Vancouver: The Big One

The reported mood back home in Canada before last night’s big quarterfinal hockey game against Russia was, to be honest, more fearful than frenzied. People are often puzzled by the seeming discrepancy of football jersey
、 Canadian niceness with the rock-’em-sock-’em aggression of our national sport, but the truth is that Canadians are not really nice. As one who has lived among them for most of his life—even in New York, still connected by family and in-laws—I can assure you that Canadians are not nice. They are just socially graceful, which gives them the appearance of niceness while actually covering over considerable reserves of disgust and disapproval, particularly at those who lack the sensitivity Canadians possess by national training. The tone of the best Canadian literature is rather snappish and sardonic, even vinegary—think of Robertson Davies—and that is the tone Canadians assume again in private after you have left the party and they have seen you off warmly at the door. Inside that Canadian woman, smiling nicely as she fends off drunken confidences and heads off one more obvious American social faux pas at the pass, is the soul of soccer uniforms a Canadian defenseman, imagining knocking you senseless in retaliation. (I once heard the great Alice Munro, being feted in New York, respond to a series of sincere but Americanly overdone complimentary toasts with a simple, deflating, body-crushing “Well…!” Chris Pronger couldn’t have hit harder.)

It is that same exquisite sensitivity, the lack of calluses on the soul, that explains why, if you were not raised in Canada, it is so hard to understand the desperate depth of emotion with which a Canada-Russia hockey game takes place. Though the memory of the great victories—in the 1972 Summit Series; Gretzky to Lemieux in 1987—remains, so does, just as indelibly, that of the brutal losses. Insensitive Americans are efficient at forgetting all about old defeats—who now remembers the 1984 Olympic team or, for that matter, the War of 1812?—but Canadians, more self-aware, are not. Memories of the 1981 Canada Cup, where the Russians—er, Soviets, as they were—destroyed a very good Team Canada, 8-1, or of nba jerseys the Challenge Cup in 1979, when the Russians defeated an N.H.L. All-Star team 6-0, are still fresh for a lot of us. So the e-mails that flowed from back home all yesterday were, as I said, essentially apprehensive.

And they were inflected, interestingly, by a certain nostalgia for the old Cold War confrontations. The Soviet team was no fun to play for, but, God, they were fun to watch. Regimented to within an inch of their lives by a series of coaches who themselves lived in fear, they played a passing pattern game as tightly drilled as the City Ballet chorus. Americans should be properly grateful for that “Miracle on Ice” in 1980; it really was a miracle. Given the imbalance of skill between the two teams, the U.S.A.-Soviet game could have been replayed several hundred times without a second American victory. Those days are gone, and the new circumstance is that the Russian N.H.L.ers, as underrehearsed as a soccer jerseys Bob Dylan backup band, now play Canadian hockey, dispy-doodling one on six, while it is left to the Canadians to play mildly orchestrated hockey, being able at least to call up one full line, from the San Jose Sharks, who have actually played together before.