Dave Bidini
Books by Lorna Jackson
Victoria's Beacon Hill Park, summer's end: squirrels frantic, flora drab
and pitchy, a hockey's-coming chill. Dave Bidini slouches warm and ironic
in his Hockey Night in Canada polyester blazer. The tippy fedora circles
his endless forehead, and with white high-tops, a big spontaneous laugh and
face, he's half boy, half man.
"You're fucking with the time-space continuum when you're talking about
hockey as it relates to history," he says about the structural dekes
of his new book. The Best Game You Can Name (McClelland & Stewart, $34.99)
is half Studs Terkel oral history, half John McPhee narrative of one hilariously
nasty all-musician game with Bidini's Toronto rec team, the Morningstars.
Canada's most articulate and mercenary sports writer, Bidini wrote Tropic
of Hockey and Baseballissimo, works that proved sports-and-travel writing—if
concocted with love, wit, and skill—can astonish. For those books, he left
comfy and smug Canada to study players, their cultures and games, or, as
Bidini wise-asses, to undertake "an inward journey of self-discovery
through sports".
Enough about him: Best Game is "a domestic portrait", he says,
that lets NHL players from past eras tell stories. "Players die," says
Bidini, "and their stories die with them." But via 44 men—Tim Ecclestone,
Steve Larmer, Walt McKechnie, Eddie Mio—Bidini hooks some of those words
before they're washed out with the pro-sports tide.
"For a lot of these guys," he explains, "all they had were
their stories. Some of them are Wendy's franchisees; some sell real estate.
They're born as people after the game. They're boys; they move into themselves
with the game at their back. And that's what makes them great storytellers
and interesting people. It's not just them in twilight; it's them now. So
for them to express themselves that way"?—he goes muted and sincere—"it's
kind of a beautiful thing."
Self-doubt, soul-shredding injuries, unhinged sex and boozing-not the usual
glamour. Given a good locker-room anecdote, Bidini was counselled by a psychotherapist
friend to ask players "How did you feel about that?" and away they
went into what the author calls "deeper emotional territory". Frank
Mahovlich on the Group of Seven. Jim Schoenfeld on the death of teammate
Tim Horton ("I went out and shovelled snow from one part of the patio
to the other, then shovelled it back."). Shaped by Bidini's craft-centric
eye and ear, the material—including the Morningstars' quest for hockey infamy—is
stunning.
"Beyond the subject matter," he says, the book treats hockey writing
as a serious literary endeavour. "It's been booted in the balls a lot
of times by the literati. It's a stubborn fight to try and write this kind
of book. I want people to take away from this that you can write about the
game in an uncommon way. You can get in there and mix it up. It's just like
in hockey. We need more renegades, more rebels. And like with the band"—Bidini's
Rheostatics—"you want younger people to see what you do and go, 'I wanna
do that; I wanna do it like that.'?"
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