I’m 54. I began to play hockey when I was four in Whitehorse, Yukon. As a military child I skated all over the country and consequently felt the differences in everything from ice textures, to styles of play, to partisan fan worship indigenous to many regions. In some respects I was born into Hometown Hockey. It is a very familiar arena.
And yet, as I’ve ruminated on our new show that commences Sunday, Oct. 12, with the Toronto Maple Leafs visiting the New York Rangers and with our broadcast emanating from London, Ont., I feel a strange responsibility. Hometown Hockey in name alone infers “This is us.” And any time you showcase someone there is an inherent duty to get it right.
I’ve written previously in my book Cornered that the greatest secret I learned in broadcasting was to let one’s guest be the star.
In over 30 years hosting NHL games on TV, I’ve searched for new ways to say essentially the same thing: “Big game tonight.” In order to frame the stories differently, I, like others, rely on the muses: literature, science and the arts. In 1972 Margaret Atwood published a book called Survival, an exploration of Canadian literature that in part looked at how our writers and writing compare to those from around the world.
My favourite part of Survival tells of the character Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. On the flyleaf of Dedalus’s geography textbook, so the story goes, Stephen has written the following:
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
In other words, a complete list of nearly everything a human can be and write about, from the personal, through the social and cultural (or national), and ending with “The Universe,” or the universal. As Atwood explains, in 1972, writers in Canada tended to write about the personal and the universal, but they skipped the national. Atwood taught us about the need to read Canadian literature and apply it because it provides an idea of how great writing is made—and about who we are. It was a seminal teaching. From Alice Munro to Joseph Boyden, Blue Rodeo and The Tragically Hip, we now have the mirror upon which to know ourselves.
Hockey deserves this treatment. As the wonderful literary critic Northrup Frye pointed out, asking the question, “Who am I?” is really the same as asking, “Where is here?” Every Sunday we’ll go after these questions and search for answers.
I know that all sounds a bit lofty. And it is a responsibility. But really it just means we are going to take you someplace, in Canada, and tell you a story. Our story.