Olympia
by David Kary
There must have been twenty pickup trucks outside the Pioneer Hotel, parked at
whatever angles the snow piles would allow. Most of them had hockey sticks in the
back, along with an equipment bag that was left open to let out the stink. My
banged-up red Ford was in one of the good spots right by the entrance. No equipment
bag in that one. I’d stopped playing five years earlier when I was demoted to team
manager.
The game had been a bad loss against Outlook but we weren’t going to let that stop
us from enjoying ourselves. Reg the pub-keeper had to move fast just to keep us
liquidated and the jukebox was turned up loud, playing country music like it always
did. I seem to remember Hank Snow singing “I’ve Been Everywhere.”
I was sitting with Joey Friese at one of those little round tables, no wider across
top than the tray Reg was hauling around. I was into my second bottle of Boh, doing
more listening than talking, when I looked up to see Terry Eckert standing over us.
He asked if the third chair was taken.
“It is now. Sit down you big shithead.”
Joey picked up where he’d left off as Terry lowered his tired body into the chair. He
was a rare sight at this establishment. When the game was over, he’d generally go
straight back to his farm and family. I was wondering what brought him out but he
couldn’t get a word in edgewise until Joey left to use the men’s room.
“I’m gonna have to miss a few games in January,” he said. I appreciated the notice,
but most guys wouldn’t give me a whole month’s worth.
“You don’t need to go in for surgery or anything, do you?”
“No, nothing like that.”
I waited a while longer, but nothing more was coming.
“What is it then?” I asked eventually.
Terry was caught off guard, like it never crossed his mind that I might dig that deep.
He finally heaved his barrel chest and let it out: “I just need to go on a trip.”
“Where to?”
Another pause. Then he showed a crack of a smile. It was too late to hold back now.
“Detroit.” As in Detroit, Michigan. I said nothing, which is the best way I know to act
unsurprised, but the idea of that place hung over our table like the cloud of cigarette
smoke that Joey left behind. I took a good long pull from my bottle. Terry did the same
with his. The beer helped clear my head.
“What’s in Detroit?”
“I wanna see him play again before he retires.”
I took another pull from my bottle.
“It’d be a helluva lot easier to fly to Toronto, or Vancouver now that they have a team.”
“Nope, it’s gotta be Detroit,” he says.
“You wouldn’t have to fly at all, you know. You could just drive down to Minnesota
to see him play against the North Stars.”
“I wanna see him play in his own rink.”
I asked him if he’s taking Pauline with him and he tells me she’s gotta stay home
with the kids. He’ll just go by himself.
I can’t quite explain what went through my head then. Maybe I panicked at the thought
of not being part of this.
“You shouldn’t take a trip like that by yourself.”
*
Terry played against Gordie Howe something like 25 years earlier, while the war
was still on. He never shared a lot of details, but I know that Gordie was with
his regular club and Terry was on a hand-picked team from some of the small towns
in the area. He said it was like an all-star team but nobody used that word back
then. The game was played at a rink in Saskatoon, ending in a 4-4 tie. Gordie
scored three goals. Terry scored one. “Shoulda got two,” I remember him saying,
as if some missed chance was still fresh on his mind.
A year later Terry heard that the Howe kid was playing somewhere in Ontario, and after
that people said he was somewhere down in the States. Then, in 1946, he showed up with the Red Wings.
Terry left his mark closer to home. He went on to play senior hockey with the
Saskatoon Quakers and helped them win the Western Canada Senior League championship
in ’51. Then the league merged with the Pacific Coast League and Terry didn’t have
the stomach for that sort of travel. He spent his winters at home from then on,
playing for the Goodwood Gryphons.
We were an ordinary small town senior team before he came along, maybe a bit worse
than most, and he was the biggest fish we were ever going to see in our little pond.
He had everything—size, speed, toughness, and a wrist shot we’d never seen the likes
of. None of the other teams could do much of anything to stop him. He led the league
in scoring from the start and inspired the rest of us to play better than we knew
we could. We won our first league championship by ’56 and stayed on top of the
league until the mid-sixties.
