My travels on the hockey highway through Canada

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In the waning days of the pandemic, sportswriter Ronnie Shuker stuffed his skates, sticks, and backpack into his faithful automobile Gumpy (named for legendary goaltender Gumpy Worsley) and set off on a 30,000-mile, coast-to-coast-to-coast investigation of the many ways hockey touches the lives of Canadians. In The Country and the Game: 30,000 Miles of Hockey Stories (Sutherland House Books), he captures the stories of legends such as Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky, and Gordie Howe while spotlighting the unsung heroes and hidden corners that embody the heart of the sport. These excerpts from the book reveal just a few of the moments — from small-town rivalries to literary reflections — that underscore why hockey isn’t just Canada’s game, but our cultural backbone.

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A young Bobby Orr wows scouts

On Good Friday, March 31, 1961, about five hundred people packed the Wellington Street Arena in Gananoque for the provincial bantam semifinal against Parry Sound. Gananoque won the first of the two-game total-goals playoff series on the road a week earlier. Parry Sound made the long road trip from the shores of Georgian Bay to this little town on the St. Lawrence for game two.

In the crowd that night were several NHL scouts, including a young Scotty Bowman from the Canadiens, as well as Wren Blair and legendary center Milt Schmidt from the Boston Bruins. Blair and Schmidt had made the drive to Gananoque to check out a pair of local players, Doug Higgins (number 8) and Rick Eaton (number 17), but by the end of the second period their eyes had become glued to a small skinny kid from Parry Sound wearing number 2. Five years later, Bobby Orr debuted for the Bruins.

Lost in the lore of Orr is how that game in Gananoque ended and what became of the two players the Bruins came to scout. Gananoque was a powerhouse in the 1960-61 season. Doug and Rick were the team’s two superstars. Both knew that bird dogs from the Canadiens and Bruins were going to be scouting them that night. After Parry Sound jumped out to a 2-0 advantage in the first period, Gananoque tied it up 3-3 by the end of the second, with a goal from Rick and a pair of assists from Doug. Eventually, Gananoque took the lead. Orr managed to send the game into overtime, but it would not be his night, even if the game ended up charting his NHL career. Doug got his third assist as Gananoque won the game and the series in overtime.

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I track down Doug at his home in Petawawa in eastern Ontario. All these years later, he can still recall, in detail, the night they beat Bobby Orr.

“Oh, it was a hell of a game,” Doug says. “You better believe it.”

“Did you know about Orr when you played him?” I ask.

“No, we didn’t know about him. But he probably knew about Ricky and me by that time.”

I like Doug’s swagger. He had it as a kid, and he still has it into his seventies.

That was our Stanley Cup, winning that.

Doug Higgins

In the annals of Orr, Doug’s story usually ends there. But after beating Parry Sound, Gananoque advanced to the best-of-five provincial final. There they played a team from Goderich, on the coast of Lake Huron. It was a tight series, but Gananoque won it in five games. Doug had four goals and one assist in the Saturday night final to give his hometown its first provincial championship.

“That was our Stanley Cup, winning that,” he says.

The town feted the players like it was a Stanley Cup. When they returned home in the early hours of Sunday morning, just about all of Gananoque came out to meet them. The local fire engine siren blared and the players were brought up to the balcony of the old Provincial Inn in the heart of Gananoque, where the town often made announcements. As captain, Doug had to give a speech to the crowd.

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“I looked down the street and it’s rows of people welcoming us,” Doug says. “They got us out of the car, put us on the firetruck, took us through the town, frickin’ siren going, the streets lined with people. This old lady came running out in her nightcap, and she goes, ‘Has the whole goddamn town gone crazy?’ Everybody got behind it. That doesn’t happen today, but that’s what it was back then.”

After that season, Doug went on to play junior hockey and college hockey in southeastern Ontario. Although he never made it to the NHL, he did end up signing a contract. Two, in fact.

One night, Doug came home from school and his father told him to sit down. Bowman had called. The Canadiens wanted to sign him.

“Well, Christ, that was my dream team as a kid,” Doug says. “I stood up and literally was dizzy thinking about it. So he came and I signed a contract with Montreal. Still have it.”

At the time, the NHL consisted of the Original Six teams. The other five quickly came calling. When it was Boston’s turn, the Bruins phoned and asked if they could come over to talk with Doug. His father told them they were wasting their time.

