1443436909 (N) by Ron MacLean

Author:Ron MacLean
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2015-09-02T21:00:00+00:00

You Know How to Whistle, Don’t You?

At the 2005 Juno Awards in Winnipeg, k.d. lang sang Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” It was transcendent. Kathryn Dawn Lang attended Red Deer College. It was there that she formed a Patsy Cline tribute band called the Reclines.

At the same time k.d. was studying Friday Dance Promenades, I was in the church of Saturday night hockey. Red Deer College hockey coach Allan Ferchuk was on the forefront. He was one of the teachers overhauling the game. The narrow escape we had in the 1972 Summit Series gave rise to a lot of introspection. Red Deer College paid for Ferchuk to visit Russia in 1976 so he could learn about their hockey uprising. He discovered the Russians were using the physiology teachings of a Canadian, Lloyd Percival.

Percival was the director/host of Sports College of the Air on CBC Radio. He later ran the Fitness Institute. When Percival’s The Hockey Handbook, the first how-to book of hockey fundamentals, was published in 1951, most professional Canadian coaches thought it was bunk, but Russian and European coaches used it to guide players to international success.

The Russians borrowed from soccer to design a power play, creating a series of two-on-ones. They borrowed from basketball to press on the forecheck and from volleyball to bump back on offence. It was a time when educators from Canadian colleges and universities found a voice in the entrenched old school of the professional game.

That brings me back to Leonard Cohen. When he wrote eighty verses of “Hallelujah,” in 1984, he was at a low point in his career. Just as Wayne Gretzky owns sixty-one NHL records, and will tell you that scoring fifty goals in thirty-nine games, as he did in 1981, is “The Record,” Cohen has said his version of fifty in thirty-nine is the five verses of “Hallelujah” he recorded.

For me, it’s the third verse that takes me back to Red Deer.

Baby I’ve been here before.

I know this room, I’ve walked this floor.

I used to live alone before I knew you

I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch,

but love is not a victory march

it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!

What does this mean? Well, when I was a boy in Red Deer, I recall how my mom, Lila, was a person you could not put one over on. Mom explained that the fight was fixed. So Lila and Leonard were in agreement—do your best, even if it isn’t much, if you cannot feel, try to touch, tell the truth and don’t come to fool the few. And even if it all goes wrong, you’ll stand before the lord of song with nothing on your tongue but hallelujah.

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