COLUMN ONE : In Canada, Hockey Is a Game of Life : It’s more than a Canadian national pastime, it’s a passion. But many citizens complain about the mongrelizing influence of the United States.

He who would know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

--Jacques Barzun

If, half a century ago, Jacques Barzun had set up shop as an immigrant man of letters at Montreal’s McGill University, and not, as he did, at Columbia in New York City, it is a good bet that his famous dictum would have bound Canada to ice hockey, and not America to baseball.

Catchy cultural clue, or dubious anthropology? Whichever it is, those who would understand Canada in the 1990s could do worse than follow hockey. Metaphors aside, the fortunes of game and country today seem very much the same.

Hockey is more than the Canadian national pastime; it is a passion, a cultural icon, as tied up in the it-ness of Canada as soccer is to Brazil or the bullfight to Spain. “Hockey Night in Canada” has been one of the five most-watched TV shows here every year since the dawn of television, and, in Parliament, a National Hockey Caucus monitors the Canadian-ness of the game.

Practically any Canadian can tell you exactly where he was when Paul Henderson potted the winning goal in the deciding game of the 1972 Canada-Soviet series, just the way practically any American over 35 can tell you where he was when he heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot to death in Texas.

“It is one of the things that makes us distinctly Canadian, this memory,” writes Ken Dryden, a former goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, and now a best-selling hockey writer.

Such is the place of hockey in Canada that a general-interest magazine here, in a recent cover story, exhorted parents to build their own back yard rinks, giving “the definitive, the quintessential, the perfect” hockey-rink recipe: Cut the grass short in the fall; wait for the first snow; shovel the snow to half-an-inch deep; run the sprinkler all night, getting up every three hours to move it around; hose down the sprinkled area with the nozzle set on “mist”; then take the nozzle off the hose and dump as much water as possible on the misted area.

All this takes about 10 frigid days and nights of running around the back yard with a parka and galoshes over your pajamas--yet each year, the hopeful parents of countless budding Wayne Gretzkys bend to such outlandish labors, and bend to them lovingly.

“Hockey helps us express what we feel about Canada, and ourselves,” Dryden writes. “The winter, the land, the sound of children’s voices, a frozen river, a game--all are part of our collective imaginations. Hockey makes Canada feel more Canadian.”

But now, in Canada, the national passion makes a good mirror of the nation’s troubled psyche. From the Pacific to the Arctic to the Atlantic, growing numbers of Canadians are worried that their country--and their national sport--is no longer really their own.

One by one, Canadians say, the time-honored institutions that have made their country what it is--and that have kept it separate from the United States, and special in the world--are being dismantled. The fear is that, in the end, Canada’s national culture and economy will end up inextricably bound with, and indistinguishable from, those of the United States.

First, for example, there’s the two-year-old bilateral free-trade pact with America, which Canadians fear will turn their social-welfare-oriented economy into a mere appendage of the laissez-faire United States.

Then there are the ever-intensifying separatist feelings in French-speaking Quebec. Many Canadians are proud of their country’s efforts to foster bilingualism, and to put an end to the age-old discrimination against the French. But now, it looks as though Quebec may secede anyway, and the Canadian dream of standing as a beacon of tolerance and opportunity will be snuffed out.

There’s also Canada’s new, uncomfortable role as a warrior in the Third World. For years, Canadians had exulted in a non-interventionist foreign policy, with an army deployed strictly as a peacekeeping force for the United Nations. But now Canada has a small contingent of sailors and airmen in the Persian Gulf, and many Canadians suspect that their once-independent foreign policy is being scripted out of Foggy Bottom.

“When George Bush says, ‘Jump,’ (Prime Minister) Brian Mulroney says, ‘How high?’ ” figures Radisson school principal Walter Kyliuk, who turned out with his chums in Radisson’s Red Bull Cafe on a recent day to talk about the national sport and the national malaise.

Highlighting a Trend

For even hockey, that most Canadian of all Canadiana, has not been safe from the mongrelizing forces marshaling to the south. And Radisson, population 434, makes a good place to see the trend in motion. Radisson is the proud hometown of longtime National Hockey League defenseman Bill Hajt, who played out his career with the Buffalo Sabres. A billboard on the edge of town shows Hajt’s likeness in blue and gold, and boasts the Radisson-NHL connection.

“This,” says Radisson’s grain-elevator manager Don Harris, with a nod toward the Red Bull’s frosty windows and the spreading white plains beyond, “is the hotbed of hockey.”

But that is of little solace in the unhappy Canada of 1991. Grain prices are off internationally, and that has farmers here on the breadbasket prairies worried about foreclosure. And now, just when times are looking bleakest, the worst possible fate that can befall a Canadian prairie village has hit Radisson: The local indoor hockey rink--the drafty, homely domed structure where Bill Hajt learned the game as a schoolboy--has been condemned.

