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Students in English 2060 at Dal play, talk, study the sport in literature
ALMOST EVERYBODY has a backpack, and most chat in small groups or peck away at laptops as they wait to get into the lecture theatre. But one student has a hockey stick.
"They had a five-on-three for two minutes" comes out of a conversation in a corner, and when the professor arrives, he’s dressed in a hockey sweater.
This is Engl 2060 at Dalhousie University, Sports Literature and Culture: Hockey.
The course, offered for the first time this year, is the brainchild of professor David McNeil, who after a quarter-century as a university teacher, is for the first time combining his two loves: the language and the game.
McNeil is probably best known in the wider Halifax sporting community as the father of two basketball-playing daughters, but he grew up the son of goalie Gerry McNeil, whose colleagues on the Montreal Canadiens included Maurice Richard and Jacques Plante.
In fact, Gerry McNeil appears in one of the novels studied by the class, The Divine Ryans, by Wayne Johnston. The professor said he hopes he hasn’t belaboured his hockey lineage.
"Sometimes, I think they’re interested; other times, I don’t think they’re terribly interested," McNeil said of the students. "It doesn’t give me any credibility as an English teacher — as a hockey person, a little credibility. I brought in his Stanley Cup ring one day and passed it around. They thought that was pretty cool."
Of course, Gerry McNeil played in the 1950s, ancient times for today’s university students, who are even too young to have seen John Kordic play. Kordic’s life is the subject of the Christopher Wiseman poem Phone Calls Home.
…you became the goon, the heavyweight,
Sent off the bench to intimidate and subdue.
…but your parents were ashamed, watching you
fight on national TV.
As a 2000 level class, Engl 2060 is meant to appeal to the widest possible audience, and the reading material includes work by legendary Habs goalie Ken Dryden and Stephen Brunt, a top sportswriter for the Globe and Mail.
"At the same time, it is literature, so we do poetry, three or four classes on poetry, and they usually fight it," said McNeil. "They don’t really want to do poetry, but they often find out that some of the stuff is kind of neat."
Halifax poet Matt Robinson, whose book No Cage Contains a Stare That Well was written during the years he was playing pickup hockey six to eight times a week, described himself as "house league all-star" before he read and discussed his poetry with the class.
His poems, with titles like Zamboni Driver’s Lament and House League Photo are influenced more by the fact he was a goaltender than by the fact he wasn’t especially good at it.
"You have sort of that unique view, a weird in-between of watching the game and being a part of it. Because I didn’t play at a high level, I always enjoyed the game. It never became a chore for me; it never became something that I had to do," Robinson said. "Even though it’s darker poetry, there’s joy or excitement which underlies it.
"There are a fair number of players in the class, or guys who have played at a far higher level than I have. I don’t want to say it’s intimidating, but you’re always wondering whether your approach rings true for them."
Matt Anthony, doing a double major in English and sociology, is also a member of the Dalhousie men’s hockey team. He learned about the class when he saw a notice about it at the Dal arena.
"I was doing other classes, like Contemporary Criticism, and Renaissance Literature, and that’s not as big a part of my life as hockey is. It’s good to read hockey literature and learn about the history of the game. The game that we watch today is nothing like it was in the ’50s," Anthony said. "I grew up with . . . collections of old players, biographies and autobiographies, but I had no idea about the poetry or any of the short stories that we’ve read. Even knowing that Ken Dryden wrote a short story, I had no idea that he was such a good writer."
Being a hockey player doesn’t necessarily give him any advantage, Anthony said, but as a goaltender himself, he has best enjoyed an excerpt from a book by Dryden.
"It talked about the pre-game dressing room talk, getting ready for the game, the highs and lows, and it’s actually people articulating what we as hockey players go through every day," he said.
"Reading the literature, (the authors) notice things that I’ve not even thought about. Another one was A Nation Plays Chopsticks. Mark Anthony Jarman wrote it, and it talked about beer-league and just playing the game itself and the camaraderie away from the rink, driving on road trips, and some of the stories were just dead-on with what hockey’s all about."
Sports Literature and Culture: Hockey is the first new class McNeil has developed in a teaching career that began at the University of Alberta in 1983, a year before he came to Dalhousie.
He knew there was sufficient literature in the area, and this year at least, the class is small enough that he knows everyone’s name.
"I had an interest in it, and I thought there would be interest from the students. A lot of my students are from outside the faculty, outside the faculty of arts and social science. There are a lot of people from management and from kinesiology. A lot of the athletes are from kinesiology, a lot of the women athletes. It was an attempt to draw people from outside our faculty to a literature class," said McNeil, who has noticed a pattern as to which students participate in class the most.
"My female hockey players do not participate, and they’re all in kinesiology. But you know what? There’s not a lot of literature that talks to them; there just isn’t. We’ve had one story about a woman who plays hockey."
In addition to books and PowerPoint, an antique wooden puck is one of the teaching tools employed by McNeil. The puck is held by the student who has most recently made an especially illuminating observation in class, or asked the most thoughtful question or earned the highest mark on the mid-term exam.
"The idea is, you have to bring the puck to class because I can ask for it at any time. Once, someone was not there when the puck got asked for, so the play got screwed up — that’s hockey. It’s just a way of having fun," said McNeil, who brought the puck to class on the first day, when he held a ceremonial faceoff before posing his first query.
"The question was ‘What is the poetic device that is used in the epigraph to this class?’ That was the first question I asked in the class, so you had to know what an epigraph was, you had to know what the literary device was: it was simile."
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