This is an excerpt from the Opening to a script I started two years ago that I have never finished but I am edging back towards. It is called Magical.
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Canadians are unique in a lot of respects. We are
generally perceived as polite, non violent people. We also have a love for donuts and coffee. Tim Hortons is simply known as Timmies, and every Canadian knows what a Timbit is. Tim Horton was in fact a famous hockey player in his day. I had all his hockey cards.
As Canadians we can take the worst amount of cold weather and snow and deal with it. And we love hockey.
Americans have baseball, most of the rest of the world
have soccer. We have hockey.
Hockey. It's in our blood. From the time we can speak,
read, write, watch, and play, its something we know. Like learning that we need
to eat and do all the things that are essential and natural to our being and
living, hockey becomes ingrained and part of our culture. And our being. To be Canadian, and
to some extent, to be a Canadian boy, means that we know, watch, play and love
hockey. I was no exception to that.
But what that means to each succeeding generation is
completely different. And more importantly, how we experienced and internalized
that event is very different from generation to generation and city to city.
Growing up in the late sixties and early seventies,
life seemed very simple to a young Canadian boy mired in the suburban sprawl of
Montreal. Get up, eat breakfast, go to school, come home, watch a few cartoons,
go out and play street hockey, then eat dinner, watch a few shows, and off to
bed.
Of course, the world wasn’t really that simple. Quebec
was on the verge of a separation movement, the hippie culture was encroaching
on the 'father knows best' culture of the generation before it, and the games
that I loved, hockey and baseball, were
changing from wonder sports to very big business. But as a preteen boy, I
didn’t know or care about any of that. Innocence ruled the day in my sheltered
suburban existence.
Heroes were heroes and you didn’t know better. Star
players were to be admired and you didn’t know anything about contract disputes
or union uprisings. Players were gods and you emulated them and that’s all you
knew.
Passion was about the game and the players and your
team, whatever that was.
For the kids on my street, there were two pastimes,
street hockey in the winter and baseball in the summer. If you lived on the
street, you played, whether that was well or not.
Baseball was always my game. My love. My passion. I was a complete and obsessed Montreal Expos fan.
My first passion was always baseball, but I loved hockey. More as a spectator than a player, because frankly, I was not very good at all at ice hockey. As a fan of the Montreal Canadians though, I lived and died with every game and every minute of every game.
By the time I was in my late 20's my team was the Maple Leafs and there was no bigger block of time in that history than the 93 playoffs. Those 3 to 4 weeks. This is the story of that Magical time and the events, and how they related to so much of my life that came before it.
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