The hockey-lovers forgathering at the Red Bull don’t have any trouble making a connection between their local rink calamity and the broader problems of their country. Hockey is a tie that binds this increasingly fractious nation together, they say, and at a local level, an indoor hockey rink is the binding force of a Canadian prairie town--the “community living room,” as Kyliuk puts it.

Indeed, Canadian villages of as few as 100 spare nothing on the upkeep of their all-important sheets of ice, sheltered under aging Quonset hut domes. In towns too small to have a mall or a movie theater, “rink rats” know how to kill whole days in hockey arenas, and do so in dignity. Parents who can’t find a baby-sitter know they can leave their youngsters safely at a local rink.

“The arena is just as important as the school in a community,” says Scotty Mundt, Bill Hajt’s coach from years ago. “The kids can learn a lot there.”

Close a hockey rink, prairie-dwellers say, and people won’t have anywhere to meet, to parse the news, to while away the long winter evenings. Without a rink of their own, people are apt to start driving to other nearby dots on the map, and using the rinks there. They may start shopping in the neighboring towns, and before long, the neglected local stores will be closing. Then the post office will go. Then the school. In the end, Saskatchewan has another ghost town, and a bit of the national soul has gone cold.

“Without a rink, what have you got?” Mundt asks.

“Without a rink, you’re just a black peg on the wall,” Harris offers. “You’re nothing.”

American Influence

All across Canada, nationalists see hockey as yet another precious piece of the country’s life slipping slowly through the national fingers. Most NHL players still come from Canada, to be sure: of the 553 players on the league’s rosters at the beginning of the current season, 402 of them, or 73%, are Canadian. But as the NHL has grown in recent years, more and more franchises have been awarded in American cities. That has meant more and more Americans taking owner’s seats on the all-important NHL Board of Governors.

And that, Canadian nationalists say, has concentrated the money and the decision-making authority--the power to make hockey what it is--in the unsentimental hands of the Yanks.

“There is a realization now that we don’t control the game any longer,” says Al Strachan, an Edmonton-based sports columnist for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, who looks back longingly on the days when the league had just six teams and four owners--two Canadians and two Americans--and the head office was in Montreal, not New York.

“Back then, the league was run, basically, for the benefit of Canadians,” he says. “Now we just provide the cannon fodder.”

Time and again, Canadian fans have developed an idea of how the NHL should conduct its affairs, only to see the league do things a different way.

“There’s nothing wrong with being born American or opting to live there,” says Strachan, striking a common Canadian pose. “The problem is that Americans think like Americans. It has been said that a Canadian who makes $5 million will retire and enjoy his money. An American who makes $5 million will work harder than ever to turn it into $10 million. While that’s an oversimplification, it serves to illustrate the attitude that permeates the (NHL) board. Profit rules supreme.”

Canadian nationalists unload any number of examples, but their biggest beefs tend to revolve around the expansion of the NHL. Canadians, not surprisingly, would like to have more professional teams north of the 49th parallel.

But the NHL has been eager to expand south and west--not north--and to convert hockey from a largely northeastern regional phenomenon to a coast-to-coast passion. Hockey is not just a game, of course; it is also a business, and the men who keep the enterprise rolling along need millions of fans from California to New Jersey to buy pennants and posters, hotdogs and beer--and to boost the sport’s television ratings, maybe even making a network contract possible one day.

With that in mind, the NHL has begun icing new teams in such balmy and unexploited territory as San Jose and Tampa Bay.

“We’ve got the facilities, we’ve got the fans, we’ve got everything,” Kyliuk says. “We just haven’t got the bucks.”

Consider the back of the hand given Saskatoon hockey promoter Bill Hunter, who in 1983 negotiated an agreement-in-principle to buy the wobbly St. Louis Blues away from Ralston Purina and move them to Saskatoon. A pleasant prairie city named after a local berry, Saskatoon has a spacious new hockey arena, and a population of about 200,000 that packs it regularly for junior hockey games. But that wasn’t of interest to the NHL.

The way Canadian purists see it, the NHL’s American owners want to increase gate receipts, and fear that if there are too many Canadian teams, visiting from strange, unknown cities to the north, Americans won’t come out for the games.

