Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places
By Dave Bidini McClelland & Stewart, 288 pages, $32.99 REVIEWED BY
It's a strange language, no question, and sometimes to an untrained ear it can sound as harsh and as meaningless as radio interference. And yet as any native speaker will tell you, hockey is a complex and even poetic tongue, full of surprising lights and weights. To speak it is to know the power that's packed into the simple syllables of proper nouns: Rogie Vachon or Rocky Saganiuk. It's the unapologetic freedom to talk about parking oneself in the slot and then, instead of going five-hole, looking upstairs, to the top shelf, where they keep the peanut butter.
If you're at all hockeylingual, you won't want to miss Dave Bidini's wonderful, quixotic Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places. As far as I'm concerned it belongs on the shelf of necessary hockey books, up there with Jack Ludwig's Hockey Night in Moscow,Ken Dryden's The Game,George Plimpton's Open Ice and everything by Roy MacGregor.
The seed for this fresh, frank and piercingly funny book was planted in 1986 in a last-ditch motel in way-out Georgia, when Bidini (who's from Toronto, and also plays guitar for The Rheostatics) happened upon an old goalie from Oshawa.
If you believe in hockey, Bidini decided that day, it will find you. A decade later, disillusioned with the state of the Canadian game, he took his belief on the road. What's hockey like, he wondered, away from "economics, corporate lust, the ravages of progress?"
He wanted to find out how the game might be faring far from its home, in places where even those puckish zealots who think of hockey as being as universal as Truth and e-commerce would be surprised to learn it had a life. He wasn't just going as a writer, either: He was going to play.
Off he went, with his wife, Janet; his Koho; and the big, rank bag of equipment that is our birthright as Canadians.
When Bidini told the soldier at the airport in Dubai he was there to play ice hockey, the guy waved his gun. "You are crazy," he said. But Bidini played, sharing a rink with the Kuwait Mooseheads and the Riyadh Rangers. He suited up in China, too, and in Transylvania. The ice was good and it was bad; the hockey, too. It didn't matter which: Wherever Bidini goes, whatever the conditions, Tropic of Hockey is a manic, bawdy, marvellous piece of work.
Journeys, of course, are as much about starting points as destinations, and Bidini finds plenty of room to ruminate about the game back home, its lore and history, his own complicated love for it.
Along with a running memoir (of his early house-league days in Etobicoke; of his abiding love for Wendel Clark), he fits in commentaries on such things as the role of hate in hockey; a short history of boozing and the NHL; and the ways in which Dubai resembles Mississauga.
Bidini also surrenders the long-held notion -- how familiar it is -- that nobody plays better hockey than Canadians. "I finally saw my attitude for what it was: bullshit rooted in pride and vanity."
Far from those roots, Bidini finds what he went looking for: hockey in its simplest, purest form, as it used to be, a game of passion and of people. Stephen Smith is a Toronto literary journalist and a lanky left-winger. Tropic of Hockey is excerpted today in the Travel section.