Milk And Sugar With That? Mom’s Hockey Career, by Annick Labadie

I’m still in Olympic mode, so you’ll have to bear with me again.  I’m also in feminist mode.  So, smile.  On February 25th, Canada’s women’s hockey team won its third straight gold medal, 2-0, against the U. S. of A.  I’m happy for them.  Many others are only lukewarm, and I’ll quickly tell you why. In three words: Boring. Manly. Joke.

First, detractors say that the sport, with its moratorium on body checking and entertaining plays, is a dull circus of incompetence. Over a few beers, guys will tell you their recreational Bantam squad could beat the crap out of Team Canada.  Just like they tell you that heavyweight-boxing champion David Haye would obliterate Juan Manuel Marquez, the lightweight king.  Oh, wait, they don’t.

Second, you’ll hear that women’s hockey players, with their mannish looks and violent tendencies, are probably all lesbians. That Canada’s head coach Melody Davidson could be the brother of Edmonton Oilers’ coach Pat Quinn.  Will they also mention that she is actually competent, just like Pat Quinn? Or that hockey pros like Ken Daneyko and Tim Hunter aren’t incredibly aesthetic either? Or that, well who cares who’s sleeping with whom anyway? No. You won’t hear that.

Third, you’ll hear that Olympic victory in women’s ice hockey is a bit of a farce.  First appearing at the Nagano Olympic games, twelve years ago, the sport has been utterly dominated by North American teams.  The rest of the world hasn’t caught up yet.  Consequently, our women apparently win because they perform a little less badly than everybody else.  Hunter beating Daneyko in a beauty contest, if you will. IOC president Jacques Rogges even stated that the sport needed to show some signs of improvement and continue to grow, or else it would be cancelled.  Swedish coach Peter Elander has blamed performance gaps on issues such as smaller funding, and restricted pools of athletes to choose from. Issues only relevant to women’s Olympic ice hockey, of course.

Instead of celebrating these women’s hat tricks, we discuss the sport’s low popularity. Instead of appraising their performances, we chat about their husbands and their fashion sense*.  Instead of honoring their utter domination, as is allowed in the men’s game, we begin to flirt with concepts like the mercy rule. Just stop the game when the score differential is too high. Imagine the men stopping after two period because they’re destroying Kazakhstan 13-0.

In the end, a sport whose legitimacy is questioned as much as its players stands on shaky terrain. But it seems that in the midst of these petty discussions about who’s hot and who’s not, who’s mean and who isn’t, we’re forgetting the point.  I’m reminded of that point whenever I hear my mother talking about ice hockey.  And so, because continuing my dissection of ice hockey’s gender issues might get a little boring I’d like to tell you a story instead.  It’s my mom’s story.  And my dad’s story.

The year was 1957.  Somewhere inside Quebec City’s Catholic hospital, my father was born.  The September 16^th birth date was only a few weeks before my grandfather, Michel Labadie, commenced his fifth season with the QHL Quebec Aces.  Dad would spend the first twelve years of his life packed in the back of a Plymouth Belvedere, along with my grandparents and the few possessions they lugged around whenever Michel was traded.  For Dad, it was life on the road.  When he turned two, Grandpa would land in Cleveland.  Later Springfield.  Then Victoria (BC), where he would lift the Lester Cup after beating the Portland Buckaroos 4-3 in Game 7 of the WHL finals.  He scored three goals and assisted on another that day.  My uncles still talk about that game over beers once in a while.  Grandpa would finish his career in Buffalo.  Hockey — the family breadwinner, the source of incessant spotlight, the sport firmly coded into my father’s DNA — shaped his life.

The year was 1956.  Somewhere in Arvida, a rural town in the heartland of Quebec, my mother was born.  My grandparents, who only connected to professional hockey through extremist fandom, both worked as humble office clerks turning the wheels of the aluminum industry.  A simple town, whose plant’s toxic fumes turned snow into brown muck by January, gave my mother ice hockey. She’d never wear skates of the white, toe-pick variety. No one really knows how it happened.  The town priest was convinced she should enjoy more reasonable activities.  Like vacuuming.

