Wayne Gretzky - Revisited

By Dorothy Nixon

To my average Canadian boys, hockey players don't skate on ice, they walk on water. Indeed, all athletes are heroes to them. This has probably been true for many little boys, across cultures and across time, certainly since that first lithe muscular Greek youth donned his fig leaf (sans corporate logo) to compete in the discus, hammer-throw, and chariot race at Olympiad Number One. And it might even have been true since the first cave man brought home a beast on the end of a spear. There may even be a reptilian brain "survival of the fittest" rationale motivating all this reverence toward the fastest and the strongest.

But, then again, we've evolved since then, haven't we? We're living in an information age, where intelligence is the measure of success. So why, these days, do we exalt the "Gladiator Class" to an even greater extent than ever before, with the fleetest and the brawniest not only eliciting the unwavering devotion of every child, but also making so much money for their skills that other professions, like teacher and poet, pale in comparison?

"Professional sports," I tell my bewildered sports-minded boys, "exist to sell beer and high-top running shoes. And don't forget it!"

"Oh, you're weird, " my eldest, Andrew, retorts.

"And besides, you don't understand," my younger son Mark, adds. "You're a girl!"

But the truth is, I do understand about sports, if only from a fan's point of view. I grew up as the only girl in a family with two brothers and a father who were into sports in a big way. My British pater, an ex-Oxford track athlete, followed American football and believed that Sports Illustrated, sans swimsuit issue, had some of the best writing around. My older brother spent many a clear summer evening fiddling with the radio dial in the hope of trapping the Yankees broadcast signal. He even taught me how to score a baseball game when I was nine. And the whole family loved hockey. Even I knew every player in the six-team NHL, and I was devastated when "Les Canadiens" lost in the Stanley Cup playoffs (much as my dear Andrew is today.)

When Montreal bought an expansion baseball team in '69, my brothers and I made frequent pilgrimages from our home in suburban Rosemere to the city's Park Extension area, (where dead goats hung in the shop windows), to watch our hapless Expos, made up of has-beens and never-wases, lose most of the time. I loved baseball then; I still do.

"O.K. So you can tell a fly ball from a bunt. But you never actually played any sports, did you?" says Andrew.

Well, I had to admit that was true enough. Although my father was quick to praise my cat-like eye-hand coordination during "pitch and catch," he never encouraged me to play on a baseball team, like my brothers. The only girls who played any team sports back then were from private schools, and they played field hockey in silly-looking bloomers that I wouldn't be caught dead in.

My husband today cares little for sports, the doing or the watching. We put our sons in soccer only because it seemed the right middle-class thing to do. We taught them to swim early because I can't swim and dreaded the thought of them drowning with me standing by helplessly. And we put them in hockey only to teach them to skate, because skating is a necessary social skill here in the Great White North. Little did I know that they would want to join a hockey league and get up at five in the morning to attend practices.

"Five a.m.? Are you nuts? That's masochism!"

"But we want to, Mom. We love hockey."

"O.K. So, love hockey, but just keep one thing in mind. Loving hockey doesn't have to mean loving hockey players. Hockey players, like all professional athletes, aren't heroes. They are just very young men with very little education and far too much money who often act accordingly."

My husband thinks I'm being cruel by saying this. But it doesn't matter anyway, my sons hear nothing of it. To them, as to most of their friends, hockey players are the ultimate and there's no dissuading them. When the kids in Andrew's grade 4 class were asked to write a biography, every boy chose Wayne Gretsky. ("What about Da Vinci, or Penfield, or Joan of Arc?" I asked my son. He just shrugged. Hockey players are heroes to ten-year-old boys today -- not artists, not brain surgeons, not saints.) Andrew, like all his friends, wants to be a hockey player when he grows up. The day he saw Vincent Damphousse, the Canadiens' left winger, walking on downtown Sherbrooke Street, was the most memorable day of his life.

"But only a tiny, select group ever make the pros," I tell Andrew. "To be a top athlete you have to be extremely talented, very lucky and fiercely competitive."

To this he simply answers, "I am competitive," which may just be the understatement of the year. My firstborn plainly hates to lose. He fumes after every loss, or tie, or "bad" call by the "know-nothing" referee. This can get very tiring. And the worse part is that all his friends are the same way: birds of a feather. To Mark, on the other hand, a loss is as good as a win. Even though he is a natural athlete, so strong I sometimes wonder if he's from Krypton, most days he seems to be going through the motions out there on the soccer field. I think Mark is an artist trapped in the body of an athlete: he sometimes does a Gene Kelley routine across the kitchen floor in his cleats. In a different world, he probably wouldn't play competitively. He just likes the attention.

"Why don't we check out tap school for Mark? " I ask my husband, who makes no effort to reply. Is the suggestion that far-fetched? Does he think I'm joking?

Here's a man who does the dishes and the laundry, (no you can't have his address!) and who could care less about sports himself, but who still clearly believes that boys do sports, that sports are good, a necessary part of growing up male in our society. Culture's influence runs deep.

Couch potato feminist that I am, I can't decide. I'm not unhappy that they like sports; I want them to be fit and I want them to fit in. It's just all those expensive high tops, sleazy swimsuit issues and that river of beer down the road that has me wondering.