Anyway, in the end everything worked out fine. On Tuesday morning Russ Kowalchuk’s virtue shone with its radiance restored. Earlier, Art Potter, the politically astute president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, had confided to a Canadian reporter, “These are cold war tactics to demoralize the Canadian team. They always stab us in the back here.” But now even he was satisfied. Witnesses swore there was no girl in the lobby. The Malmen Hotel apologized. Russ Kowalchuk, after all, was a nice clean-living Canadian boy. In the late watches of the night, he did not lust after Swedish girls, but possibly, like Bobby Kromm and Don Freer, yearned for nothing more depraved than a Ping-Pong table. A McIntosh apple, maybe.

  Finally, the Smoke Eaters did not behave badly in Stockholm. They were misunderstood. They also finished fourth.

  5

  Safari

  A week before our scheduled departure for Kenya in 1982, excitement ruled our home. After all, we were soon to abandon wintry Montreal for the fabled Aberdare Salient, Lake Baringo in the Great Rift Valley, and the Masai Mara Game Reserve. Lions, leopards, elephants, zebras, antelopes, and gazelles. Florence and I took to studying Ker and Downey Tented Safari brochures in bed. Our insect-proof tents, we were assured, would include bedside lamps, washbasins, and adjoining shower and toilet tents. African crew would do our laundry overnight, except for women’s lingerie, a task they took to be humiliating. Our group was to consist of three couples. All old friends, all new to Africa. Remember, a thrilling covering letter enjoined us, to bring two pairs of sunglasses. “It’s one thing to drop them from a Land Rover; another, in murky, crocodile-infested waters.”

  A week before we left, my arm rendered leaden by a cholera shot, I repaired to my favourite downtown bar. How about one for the road, a crony asked. “Certainly,” I replied. “But first,” I added in a voice calculated to boom across the bar, “I must take my malaria pill.”

  We landed in Nairobi (fifty-five hundred feet above sea level, population 135,000) early in the morning, flying overnight from London. A testing time, this, for at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport we were to meet the two guides with whom we would trek through the reserves for the next eleven days. If the chemistry weren’t right, we all agreed, the trip could be a washout. Happily, our apprehensions were for nothing. David Mead, forty-three, and Alan Binks, thirty-eight, turned out to be affable, cultured fellows, both of them fluent in Swahili. Truly good companions.

  Mead, a Sandhurst graduate, had been in Africa since 1968, a professional white hunter until it was ruled illegal in 1977. Binks, a naturalist and photographer, immigrated to Africa in 1967 and was now a Kenyan citizen. “In England,” he said, “the horizon meant the next garden hedge. Here, the space is immense.” But, he allowed, there were problems in Kenya. “We have no oil, no natural resources. Just coffee, tea, and tourism.”

&n
bsp; The Norfolk, where we were to stay overnight, is possibly the most legendary hotel in East Africa, built in 1904 by Maj. C. G. R. Ringer. Its guest list since then would seem to include just about everybody accounted for in Burke’s Peerage, as well as Teddy Roosevelt and his son Kermit, Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), author of the classic Out of Africa, Winston Churchill, and, of course, Mr. Hemingway. Abraham Brock, who arrived from South Africa in 1903, when the lands of the Great Rift Valley were proposed as a projected colony for Jewish settlement—a new Canaan that was just not to be—bought the hotel in 1927. It was now part of the Brock chain, which included Treetops, the Lake Baringo Club, and seven other hotels and lodges. Brock was reported to have played a crucial role in the celebrated Israeli raid on Entebbe airport, in 1976, which liberated Israeli captives who had been on a plane hijacked by the PLO. It was said that he was the one who negotiated refuelling rights in Kenya for the Israeli special forces, en route to Uganda.

  There was no need, incidentally, to fret about safari suits. Once installed at the Norfolk, we hurried over to Colpro, a shop on Kimathi Street run by enterprising Indians, where we were equipped with the appropriate cotton safari suits, very reasonably priced, and altered within a couple of hours.