Some will say she was born in the wrong era.  That same year, 1956, somewhere inside Ottawa’s Canadian Supreme Court, a judge ruled against nine-year-old Abby Hoffman. Her parents had challenged the “boys only” rule instilled in Ontario’s minor hockey league.

And also the same year, in some hockey rink in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, the mighty Soviet Union entered the Olympic hockey tournament for the first time, forever altering Canada’s streak of hockey domination.  At the first Winter Olympics in 1924, Canada had outscored its opponents 47-3. In ’48, a mere 24 years later, it had outscored them 69-5.  Until the dreaded ’56 Games, Canada won pretty much all the time. Born a few years too late, both of my parents would wait 46 years for another Canadian gold (and for a second gold eight years later!).  However, unlike Dad, Mom wouldn’t get to experience the wonderful hockey structure Canadian men naturally grew up with.

From early childhood, both Mom and Dad lived to the pulse of hockey.  Dad would watch Grandpa and his teammates entertain boisterous crowds late into the night.  Grandpa would record 50-point seasons more often than not.  Dragged from arena to arena, Dad learned how to tape his stick just like the pros.  Making mental notes on how best to emulate Grandpa’s finesse, Dad fervently observed the stick handling, and studied every faceoff trick in the book.  His closest buddies probably operated Zambonis. Though he would never play organized hockey until my grandfather retired, Dad’s evenings were spent fighting the biting cold, playing ball hockey in the streets with friends he made and soon abandoned. As he got older, his two younger brothers joined him on the hockey journey. They would slowly transform the family piano into an expensive basement hockey goal. And the piano seat: into a bench press.  Dad was destined for hockey greatness, just like Grandpa.

Mom’s obsession with the sport came as a much bigger surprise.  While her cousins discussed neighborhood boys, she was busy double-deking those same boys on the parochial ice rink.  Some would say something went haywire in her development.  Mom would answer that she “just really liked hockey, competition, and smack-talking” when she won.  Today still, Mom’s wise face is painted with a childlike grin whenever she laces up a pair of Tacks hockey skates.  Winter after winter, summer after summer, she fueled on hockey, running up the score everywhere she went.  Just like Dad did in Neufchatel; the small Quebec City borough my grandparents finally settled to live in.  Once a week, when the girls were allowed to use the ice rink usually reserved for the boys, curious onlookers would fill up the stands to watch the town weirdo – my mom – in action.  She would consistently score dozens of goals.  Had she been born in the late seventies, my mother might have been Hayley Wickenheiser, the first woman other than a goalie to play professional hockey.  She was that good.  (Note: If you’re wondering where I get this information, it’s not from my mother. The old neighbors who will never shut up about mom’s exploits whenever we give my grandparents a visit usually provide enough detail.)

Yet, my mother would sit in the stands when her little brother, Martin, would face Wayne Gretzky in the International Pee Wee Tournament.  She would get close enough to the ice, sure, but only because Martin’s coach would signal her to approach the bench.  He wanted a coffee. My mother had enough street credibility to pick her own teams at the local rink, yet she couldn’t play with those same picks in a team uniform. Just like Abby Hoffman, the Ontarian hockey girl reject, Mom would never get to play in a high level organized league.

Fast forward to 1972.  While Olympic teams didn’t allow for professionals to play until 1998, the Summit Series, held in Moscow, was the perfect platform to compare the world’s best players.  Full Strength Canada, boasting players like Phil Esposito, Paul Henderson, Bobby Clarke and Ken Dryden, fought the Soviet Union in an eight-game series. It captured Canada’s undivided attention. Although most had predicted a Canadian sweep, our countrymen barely won the series 4 to 3 (with one tie in game 3).  These events proved once and for all that Europe, with its archaic equipment and ridiculous training methods, had caught up with the North American hockey empire.  The field was leveling.  Which kind of sucked. Canadians loved it when their men steamrolled over everyone else.