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“We’ll be over tomorrow night,” they said.

The next night, Blair and Schmidt arrived at the house. Doug’s father told them again that his son had already signed with the Canadiens. Blair opened his briefcase.

“Well, Doug, Montreal actually can’t sign you,” he said. “I got your release here from the town of Gananoque.”

In what was common practice at the time, before the NHL instituted a draft, the Bruins had been sponsoring Gananoque’s hockey system under the table for years in return for being the first NHL team in line to snatch a prospect or two coming out of town. It was through this side deal that the Bruins got first dibs on Doug.

Doug was only a teenager, but the kid had moxie, and he wasn’t afraid to negotiate, even with hockey’s big guns. He’d already received new skates from the Canadiens, and the Chicago Black Hawks, who won the Stanley Cup that year, had sent him a stick autographed by the entire team. Doug knew he had leverage.

“I wasn’t stupid at fourteen,” he says. “I told them, ‘You buy my parents a new car and I’ll sign. The contract plus a new car.’ They said, ‘We don’t have that authority. We’ll have to speak to the owner of the Bruins. We’ll give you a call in about five days.’”

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They left the house at midnight. At seven o’clock the next morning, the phone rang.

“Have your parents order the car,” Blair told Doug. “We’ll be over tonight.”

Doug never did play a game with the Bruins, but his parents got that car: a brand-new 1961 Ford.

Doug’s place in the Orr story has followed him everywhere, including Petawawa, where he resettled with his high school sweetheart, raised their three daughters, and had a long career in the federal government. For his part, Orr never forgot that game in Gananoque. He sent Doug a large autographed framed photo of the goal Orr scored to win the 1970 Stanley Cup:

Doug,
Thanks For The Pass
From Parry Sound to Gananoque
Your Friend
Bobby Orr

“You can’t believe how this story affected my work and how it opened doors for me,” Doug says. “It was amazing the way it helped my career.”

All these years later, people still ask Doug about Orr and reporters come calling. Some he’ll talk to, others he won’t. I didn’t ask Doug why he agreed to talk with me. Maybe it was because I took the time to read the footnotes in the Great Book of Hockey History instead of just the chapter headings. Or maybe it was because he was a fellow road tripper.

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Since retiring, Doug had been making semiannual hockey road trips with a group of ten friends (five Canadians and five Americans) in an attempt to see a game in every NHL city. So far, they’ve checked off Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Washington, and New York.

“It’s a road trip like you’re doing,” he says. “We meet the Americans there. Sometimes they fly, but we always drive. We have more fun in the van than anything. I think we might just do Ottawa this year. The Americans wanna come to Ottawa because they like skating on the canal. We took them curling one year, and they all came out on the ice with helmets on.”

I loved every minute of it. They were great times while they lasted.

Rick Eaton

When I mention to Doug that I haven’t been able to track down Rick, he tells me he’s still living in Gananoque. As kids, they lived just a block away from each other and played every level of hockey together until they aged out and went to different teams. They were fast friends growing up, and still are. Doug calls his old running mate.

“You just got out of the hospital? A new heart valve? Oh, a pacemaker? Holy Christ, the way you used to skate around me you don’t need a pacemaker. Okay, I’ll put Ronnie on, Rick. I’ll be in touch, buddy.”

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Instead of following the Trans-Canada down to Highway 401, I opt for the meandering backroads of eastern Ontario that bring me to Perth for the night and then down to Gananoque in the morning, backdooring me into town. I drive over to Rick’s house just down the road from the Lou Jeffries Recreation Centre, which replaced the old Wellington Street Arena and where today a photo of Doug and Rick and the rest of the 1961 championship team hangs in the lobby.

When I meet Rick at his home, he’s been one day out of hospital. He is wheezy and has difficulty breathing. He’s still getting used to his pacemaker. But his memory is sharp, especially of that championship season.

“We were beating most teams we played, and then we came to Parry Sound,” Rick says. “That was tough.”

Rick recalls that game much as Doug described it, then offers an additional detail. After the game, players from both teams poured into Boston Cafe in Gananoque. Among the group were Doug, Rick, and Orr, sharing Cherry Cokes after their hard-fought series. Hockey historian Bill Fitsell was smart enough to snap a photo for posterity. Everyone is all smiles, even Orr.

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“I don’t know if we’d have went if we’d lost,” Rick says. “But we didn’t lose.”