Like the rest of us, Terry put on a few pounds over the years. Most of it was muscle,
but it was farmer’s muscle, not hockey muscle. So, in ’66—the same year I was cut from
the lineup—Terry moved from centre ice to defense. He could conserve his energy back
there and use his size to full advantage. He anchored the power play and made life
completely miserable for anyone who tried to park in front of our net, but he
couldn’t carry the team anymore. By the time the ’70-71 season rolled around,
things weren’t looking so good. We’d lost a couple of good players from the year
before, and the kids we’d brought in weren’t getting the job done. As for the
veterans, they were another year older and another year slower. Even Terry was
making mistakes and getting beaten to the puck.
Then one night in Rosetown things got interesting. The home team was up 7-1 near the end
of the third period, and they really should have taken their foot off the gas. One of
their young hotshots was cruising up to our blue line when somebody sent a pass his
way. He was watching the puck hit his stick when Terry’s shoulder arrived on his
chest—a clean check, but way harder than it had to be. The youngster fell like a sack
of year-old potatoes and ended up face down on the ice, hardly moving. All hell broke
loose after that. The Rosetown fans screamed for Terry’s head and one of their tough
guys seemed like he wanted to deliver it to them. Terry had to beat him up pretty good
before he’d change his mind. The show ended with the two of them skating to the
dressing rooms, looking down at the ice to avoid the fans’ eyes.
About a week later Terry tells me he has to take a trip to Detroit.
*
The taxi driver who took us from our hotel to Olympia Stadium asked where we were from.
“Just got in from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,” I said. His eyes flashed with suspicion in
the rear-view mirror, like he thought I was making those places up. I felt like telling
him it was Gordie Howe’s home town, but I thought better of it. He took us through a
series of miserable-looking streets and then turned onto a wide one called Grand River
Avenue. It was getting dark, but there wasn’t much to see anyway, not until that big
old stadium came into view. It stood out like a temple in an open plain of parking
lots. Car headlights crawled forward all around it like torch-bearing pilgrims.
We rolled up to the front end of the Olympia under a pool of white light that spilled
on to the avenue. The big marquee read, “SATURDAY 8:00 PM, WINGS vs BUFFALO.” Underneath
that it said, “SUNDAY 8:00 PM, WINGS vs TORONTO.” It was like they had written out our
itinerary in oversized red letters for everyone to see.
We’d picked that weekend mostly for my benefit—I’d been a Maple Leafs fan all my life,
and Terry said he didn’t care who the Wings were gonna be playing. He said he just wanted
to see them play well, which seemed unlikely given the way things were going lately. They
had 12 wins and 22 losses when we dropped into town, and the team had hit rock bottom
just a week earlier in a game we saw on Hockey Night in Canada. The final score that
night was 13-0 for Toronto.
*
We handed the man our tickets and came into a big long room they called the Concourse.
Everywhere in front of us there were well-dressed men and women, stepping sharply like
they knew where they were going. Neither of us are much good in crowds, but we somehow
managed to find our seats. They were good ones, about 15 rows above the ice near one of
the blue lines.
The place must have been about three times bigger than any arena I’d ever been inside, a
huge oblong bowl with umpteen thousand dark red seats. The aisles were red too, but the
facades and pillars were white like the trim on the home team’s sweaters. Red and white
Stanley Cup banners dangled from the ceiling like they were hanging from the sky, amidst
clusters of white lights. I had to strain my eyes to see the rows of wooden rafters high
above them in the dark.
Terry beside me didn’t seem interested in anything but the ice sheet down below, which
I have to admit was a work of art in its own right. The surface was smooth like glass,
without a single smudge or blemish, and it shone so brightly you’d swear it was lit up
from underneath. As for the lines and faceoff circles, it was like God Himself had
brought out His compass and straightedge. It was a shame to scar up anything as
perfect as that, but before long a gate flung open and the players streamed in—first
the Sabres, then the Red Wings. They started churning through their warmups like it
was just another day at the office, each team careful to keep their business to
their own side.
