Dispatches from the Sporting Life

Anthony MacKenzie is an associate professor of history at St. Francis
Xavier University.

Canadians at the 1963 world hockey playoffs in Sweden were not popular
visitors. “[A]nti-Canadian feeling is so strong here that it has
become impossible to wear a maple leaf on your lapel without being
branded as ruffian, hooligan and … sex maniac,” Stockholm papers
reported. But the Canadians were not badly behaved, Mordecai Richler
says, merely misunderstood.

In this collection of essays on sport, two seem rather out of place:
one on angling, the other on an African safari. Richler is more in his
element dealing with pro athletes, their wives and girlfriends, sports
writers, umpires, and referees. His irreverent, astringent style is well
suited to writing about “men playing boys’ games” and being highly
paid for it. He is not afraid to cast a pebble at idols, describing the
“Great Gretzky” as “very nice but incapable of genuine wit or
irreverence.” And he dismisses athletes’ wives who complain of being
neglected, noting that the only alternative careers open to them are
either working behind the counter at McDonald’s or “doing something
even less useful … becoming a sociologist or a professor of English
Lit 101.”

In 1968, Richler noted the differences between the American newcomers
on the Canadian hockey scene and the natives: “they have seen cutlery
before, know how to dial long-distance, are capable of saying more to a
young lady than ‘how much?’” At the same time, American athletes
coming to Canada are astounded to find it a different country; an
Expo’s import complained that “most of the players dislike it
intensely … there is the weather problem and the culture shock … the
wives don’t want to learn French, and then there’s the tax situation
… they feel neglected and out on the tundra.”

In these columns, we also learn that Jewish ballplayers were subjected
to racial slurs much earlier than blacks, as Jews were playing
big-league ball long before Jackie Robinson’s breakthrough. All in
all, this is a first-class book about some strenuous activities that
keep so many North Americans enslaved to their TV sets.