Elbows up, p.7
Elbows Up!, page 7
In twelve years, so far, touch wood, my son has been lucky. Once in Africa he had malaria, and a few other times, in Canada and England, he had such things as throat infections or chicken pox. Each time I have been afraid in that one-way, guts of ice feeling that I could probably face anything at all except that something really bad should happen to one of my kids.
Now he rides on his bike for countless miles around the countryside. He is a science man at heart, and his electric train set has complicated switches and intricate wiring which he has rigged up himself and which miraculously work and make the miniature engines do as he bids. He has lived life so far among people who were basically friendly towards him. This is not to say that he has never felt pain. He has. More, even, than I know, and I know some of it. But at least until this point in his life, his pain has been something which he could, in some way, deal with by himself.
I have seen your son only once, Mrs. Bass. That was in a newspaper photograph. In Detroit, he went out one evening when his playmates asked him to. It was not an evening to be out. Your son was shot by the police. By accident, the paper said. Shot by accident in the neck. The police were aiming at Billy Furr, who was walking out of Mack Liquors, not with a fortune in his hands but with precisely six tins of stolen beer. When Billy Furr saw the police, something told him to run and keep on running, so he did that, and he was shot dead. But the police had fired more than once, and Joe Bass happened to be in the way. The papers did not say whether he was expected to recover or not, nor how much a twelve-year-old could recover from something like that. A Negro twelve-year-old.
Your son looked a skinny kid, a little taller than my twelve-year-old but not as robust. He was lying on the sidewalk, and his eyes were open. He was seeing everything, I guess, including himself. He was bleeding, and one of his hands lay languidly outstretched in a spillage of blood. His face didn’t have any expression at all. I looked at the picture for quite a long time. Then I put it away, but it would not be put away. The blank kid-face there kept fluctuating in my mind. Sometimes it was the face of your son, sometimes of mine.
Then I recalled another newspaper photograph. It was of a North Vietnamese woman. Some marvelous new kind of napalm had just come into use. I do not understand the technicalities. This substance when it alights flaming onto skin cannot be removed. It adheres. The woman was holding a child who looked about eighteen months old, and she was trying to pluck something away from the burn-blackening area on the child’s face. I wondered how she felt when her child newly took on life and emerged, and if she had almost imagined she was looking over God’s shoulder then.
Mrs. Bass, these are the two pictures. I know they are not fair. I know the many-sidedness of that country in which you live. I know the people I love there, who are more heartbroken than I at the descent into lunacy. Also, I am a North American—I cannot exclude myself from the dilemma. I cannot say them. It is forced upon me to say us. Perhaps you know who the enemy is—and perhaps it is I.
Once, a long time ago, from the eyes of twenty-two, I wrote a poem about my father, or maybe about the local cemetery, in which the words said, Under the stone lies my father, ten years dead, who would never know as his, this bastard world he sired. It did not occur to me then that I would one day stand in that same relation to the world—no longer as a child, but as a parent.
I am not even sure who is responsible. Responsibility seems to have become too diffuse, and a whole continent (if not, indeed, a whole world) appears to be spinning in automation. The wheels turn, but no one admits to turning them. People with actual names and places of belonging are killed, and there is increasingly little difference between these acts and the fake deaths of the cowboys who never were. The fantasy is taking over, like the strangler vines of the jungle taking over the trees. It is all happening on TV.
Except that it isn’t. You know, because you felt the pain in your own flesh, that evening when the police shot your son. Is it necessary to feel pain in our own flesh before we really know? More and more, I think that it probably is.
I have spent fifteen years of my life writing novels and other things. I have had, if any faith at all, a faith in the word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The kind of belief that many writers have—the belief that if we are to make ourselves known to one another, if we are really to know the reality of another, we must communicate with what is almost the only means we have—human speech. There are other means of communication, I know, but they are limited because they are so personal and individual—we can make love; we can hold and comfort our children. Otherwise, we are stuck with words. We have to try to talk to one another, because the imperfect means is the only general one we have.
And yet—I look at the picture of your twelve-year-old son on the sidewalks of Detroit, pillowed in blood. And I wonder—if it were in physical fact my son, of the same age, would I be able to go on writing novels, in the belief that this was a worthwhile thing to be doing this year (as they say) of Our Lord? Mrs. Bass, I do not think I can answer that question.