During game 8 of the Summit series (the tiebreaker), Dad — now a teenager, a hockey stud, a perennial champion also respected on the football field and in the swimming pool — skipped afternoon class and hit the bar with his football buddies.  They downed Labatt 50’s each time Canada scored.  Later that year, he would be one of the youngest Quebec players to take part in junior major hockey training camps.  Unfortunately, his efforts would be dampened by mononucleosis and a recently stitched knee that would burst open in a pool of blood in the middle of camp.  Not a good thing to boast on a hockey résumé.

While Dad was drinking beers that day, Mom was hurrying her way back into the family house with a bag of home supplies, already late for tipoff.  Though she was now focusing her athleticism on sports like track and field, gymnastics, volleyball, and basketball (which she inevitably dominated, as evidenced by the stack of medals stowed in her night table), her greatest love was still – and always will be – hockey. So great, in fact, that she’d smash the car door on her hand in an attempt to reach the living room television faster.  She’d break three fingers in the process. Convinced she loved hockey just yet? Her game 8 would be spent in the ER.

Five years later, Mom would enroll in her university intramural league.  Though insisting on playing at the highest level, where she had unofficially belonged all those years, she’d be forced instead to play with women like her cousins, who hadn’t exactly spent their childhoods dreaming about hockey day and night.  After scoring 19 goals in her first appearance, securing the women’s intramural league scoring championship with only one game played, she would finally be allowed into the men’s league, where she’d finish on the all-star team.  The dark recesses of intramural sport became Mom’s first true platform of hockey expression**.  Who knows how many other women were in that situation?

Dad also made it to college.  After frustrating experiences with the junior major league, he would play intercollegiate hockey while securing a physical education degree.  Some would say it didn’t quite pan out the way he wanted to. Later, he’d be hired as a football coach by a quirky athletic director who loved to talk about hockey.  That athletic director was my mother.  He would be offered a pro contract to play in Europe a few weeks later, but would never leave.  I was born five years later.

This is not a love story.  It’s a hockey story.  My father had the luxury of opportunities my mother never had, and as I watched the Canadian women receiving those gold medals on Thursday, I was reminded that my mom, had she been born in another era, would also have one of those babies stowed away in the night table.

Women’s hockey will improve.  Others will catch up, just like the Soviets did.  It took Sweden 64 years to beat Canada.  Nobody was questioning hockey’s legitimacy then.  Nobody was asking for the mercy rule from ’24 to ’56, when Canada dominated the Olympic ice rink.  And nobody asks for it now, when the Canadian men steamroll over the likes of France and Latvia during the World Junior Championships.

So for the time being, while Canada kicks the planet’s ass, let’s just say it’s because these women, who are now living a dream so many more were denied, have made enough sacrifices to merit such a position.  Like my mom, they spent their days on the hockey rink.  Unlike my mom, there was somebody who, instead of asking them for a coffee, asked them to lace up their skates and come to play.

So, keep killing ‘em Canada.  Forget the mercy rule.  That rule should only apply to those outsiders looking in from the comfort of their couch, frowning at the sight of Melody Davidson.

* To this, you could respond that women are the ones talking about these issues. And you’d be correct. I’m not aiming my diatribe at men specifically, but at all those involved in this discourse. It should be noted that disagreements exist on whether women’s sport should be modeled on men’s sport, or whether they should carry their own separate values and focus. That discussion is for another day. For now, my point is that attention is presently focused on things that have nothing to do with placing a cylindrical object inside a net. And I’ve got a bit of a problem with that.

** In case you’re wondering, my point isn’t that women should be allowed to play with men to solve the hockey issues. It’s simply that at that point in time, women like my mother didn’t have an organized hockey structure enabling them to play their sport as seriously as the men did. They still don’t, but that’s another story.