HIS BRILLIANT HOCKEY CAREER

A BEAUTIFUL GAME: THE MOSTLY TRUE STORY OF MY LONG-TIME CONNECTION TO THE GAME OF HOCKEY

Written and performed by Michael Parent

At Lewiston Public Library in Lewiston , Maine

On January 23, 2008

Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves  

In Maine , as in much of the Canadian Maritimes, the winters are long, icy, and cold. From November through March, the weather is uncertain, bringing a mixture of snow and freezing rain that can make both driving and walking a challenge. Some people—snowbirds, we call them—leave as soon as the sky turns pewter gray, and they head for warmer climates, say, the Carolinas or Florida or the Southwest. Other more hardy souls, either because of temperament or economics, eschew such cowardly flights, and embrace their inner winter, so to speak. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the North East’s devotion to hockey, a speeding, almost super-sonic, game played on sharp blades, where the players wield sticks and attack a small hard, black object called a puck, which in the wrong hands could be a deadly weapon. (Perhaps the Coen brothers should give this some thought for their next movie.) Fights often break out, blood is spilled, and a friend of ours, an otherwise gentle Quaker, is a devoted fan, screaming himself hoarse at games. It seems that hockey can cut across many boundaries.

Michael Parent—who, along with Susan Poulin and Gordon Carlisle, is one of Maine ’s finest humorists and storytellers—has taken his obsession with hockey and has created a one-man show that chronicles his history with the game. In the process, mixing fact with fancy, he tells the story of his family, of his city ( Lewiston , a once-thriving mill town), of the early 1960s, and of his ethnic group, Franco-Americans. To combine so many different elements can be tricky, but once again Parent has come through, and the result is a rich, entertaining show that manages to be humorous, sympathetic, entertaining, and just plain exciting. As if all this weren’t enough, he also gives viewers a sense of what it was like to be a Franco-American in the early 1960s, and as Franco-Americans have long been Maine ’s largest but most-silent minority, this can only be good. As Parent observed in his excellent One More Thing, Franco-Americans were taught to bite their tongues. Yes, we were, and it’s a lesson we are just beginning to unlearn.

Parent begins the show in the present, as a sixty-one year old who still plays ice hockey and is a goalie, but he soon moves to the past, when the Lewiston ice arena, “a local shrine,” burned to the ground in less than hour. Some people even cried, which they didn’t do when they lost their jobs at the textile mills or shoe shops. But Parent didn’t cry. He had not yet caught “hockey fever,” and, in a town crazy about hockey, he was that rare soul who hadn’t learned to skate as soon as he learned to walk. But he did like sports and played basketball and baseball, and one winter’s day, he got roped into being a “shovel goalie” in a pick-up game that was so casual the goalie was allowed to wear boots. As the saying goes, Parent was hooked, and even though he couldn’t skate, he tried out for the team. He did better than expected because of the good reflexes he gained during his time as “pin-boy” at the local bowling alley, where he learned to dodge the balls of malicious bowlers.

He played in junior high but had a setback in high school because of an elbow injury and an after-school job. But fate has a habit of intervening in mysterious ways, and during his junior year, when “goalies dropped like flies,” Parent got a new job that was more flexible, allowing him to become a goalie. In his senior year, the team hit pay dirt, not only winning the state championship but also making its way to the New England Championship, a big important game for a small high school from a small city where many of the team members had learned to play on free, used skates and were so poor they had to use Life Magazine as padding. They were a true underdog team, and there is no more satisfying story than the rise of the underdogs against incredible odds. Naturally, I’m not going to say whether Parents’ team won or lost. That would be spoiling the fun and suspense of the show for readers who might go to a performance.

The above descriptions might make A Beautiful Game sound as though it were a straight narration down memory lane, but nothing could be further from the truth. To round out his story, Parent brings in a number of characters, including his laconic father, his supportive mother, friends, opponents, and coaches. But my two favorites, aside from Parent himself, are Gaston, an obsessed and devoted fan, and Fred Libby, a high-school sports announcer. Gaston is both funny and sad, a man who has lost his job at the mill and now works at a poultry processing plant. He longs for his old job and is convinced President Kennedy “will take care of the problem.” And besides, he doesn’t want to move to North Carolina , where the mills have relocated in what would become a relentless quest for cheap labor. (We know where those mills went next.) Gaston’s obsession is so complete that he bets half his paycheck on the state championship games and his whole paycheck on the New England Championship. To hedge his bets, Gaston says the rosary, very, very fast and in French, convinced that even if the team loses, the prayers will still be good for another time. Then there is Fred Libby, the man who brings the game, via radio, to those who can’t see it in person. Parent does such a good job with Libby that at one point, when Libby is doing a play-by-play of the big game, I could actually “see” the action and hear the skaters as their blades cut into the ice. Dear readers, I am not a sports fan. In fact, I am so indifferent that I didn’t even realize that the Red Sox won the World Series this year. If Parent can work his magic on someone like me, then he can work it on anyone.

I saw this show in Lewiston , Maine , Parent’s hometown, and the audience was full of elderly, responsive Franco-Americans who had lived through the time of the big game. Needless to say, they were with him all the way. But this funny, humane show will appeal to those who are not Franco Americans and who are not sports fans. Parent has taken a time, a place, characters, and an event and has brought them vividly to life. I know I am repeating myself by ending this review in a way that I end most theater reviews, but do go see this show if it comes to a venue near you.

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