“It’s a terrible thing to say, but Americans are really ignorant about Canada,” says Murray Hume, sports director for Saskatoon Community Radio. “Can you imagine the Saskatoon Blues going down to play the New York Rangers? People would have to get out their atlases. They’d be saying: ‘What kind of bush-league team is this?’ ”

Thus, when the NHL Board of Governors vetoed Hunter’s deal and helped the Blues find new owners in St. Louis, Canadians were angry but not surprised. They assume that the league has a built-in bias against expansion in Canada. NHL spokesman Gary Meagher, himself a Canadian, tries to deflate this theory. He says that the league nixed Hunter’s Saskatoon deal not out of prejudice against Canadian growth, but because it is the NHL’s longstanding policy to do everything possible to keep franchises from moving from city to city.

Still, cognoscenti say, the very nature of hockey has begun to change, with Americans owning the puck. “The good old rock-’em, sock-’em, Canadian hockey is dissipating,” says Don Cherry, erstwhile coach of the Boston Bruins and now a regular commentator on “Hockey Night in Canada.”

Dropping the Gloves

It turns out that while Canadians may have the reputation of being international peace-keepers and doves, when it comes to hockey, they have no qualms whatsoever about dropping the gloves. Older Canadian fans in particular argue that fighting has served a legitimate--even meritorious--purpose in hockey over the years.

They remember how the game was played into the 1950s, when players wore neither helmets nor visors, and when anyone slashing an opponent in the face with the standard, solid-ash stick of the day stood a good chance of causing serious injury. Back then, fighting was an accepted way of enforcing the unwritten code of the game: You never tried to really sock it to your opponent.

Then, things changed as hockey took off in the United States, with its less-than-discriminating fans. Starting in the 1970s, the Philadelphia Flyers rung in an aggressive new style of hockey, with psyched-up players picking fights not to enforce fair play, but merely to intimidate opponents and win through shows of force. Americans loved it--for all the wrong reasons, Canadians say.

“American fans are not as knowledgeable as Canadian fans,” Hume says. “I’m not saying they’re stupid; they just didn’t grow up with the game. They don’t understand the finer points, and they want to see the rough, tough stuff.”

But as fighting for fighting’s sake began to color the image of hockey in the United States, there came a backlash.

Football in the United States has, after all, cultivated its mass following by hiring beauty queens as commentators, placing floral arrangements in press booths, dispatching players to prayer breakfasts, turning off the TV cameras during the occasional brawl and in countless other small ways, “elevating” the game. Doesn’t it follow that, as long as hockey is linked up in the American mind with blood and broken teeth, it will also be associated with such low-brow and downmarket fare as all-star wrestling, boxing and roller derbies?

“The worst thing that could happen in three or four minutes of TV time (from a promoter’s point of view) would be to have a brawl, with equipment all over the ice and sweaters torn,” says Don Thain, a former hockey-equipment manufacturer and now a professor of business administration in London, Ontario. “It’s supposed to be a sport, and for all the sociologists who would be watching it, and for all the people who sell corn flakes and beer, the assumption is that this is not the way to set a good example.”

So American hockey promoters have been campaigning to end fighting--and Canadian purists complain that their game’s traditional spirit will be sacrificed for the almighty buck--an American buck. The NHL hasn’t banned fighting, but in 1987 it wrote a new penalty schedule for players who start fights.

“The game is definitely changing,” Cherry says. “There’s not as many fights. There’s not as much hitting. We’re going for sweetheart hockey.”

Back in Radisson, time is running out on the hockey-lovers at the Red Bull Cafe. They have let the local boys go on skating in the doomed rink, mindful that a heavy snowfall might one day take down the roof. Sympathetic provincial building inspectors have been looking the other way. The village has also launched a fund-raising drive, and Dryden, the goalie-turned-author, scripted a television show about Radisson’s plight.

For a few glorious days, the eyes of the nation were on the tiny village. Donations poured in from British Columbia to Newfoundland, from people who wanted to save hockey in Radisson, and maybe, in the process, save the Canadian prairie village from extinction. But it costs some $500,000 to build even a plain-vanilla, standing-room-only rink with no dressing rooms, and so far, Radisson has put together just $255,000.

“We’re in a position now where we could really use a kick-start,” says Harris, the grain-elevator manager.

So Radisson is looking south--to the United States. In November, the people here posted a letter to Wayne Gretzky, a.k.a. the Great One, asking him to fly in from Los Angeles and host a fund-raising dinner.

And why not? The people of Radisson had already swallowed a hefty chunk of their national pride long ago, when Gretzky left the Edmonton Oilers and moved to California. Many of them started cheering for the L. A. Kings.

“We can’t get along without the United States,” Harris says. “No doubt about it. Don’t get me wrong--I’m not blaming the States. I blame ourselves. Maybe we don’t have enough guts to stand up and fight for it. But America is bigger. It has more power, more resources. We’re beat from the start.”

And Gretzky? So far, he hasn’t written back.

“Can you help us?” Kyliuk wonders. “Tell him we’re anxiously awaiting a response. Every community needs a living room.”