After that championship season, Rick played a few more years with junior teams across Ontario. He even played briefly with Orr in junior hockey during Orr’s first season with the Oshawa Generals. Like Doug, Rick also signed with the Bruins, although he never made it to Boston. He did have an offer to play semipro in Australia but turned it down, giving up hockey for good and taking a job at a local medical company, where he worked until retirement.

“You know whether you’ve got the talent to do it or you don’t, and I knew after a certain point I didn’t,” Rick says. “I realized what my capabilities were and got out of it.”

Although he was born in British Columbia, Rick was raised in Gananoque and has spent almost his entire life here. Having left when he was young, Doug never had to deal with the small-town chatter.

“‘You’re not as good as Bobby Orr,’ I would get that a lot,” Rick says.

“Nobody was as good as Bobby Orr, except maybe Wayne Gretzky,” I say.

“No, but that didn’t matter to some of them.”

The fact is that only about 5,500 Canadians have played in the NHL since its first season, 1917-18, and most of those got only a touch further than Doug and Rick did in signing NHL contracts.

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For the most part, Rick has treated the Orr chapter in his life as a positive.

“Did I enjoy it while I was doing it? I loved every minute of it,” he says. “They were great times while they lasted.”

Brantford, Ont., the town the Gretzkys built

For all its monuments to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and Joseph Brant, the city’s founder, Brantford is the city the Gretzkys built. The truth, of course, is that Wayne Gretzky long ago outgrew Brantford, but Brantford has never outgrown Wayne Gretzky. It is a city synonymous with someone who hasn’t lived there since he left town as a teenaged phenom, a place that cannot get out from under everything it has erected and named after him and his father. Wayne Gretzky Parkway cuts through the heart of the city, while in the city’s north end the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre, on Walter Gretzky Boulevard, is fronted by a twelve-foot bronze statue of the Great One. The arena, statue, and boulevard are all within walking distance of the family home at 42 Varadi Avenue, otherwise known as Gretzky Street, where tourists take drive-by selfies. There is also Walter Gretzky Municipal Golf Course and Walter Gretzky Elementary School, named after Wayne’s father.

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From Burlington, I get onto Highway 403 bound for Brantford, about half an hour away. On the outskirts of town, I stop at a coffee shop, not far from the local Zamboni factory, the company’s first international plant. There I find Jimmy MacNeil sitting quietly in front of an electric fireplace.

“You’re lucky to get me today because my wife and I were Christmas shopping,” he says. “I asked her, ‘Can you drop me off for an hour or so?’ Then she went on to continue shopping. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing because she’s got the credit card.”

Jimmy has a soft chuckle that would sound sinister coming from a larger man. But he looks boyish in his beige Zamboni cap and black fleece Zamboni jacket overtop a gray hoodie, and he speaks in a high-pitched tone that makes him sound much younger. All that gives away his age is his reddish-gray beard.

There are no highways or arenas in Brantford named after Jimmy, and no boulevards, schools, or golf courses named after his father. No statues of him have been erected, and no one stops in front of his childhood home to snap a photo. The same age as Gretzky, Jimmy is the kind of behind-the-scenes blue-collar worker in hockey that only a country like Canada could turn into celebrity for a time.

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Jimmy was born in Brantford and into Zambonis. His father was once the only authorized Zamboni repairman for all of Canada. Some machines he would repair at his shop on the family farm; others he would travel to fix onsite, across Ontario and even into upper New York State. Each of his eight kids helped him at one time or another.

“I was basically his assistant,” Jimmy says. “I was never smart enough to be as good of a mechanic as he was, but I could change oil and I could do the little things that could be done just to help him out.”

Jimmy’s first job was at an arena in St. George, north of Brantford, where he learned to drive and make ice with an Olympia, Zamboni’s main competitor. When he moved on to the old Civic Centre in the city, Jimmy began to make a name for himself, goofing around with the fans and hamming it up for the crowd. During one game, with the World Cup going on, he put the Olympia in gear and let it run down the ice while he climbed out of his seat, stood on the snow tank, and kicked soccer balls into the stands.

“Of course, that brought the crowd to their feet and brought my boss back to visit me, too,” Jimmy says. “And it was just never done again.”

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In the 1990s, the Civic Centre was home to a semipro team called the Brantford Smoke in the now-defunct Colonial Hockey League. When new owners took over the team, they went for a wholesale rebranding, right down to their eccentric Olympia driver. They had a jersey made up for Jimmy and put a nickname on the nameplate: Iceman.