I am afraid for all our children.
DAVE BIDINI
Too Wide to See and Too Long to Know
In the depths of February—especially this past one, when snow fell in record clumps across my city, Toronto—we take whatever we can get to make us feel alive in the world, cocooned by couch throws and Netflix, waiting for the light to return. So when the National Hockey League first announced a novel four-team international contest to supplant the traditional by-rote all-star competition, it seemed mostly a bridge to get us through to spring—something to watch out of one eye between the dark hours. Besides, nation vs. nation men’s hockey had, for a generation of wanting young fans, only been celebrated by parents and mature siblings old enough to have watched Sidney Crosby feather the puck between Ryan Miller’s pads in Vancouver, or Mario Lemieux torch the Russians in Hamilton in 1987, or—in the Mesozoic age—Paul Henderson score three straight winning goals in the last three games of the first Summit Series in Moscow. Recent times had seen nhl commissioner Gary Bettman demure on global play, withdrawing the best of the men’s pros until certain demands—insurance, rebroadcasting rights—were met by the iihf. As a result, neither Connor McDavid nor Auston Matthews nor Victor Hedman had the opportunity to measure their genius against one another on the international stage, bereft in a time of administrative chess play.
Snow fell and temperatures sank. Frank and I—my Italo-Canadian neighbour with whom I share the distinction of us having bought, and moved into, our Italo-Canadian grandparents’ homes within a few years of each other—woke most mornings to the squealing of car tires fighting to get out of iced-in parking spots, the two of us emerging collars-high with gloves, shovels, and planks of wood to free stranded Acuras and Hyundais. Walking around the neighbourhood that winter after a tromp to the corner store inevitably meant being consumed by gusts of flurries, new layers of snow painting the ground whenever it threatened to go the way of grey slush. The evenings grew darker faster and streetlamps glowed against the cruel sky. After dinner, I would step sweater’ed into my glerups and lie back across the couch, searching for the remote between cushions.
The nhl had paused their season for a two-week break, and while most of the players left dressing rooms flip-flopped for languid days on beaches and yachts, the best ninety or so skaters in the world—minus Putin’s Russians as well as the Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, and Swiss—headed to their respective national team camps, fitting in just two designated training days before the real thing started. In normal times, the tournament would have built slowly—some slow chords over a gentle snare and maybe the murmur of a voice, before going full “Who’s Next” by the time the final between the two best teams came around—but, because it was a short event, and because the Americans had re-elected Donald Trump, the 4 Nations suddenly became heavy with must-win games alongside everything the American president, and therefore America, now symbolized: antipathy, greed, aggression, misanthropy, and a callous sense of self-determination.
After his inauguration in January, Trump had opined about the possible annexation of Canada, repeatedly using the term 51st state in press gatherings the way one might use the term fixed mortgage, as if continental invasions were merely transactional. Trump openly mocked Trudeau, the exiting pm, and told crowds that he viewed the border as an antiquated scribble, randomly drawn by a fool in a beard and briarwood pipe. American players—some of whom, like Matthews, Brady Tkachuk, and others who captained Canadian teams—were asked how they felt about their president wanting to eclipse Canada’s sovereignty, and, having been programmed from an early age to speak in neutral, they expertly said nothing until they did not. Later in the tournament, Trump telephoned the American team in their dressing room—it became obvious early on that he was immune to the exact language of the game—and J.T. Miller, not being able to help himself, said that “it was awesome to get his support,” despite the fact that crowds in the city where he had until recently played, Vancouver, had booed “The Star-Spangled Banner” to protest Trump’s gentle threats, if there is such a thing.
