Gaston - Midnight hockey: all about beer, the boys, and the real Canadian game

A perceptive, wonderfully funny memoir about the Canadian addiction that is hockey from a very good writer and an OK (it sounds like) player. What other writer can boast of having had his nose broken by Denis Potvin and seeing a teammate spanked by a Nanaimo waitress? Splendid fun.

Stephen Cole, author of The Canadian Hockey Atlas

Bill Gastons book stinks like hockey, as all great hockey books should.

Dave Bidini, author of Best Game You Can Name and Tropic of Hockey

An amazingly accurateand often side-splittingly funnyautobiography of millions of male Canadians.

Winnipeg Free Press

A hilarious autobiographical romp. Its page-turning, read-aloud-to-anyone-within-earshot material.

Tyee Books

Very funny, true-to life celebration of the euphoria that is hockey.

Owen Sound Sun Times

A lovely book.

The Globe and Mail

also by
BILL GASTON

NOVELS
Tall Lives
The Cameraman
Bella Combe Journal
The Good Body
Sointula

SHORT STORIES
Deep Cove Stories
North of Jesus Beans
Sex is Red
Mount Appetite
Gargoyles

To the boundless spirit of Alex Dick
19502006

M Y OLDER BROTHER I AN is a longtime Oilers fan, so when he moved from Edmonton to Toronto, I called to see how things were going. In the background I could hear horns honking, people yelling, and when I asked him about it, he grumbled, Fuckin Toronto fuckin Leafs.

The Maple Leafs had won something spectacularly unimportanta game maybe, or perhaps they got a shot on goal, or managed to miss the playoffs by fewer points than last year. Whatever the reason, the entire city had spilled out into the streets, whooping and cheering. Later, as Ian elbowed his way down Yonge Street he stopped. Looked around. There were men and women. Young and old. Kids in turbans. Guys in tailored suits. Paunchy oldtimers and noisy whoooooo! girls perched atop jock-drunk shoulders. Jamaican kids and Vietnamese, laughing, chanting, fingers pointed heavenward. It was Little Italy and Chinatown, new Canadians and old, all jumbled together as they celebrated The Game. Our Game. That singular common denominator that crosses solitudes, that unites us as a nation. It was a beautiful moment.

So youve converted? I asked. A Leafs fan now?

Fuck no, he said.

Hockey is many things. Its cold fire. Steel on ice. Its chess played at 200 miles an hour. Its a game of momentum, with strange ebbs and surging flows. But for all its quicksilver perfection, hockey is still a sport played by mortals. Fallible flesh and bone. This is a book about the game beyond the glitz, after the crowds have thinned, when the cheers have died and the lights have dimmed.

For every player who fought his way into the NHL or onto Canadas Olympic squad, there are a hundred more like Bill Gaston: players who were good, very good, but not quite good enough. Bill played in the juniors and went pro for a season in Frances Ligue du Sud. He even skated a game in Switzerland under the banner of Gaston Bobo, but he never circled an NHL arena to the throbbing sound of his own name.

Told over the course of a season spent with an oldtimers team, Midnight Hockey is a tale of tube skates and taped glasses, of guilt-free beer cooling in Zamboni snow and the eroticism of a well-timed breakaway. Youll learn the real difference between beer-league hockey and oldtimers, and youll finally discover why goalies are insane. (Bill solves this riddle, and it doesnt have to do with them being human targets in a particularly malicious firing rangewell, not exclusively anyway.) Youll learn why hockey players represent the highest level of human evolution, and why public urination is something of an art form. A minor art form, true. But an art form nonetheless.

Still, amid the locker-room farts (punchlines, all on their own) and lumberjack burps (ditto), in the sweat-sheen of second-rate strippers and the malty aroma of the mythic Beer Cooler, amid the apocalyptic hangovers and stick-induced vasectomies, theres something else going on here. Midnight Hockey is, ultimately, a meditation on mortalityas heartfelt as possible when discussing frozen pucks and drunken players.

This is a book about outgrowing your body, about chasing your younger self down the ice, pokechecking like mad but always two strides behind, as the gap between you gets larger and larger and maybe you catch an ass-view glimpse of your younger self banking one in, but you never do manage to steal that puck. Its about trying to beat life at its own gameand failing, and knowing you will fail, and trying just the same.

It comes in creaks and sighs, old age does. And the temptation is always present to simply run out the clock, to rag the puckknowing that when you finally do hang up your skates, the game will continue without you. Its bigger than you.

This is a funny book. Terrifically funny. Made all the funnier by the fact that it is so very sad.

Bill Gaston has played oldtimers hockey with judges and farmers, carpenters and professors and priests. All of them tilting at that same blue line: sagging Quixotes, fuelled by ibuprofen and denial, fighting to stay in the game, trying to stave off a final, sudden-death overtime defeat.

I think that hockey players are good at the game of life, Bill notes, because they know how to play hurt.

It makes you wonder about our choice of Mountie as National Icon. A scarlet-jacketed Mountiepure of heart, strong of jawwould never take someone down with an elbow to the throat. Mounties dont spit and swear or argue with the ref. Mounties shoot straight. Theyd never deke out a goalie, let alone suckerpunch an opponent. (At least, not the Mounties of lore.)

The hockey player is more heroic precisely because he or she is so flawed, so human. Hockey players have to rise to the game; the game demands it.

Will Ferguson, Calgary

O NE OF MY FAVOURITE WRITERS is Annie Dillard, despite what she once said about writers who write books designed for specific audiences or markets, which is: It amounts to a wasted and sad life.

Well, I wasnt sad, or even all that wasted, while writing this book. Though writing a book for hockey players does sound a little iffy. I mean, the suspicion is not only that hockey players dont read, its that they probably cant. But my equally strong suspicion is that this wont deter them. So if this applies to youthat is, if you cant read but have gotten this farI salute you for helping me prove Annie Dillard wrong.

That rumours all nonsense, that hockey players are dumb. I know of several hockey players who read really well. And Eric Nesterenko, while playing with the Chicago Blackhawks, actually published a book of poems. (To my knowledge he was never beaten up for itat least not by his own team.) During Hockey Night in Canada interviews, Ken Drydens lawyerlike mouth almost single-handedly succeeded in putting an end to that dumb-rumour, but it only half took hold. What Im getting to in my roundabout way is that oldtimer hockey players only act dumb for a few hours a week, and they actually lead other lives.