fred fearnot (and hockey hal)
pond hockey
lake effect
(Artist: Arthur Getz)
underneath it all
Get Out There: “Skating Pond, Yellow Lake, BC” (2009) by Scott Conarroe. Edmonton-born, Conarroe is a prize-winning photographer who divides his time between B.C. and Switzerland. For more of his remarkable views and vision, visit his website and/or his page at Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery. (Image: © Scott Conarroe / courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery)
behind the lines
Off Duty: The game goes on in “Military Moscow,” by Soviet painter Aleksandr Deyneka, which he completed in the span of wartime years 1941-46. The question is … which game is it? As I wrote in a book of mine, the story of how Russians came to the hockey we know involves a bit of a tangled provenance, a layer of mist, and a Chekhovian touch of men quarrelling offstage. Before 1946, Russians tended to play soccer in the summer and bandy — russki hokkei — when winter came. They’d been doing it, in one form or another, going back to Peter The Great’s time. Canatsky hokkei (ours) wasn’t unknown, especially in the Baltics, but mostly they bandyed, chasing a ball, with 11-man teams skating on a rink the size of a soccer field. Sticks were short and curled and wrapped in cord. Lawrence Martin says that there was a Canadian-sized hockey rink in a central Moscow soccer stadium going back to 1938, and that puck-hockey was introduced to phys-ed curricula starting in 1939. It was in ’46 that the first hockey league got going in a serious way. And so, here, under the barrage balloon? The sticks look fairly hockey-shaped, to me. There seems just to be the one goal, so it could be that they’re just taking shots. Either way, there’s no mistaking, or oppressing, the pure shinny spirit of the moment.
thaw deal
The Cost of Defrost: American illustrator Henry Hintermeister’s portrait of the seasons in shift ornamented the cover of Country Gentleman magazine in March of 1936.
rhapsody in blue
In The Gloaming: Skaters gonna skate, and did, with pucks in play, too, during the innocent winter of 1954, on Toronto’s frozen Grenadier Pond, in the city’s westside High Park. (Image: Desmond E. Wainwright, City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 536, Item 251)
it’s only offside if you hit the open ocean
Showdown Offshore: Spectators watch a game on the ice at Cutlers Cove, Guysborough, Nova Scotia, ca. 1900. (Image: Buckley Family collection, Nova Scotia Archives, 1985-386 no. 369)
one on one
(Artist: Charles E. Martin)
buddy wasisname and the other fellers
If nothing else, “The Ice Ace From Nowhere” answers a question that no-one ever asked: where can I get me some concussion-themed fiction with a hockey slant?
I’m just really getting going, but here’s some of what I know of John Marshall’s serial tale of high crimes and head trauma: it was published in instalments through the fall of 1948 and into ’49 in a boisterous, boy’s-own English weekly called “The Champion” that somehow came to add hockey to its regular roster of adventures involving Indigenous footballers (Johnny Fleetfoot, Redskin Winger) and RAF pilots who used to be championship boxers (Rockfist Rogan).
I don’t know who Marshall was, or what else he wrote, but I can tell you that, so far, he’s gone all in on his post-concussion-syndrome storyline. Chapter one: man wakes up lying on the ice “of a frozen river in Canada.” Knowing not a thing about it (or anything), he asks himself the old Talking Heads puzzler: “How did I get here?” No clue. There’s a stick nearby and a puck; he’s wearing skates. “Guess I must have taken a big bump,” he tells himself, just like a hockey player. “I seem to have scrambled my brains a little. It’ll all come back to me in a minute.”
Nope.
Still, he figures out how to get himself going on skates. Attaboy. Within a couple of paragraphs he’s discovered a bag full of money. In a tree. Also? A helpful newspaper clipping suggesting that he may have killed a man while robbing a bank in Chicago before … skating north? The police must be after him, he decides; best to keep on skating? Before he can ponder much on that, he finds himself recruited to try out for a hockey team, the Gladiators, that just happens to be practicing around a bend of the river because, you know, Canada.
Our hero (villain?) doesn’t remember his name, so he can’t tell it to the Gladiators, who think he’s just shy, and dub him “Silent.” Uh-oh: as the scrimmaging starts, he realizes … he … he … doesn’t know the rules. So that might be a problem, especially if the Gladiators have a concussion spotter on staff. I’ll have to let you know how it goes: that’s as far as I’ve got in this particular brain-injury barn-burner.
soon
The Wait: What’s a net without the ice under it? Waiting for winter in Catalina, Newfoundland, south of Bonavista.
melting point
(Artist: Ed McNally)
solo rush
Breakaway: A lone puckhandler perfects his craft on the ice of Berry Creek, circa 1914—18, on the J.W. Forster ranch near Hanna, Alberta, northeast of Calgary. (Image: Glenbow Archives, NA-3968-8)
puckstruck 