Canada's Game by Holman Andrew C.;

Author:Holman, Andrew C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2009-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

Brian McFarlane is not best known as Leslie McFarlane’s son, but he is well established as a true man of hockey. Hockey junkies will have read Brian McFarlane’s World of Hockey;Brian McFarlane’s History of Hockey ;Proud Past, Bright Future: One Hundred Years of Canadian Women’s Hockey ; Still More It Happened in Hockey: Still More Weird and Wonderful Stories from Canada’s Greatest Game; his series Brian McFarlane’s Original Six; or others of his dozens of books on hockey. These books have made him one of the most comprehensive hockey historians alive. Brian McFarlane is a patriotic scholar, and his research repeatedly brings Canada’s involvement in hockey history onto the page. He points out, for example, that the early hockey scholar, British journalist Ian Gordon, traced the sport to Windsor Castle, circa 1853, even though hockey was written about in Windsor, Nova Scotia, prior to 1810. Many other Canadian “origins” of hockey can be found in The Puck Starts Here: The Origin of Canada’s Great Winter Game, Ice Hockey, and other of his books in which he attempts to establish the sport once and for all as a Canadian one.

Where did this love of the game come from? Mordecai Richler gives one the sense in which the importance of hockey is passed down in Canadian families as he describes the way he imagines his son, far off in the future after his death, will tell his own son what the boy’s grandfather was like in “Cheap Skates”: “There were hockey games on TV, and if I dared to tiptoe into the living room to inform him, say, I’ve just won a scholarship to Harvard, or I’m getting married tomorrow, or, ‘Hey, congratulations! My wife just gave birth – you’re a grandfather,’ he would glare at me and say, ‘Not now you fool. We can discuss such trivialities between periods’” (Richler 2002, 141). Indeed, writing the foreword to Dispatches from the Sporting Life, Noah Richler recalls his father’s preferred place on Saturday nights from September to May: “on the living room couch, watching Hockey Night in Canada” (ix). He remembers watching with his father the Canadians play the Russians in 1972, going with his father to the Montreal Forum to see the Canadiens for the first time, listening to his father calling the Canadiens “Nos Glorieux” (xi). Noah Richler knows that hockey was a part of his father and, more important, a part of his relationship with his father.

Brian McFarlane sets his Mitchell Brothers series in the 1930s – significantly, the time when his father was writing his hockey stories. He actually wants to expand that time span, however, for the simple reason that he wants to weave more of Canadian history into his hockey tales:

This gives me the freedom to take them back to [nhl Hall of Famer] One-Eyed McGee’s day. Let them learn all about hockey at the turn of the century, how they played with very limited equipment and short sticks, and the game is just as rough and rugged as it is today … I can take them back to the Riel Rebellion.

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