Maurice Richard (review)

The Extraordinary Canadians series, begun in 2008 as an attempt to (re)introduce Canadians to significant figures - with series editor John Ralston Saul determining which subjects are significant - now encompasses eighteen volumes covering twenty subjects. The authors selected are not scholarly historians, but well-known Canadian literary figures. Only one of the series' subjects is a sports figure, and it is left to Charles Foran to profile Maurice 'Rocket' Richard, the Montreal Canadiens star of the 1940s and 1950s. Foran is well suited to the task; the author of a number of well-regarded novels, his 2010 biography of Mordecai Richler won the Charles Taylor prize for literary non-fiction. The challenge, however, is that Richard's story, or more precisely the mythology surrounding the francophone hockey star is well known: he has been crafted as a symbol of French-Canadian resistance, especially following the 1955 'Richard Riot' in Montreal - his renowned dark stare, fiery temper, and the imposing speed and power he displayed on the ice, all standing in for rising francophone discontent in the 1950s.

Despite the prominence that Richard came to assume in French Canada, Foran emphasizes that the player was 'notoriously inarticulate' (78) and did not desire the nationalist significance that was attached to his actions both on and off the ice. Nevertheless, Richard's symbolic value transcended his hockey career. In the aftermath of the riot that coursed through Montreal's streets following Richard's 1955 suspension for on-ice violence by nhl president Clarence Campbell, Foran notes, 'His own views were suddenly, and permanently, immaterial. What others believed he should be, could be, had to be, for historical and political reasons, now mattered' (105). To the end, though, Richard was a reluctant hero: he never openly supported Quebec nationalism or the struggle for sovereignty, and his family refused to allow his coffin to be draped in the fleur-de-lys for the political sympathies it might signal.

In constructing this landscape of francophone resentment and ultimately resistance, Foran introduces the necessary foils. The Canadiens' owners and Campbell represent anglophone hockey authority, and class inequity played out in the stands at the Montreal Forum where well-heeled Anglos sat in expensive seats near the ice, while the working-class French and Irish and Scots sat on wooden benches separated from the rest of the arena by chicken wire. Foran emphasizes that class divides were secondarily language divides. But in Maurice Richard, it is difficult not to foreground the latter. As a result, the 'two Maurices' becomes a literary device for paralleling Richard's on-ice fortunes with those of the socially conservative Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale provincial government. Richard's failed attempt in 1947 to extract a higher salary from the Canadiens corresponds with the treatment that striking asbestos workers faced from Duplessis, while the demise of the Union Nationale in the late 1950s dovetails with the end of Richard's career and the player's waning influence as a nationalist symbol.

There are a number of factual errors in Foran's account (e.g., what the H in the Canadiens' logo stands for, claiming that Jacques Plante was the first goaltender to wear a mask), disappointing because the narrative history of hockey is so well documented. Nevertheless, a historical audience may find that the comingling of Richard's story with the rising tide of Quebec nationalism and dissatisfaction with Duplessis adds little to the Rocket's public record. Ideally Extraordinary Canadians should go beyond: 'He wasn't just a man of his times, he was a man who had defined those times' (138). Such a point of departure reflects Foran's choice of sources, including the work of Roch Carrier and Bernard Melançon and the 2005 biopic The Rocket, all of which approach Richard as primarily a symbolic figure. Equally challenging is Foran's search to capture Richard's private mind on his public significance - something upon which Richard himself rarely, if ever, commented.

Yet when considering the audience of this biography and its series, there is...