In past times, especially during the Cold War, the Russians had routinely worn the black hat, and I can remember watching the 1972 Summit Series believing that, if Canada didn’t emerge victorious, we might fall prey to communism, and our lives would change forever. In morning classes that fall, we watched 8mm movies on a projector wheeled in on a stand about what to do in case of a nuclear attack, while in the evening, ctv broadcast the Russia team taking apart the Canadians on the ice as they deadheaded their way across the country, before the event moved to the U.S.S.R. Later tourneys possessed less political drama—the world was changing, Russian players were defecting here, and Canada was sailing along unrivalled as the pre-eminent hockey nation—and even through the 1990s and 2000s, when Team usa began icing real stars with unassailable nhl pedigrees, there was never any sense that a loss to an opponent would mean a national crisis or humiliation at the hands of an adversary. But in 2025, and after years without serious men’s international competitions, two things had changed: the American stars were now on par with the Canadians, and their wretched president was a monstrous dreamer who might one day consume us whole.
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Despite being a public Canadian hockey person—player, author, filmmaker, and, once, playwright (of The Five Hole Stories)—I’ve tried to cheer Americans wherever possible, owing to fans I’ve met over the years who, because they love the game dearly, have a sense of Canada that’s steeped in history, geography, and culture. During my first hockey journey abroad, I played in China with the Foxes of Peapack, New Jersey, who graciously absorbed me into the fold on their tour of Asia. The late Marc Nathan—who, among other things, was Seymour Stein’s A&R bird dog, discovering the Barenaked Ladies and signing them to Sire—had an encyclopedic knowledge of the minor leagues—names, stats, trophies—and, as a gay man in California in the 1970s, befriended the wives of L.A. Kings players. He was with them the night Billy Harris Jr. was traded from Long Island. “They all wondered if he had a big cock,” he told me. “They were excited that a new guy was coming in who they could fuck.” Buffalo’s Jeff Z. Klein, one of my literary mentors, was the sports editor for The Village Voice, and his early columns about the Rangers showed me what kind of writer I wanted to be. Other Americans—like Stu Hackel, who ran nhl media from New York, Art Berglund, and Brooklyn’s Lou Vairo, an early pioneer of usa Hockey—gave me hours of their time to talk about what it was like, as an American, to be an outsider in the Canadian game, something I’d never considered. Their experience in hockey in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s wasn’t that different from mine as an alternative musician trying to establish myself against the corporate-scape of Canadian music, or as a hockey writer wanting to tell stories from rinks in Harbin or Hong Kong instead of the Corel Centre. For years, people had a jaundiced view of southern hockey culture, and Americans had to grind and, ultimately, win to be afforded any kind of respect, although their “Miracle on Ice” triumph in 1980 was considered by some Canadians to be the result of Soviet hubris rather than American talent.
No matter how intensely political it got during 4 Nations, and no matter how brusquely the president tried to impose himself on the event the way he tried to impose himself on everything else, I reminded myself that some American celebrations would be pure, and a good thing would happen to good people, no matter how hard I hoped against it.
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Over Family Day weekend, the Canadians played the Americans in the round robin, losing 3–1 and ceding top spot to the U.S. After the game, J.T. Miller—again, not helping himself—revealed that the Americans had hatched an outrageous plan over an evening’s group text: a few players would fling their gloves away and fight the Canadians the moment the puck hit the ice. This happened. There were three scraps in the first nine seconds. In a vacuum, men slugging at each other is not the kind of thing anyone needs to see—premeditated brawls possess none of the passion and fervour that more tempestuous fights do—but in a charged political setting where one team’s head of state had told the other’s that his country should not exist as a nation (all of this in a time of war in Gaza and Ukraine), I found myself rising from my couch to make sure what I was seeing was real, my heart pounding through my shirt.
Brady and Matthew, the Tkachuk brothers—more classically, and brashly, American than, say, Mike Modanos who predated them, and outrageously rendered as if by a Mad magazine cartoonist imagining what an off-the-hook hockey player should look like to an eleven-year-old—circled their combatants while chewing the mouth guard like a horse’s bit before wildly swinging at Brandon Hagel and Sam Bennett, both of whom showed an alarming amount of poise considering the surprise assault. In the following shift, Miller came at defenceman Colton Parayko in the crease, engaging in the third bout and looking less like a middleweight trying to get on the inside than a petulant ape batting at fruit flies. Still, everything about the nature of our continent was manifest in that hot moment, with Matthews, Mexico’s proxy, watching from the bench. It was visceral, ugly, and astonishing. Coming off the ice into the penalty box, the Tkachuks brayed at the Bell Centre crowd, applauding themselves and each other. The Americans had dragged the game by its heels into the ditch, and won. That Team Canada had let them said as much about our play as it did theirs.
