Hockey Dreams
that they could no longer keep up. I was also beginning to hear the name which would become synonymous with every foul trick perpetrated against Canada by the Europeans for the next ten years — Bunny Ahearne, the persistent, diabolical, president of the IIHL. When Brendan Behan the Irish writer mentioned that Canada should stick to its league, ice hockey, we should have taken his advice. What Mr. Behan wouldn’t have been aware of, is that an Irishman named Ahearne was trying to keep us from this as much as he could.
    And now, in 1961, we were sending another team called the TRAIL SMOKE EATERS.
    I can only tell you what I remember about them from my vantage point on the Miramichi. I had heard about them. And in my mind they were dark forms moving across sections of large unfriendly, unpainted ice, far away in another world fighting for us, and ready to be dismissed by many of us at any given moment. And I felt sad and apprehensive. I don’t know whether I felt sad and apprehensive for them, for me, or for Canada. Perhaps it was for us all. And this apprehensiveness, or the memory of it, has never left me. I remember when they lost their first exhibition game against the Swedes, after travelling for days to get there.
    Trail hadn’t won the Allen Cup and were not the first to be asked. Chatham, Ontario, did and was, as Mr. Scott Young reports in his book
War On Ice
. But because of finances they couldn’t take up the challenge. And it was left to Trail. It was left to Trail — a place so far away from me, from my view of Canada, from where I was, it was strange that they were representing us. Except we both knew, that is the Miramichi and Trail, what hockey meant to us. We could still smell the hockey blades in the fall night air.
    I sometimes like to think that our attitude has gotten better since the Trail Smoke Eaters. Yet I think our international hockey has been like this: we have stuck our head in the sand and refused to really examine what we are doing and why we are doing it in our attitude toward our sport. It happenedjust as the old Colonel said it would, just as the Second World War did.
    For years, all during the terrible seventies and eighties, we thought we had to find a system to beat the Russians or the Czechs, or the Finns or Swedes, and we relied on defence. Can you imagine, thinking we needed a special system?
    For Canada to rely largely on defence is similar to having Joe Frazier decide that the best way to beat Mohammed Ali is not to throw his left hook.
    “A lapse in defence” or “a breakdown in our own end” was always what cost us this game or that and our national coach for a number of years was always there to tell us this, and to reassure us, that once our defence got better, or once we played our positions, and remembered what to do, we would raise our game to the level of the opposition.
    I am almost positive the Russians and Czechs and Finns and Swedes loved to hear this. This has nothing to do with me not liking defence — I remember Paul Coffey stopping a two-on-one against the Soviets in 1984 just before Canada scored the winning goal.
    I remember being amazed at our three players on the ice for seven — eight minutes in the eighth game against five rushing Soviets in 1972. In their rink with their referee; with
their
system. And I can also say that I don’t think it was a defensive system that made these moments so great for Canada. It was the absence of a system.
    The one thing a defensive system did for Canada in internationalhockey was inhibit what we could do instinctively. Taking the man, and hitting him. And actually shooting. A system relying on defence always made a nation who relied on intuition a nation of second guessers.
    Besides, the one thing we tried to curtail in our defensive systems of the seventies and eighties, was the one thing Canadian defence has always relied upon — hitting. We were frightened of hitting, because of our reputations. So we played

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