“They call this place The Old Red Barn,” I said, feeling like I had to say something.
“Huh?” Terry seemed far away. His eyes were locked on the players below.
“It says in this programme here that ‘Detroit fans affectionately refer to the Olympia
as The Old Red Barn.’” I was still getting used to having to shout out to be heard in
there.
“Doesn’t look like any barn I’ve ever known.”
“Me neither.”
It wasn’t hard to pick out Gordie among the swarm of white and red sweaters below us.
No one else had that same wide-legged skating style or those big, sloping shoulders.
I got that unreal feeling that comes over you when you finally see what you came for.
If Terry felt anything like that, he was keeping it to himself.
When the players and coaches finally assembled to hear the U.S. national anthem,
Terry leaned over to my ear: “That’s not Ned Harkness behind the bench.”
“Who?”
“The Detroit coach. It’s somebody different.”
I had to strain my eyes to see that Terry was right. It wasn’t the same guy we saw
pacing and cursing behind the bench on TV a week earlier. And when the puck dropped
a minute later the Wings looked like a different team too. They were a step faster
than the Sabres from the start, playing hard and tough like the mighty Red Wings of
old. The crowd was showing signs of life too, but their cheers were restrained, like
they doubted that what they were seeing was real.
Then the Wings broke through, just 4 minutes 55 seconds into the game. Frank Mahovlich
fed the puck to Gordie, who unleashed a low, hard wrister past the Sabres’ goalie.
The fans jumped from their seats and let out a roar so loud I could feel the place
shake. You got the sense that they weren’t about to hold anything back when it was
Gordie doing the scoring. Down on the ice, their hero’s celebration was a quick one,
as if to say there’s nothing to get too excited about here, there’s still lots of
work to do. I looked over at Terry who was up on his feet like the rest of us. He
wasn’t exactly beaming, but he seemed at ease with himself for the first time on
this trip.
After the crowd settled down, I asked the guy next to me if he knew who was coaching
the Wings. He said it was Doug Barkley. Ned Harkness had stepped down earlier in
the day—something about a players’ revolt. He wasn’t out of the picture though; he’d
be staying on as General Manager. Terry leaned in and listened with interest. He
told me that Barkley used to play defense for the Wings before he took a stick to the
eye and had to retire.
The Wings didn’t let up. They took more penalties than they should have but managed
to keep the Sabres off the board for the rest of the period. In the second period
they got another goal, this time from Nick Libett. Buffalo got one of their own
in the third, but they couldn’t draw even. Mahovlich scored to give the Wings some
breathing room with only two minutes left. The Sabres got one back, but by then
the result wasn’t much in doubt. The game ended 3-2.
The fans were lively and upbeat as they filtered out of the Olympia. For tonight at
least, one win would erase the memory of a dismal season. We sat a while longer,
waiting for the crowd to thin out. Before long most of the hubbub had died down and
the place was almost peaceful.
Then I heard Terry say, “It’s not gonna work, y’know.”
“What?”
“Bringing in a new coach.”
I took a breath—relieved that Terry was talking about hockey and not something else.
“Seemed to work pretty well tonight.”
“Yeah, but they can’t keep it up.” Terry had an unfamiliar edge to his voice now,
and his words picked up speed as he talked. “Think about it. You’ve got this core
of veterans—Howe, Delvecchio, Bergman—most of whom have been around since the
team’s glory days. They know how to win, but their way of winning hasn’t been
working so well lately. Then there’s this group of young players. They’ve got
talent, but they’re not clicking with the old guys. In comes Doug Barkley. He’s
younger than most of the veterans—hell, it wasn’t long ago that he came into the
league and was learning his trade from some of the guys he’s coaching now.
What’s he gonna do? And don’t forget you still have that halfwit Harkness in
charge upstairs. The team’s in an impossible situation.”
I had nothing to say. He’d obviously thought about this a lot more than I had.
