Tyee’s Novel New Hockey Season

Editor’s note: As humanitarian assistance for all those suffering NHL withdrawal The Tyee exclusively offers The Meaning of Hockey, a brand new online novel by Gary Engler, former Vancouver Sun associate sports editor. Read the first chapter here.

Over our 16-week hockey season, beginning today (and running every Monday, Wednesday and Friday) follow the fictional fading fortunes of former Canucks star Bobby Benoit who returns to Vancouver to coach a new junior hockey team – and to stickhandle his way through male menopause, falling in love with a feminist and reconnecting with an estranged son.

The author interviewed stars like Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and Lennox Lewis in a decade of writing about sports at The Sun. Here the tables are turned. Gary is interviewed by his son Yves Engler, former Chilliwack Chief B.C. Junior Hockey League player.

Yves: First I have to say this is pretty weird, interviewing my own father.

Gary: I remember changing your diapers, teaching you how to skate and the day you threw the pancakes your sister made for you out the window.

Y: Point taken. So what is your novel The Meaning of Hockey about?

G: I can’t remember who told me this — [novelist] Jane Rule or [playwright] George Ryga — but it was something like ‘the reason you write it is so that you don’t have to talk about what it’s about.’

Y: Have you noticed yourself getting crabbier as you get older?

G: That’s one of the things the novel is about. One of the titles under discussion was Stickhandling Male Menopause. Yes, I have noticed a change in my moods as I get older, just like happens to Bobby Benoit, the main character in this novel.

Y: A former star with the Canucks who struggles to find meaning in his life by discovering his ‘philosophy’ of hockey.

G: He’s a guy about to turn fifty, having a mid-life crisis, who has devoted his entire life to the game.

Y: But Bobby isn’t satisfied by the world of sport anymore. When he returns to Vancouver to run a junior hockey team, he meets a woman who is a feminist and he is trying to reconnect with his son who is an anarchist. Bobby decides he doesn’t even like hockey anymore.

G: That’s true but the only way he can make sense of his existence is through hockey, because that’s all he has.

Y: Is this some kind of metaphor for Canada, like now with all the turmoil about the cancellation of the NHL season?

G: Not intentionally. But I think Canada does need someone to write a hockey story that enters into our collective consciousness and becomes a reference point for how we see ourselves. That would be good for our literary culture. We need a great Canadian hockey story, a great Canadian Mounted Police story, a great Canadian coureur de bois story, a great B.C. salmon fishing story and so on. English Canadian literature has so far not connected with popular culture in the way that it should.

Y: Why do you think it hasn’t?

G: Lots of reasons. Number one being intellectual colonialism, first English and then American. It’s changing, but to a large extent ‘Canadian’ is still seen as inferior. If you were really good, you’d be somewhere else. Popular music has overcome this, but it took decades of CRTC regulations. Number two is the absence of a mechanism to deliver English Canadian mass-market literature or film — the two most important means of telling popular stories. Aside from Harlequin, which is owned by Torstar but is international in outlook, there are no Canadian mass-market publishers. English Canadian literature is almost exclusively aimed at niche markets, whether intellectual or geographical. And the state of Canadian film distribution is even worse.

Y: I’m surprised you have so many opinions about literature when you spent most of your life being a journalist.

G: Journalists have opinions about everything. We’re instant experts.

Y: I’ll vouch for that.

G: Watch what you’re saying. Being full of yourself might be genetic.

Y: Your main character in The Meaning of Hockey is always telling stories about his glory days. Is that something you know anything about?

G: What’s your point?

Y: Don’t be so defensive.

G: Are you trying to say that I’m like Bobby Benoit? I was never a star.

Y: But you had quite a bit of success as a playwright at a very young age.

G: It’s true. I was running my own theatre in Calgary before I turned 21. My play Sudden Death Overtime was performed at Factory Theatre Lab in Toronto and Theatre Calgary before my 22nd birthday.

Y: But you quit that world after a few years.

G: I found the insecurity that permeates the world of theatre to be oppressive. Life on stage is one long audition. George Ryga, who I became friends with after meeting him at the Banff Centre, told me to quit theatre and get a real job, so I’d have something real to write about. It was good advice.

Y: Journalism is a real job?

G: I spent over a decade working in construction, in a steel mill, on coastal freighters, as a truck driver, before I got a job at The Sun in 1987. But to answer your question, journalism was a great job. First month at the paper I got the baseball beat and covered the Vancouver Canadians for a season. Free peanuts, popcorn, beer and I got paid to watch baseball games at the most beautiful little stadium in the world, then write stories about it afterwards. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Y: A male fantasy come true. Bobby Benoit is a guy who has lived the male fantasy life of complete irresponsibility but finally has to confront reality as he approaches fifty. Do you think it is common for men not “to grow up” until they get that old?

G: You should direct that question to your mother. What you have to understand about many sports stars is that they have been famous from a very early age. Guys like Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby, Lebron James have been at the centre of their particular universe since they were thirteen, fourteen or even earlier. Imagine what that does to your head. And yes, I think there is a ‘maleness’ to this.  It was fun to have Bobby fall in love with a Vancouver feminist.

Y: My final question is why have this novel published on-line?

G: I sent it around to a few publishers and got back strange notes like: ‘Great writing, but too mainstream for us’ and ‘We don’t do genre novels’ — still can’t figure out what genre this fits into. Then I realized more people were likely to read it online than if a small publisher printed a thousand copies. But even more important, with an online serialized novel the reader can tell me what they like and don’t like — the equivalent of hockey fans cheering a good hip check or booing a soft goal. Shouldn’t the fans of a hockey novel have the same opportunity?

Yves Engler attended Kitsilano and Vancouver Technical high schools before heading off to Montreal to make use of his French immersion education. He is the author of Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical to be released by RED Press in September 2005.