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While it’s hard to celebrate hockey’s cultural and societal glue without sounding like an apologist for a game troubled by abusive climates, an anti-lgbtq agenda (in 2023, the nhl suspended any Pride imagery from its games), and an elite white athletic body, the game can still comfort us like an old cottage blanket, even when that blanket is set on fire—which is something you could imagine Matthew Tkachuk doing, slipping downstairs in his nightdress and cap with a Bic lighter tucked into the band of his underpants. Reels of the game’s fights were everywhere. J.T. Miller said it “was the coolest experience I’ve probably had on the ice,” which probably says more about how few trophies he’s won than he’d like. Hagel, for his part, said “we’re out there playing for the flag, not the cameras,” and when asked about group chats, confessed that his team didn’t have one, which led Matthew to suggest that Team Canada couldn’t like each other very much. Narrative lather grew as the press converged to cover the rematch, and media experts predicated, correctly, that the championship would be the most-watched hockey game in U.S. history (nine million people tuned in).
On the evening of the game, I walked five kilometres in my long dark winter coat through the city to my friend’s shed—the gathering point for our longstanding men’s hockey team—as if spending time moving in the cold was a rite that this kind of game had earned. On my route I passed the frosted window of Empire Falafel on Bloor, whose Eritrean owner, Mohammed, was standing in front of the big screen at the back of the store, flicking past countless African and Arab league football matches to try to find the pregame broadcast. Earlier in the day, he’d laughed and told me he’d be tuning in to see Canada “give it to those bad guys down south,” so I opened the door, bringing a swoosh of the cold breeze behind me, and shouted “22, channel 22,” to him before ducking out. On the street, there were people everywhere in Leaf and Team Canada toques and scarves, striding below apartment windows with flags draped over them. A wave of nerves and sick excitement found me, before I remembered something that had happened in 2002 at the gold medal game in Salt Lake City—a match that would produce Canada’s first men’s gold in hockey in fifty years—when I telephoned my friend Brad Pascall, then head of communications with Hockey Canada. Answering the phone, he told me he was in the dressing room as the players were getting ready to play. “Mario Lemieux, Joe Sakic, they’re right in front of me,” he said. I asked him how they were, imagining them to be as ill and anxious as I was. Instead, he told me, “Dave, they’re so excited. They can’t wait to get going.” It was a good reminder why I was writing about the game instead of playing in it.
The puck dropped a few moments after singer Chantal Kreviazuk bent the words to “O Canada” to sing “that only us command” at the frothy crowd in the sold-out Boston rink. Before the game, the Americans’ gm, former Oiler Bill Guerin, had said he hoped that Trump would attend the final game, but he didn’t, possibly choosing to tend to the business of running a nation, but just as possibly not. The game was smooth, lightning-fast, and as close as a whisper to an ear, running into overtime after Sam Bennett tied the score in the second period. Looking back, the Americans’ behaviour in the round robin game was a lot like their president’s, producing endless media heat yet ill-conceived, without a thought to what would follow. What the U.S. team had done could only be done once—any further aggression wouldn’t have the impact it had arriving cold, out of the blue—and by the time the final began, the Canadians could play knowing that the U.S. had, literally, thrown their best punch. The teams settled into what mattered most—game play—with Canada relying on four key players: McDavid, the speed demon; forward Nate MacKinnon, who plays every shift like a person trying to bust through a facade; defenceman Cale Makar, the Fred Astaire of hockey; and resolute captain Sidney Crosby, who has never lost very much at anything. You could fit the darting, smart Leaf forward Mitch Marner in that group, too, although he’s skated most of his career in the shadow of his Toronto teammate Auston Matthews, who in the 2024–25 season scored sixty-nine goals before being awarded team captaincy. In this game Marner expertly assisted on the tying and winning goals, the latter shunted to McDavid past a lunging Matthews, as if Marner had directly challenged his teammate’s ability to intercept the puck, which he could not. The puck went in, the Canadians besieged goalie Jordan Binnington in a scrum of joy, and the Tkachuks hung their heads at the bench, mouth guards hidden in the depths of their gloves.