*
Before going up to our seats for the second game we spotted a bit of a commotion up
ahead in the concourse. My first thought was that some sort of scuffle was breaking
out, but coming in for a closer look I saw that fans were peacefully assembling
themselves along a belt-high railing that ran parallel to a wall. The railing
created a path between a closed set of red double doors on one end and the lights
of the arena on the other. It was pretty obvious what everybody was there for.
Before long the doors swung open and the lane filled with my guys in blue and white.
George Armstrong, Davey Keon, and the rest of the Leafs bulled their way through
to the ice, paying no notice to the boos from the gathered Detroit fans or the
scattered cheers from their own fans who’d come down from Ontario. We were close
enough to see the bumps and bruises on their faces, the stitches, and the missing
teeth. From that distance you get a sense of how physically powerful those guys are.
Something about the way they moved makes you want to step back, to give them some
extra space. No, they aren’t like the rest of us, I thought. They reminded me of
the guy standing there beside me, ten years earlier. I glanced over his way. He
wasn’t enjoying this especially much. More than anything, he seemed anxious to get
up to his seat.
Then the doors soon swung open for the local heroes, taking bow-legged strides to
cheers all around. They walked more slowly and comfortably than the Leafs did, but
you could see that most of them were doing their best to ignore the lot of us.
Gordie, who was at the end of the procession, raised the butt end of his stick to
acknowledge the crowd and then dipped his head in a humble salute. A few steps later
he did the sort of thing he was famous for, stopping a moment to tousle the hair of
a red-headed youngster barely tall enough to see over the railing. Then he quickened
his step and disappeared into the glare of the rink.
When we reached our seats that night it seemed like half the people in our section had
come down to support the Leafs. The guys beside us had driven down from Sarnia. Others
were proudly shouting out their hometowns to anyone who cared: Windsor, London,
Woodstock, and half a dozen other places. I thought about Terry saying he wanted to
see Gordie play in his own rink, and I wondered if this game qualified.
“It was good to see the teams so close up, eh?”
Terry said nothing. I was getting tired of him being so quiet.
“Hard to figure that the star player would be the one who mixes so easily with the fans.”
“Yeah, they say he always has time to spend with the fans. Never turns away anybody
looking for an autograph they say.” He wasn’t saying this in an admiring way, but
he wasn’t criticizing either. He kept his eyes directed iceward.
When the puck dropped, the Red Wings looked like the same reinvigorated bunch we saw
the night before, but things weren’t going as well on the scoreboard. The Leafs
weren’t much better than the Sabres the night before, but their goalie, Bruce
Gamble, was playing like I never knew he could, blocking everything the Wings
could throw his way. At the end of the second period the Leafs were up 1-0.
Gordie had some chances but wasn’t breaking through. It wasn’t like he was playing
badly or anything, but over the years we’d come to expect more from him and he
wasn’t delivering. I suppose things must have been that way for him all season.
The goal against Buffalo was just his 14th.
I asked Terry what he thought was holding Gordie back. I was pretty sure it was
something he’d been thinking about too.
“Mostly it’s the team that’s messed up. The teams that Gordie used to play with were
a well-oiled machine, where everybody knew their part and knew where to find their
teammates. Tonight, they’ve got the throttle up real high but they’re clunking pretty
badly.” Terry was talking faster than usual again, like he did at the end of the
Buffalo game.
“So Gordie’s the same player he’s always been?”
“I didn’t say that. Something’s missing, I just don’t know what.”
I tried to goad him into saying more, but he was done sharing his opinions for the
night. The game ended 3-2 for the Leafs even though the Red Wings outshot them 34-19.
Gordie was held off the scoresheet.
*
On the plane ride home, I decided to grab my chance, knowing Terry would be even less
talkative once we got back to Goodwood.
“So you think you could have done it?”
“Done what?”
“Played in Detroit. Or anywhere else in the NHL.”
Terry looked at me sideways from his window seat. It was an unbelieving kind of
look you might give somebody who farted in church. Then he turned to speak to
me straight on. His voice sounded more tired than it did a minute earlier.