“I now have to explain to people it’s because I made ice, not because I’m associated with the Mob,” Jimmy says. “Gotta be careful and clarify. I don’t wanna get whacked someday just for using the wrong term.”

In 1999, the year Gretzky retired from the NHL, Jimmy was nominated for Zamboni Driver of the Year in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the machine’s invention. He went up against drivers from the NHL and around the world. But nominees didn’t have to be professional Zamboni drivers. Anyone who’d ever driven a Zamboni in a movie or even for a promotion at an arena was on the list. That little loophole added musicians, actors, and athletes into the mix. Garth Brooks, Matthew McConaughey, former basketball star John Stockton — Jimmy beat them all.

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After becoming the world’s most famous Zamboni driver, Jimmy was handpicked for a cross-country road trip two years later in support of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. At the time, Canada hadn’t finished first in Olympic hockey since 1952, so the road trip was dubbed the Drive for Gold.

From September 30, 2001, to January 24, 2002, Jimmy drove a Zamboni in a series of stops across Canada, from St. John’s to Victoria. Two transport trailers shuttled the Zamboni and a backup from place to place, while a tour bus carried the crew of sixteen, including Jimmy and his brother. At each stop, with a police escort, the crew would start at first light on the outskirts of the city or town, unload the Zamboni, and then Jimmy and his brother would take turns driving until mid- afternoon, topping out at about 5.5 kilometers (3.5 miles) per hour. People could buy a ride at $20.02 for 1 kilometer, sitting in special seats added to the Zamboni, equipped with a mock steering wheel for kids.

In all, Jimmy made sixty-nine stops, many of them in the hometowns of players on the men’s and women’s Olympic hockey teams. On average, he hit one town every other day. Travel one day, drive through a town the next. No flat tires, no breakdowns, just a couple of oil changes and a hiccup in Newfoundland when they ran out of gas (the Zambonis had been converted to gasoline to prevent the propane lines from freezing up). They never did need the backup.

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“Was it Andy Warhol who said we all get fifteen minutes of fame?” Jimmy says. “I’ve gotten at least that. Sometimes I think I’m into overtime, and then somebody like you contacts me. I can talk all day.”

We talk for about two hours until Jimmy gets a text from his wife, who’s waiting in the parking lot. We walk outside, shake hands, and drive away in our respective rides, me alone to Cambridge in Gumpy, and Jimmy home with his wife in their Ford Escape with its “NICE ICE” license plates.

Elbows up in Saskatoon, Gordie Howe

The city that Gordie Howe built, Saskatoon, is saturated with tributes to Mr. Hockey. There is the Gordie Howe Sports Complex, Gordie Howe Kinsmen Arena, Gordon Howe Park, and Gordon Howe Campground, all of which sit in or around the Gordie Howe Management Area. To the south is the Gordie Howe Bridge, while to the north stands a Gordie Howe statue outside the SaskTel Centre. There is also a monument that commemorates where the hockey gods delivered Howe to the hockey world in what used to be the village of Floral, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of the city. Howe is elsewhere in Canada, too. Once construction on the new border crossing between Detroit and Windsor is complete, Highway 401 in Ontario will end at the Gordie Howe International Bridge. In Chatham-Kent, Ontario, there is even a snowplow named after Howe. The Gordie Plow.

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In any list of the greatest players of all time, Howe is often placed third behind Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr. But neither had it harder than Howe. Orr came into the NHL in the late 1960s, just as the league was doubling in size, and by the time he retired it had nearly tripled. When Gretzky took over in the 1980s, the NHL had hit its highest level of scoring per game in the history of the league, a time when goalies were pylons who occasionally got in the way of pucks. Howe played his first twenty-one years when there were only six teams. Imagine having to beat one of the five best goalies in the world every given game. At one point in Howe’s career, the NHL’s six starting goalies were Jacques Plante, Glenn Hall, Johnny Bower, Gump Worsley, Harry Lumley, and his Detroit Red Wings’ own Terry Sawchuk. All six are in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

It is a couple of hours up Highway 11 from Regina to Saskatoon, “from the ice box to the freezer,” says P.J. Kennedy when I meet him at Merlis Belcher Place, home of the University of Saskatchewan Huskies. As planned, I find P.J. in the windowed lobby of the arena. As expected, briefcase in hand, he’s come prepared.

