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Maple Leaf (Gardens) forever: Sex, Canadian historians, and national history, The
Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 2001 by Steven Maynard
The Maple Leaf (Gardens) Forever: Sex, Canadian Historians and National History'
As the Canadian battle between national and social historians rages on, the author argues that the history of sexuality is national history. In this manoeuvre through Canada's history wars, the author recruits for his troops, among others, Kate Millet, Butch Bouchard, Michel Foucault, Charlotte Whitton, A.R.M. Lower and Pierre Berton.
Alors que la bataille entre les historiens nationaux et sociaux fait rage au Canada, i'auteur soutient que 1'histoire de la sexualite constitue l'histoire de la sexuality constitue I'histoire nationale. Au cours des peregrinations a travers ces guerres de l'histoire canadienne, l'auteur recrute en qualite de troupes, entre autres : A.R.M. Lower, Butch Bouchard, Michel Foucault et Pierre Berton.
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"If I were asked by some stranger to North American culture to show him the most important religious building in Canada," wrote historian William Kilbourn in 1966, "I would take him to Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens." Here one found "the religious cult that celebrates the Gardens' reason for being - Hockey Night in Canada ... the Saturday night ritual of the Fifties and after, in two million homes across seven time zones, as two or three gather together before the household altar's moving screen to watch their gods and heroes locked in mortal combat." Maple Leaf Gardens and "Hockey Night in Canada" registered for Kilbourn in more than the idiom of religious fanaticism; they were also the stuff of nightmares. "My own first recollections of Maple Leaf Gardens somehow combined the cult of the hockey hero, and other more terrible rites of death and memory. As if it was not enough excitement for an eight-year-old boy to see his first period of N.H.L. hockey, the vast cavern was darkened at intermission, and a small black box ... was set out under a spotlight on a little stand at centre ice ... It was a memorial service for Charlie Gardiner, the great Black Hawk goalie who had died the summer before. For months after, the unnamable ghosts and solemn mysteries from somewhere high among those shadowy heights, with their flags and rafters and catwalks, haunted my dreams" (236-38). Kilbourn was likely not the first and he was certainly not the last for whom memory of Maple Leaf Gardens "somehow combined the cult of the hockey hero and other more terrible rites."
As Kilboum's memories attest, ever since its opening in 1931, Maple Leaf Gardens has loomed large in the national imagery. Foster Hewitt's radio broadcasts of hockey games from the Gardens went coast to coast beginning in January 1933, making NHL hockey one of the first radio programs to address a national audience (Gruneau and Whitson 100). The national and historical significance of the Gardens has always become particularly clear when demolition has been threatened. Speaking up at one such moment in 1989, historian Michael Bliss put it this way in a memorandum to the Toronto Historical Board: "Maple Leaf Gardens is one of this country's most historic buildings ... The cathedral of Canadian hockey during the sport's Golden Age, a time when hockey became part of the fabric of the culture for millions and millions of Canadians ... If in 1989 we no longer believe that Maple Leaf Gardens has been a historically significant building - if we are happy to let it disappear under the wreckers' ball - then we might as well give up" (qtd. in Mays 277).
Skip now to February 13, 1999. It's hockey night in Canada. We are in Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens. But this is no ordinary game. It is the last time the Toronto Maple Leafs will call the Gardens home; the Leafs are moving to a brand-new arena. In the days leading up to the Leafs' departure, journalists bid farewell to the place they routinely called the "national shrine" of Canada's "national sport." An editorial in Canada's "national newspaper," while somewhat more attentive than Bliss to the limitations of hockey's "macho nationalism" (Gruneau and Whitson 187), nonetheless ended on the same nationalistic note: "Yes, yes, we know everyone isn't a hockey fan ... And we even understand there is a largely, if not entirely, male quality to the rapturous marriage of athlete, game, fan and arena. Still, hockey night at the Gardens was something fundamentally Canadian" ("Bye-bye MakeBelieve Gardens" A12). These exercises in nostalgia and nationalism, however, hit a rough spot when they get to the Gardens' more recent history. Sports journalist Stephen Brunt asked his readers: "Is there any way to get past the horrors that were being perpetrated behind closed doors, when the Gardens/Leafs allure was used to facilitate the sexual exploitation of children?" (A34). In a long piece on the history of the Gardens as a "national institution," John Barber, echoing Kilbourn's nightmarish vision of the Gardens as a haunted labyrinth, conjured up the "darker crannies" of the arena "where Gardens employees were regularly violating young boys in return for tickets to hockey games." "The paint in the public areas is still fresh - always has been," Barber wrote, "but there is now something sinister, the legacy of abuse, that it can never cover up" (A13).
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