“You gotta remember that the players were a lot better back then, before all those
expansion teams joined up. A lot of really good players tried out over the years
but never caught on. I doubt that I would have had any more luck than they did.”
“But how many of them could play like you could?”
“I really don’t know.”
“And who knows how much better you could have been if you went at it full time?”
“You’re right, I don’t know. And I don’t know that I wouldn’t have busted up my
ankle either. What it really comes down to is this: a guy can’t waste his
time thinking about what might have been.”
That sounded like a sensible conclusion to me. I would have let the conversation
end there, but Terry had one more thing to say.
“Besides, I never said I would have wanted to play.”
That really bugged me somehow. What was the point of taking this trip if you
never dreamed of being in Gordie’s skates?
“Am I hearing you right? You wouldn’t want to get paid good money to play the
best game in the world? And get every summer off?”
“I’ve got nothing against money. And I could handle the losing seasons, know-nothing
owners, and coaches who can’t coach. But there’s one thing I couldn’t handle
and that’s constantly being put out there on display. You saw the way those
guys had to walk through that cattle chute.” I definitely had him riled up now.
“Didn’t look so bad to me.”
“For some people maybe it’s not so bad. Somebody like Gordie accepts that as part
of his job and maybe even likes it. But I’m not like that.”
“But you wouldn’t have to put up with everything that a star has to. Gordie gets
all that attention because he’s one of the best there’s ever been. You said
yourself that you’d be lucky just to make the team. An ordinary guy could be
picking his nose out there and nobody’d even notice.”
Terry smiled a bit, but turned his eyes to the seat back in front of him. “When I was
sitting up there in the stands watching those guys play, I kept thinking about my
kids’ table hockey game. You know, the kind with the players that move when you
push and spin those rods underneath. I kept thinking that’s what it must be
like—you’re just this little guy down there while some bigshots are making all
the decisions and everybody else watches your every move from above. And you
do this every year, from October to May.”
“You don’t think you could get used to it?” I asked.
“You know, maybe a person could get used to all that, but getting used to anything has its
price. When I watched those games, I just kept thinking that’s just no way to live. Maybe
I’ve been out in the open too long, tending to my cows and whatever else. I just don’t
see how a person could breathe properly inside that bubble.”
That’s when the stewardess asked if we’d like some refreshments. I had her set me up with a
beer. Terry stuck to ginger ale. He seemed relieved to be out from under my questions, but I
wasn’t going to let him off that easy.
“Did anybody ever ask you to try out? For an NHL team, I mean.”
“Yeah, once or twice. I don’t know if they called themselves scouts back then, but they’d be
hanging around the rink every now and then.”
“And what happened?”
“This one guy said he worked for the Leafs. He talked to me for a little bit, and then he must
have spent half an hour talking to my dad. Dad told him I was needed on the farm. And he was right.
The crops were good and so were the prices. Besides, working on the farm was the only sure way to
stay out of the war.”
Those words might sound confident when you see them on paper, but the big guy’s voice was cracking
up pretty bad by the time he finished saying them. He turned to look out the cabin window when he
was done. It was a clear day and you could see Lake Superior down below.
I regretted prodding him like I had, and the longer he stayed quiet the worse I felt. Maybe my
wife is right and I am too much of a shit disturber. It’s best to let people find their own
answers she says. They’re the ones who know what sort of answers they can live with.
But I enjoy being a shit disturber, just like I enjoyed every minute of that trip to Detroit,
except for that part on the flight home. I should have known then that it would be Terry’s final
season, but I was as surprised as everybody else by what he announced in the dressing room eight
weeks later. No one expected him to retire after finishing the season so strong and practically
dragging the team into the playoffs. We pleaded with him but he wasn’t buying any of it.
Gordie Howe also announced his retirement that spring but came back to play again a few years
later, as the whole world knows. Some of us wished that Terry would do the same, but no one ever
had the nerve to ask him.
David Kary |