Top Ten Sports-in-Can-Lit Moments

To celebrate the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, Canadian Literature presents Laurie Ricou's "Top Ten Sports-in-Can-Lit Moments" (from his editorial, "Thinking Tremolo and Backflip," in Canadian Literature #202).

Please submit your own list of ten (or less) moments and we'll (maybe) publish them on this page! Check out archive for other submissions.

Top Ten Sports-in-Can-Lit Moments by Laurie Ricou

Number 10

Much of the secrecy and bonding inherent in a game rests in its special vocabulary. Pasha Malla’s story “Dizzy When You Look Down In,” from his first collection The Withdrawal Method (2008), bounces and feints with basketball jargon. The unnamed first-person narrator sits in a hospital waiting results of amputation surgery being performed on his diabetic brother Derrek, nickname Dizzy. Across the room is Brad Bettis, enthusiastic former jock, who ten years earlier had played high school basketball against Dizzy and his brother. “Dizzy Calder,” Bettis enthuses, “Man, that kid could play.” The narrator hesitates to encourage the conversation, to pick up the jock talk or to reveal much about his brother’s failed post-high school basketball career. Soon Bettis abandons his attempts at gossip, his talismanic rolled-up copy of Sports Illustrated falls to the floor, and he gives completely devoted attention to his wife’s recovery from cancer surgery. At this point, the reader realizes with some surprise that all the basketball jargon we’ve been immersed in comes not in dialogue, but in the narrator’s remembering his relation to his younger brother. Jargon is the crutch on which he rests to avoid thinking amputation. The lingo that used to keep them together now keeps him from Dizzy. The dizzying basketball chatter takes over, drugs him, allows him to live an imagined life where he need not confront the gap between Dizzy’s politics—Che Guevara is his hero; he does community work in Cuba—and his own career as pharmaceutical salesman. He can only get as far as the door of his brother’s recovery room: there he stands dizzy, looking down, imagining the healing visit he cannot bring himself to make.

Number 9

Sadie is a speed swimmer and a lit student in Angie Abdou’s novel The Bone Cage (2007). The story of her preparation for the Sydney Olympics, and of her love affair with Digger, an Olympic wrestler, drawson Jane Austen, Dickens, Paradise Lost, and Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel. Fitzgerald and Browning shape the novel’s resolution. The novel is a study in emotional and physical kinesis, patiently attentive to recording the fine details of tedious athletic training. Abdou reaches toward the possibility of self-deception as physical form. Sadie acknowledges the importance of falsehood, which is also to say fiction: “‘We athletes are experts at lying to ourselves and believing it. It’s the one thing we practice every day.’” Abdou focuses on the politics and perception of the body, turning her story on “the paradox of the athletic life: listen to your body but don’t listen to your body.”

Number 8

Paul Tallard, the Canadien who comes to dream in English, is Hugh MacLennan’s version of what Canadian uneasily means. MacLennan defines Paul’s emerging twelve-year-old citizenship as his enjoying of multiple sports: football (by which MacLennan presumably means European football), boxing, cricket, some clandestine baseball. And, of course, hockey, to which Paul and MacLennan devote by far the most attention. MacLennan’s accounts read now a bit awkwardly and predictably, as if inimitation of much tabloid sports journalism, but he’s at his best evoking the instant of silence after a whistle, before the face-off—the period when the game is not being played.

Paul loved these moments when the game paused and he was able to get the whole feel of it: the full exhilaration of the air coldly still in the sunshine, the teams poised … the sticks twitching nervously and the sweat warming on the face …

The magic, as with Morenz halting in mid-breakaway, is in the waiting not the doing, in the wholeness, the sensory alertness, the anticipatory readiness.

Number 7

From “Baseball, a poem in the magic number 9”: “In the beginning was the word, & the word was / ‘Play Ball!’” That was 1965, just a few years after this journal was founded, and George Bowering, while writing so much about so many worlds, has never stopped writing his baseball poem.

Number 6

Arley McNeney’s Post (2007), opens on the eve of Nolan Taylor’s hip replacement surgery. A member of the Canadian women’s wheelchair basketball team, Nolan must now imagine herself into a new life and a new identity with and beyond her sport. Post, driven by a sustained teasing of the pun bawdy-body, concerns what comes after. In big wheeling sentences, McNeney turns through the mind’s following the body turning; this excerpt is less than half of the single sentence from which it comes:

Tony continues to play me despite my flailing, my failing and as I push across the court after the play my arms move in their ritual, my fingertips against the smooth push-rims, the movement just another link back through my body and round and around again and everyone is shouting at me different words until they form a scum, a churned foam of noise, dirty as the Fraser, and now the wind has shifted and here is the scent of sewage from the open door, and here is the froth of words building like rapids over me, my arms trying to arc like bridges, and here is another shot scored on me.

Number 5

Cecelia Frey’s poem “Running” relies heavily on monosyllables to convey the steady pounding of feet against ground, a version of drumming that transforms running into spirit quest:

me deer swift free
……
I leave behind all others
and you, partner
where are you

Number 4

The hockey references in Michael Ondaatje’s “To A Sad Daughter” feel quite incongruous in a poem that is mostly a love poem delivering fatherly counsel. But it is just such incongruity—“Belligerent goalies are your ideal”—that measures the cultural distance between like and love, between sweet sixteen and I-wasn’t-expecting-this. The poem is high on my highlight list because I’ve turned to it often to find ways to tell my own children how much they matter:

You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.

I wonder if Kroetsch had this poem in mind when he addressed “Listening to the Radio” to Ondaatje?

Number 3

Roch Carrier’s “Le Chandail de hockey” “The Hockey Sweater.”

Number 2

Michael Kusugak’s Northern Lights: The Soccer Trails (1993). The students in my course titled “Literature and Sport” were puzzled by The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, surprised by the baseball lingo in The Brothers K, and passionate about Sherman Alexie. But they were most moved by the story of Kataujag, who reconnects with her dead mother playing onthe sea ice with “a soccer ball … of caribou skin … stuffed full of dry moss and fur” and watching the aurora borealis, “thousands of strands of light looked like they were all running around after each other chasing a soccer ball.” They agreed that the one book on the course they would not be looking to sell back to the bookstore at the end of the year was Northern Lights: The Soccer Trails.

Number 1

Icarus, as interpreted by Don McKay in “Icarus,” is the top athlete in Canadian literature. Icarus makes of his falling—he has rehearsed it in song—an exuberant flight and a diving. No existential angst for this athlete:

Icarus is thinking tremolo and
backflip, is thinking
next time with a half-twist
and a tuck and isn’t
sorry.

As Huizinga proposes, “playing is no ‘doing’ in the ordinary sense.” You don’t do play or do a game. You can only play at playing. When sport drops into the pages of Canadian literature, it does so most exhilaratingly with a half-twist and a tuck. And isn’t sorry.