I’m 13, my nose is numb, my hair is covered in a white frost, and I’m propped up on a hockey net in the middle of the night. In six hours, the ice will be taken over by Timbits kids, but right now a freckly hockey player is taking off his snapback, revealing a long and luscious red flow, and is leaning in to give me my first real kiss. His lips taste like dip, because he’s got a whole mouthful of dip. I stumble a little while getting off the net, and he says, "Don’t worry, I’d never let you fall…"
Being from northern Ontario, watching hockey movies and TV shows is kind of a given. Frankly, the game was merely an excuse to interact with a fascinating and familiar cast of characters. Dirty men with weathered faces and gaits like refrigerators. Men with big muscles and big mouths filled with Franglais, and tongues like the ones on cigarette packages. Big and strong and safe men, who remind me of playing pool with my uncles after funerals, and how special I would feel after they snuck me a sip of their beer. Men who protect their team.
The best of the bunch is the 2011 Canadian classic Goon, directed by Michael Dowse. It follows tongue-tied himbo Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott), after he gets recruited to be an enforcer for star player Xavier LaFlamme (Marc-André Grondin) on the Halifax Highlanders. Glatt, while being “blessed by the fists of god”, is not what you would call good at hockey. He’s also stupid, in his own opinion, and he’s not wrong. But Glatt’s moral compass is true; he is loyal, remorseful when he fucks up, and respects his team. Even after Glatt gets with Eva (Alison Pill), a flawed but sweet girl with a boyfriend, he takes a pummeling from the poor sap, saying to her afterwards through blood-soaked teeth, “When you deserve a beating, you take one.”
"Liking him is simple because fiction is the only place he can exist..."
Glatt’s version of manhood is sincere, and maybe that is why I love this movie so much. He is protective without a temper, strong without being threatening. Usually the good qualities come with the bad, but with Glatt we can have our cake and eat it too. Liking him is simple because fiction is the only place he can exist—unlike the rest of the cast, who share all of Glatt’s honourable characteristics, while simultaneously being boorish, sexist, hot-headed, and hateful. Unfortunately, this is the more recognizable version of masculinity.
After dabbling in a few weeks of flirty texting on my blue LG flip phone, things with the redheaded forward fizzled out. Luckily, my short stint as a puck slut was pretty innocent, but the thrill of being on the inside of the northern Ontario peewee in-crowd always had hockey players on my radar. Boys with big mouths full of bad words and stained teeth. Boys who globbed onto each other, moving like a murmuration of starlings, never risking being too far from the flock, filling the room with a performative machismo so thin you could see right through it. Boys who accumulated hideous rumours, drug scandals, even sexual assault allegations. And one chicken-headed boy, who announced to our middle school cafeteria that he would only have sex with me if he could put a bag over my head, the same year he won an athletic award for getting a hat-trick in a playoff game.
This September, I’ve been away from home for nine years. In Toronto, I’ve gotten to know a very different kind of man. Men who can’t use power tools or put together IKEA furniture. Sweet men who would rather apologize than disappear. Lovely men who let me speak, and carry my heavy bag and let me have a corner of their brownies. But nostalgia's poison calls to even the most comfortable at times, and hockey brings me back to the most alluring place in the palace in my mind.
So when I saw all six seasons of Jared Keeso’s 2022 Letterkenny spinoff Shoresy available on Crave, I tore right through it. Shoresy is the vulgar and relentless captain of the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs, a team that has lost the attention of the community and passion of its players. In a mission to turn the team around, and as general manager Nat (Tasya Teles) puts it, “put bums in seats”, Shoresy shepherds the team with a strict set of rules. Know people's names, do what it takes, take care of the people who take care of you, set the tone, if you can’t win don’t play, and my favourite, give your balls a tug… Which is basically: stay humble.
These rules are repeated like a mantra throughout the series, and we see how they better the team as players and men on and off the ice. The fourth season consists of Shorsey learning to love a mentorship program with a group of teen players, which is big for Shoresey since he resents the idea of coaching. He encourages a young player to go after the girl he likes. Not with crudeness or harassment like the Highlanders would, but by singing terrible karaoke to make her laugh, a direction the boys in my town would have greatly benefited from. Shoresy is not perfect, though; he doesn't trust his coach, he fights just to fight, and his foul mouth gets him in all sorts of trouble. But still, the show walks right up to the line with these characters. They are flawed enough to make them real, and pure enough to make them lovable. Like Goon, it feels like a trick, like the writers skirted past all the stuff that would make liking these characters complicated, all the stuff that I saw in real life.
"They are flawed enough to make them real, and pure enough to make them lovable."
As a preteen, my friends and I would watch the games at the local rink, and it was there that I came to understand why these guys felt they could act the way they did. Their helmets covered their ugly faces, their shoulder pads made them broader than they really were, and their uniforms stripped them of the vulnerability of individuality. They were guys like Doug Glatt, eager to break skin for their team, guys like Shorsey, chirping at their opponents to shake them up. Guys like my dad, who beat up the man who stole and pawned my mom’s engagement ring, who nearly broke down a man's door who threatened me when I was 12, who took me trick-or-treating every year even when he had to drive 10 hours to make it.
From my plastic seat, far up in the rafters, they looked like the perfect version of a man. Like watching hockey on screen, the players are alluring when you’re a spectator, when there is a thin wall of pixels or plexiglass between you.