What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book for the hockey fan in you,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Perhaps you’ve already read the book that accompanies this letter. I can’t imagine that someone before me hasn’t thought of offering it to you. You’re a big hockey fan and Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places, by Dave Bidini, is all about hockey. But I’d say it’s a cut above most hockey books because it’s written by someone who (a) has the game in his blood, and (b) knows how to write. The hockey knowledge is evident. The book is replete with anecdotes, stories and events from the history of hockey, featuring a good number of players that I’m sure will be familiar to you but were unknown to me. And the knowledge goes deeper than that. This is no academic or journalistic account. Bidini is hockey mad. As he relates in his book, he played as a teen, but gave up when the pressure got too much. Then as an adult he started to play again in a rec league in Toronto and hockey became a central part of his life. So this is a book both knowledgeable and personal. And then the man can write. Take the following line. Bidini and his wife have just left Hong Kong by train, heading for Beijing:

Just two hours out of town, all the glitter and sparkle of Hong Kong had given way to a country of stone and dust and the scrabblings of life, as neglected as the crumbs of an eraser that has rubbed out centuries of progress.

How’s that for an image that captures the difference between the dynamism of Hong Kong and the failures of communist China? Bidini can also be very funny, as in this case, a description of the special talent of Kareem, the world’s first Sudanese hockey player, who plays for the Al Ain Falcons of the United Arab Emirates:

Of all the Al Ain players, Kareem had the hardest slap shot, due in part to the fact that his wind-up started from behind his head. The only problem with Kareem’s shot was that he had no idea where it was going. When he wound-up in the offensive zone, the Falcons ducked and covered, as if he were flinging dinner plates at them. Bear [the coach] had to remind him: “Shoot at the goalie, Kareem, at the goalie.”

Tropic of Hockey is about one man’s love for the game and his quest for its soul. This quest leads him to places where you wouldn’t expect to see ice hockey. And as different as those places are, the spirit of the game, by Bidini’s reckoning, burns with the same intensity as it does in his rec league in Toronto. He finds in Harbin, northern China, in Dubai, in Miercurea Ciuc, Transylvania,  the refreshing purity of a game that is not mere entertainment but a way of meeting and being, hockey as culture rather than business, “the spirituality of sports, sports as life,” as he puts it at one point. Bidini contrasts this kind of hockey to what he feels is the packaged product put out by the NHL today.

Nothing loved can be reduced to mere entertainment, to mere anything. So just as I have an exalted view of literature and bristle at the notion of art as mere entertainment and cannot fathom anyone having a good, thinking life that doesn’t include reading, so Dave Bidini exalts, bristles and cannot fathom on the subject of hockey. Each one of us cares, defends and justifies what he or she loves. Put all those passions together, and you have a society, a culture, a nation. A last word, then, on Tropic of Hockey: it’s the most Canadian book I’ve sent you.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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