Stole This from a Hockey Card
By Chris Robinson
Nightwood, 154 pages, $17.95
Bowlbrawl
By Nathaniel G. Moore
Conundrum, 191 pages, $16.95
In the 1960s, Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton introduced a more personal note into sports reporting. The New Journalism was novelistic, and is practiced today by writers such as David Halberstam and David Maraniss. Stole This from a Hockey Card, by veteran Ottawa author Chris Robinson, and Bowlbrawl, a debut from Toronto's Nathaniel G. Moore, follow the tradition with delicious psychological forays into the tainted world of sports.
In Stole This, Robinson draws parallels between his own troubled past and that of epic defenceman Doug Harvey. He reveals the world on both sides of the hockey card: the life of Harvey, a man who had to play hockey, and that of himself, a man who just wanted the cards.
The result is a biography cum memoir that should find resonance with many Canadians. It's a story of two men who battled alcoholism, and were ruled by their love for that "stupid puck."
In Bowlbrawl, child bowling star Robert Towell grows up in the smoky dungeons of bowling alleys, in which he felt he was part of a pedophiliac "pornography ring." In the gnawing blankness of suburbia, the adult Towell retaliates, injecting lethal doses of violence into the seemingly innocuous sport. Moore fleshes out the surreal terrain of violent bowling, his engaging plot redolent of Mark Leyner's wacky corporate comedies. The reader is infected with a need to rescue each character -- and to laugh hysterically while doing so.
Chris Robinson reaches a high level of sports biography in Stole This from a Hockey Card. He was born just as "Doug Harvey's life was beginning to fall apart." He retraces the steps of Harvey's stellar career, and his long slide into substance abuse. Though he was given a hard time for his notoriously slack playing style by fellow Montreal Canadien Kenny Reardon, and felt threatened by "intimidating veterans" Butch Bouchard and Rocket Richard, by 1950 Harvey was the best defenceman on the team, eventually winning seven Norris trophies as the league's best defenceman and taking the team to five Stanley cups. Robinson compares scenes of his own life to Harvey's, creating an exquisite patchwork of sports, personal narrative and manic alcoholism that is tragic in its normalcy.
Robinson scratches the shiny surface of the good old days of the NHL, reminding us that there was nothing golden when the National Hockey League had only six teams. The "owners were kings" who skimmed off the league pension fund and conned the players by convincing them that hockey was about the love of the game. This "love" didn't help when players hit 40, and found themselves collecting $8,000 a year.
Harvey, for one, was left with nothing to bank on but nostalgia. For him, there was little chance of salvation off the ice. So he drank. The great defenceman died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1989.
Self-proclaimed literary entertainer Nathaniel G. Moore sets his violent Bowlbrawl in the politically correct climate of 1990s Toronto. Unable to forget a childhood of exploitation by bowling, Robert Towell forms the World Championship Bowling League (1996-2000), which is designed to terminate the sport. The players are casualties in Towell's revenge against the Professional Bowlers' Association.
The tournaments are reminiscent of trench warfare, in which Dragan Momchilo and Greg Lebelle, along with two ninjas and a bunch of miscreants, battle for their lives. The violence is redeemed when Greg fights to become the last Bowlbrawl champion. By doing so, he commits himself to the dark world of bowling, so that Dragan can make a clean break before he, too, is consumed.
In the end, Towell realizes that his players are not "actors" but "human beings," and dissolves the WCB. No longer at the mercy of an audience whose faces are "as pallid as panelled wood," he stops having to play up to the media. Without ever touching a bowling ball, Towell vicariously amends his childhood.
Laden with images, Bowlbrawl successfully suspends our disbelief. Much of it is envisioned through backstage wrestling cinematography and insightful interviews that provide rapid character development. The format is a playground for Moore's linguistic eccentricities: the "Scotch tape" smile of his mother, Robert's "smile [that]doubles as an axe." Psychedelic content is grounded by satirical product placements, bowling definitions, historical photographs. Above all, there's black humour.
Biography and autobiography merge in these books; Moore's tracks the evolution of a damaged child sports star through Towell's memoirs. In Robinson's, a connection is developed between the author and Doug Harvey through a series of at once masculine and emotive parallels. Robinson laments: "The problem with the heroism label is that it weeds out all the complexities of a person to showcase all that is perceived to be worthy and good." By exposing the unique qualities of Harvey and Towell, Robinson and Moore give us more than sports heroes to worship, they give us heroes we can relate to.
Janine Armin contributes
to The Village Voice and other publications. She loves hockey players and artists, especially those named Riopelle.