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“Let’s take the elevator,” he says. “Both my knees and one of my hips aren’t mine, and I don’t know when the warranty will run out. You a Leafs fan?”

“Against my better judgment.”

“Well, I am too,” he says as he strokes his white whiskers. “Sometimes, I tell people that this is a playoff beard from 1967.”

On the second floor, P.J. leads me into Smuker’s Lounge, named for Huskies player Cory Smuk, who died from cancer at age twenty-six. We grab a pair of foldup chairs and choose a table in the middle of the empty room. P.J. places his briefcase on the table and pulls out some handwritten notes, a syllabus, a bio, a publication list, and copies of three of his books. I wonder if there’s going to be a test at the end.

Inside each book is a handwritten note. The one in Words on Ice reads: “For Ronnie, always keep your head up and your mind open!”

Keep an open mind. That was all P.J. ever asked of his students in his English 114 class, better known as “the hockey class,” the first of its kind in Canada. Where skeptics would’ve seen incongruity between hockey and literature, P.J. saw connection. “Poetry on ice” is an oft-used expression for hockey, but in truth, when the game itself is narrated, the chaos of hockey comes closer to the auctioneer’s tongue than the poet’s cadence. Yet throughout Canadian literature, the pen has never strayed far from the stick.

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“I discovered, boy, there’s a lot out there, and people are just not aware of it,” P.J. says. “That’s really what triggered the course. So I put together a syllabus and presented it to the undergraduate committee. They went through it and said, ‘Oh, look at this. There’s some big-name Canadian writers.’”

Ken Dryden, Doug Beardsley, Peter Gzowski, Roch Carrier, Richard Wagamese, Donna Kane, Michael Ondaatje, Stephen Scriver, Richard Harrison, Joan Finnigan — the list is long. Many are in P.J.’s anthologies of hockey prose (Words on Ice) and poetry (Going Top Shelf), including Al Purdy’s poem “Hockey Players,” which contains the best description of hockey ever written: “this combination of ballet and murder.” But it is Bruce Meyer’s “Road Hockey” that catches my eye, a poem about a man on a train who wakes up from a dream about playing road hockey as a kid:

And as I woke just now,
at some point in a journey
I realized we’d all
become grown men,
and the waking, not the growing left me angry. Snow whirls
by the coach car window,
still clings to the furrows
of pantlegs and fields
as the journeymen continue on
their battles of earthly overtime
and the sudden darkness
after.

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At first, P.J. wasn’t sure who was going to take his new course, Reading Culture: Hockey in Canadian Literature. But students flocked to it, with a near equal split between men and women. They came from every department: arts, science, commerce, nursing, engineering, even agriculture. Only ten percent were athletes. Every year, the class was full to over-flowing. The course became so popular that P.J. taught it two or three times every year.

During the first couple of weeks of each semester, other students would email, phone, or track him down in the hallways, trying to get into the class. Other universities came calling, too, leading to copycat courses across the country.

Intended, in part, as a way to encourage more students to take an interest in literature, P.J. discovered that hockey opened the door for people who wouldn’t otherwise have given Canadian literature a chance. For fifteen years, from 2002 until P.J. retired in 2017, his students explored how hockey suffuses the Canadian canon. Along with his anthologies were poems on Don Cherry, books by famous players, biographies, autobiographies, and journalistic snippets from hockey writers. As an upper-level class, students had to write two essays and participate in a formal seminar. Anyone who thought it was going to be a bird course had to learn the hard way.

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“People who knew me knew that I wasn’t going to just offer a fluffy course,” P.J. says. “Some of the hockey players, too, they’d come in and say, ‘Gee, this is hard.’ ‘Yes it is, yes it is.’”

When he was still teaching, P.J. used to keep a photo of Howe on his desk. It was of them sharing a laugh after Howe received his honorary doctorate in 2010. At that graduation ceremony, P.J. remembered every student, whether they were a hockey fan or not, going up and shaking Howe’s hand. Nobody told them to do it. They knew they were in the presence of greatness.

“We’re standing up, and he takes his elbow, puts it in my rather obese belly, looks at me and smiles,” P.J. tells me. “I’m thinking, ‘Here he is, there he is, he’s like the old guy, done so much, and he did the old elbow in the belly.’ I thought, ‘That’s so cool, that’s so cool.’”

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