  The churning streets of downtown Nairobi teem with persistent hawkers of ugly, factory-made souvenirs. Shoeshine boys lie in wait everywhere. Possibly the only place where you can safely buy authentic indigenous jewellery and artifacts is at the government-run African Heritage, a handsome shop. We paused there so that Florence could select some things for our children. Her modest purchases in hand, she was boorishly thrust aside from the cash-register counter by burly American secret service men, as then vice-president George Bush laid out his collection of spears and shields and masks. The elegant black woman clerk toted up the items and handed Bush a considerable bill. “I’m the vice-president of the United States,” said Bush. “Don’t I get a discount?”

  “No, you don’t,” she replied.

  From African Heritage, it was only a short stroll to the famous Thorn Tree Bar at the New Stanley Hotel, an obligatory stop, even if you pass on the impala stew. Ensconced on the terrace, I asked a settler at a neighbouring table about the abortive airforce-led coup of last August 1. “What, in fact, happened to the air force?”

  “They were, um, disbanded.”

  “Do you mean…liquidated?”

  “Quite.”

  Kenya, independent since 1963, is a one-party state with a population of some fifteen million, maybe fifty thousand of them white. The autocratic successor to the great Jomo Kenyatta, President Daniel arap Moi was staunchly supported by the local press in 1982. On November 13, the page-one headline in the Daily Nation proclaimed, “THUGS IN POLLS RACE, SAY MOI”:

  “Some political majambazi [thugs] have joined the race for the Nakuru North parliamentary seat,” President Moi said yesterday.

  The President said this when he conducted a harambee funds drive at Ol Kalou, Nyandarua District, Central Province. A total of about Sh. 3.5 million was collected.

  President Moi, who spoke in Kiswahili, said he did not mind anybody being elected. But he urged the electorate to vote in a Nyayo man.

  He said he did not take pleasure in detaining anybody and added that some political majambazi had rushed to enter the race in Nakuru North street.

  He also asked the electorate not to elect wakora [hooligans]. He said he was not interested in any group and warned people not to blame him if things went wrong.

  A story on page four noted that bargain hunter George Bush might cut short his African tour to fly to Moscow for the funeral of President Leonid Brezhnev, whose death had been announced the day before. And, on page seven, there was an interesting letter to the editor from George Wanyoike of Nairobi:

  During the recent Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, Australia, I noticed that while all countries fielded national teams, the United Kingdom fielded hers on tribal lines.

  There were tribal teams from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What should we expect next time: Eskimos and Quebecan Canadians being fielded as separate teams or Luos, Kikiyus and Kalenjins being fielded as separate teams? This should be discouraged.

  A Moi supporter, Raphael Obwori Khalumba, surfaced in the letters column of Nairobi’s True Love with Trust magazine:

  I congratulate President Moi, the government and the Kenya Army, GSU and Police for suppressing the insurgence by the KAF rebels on August 1, 1982. The episode shall remain a dark and unforgettable mark in the Kenya history. The perpetrators of the attempted coup should be hunted down and punished severely. If it were not for our loyal forces, we don’t know what shape Kenya would have assumed by now.

  God is with the government of Kenya. There is no leadership as dedicated as that of our beloved President Daniel arap Moi in the whole of Africa. God bless Moi, our country Kenya, the armed forces, and all the people of Kenya.

  Back at the Norfolk my telephone rang and rang, but each time I picked it up the line was dead. I finally took my problem to the clerk at the front desk.

  “You go back to your room,” he said, “and the operator will ring you.”

  “But it’s no use, don’t you see? The line is dead. I can’t get a dial tone.”

  “You go back. Operator will ring you.”

  I did. She did. The line was dead. I returned to the front desk.

  “Your telephone doesn’t work,” said the desk clerk. “It will be fixed.”

  “Thank you. When?”

  “We must get an engineer from the post office.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Unfortunately, he just left. He will return, if he has a car.”

  A couple of hours later I confronted the front-desk clerk yet again.

