make an observation or wisecrack, as he often would at the beginning of class. I thought he might talk about the tennis war of words he had started with a female geography professor, Dr. Sanderson. Professor Ledoux stated over and over for days that he was a better tennis player than her and that she didn’t have a chance.
“For your homework,” he would say, “I want you to come up with the top ten reasons Dr. Sanderson will lose against me at tennis. And predict the score, but not in numbers. I will win by twice, or triple, or shut her out. You get the idea. I will overpower her,” he would say over and over, “just like I do to the guys on the rugby pitch.” They were a perfect parody here, at the University of Windsor for the hot topic of the time, the battle of the sexes, epitomized by tennis stars Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The original battle of the sexes, between real tennis stars, was playing out just then. To him, a woman, even a good player, wasn’t likely to beat a man like him. Ledoux would not even hear of being beaten at tennis by the female geography professor, and, of course, on the day of the match, he lost. But, he certainly made a great spectacle of it.
As I was seated at geography class, there in Dillon Hall, thinking of this colourful man, Professor Ledoux, this man, with all the markings of greatness, began to speak. I waited for a witticism from him, but a tug at my shirt distracted me.
“Hey, Joe,” the voice called. “We better get down to the Ambassador lounge. Canada and Russia are playing.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said.
The game didn’t start for an hour yet, but my cousin, John and I, rushed out of class anyway, flying down the steps from the second floor, bursting out the door, running across the square to Ambassador Auditorium, in what is now the CAW Centre.
“Where’s the fire?” Ledoux called out, knowing full well where we were going.
To our great relief, the auditorium lounge was not full, but the best seat, right in front of the television monitor was taken. It was a sofa. A guy lay on it, moaning something about how boring his ancient Greek and Roman mythology class had been. His girlfriend, or if not a girlfriend, a female fellow student, or if not a female or a fellow student, just someone, sat on the edge of the couch, at his mid-section and lay sideways across his chest. She looked quite uncomfortable, but stayed in that position for a long time—long enough that some gentlemen offered her a helping hand, in case she was in distress.
My cousin and I surveyed the lounge, each of us grabbing a lounge chair from opposite sides of the room and dragging them to opposite ends of the couch. We sat there, the distance of a couch apart and waited for the game. We both could have sat next to each other, but then one of us would not have had the best available view of the game. Opposite ends of the couch offered the best view.
The series had become a nail-biter. What we thought would be a laugher turned out to be a laugh at us. Would we be good enough, determined enough or lucky enough to come back and win? This was the only thing that mattered to us then, the only thing on our minds, in those days. No one knew if we could win, but boy, we wanted it--all of us did. We all wanted to win badly. It was not only Team Canada that we rooted for, or Canada that we rooted for. It was us. We not only wanted to win; we played for the win. We all did-- in our University lounges, our favourite bars, or our living rooms. We were playing to win. We weren’t just watching. This was the big game--Game 8. We had to win this game or Russia would be declared the winner of the series. That is because they already had three wins and a tie. We had three wins and a tie, but they had scored more goals than us.
“How much of a difference do you think Jim would have made?” I asked over the couch to my cousin, causing the guy lying on the couch to perk up.
“Hard to say,” was his reply, but I thought and still think he would be the difference maker.
“Like Bobby Hull,” finally came the answer I wanted.
“He was the best player I ever grew up with,”
I added for no apparent reason.
“Actually, I think he would have been the best player ever,” my cousin added.
In our minds, Jim’s name belonged with Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Jean Beliveau and the rest of them, only he never got the chance to prove it.
Jim was Jim Mahon. He was a big part of our lives. Not only our hockey lives, but a big part of who we were. We believed that if he had gone to the NHL, a dozen or more players from the Essex area would have followed him there, and Jim would have brought us, all of us, there with him.
Jim showed me and us, at a young age, that we were not gifted hockey players. We were generally smaller, less coordinated, not as strong, with less insight about the game. To him, it came naturally, the immense strength, the coordination, the ability, the maturity, the love to work hard at the game. It was like God gave us this great gift to grow up with, this great hockey player, this great person, and if he were playing there, in this series, he would have made a difference.
The obvious comparisons I made in my mind, between myself and this great hockey talent, took all the pressure off of me as a hockey player. I was free to make the NHL or any team or not make it or make any team or try to make them or not make them or keep trying to make them without ever being expected to make them. The pressure was off. I could aspire, at best, to be an underestimated hockey player. This is because it seemed to me that nearly everyone else playing the game was a better hockey player than I was. I could become, perhaps, a middle of the pack player, for as long as I wanted to be, moving up from level to level, in the middle of the pack. I didn’t need to be a star, not even in the hope within my mind. This is because I had seen what a great star is like. I had seen the immense talent of a star. The pressure was off me because I wasn’t that. I didn’t yearn to be a star. I could, however, hope to be a star maker, or if not a maker, a star helper. This modest goal could be my great aspiration.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been given a great gift. My great quality was that I didn’t know any better. I could work hard all over the ice. I could bump, or grind or generally make it as hard for the opposing players to play as I could, without ever having expectations from anyone that I should play better. I could simply work hard, everywhere on the ice. I never knew hockey as work. I just thought that’s what you do. You go out there and play as hard as you can all the time.
On my first organized team, the St. Clair Beach Juveniles, our coach, Dennis, came into the room between periods and started talking about working hard. I listened for a moment, turned to my centerman, Dan Sylvester, and said, “What does he mean, work hard? I thought we were playing hockey.”
“This may have been the quality we displayed best in the Canada/Russia series,” I thought. There was Pete Mahovlich holding off KGB guards from getting to Alan Eagleson, with his hockey stick. There was Al Eagleson gesturing to the KGB police with impropriety. Whatever Pete and Alan were doing, the rest of the players were also doing. We had to win by force of will. We certainly weren’t going to win with our puck-handling skills, or our one-man rushes.
Still, if Jim were playing there, we believed we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
“Hello, hockey fans...” the announcer started.
“Quiet!” someone yelled, “the game is starting.”
Russia was leading the series. We had to win today or we would accomplish the unthinkable—lose the series.
The television set was an outdated set, even for 1972, with alternating black and white, then coloured pictures. The sound was erratic at best, with undertones of static when the sound was at its best and indistinguishable noise when it was at its worst. But it didn’t matter. The game was on. We needed to win this game to be anything at all--to be Canadian. We needed to win, so our country would not sink into a depression, like the one in 1929, but not an economic depression, rather a social depression. You couldn’t cut this tension with a knife, as has been often said. There was no way of cutting it. Well, actually, there was one way, only one way—win the game.
I remember the shame we felt on the first night when Canada lost. We had bragged to our American friends at a wedding