Dispatches from the Sporting Life by Mordecai Richler

at once, the agency men began to talk urgently into their telephones.
    “… and the Smoke Eaters add yet another tally. The second counter of the series for…”
    The next game I saw—Canada vs. Czechoslovakia—was what the sporting writers of my Montreal boyhood used to call the big one, a four pointer. Whoever lost this one was unlikely to emerge world champion. Sensing the excitement, maybe even hoping for a show of violence, some fifteen thousand people turned up for the match. Most of them were obliged to stand for the entire game, maybe two hours.
    This was an exciting contest, the lead seesawing back and forth throughout. The Czech amateurs are not only better paid than ours but play with infinitely more elegance. Superb stickhandlers and accurate passers, they skated circles around the Smoke Eaters, overlooking only one thing: in order to score frequently, it is necessary to shoot on the nets. Whilethe Czechs seemed loath to part with the puck, the more primitive Canadians couldn’t get rid of it quickly enough. Their approach was to wind up and belt the puck in the general direction of the Czech zone, all five players digging in after it.
    The spectators—except for one hoarse and lonely voice that seemed to come from the farthest reaches of Helge Berglund’s Mecca—delighted in every Canadian pratfall. From time to time, the isolated Canadian supporter called out in a mournful voice, “Come on, Canada.”
    The Czechs had a built-in cheering section behind their bench. Each time one of their players put stick and puck together, a banner was unfurled and at least a hundred chunky broad-shouldered men began to leap up and down and shout something that sounded like “Umpa-Umpa-Czechoslovakia!”
    Whenever a Czech player scored, their bench would empty, everybody spilling out on the ice to embrace, leap in the air, and shout joyously. The Canadian team, made of cooler stuff, would confine their scoring celebration to players already out on the ice. With admirable unselfconsciousness, I thought, the boys would skate up and down poking each other on the behind with their hockey sticks.
    The game, incidentally, ended in a 4–4 tie.
    The Canadians wanted to see blood, the posters said. Hoodlums, one newspaper said. The red jackets go hunting at night, another claimed. George Gross, the Toronto
Telegram’s
outraged reporter, wrote, “Anti-Canadian feeling is so strong here it has become impossible to wear a maple leaf on yourlapel without being branded ruffian, hooligan and—since yesterday—sex maniac.”
    A man, that is to say, a Canadian man, couldn’t help walking taller in such a heady atmosphere, absorbing some of the fabled Smoke Eaters’ virility by osmosis. But I must confess that no window shutters were drawn as I walked down the streets. Mothers did not lock up their daughters. I was not called ruffian, hooligan, or anything even mildly deprecating. Possibly, the trouble was I wore no maple leaf in my lapel.
    Anyway, in the end everything worked out fine. On Tuesday morning Russ Kowalchuk’s virtue shone with its radiance restored. Earlier, Art Potter, the politically astute president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, had confided to a Canadian reporter, “These are cold war tactics to demoralize the Canadian team. They always stab us in the back here.” But now even he was satisfied. Witnesses swore there was no girl in the lobby. The Malmen Hotel apologized. Russ Kowalchuk, after all, was a nice clean-living Canadian boy. In the late watches of the night, he did not lust after Swedish girls, but possibly, like Bobby Kromm and Don Freer, yearned for nothing more depraved than a Ping-Pong table. A McIntosh apple, maybe.
    Finally, the Smoke Eaters did not behave badly in Stockholm. They were misunderstood. They also finished fourth.

5
Safari

    A week before our scheduled departure for Kenya in 1982, excitement ruled our home. After all, we were soon to abandon wintry Montreal for the