Dispatches from the Sporting Life by Mordecai Richler

Author:Mordecai Richler [Richler, Mordecai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37101-0
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2002-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

George Plimpton’s Open Net belongs up there on that still unfortunately small shelf of literate hockey books, alongside the best of them.

I am grateful, as I am sure Plimpton is too, that he survived his ordeal without ever taking a puck in the groin, “ringing the berries,” as they say. The pain, one goalie warned him, is like “taking your top lip and folding it back over your head,” a thrill professionals contend with each time out.

January 1986

12

Maxie

As usual, early one morning in August, I climbed upstairs to my studio in our dacha on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, tea tray in hand, and sat down at my long plank table, ready to begin work. I could no longer make out the cigarillo burns and tea stains on the table, because it was now buried end to end in snooker books by various hands, newspaper clippings, photocopies, computer printouts, stacks of Snooker Scene, and tournament programs and press releases. I just had time to flick on the power on my electric typewriter when the phone rang. It was an old Laurier poolroom chum who was still driving a taxi at the age of seventy-three. Last time I had run into him, outside that singularly ugly warehouse, the Molson Centre, where the Canadiens now play hockey of a sort, he was trying to flog tickets for that evening’s game. “So,” he said, “you became a writer and I became a scalper, and we’re both alter kockers now.” We exchanged phone numbers. I promised to meet him for lunch one day, but I had never called. Now he was on the phone at 7:15 a.m.

“Have you seen this morning’s Gazette?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Maxie Berger died.”

“How old was he?” I asked, because this information is of increasing interest to me.

“Eighty-three. I want you to write something nice about him. He was a good fighter. A mensch too.”

“I’ll call you soon, Abe, and we’ll have that lunch.”

“Yeah, sure.”

H. L. Mencken once wrote, “I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”

George Bernard Shaw was also disdainful: “It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits of which necessity have imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from kicking and beating their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.” Or each other.

Back in the days when I used to hang out in poolrooms, boxers were greatly admired by my bunch, some of whom could rattle off the names of the top ten in each division, as listed in Nat Fleischer’s Ring magazine. I had hoped to qualify for the Golden Gloves but had been taken out in a qualifying three-rounder; my ambition then was not a Booker Prize or a perch on the New York Times bestseller list but a Friday night main bout in Madison Square Garden, sponsored on radio by Gillette razor blades (“Look sharp! Feel sharp! Be sharp!”).

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