Old Sport

A reader will know right from an epigraph that the stories in this collection of essays are likely to be personal: “For God’s sake, go outside and play!” Peter Unwin quotes his mother as saying. That widely understood imperative, perhaps recognized more by Generation X and older cohorts than by younger ones, sets the stage for Unwin’s writing about “games, sports, and play.” The reminiscences range peripatetically from baseball, soccer, and lacrosse to Snakes and Ladders and snooker. With them, Unwin shows how “play is our essence and the reason we are here.”

At the heart of Playing Hard, though, are ruminations about the author’s relationship with his father, a Second World War veteran who brought his young family to Canada from Sheffield, England, in the early 1950s. “When my father’s life was coming to an end in the hospital,” Unwin explains with his first sentence, “we talked mostly about sports.” Like most sons, he had heard his old man’s stories many times, and while there are hints that something needs to be unpacked in their relationship, Unwin goes only so far in excavating it. In mentioning that his mother “died badly, a bottle nearby,” he insinuates that home life was not always pleasant.

The connection between fathers, sons, and sports is, understandably, a popular theme for authors. For instance, Noah Richler observed it in the introduction to Dispatches from the Sporting Life, the posthumous collection of Mordecai Richler’s sports writing published in 2002. Twelve-year-old Noah “received swift instruction in matters Canadian” when his family returned to Montreal from London. “My father’s love of sports,” Richler recalled, “was entirely wrapped up in the urban landscape of his childhood.” He learned quickly that baseball at Delorimier Downs and hockey at the Forum “were what Montreal Jews and French Canadians had in common.”

With A Life in the Bush: Lessons from My Father, from 1999, Roy MacGregor recounted similar stories of bonding with his dad while discussing sports, listening to play-by-play on the radio, and travelling to watch the Maple Leafs. Together they visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and near the end of the elder MacGregor’s life, they took a final trip to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, where a conversation ensued about what it might have felt like for Gordie Howe to play on the same team with his boys. “If sport, as George Orwell claimed, was nothing more than ‘an unfailing cause of ill‑will,’ it was never so with us,” MacGregor wrote. “It was, in our time and our family, the way awkward people could touch each other.”

The father-son relationship is both the most interesting and the most human part of this book. The Unwins’ dynamic was a mercurial and often distant one. There were stretches of estrangement that lasted up to two years when the two never spoke. “I was done with him,” Peter says of one such period. “Fed up.” Yet the son was always searching for connection to his father, in both life and death. Unwin writes affectionately but wistfully about playing catch as a twelve-year-old and later admits that his dad was in his eighties before they ever kicked a soccer ball together, even though it was his favourite sport — one at which he had excelled back in South Yorkshire.

Other anecdotes are telling. Unwin writes about the connection they had through darts, a game the father played well but the son never liked: “But as years passed and the distance between us grew, darts — the darts themselves, those sleek, feathered missiles — became a handy gift for a son to buy for his father at Christmas or on birthdays. They spoke of some degree of concern, some understanding that I knew his interests or that I was at least aware of them.” Reading between the lines, it seems that the interest and awareness may not always have been reciprocal.

Unwin’s short essays reveal a curious mind and strong narrative skills. He revels in the characters from the annals of sport who once were famous but now are obscure. George Lyon, for example, was born in Canada West in 1858. He took up golf at thirty-eight and could regularly drive a ball 300 yards. When he won the gold medal at the 1904 Olympic Games, in St. Louis, Missouri, he approached the podium by walking on his hands, as was his habit. Lyon took the North American seniors’ title four times and the Canadian amateur championship eight times. New York sportswriters called him the Reaper, because he cut through all his opponents. He is in Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, yet “even serious golfers have no idea who George Lyon is.”

Lyon’s disappearance from modern memory speaks to the melancholy and nostalgia that run through much of Playing Hard. Unwin writes about aging and forgetting; about when the players on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats were known by their first names; and about those red, white, and blue sponge balls “that were once everywhere and are now described as ‘vintage’ and seem to have vanished off the face of the earth.” Even his lyrical description of his father’s generation feels as if it comes from a black and white film. These men, he writes, seemed to be “forever on the verge of lighting a woman’s cigarette: bony, craggy, capable of holding their drink, good dancers, with a sort of light in their eyes that is troubled, mischievous, and, where women are involved, full of confidence.”

The universality of sports rings throughout Playing Hard. In addition to connecting with his father, Unwin has engaged with his daughters by playing various games, has talked about baseball with locals in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut (where a foul ball could end up in Hudson Bay), and has built friendships with the “good guys” in his recreational basketball league. These are some of the beauties of playing or following games. They are the foundation for relationships with both people and places and can endure for a lifetime.

In families where communication is a challenge, sports can provide a safe harbour for chatting or a convenient pivot out of a sticky conversation. Unwin’s collection reminds us how they offer many of us a narrative arc to our lives. From his first memory as a child, playing baseball under catalpa trees in Dundas, Ontario, to sitting with his dying father, there was always sports to provide a connection. Sometimes, that’s all there is.