  “If the engineer comes,” he said, “your phone will certainly be fixed.”

  “What if he doesn’t come?”

  “We like to think he will.”

  We all went to dinner at Alan Bobbé’s Bistro, reputedly the best restaurant in East Africa. I didn’t try the parrot’s eye, a specialty, but I can certainly vouch for the smoked sailfish, the truly giant shrimp from the Indian Ocean, and the king crab.

  Early the next morning, we set out with our guides in two Toyota Land Cruisers. The eight Africans who would lay out our luxurious camp in the Aberdare Salient, some one hundred miles north of Nairobi, had moved on ahead of us. In theory you are supposed to keep to the left-hand side of the road in Kenya, but in practice you drive on either side, wherever the potholes are fewest. Again and again we passed mantatus, astonishingly overcrowded little makeshift buses run by private entrepreneurs. There were pathetic shantytowns, slapped together out of waste tin and battered crates. Pineapple and coffee plantations. Long, lean, languid Africans tending to papyrus stands by the dusty roadside. Men cutting building bricks out of rock in a roadside quarry, women stooping over tiny vegetable plots, more men ambling along the road, carrying pangas. Indeed, wherever we drove there were people out walking, infinitely patient, the women sometimes carrying black parasols, more often knitting, as they passed, the men in tribal attire, stopping to wave, the children reaching out for candies. And then there were the magnificent flame trees in flower. Fever trees looming over muddy streams. The small whistling thorn, umbrella trees, and the spectacular euphorbia, or candelabra, trees. Finally, at 1:00 p.m., we arrived at the gates of Aberdare National Park, some sixty-five hundred feet above sea level:

  Visitors enter this national park entirely at their own risk. Please exercise care and keep a safe distance from any dangerous animals. They have the right of way.

  Immediately beyond the gates was our first wild beast, a warthog, seemingly bemused, willing to pose for pictures. It was a hefty specimen, say two hundred pounds, with an enormous wart-filled face and two sets of menacing tusks, the lower with a razor-sharp cutting edge. Soon we would discover these hogs are ubiquitous in the Aberdare as well as the Masai Mara, constantly on the trot, followe
d by their mates and troops of piglets. If animals drank booze, the barrel-chested warthog would be a beer belter. A hard hat. Ugly yet somehow endearing. The giraffes, on the other hand, which Isak Dinesen described as “rare, long-stemmed, speckled, gigantic flowers,” would certainly affect pince-nez and sip Dom Perignon.

  We were hardly into the forested salient when David Mead said, “There were elephants through here, maybe in the last hour.” And round a bend in the track there they were, seven of them, munching punishingly prickly thorn-tree branches. Elephants, wrote Isak Dinesen, “travelling through the dense native forest…pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.” Later we would come upon a herd of them, frolicking in a muddy waterhole. Sometimes, however, they were not so sweet-tempered, alertly extending their huge floppy ears, raising their trunks to trumpet at us. “They are perfectly capable,” Binks informed us jauntily, “of stomping on a car, flattening everybody in it.” Then he told us about the time a hippo, grazing in the evening, had espied a foolish woman with a camera poised between him and his waterhole, cutting off his retreat. He promptly chomped her to bits. “Of course, I think at least one tourist should be scarfed a year. It adds a certain spice to the safari, don’t you think?”

  We reached camp, exhilarated, and settled into a delicious lunch. Actually, the best food we would eat in Kenya would be prepared right in camp, our miracle-making chef baking bread and cooking roasts, equipped with nothing more than two metal ammunition cases laid out on a carefully tended bed of hot charcoal.

  In the afternoon we caught sight of our first bunch of black-and-white colobus monkeys, squealing as they squirted from tree to tree. Wherever the baboons gathered, two or maybe three of them stood on the high ground to guard against predators. Herds of large black Cape buffalo, their curled horns massive, scowled at us from every open glade. These weighty buffalo, dripping animosity, seemed already cast in bronze.