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Paul Foisy

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Published by Paul Foisy at Thursday, December 20, 2007 0 comments Links to this post
Monday, December 10, 2007
A small Saturday night
Hello, everybody!

Last Saturday evening, a few minutes before the start of the game between the Carolina Hurricanes and the Montreal Canadiens, j'anticipais a good show on television. But the Montreal team is capable of the best as the worst. At the end of the second period, while Saku Koivu will inflict punishment saw two minutes for high sticks, I thought that a little reading would make me the greatest good.


Digging in my library, I see the book entitled Captains Michael Ulmer. Nine of the great legends of Canadian. Wishes, I thought, this is a small book that is likely to be very promising, especially since the spectacle on the ice at the Bell Centre was not there any more exciting.

Having bought this book in a bouquinerie, I had not yet had time to read it. Shame on me! From the first pages, the author recounts the passage of the torch at the closing ceremony of the Forum in Montreal. On the wall of the locker room, he read the words from the poem by John McCrae:




Our bruised arm you tend the torch.
Can you bring it always high.




This extract carries with it the mythical dimension of the team in Montreal. At one time in Quebec, the Catholic religion and the Montreal Canadiens were the common ground that the Nation welding French Canadian. If religious practice has dissipated over time, the Canadian is always present.


But the world of professional sport has undergone such changes as the torch has become a heavy one to bear. The players no longer have that sense of belonging that could weld unity of a team. Witness to radical changes in the NHL, Toe Blake observed this phenomenon on page 33:

I may be wrong […] but it seems that the players seem to say: "If I do not play in your team, I play for someone else. "It is no longer so hard to become a member of a team than it was in the past, when there were only six. That is natural. But their attitude… Finally, some players have changed.



All and all, we are aware of this fact. However, the Bell Centre is still open and the odds listening hockey on television are on the rise in recent years. How do you explain this phenomenon? Although hockey is not what it was, the public responded positively to the call. But the company itself is no longer the same and hockey, like all other sports, moreover, has changed. Why? Because the sport is a reflection of our society!

This is an essential starting point for the understanding of society through sports history. The sport is evolving at the same pace as society. What we observe in the field of sport, the same principles prevailing in our society.


To conclude this post, I leave the floor to Toe Blake, on page 35:


Hockey has been my life. I never had the chance to win one of these contracts of one million dollars, but hockey was worth more than a million for me, and in many ways.



Ulmer, Michael. Captains. Nine of the great legends of Canadian. Your Thoughts Publishing, 1996, 183 pages.

Published by Paul Foisy at Monday, December 10, 2007 0 comments Links to this post
Friday, November 16, 2007
The eyes of Maurice Richard



On 14 November, the organizers of the Salon du livre de Montréal décernaient the Marcel-Couture Melançon to Benedict, author of the book The eyes of Maurice Richard.



The book, published by Editions Fides at the end of 2006, is not a biography of Maurice Richard. For this professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Montreal, but rather to analyze the phenomenon Maurice Richard over time. "The cultural historian, if properly done its work, must locate his analysis on a different plane. He did not criticize a man, but to understand what a society, since sixty years, wanted to make this man, that Quebec and Canada had wanted to invest in the figure of Maurice Richard. "Melançon says in his epilogue on page 240.



That is the richness of the book, which shows how, in both Quebec and English Canada, we have interpreted the actions of the great player. To do this, the author has stripped and analyzed from many sources. The bibliography is largely composed of written documents, icons, sound recordings and moving images. All this mass documentary is proof of the importance of the phenomenon Maurice Richard.



Of course, the Rocket, for his exploits, has demonstrated to his fellow citizens of the time with work and perseverance, it could achieve its goals, against all odds! But on the edge of the sporting history of Quebec, Richard phenomenon is so huge, that it's in the shadow of those who preceded him. Collectively, we did that for Maurice Richard, as if our sporting history began with him.



Benedict's book Melançon is good, because it sheds light on our collective imagination that remains in need of heroes. It shows the representations we kindly give Maurice Richard. It portrays us, and that's it.