The Great Canadian Road Trip….Song #68/250: Big League by Tom Cochrane

Over the years, there have been many deep thinkers who have pondered the question of what it means to be “Canadian”. Well, without going into a long essay on the subject, one aspect of our culture that springs to mind is a deep-rooted love for the sport of ice hockey. It is a cliche as Canadian as maple syrup to suggest that our love of ice hockey stems from our climate. But there is just something so Canadian about being outdoors in the winter time. To be honest, I am not much of a skater myself but in my younger days, I built my fair share of backyard snow forts and enlisted in armies of snowball warriors. I played road hockey until the street lights came on and our moms called us in for dinner. I have raced down hills of ice on toboggans, only to be sent flying through the air whenever we hit that inevitable bump at the bottom. Rosy cheeks and tingling fingertips are all part and parcel of what it means to be Canadian for me. If we weren’t on the ice or on the road playing hockey then we were in our homes watching Hockey Night in Canada on TV. It is not surprising that over a half century later I am still glued to my TV set (or, more truthfully, my mobile device) as I watched this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs unfold. It is also not surprising that in doing so I once again had my heart broken as my favourite team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, bowed out in disappointing fashion for the 57th season in a row!!! “Maybe next year” rings hollow but guess what I’ll be doing again when next year rolls around? 

As much as hockey is part of my life, it occupies that space in my heart and mind as a spectator sport. For thousands of others, hockey is most definitely a participatory sport. It is for those people that I write today’s post. While there are still backyard rinks scattered here and there in our towns and some are lucky enough to live by ponds and lakes that freeze solid and allow for some shinny to erupt, for the most part, our participation in the sport of hockey has taken us indoors. As much as there are churches in most Canadian towns, there are also local arenas, too. If hockey is our national religion then the local arena is our church. For if there is one experience that binds us together as a country it is traveling to our local hockey rink for a practice or a game that often starts before the sun has risen. It is the smell of a locker room filled with eager players. It is the sound of skate blades carving up a freshly cleaned sheet of ice. It is the sound of pucks hitting the boards and the glass. It is a cold beer after the game for the grownups and pizza and pop for the younger ones. It is sitting in the stands as a parent holding a hot beverage while watching your child or partner practice or play. It is an adult getting the chance to relive his or her youth by lacing those skates tightly and getting the chance to fly down the ice like Bobby Orr or to score one for Canada like Paul Henderson. The local arena is also a place where dreams of making it into the National Hockey League or the Professional Women’s Hockey League (the N.H.L. or P.W.H.L) are born and nurtured and developed into a lottery-like reality for a few special players. 

The odds of actually making it all the way from playing on a peewee team to cracking the lineup of a professional team is almost astronomical. Yet with the mindset of “if you have a ticket then you have a chance”, entire communities watch those young skaters closely in the fervent hope that one of them will show signs of talent beyond the norm. Should someone separate themselves from the pack and display an above-average level of skill as a child then the entire community adopts that child as their own. We all feel a sense of pride that someone from our town, our local team, may have what it takes to make it to “the Show”, as the big leagues are often called. Every pro hockey player comes from somewhere. Why not from our home town, too? We allow ourselves to become invested in the fortunes of children who, in most cases, are not our own. Yet their success feels like our success and so, we cheer them on as they rise through the ranks of the local hockey association hierarchy. By the time a child reaches their teenage years, we all have a pretty good sense of whether they have a realistic shot at the big leagues. For a select few, that confirmation will come in the form of being offered university scholarships or else, it will come in the form of being selected in the amateur draft by a professional hockey team. Very few teenagers are ever drafted, let alone end up cracking the lineup of a real NHL or PWHL team. But it does happen every once and a while and so, as we sit in our local arenas for those pre-dawn practices, we watch the assembled skaters and we allow ourselves to dream. For me, it is this dream that is part of what makes us Canadian. 

When local Canadian musicians travel across Canada while on tour, many stops along the way will be at local churches or at hockey rinks. Some towns or cities are big enough and lucky enough to have actual theatres and other such performance spaces dedicated to the Arts. But for the most part, the places where people gather in many towns across this land are in churches and hockey rinks. And so, when someone like singer Tom Cochrane goes out on tour, it is not uncommon for him to have his tour bus pull up outside the local arena for a concert. It was during one such stop in North Bay, Ontario that the inspiration for the song “Big League” arose. The story goes that Tom Cochrane had arrived in North Bay for a show and found himself chatting with one of the locals. This man was a custodian. In the course of their conversation, the man asked Cochrance if he was going to play a song during his show called “The Boy Inside the Man”. The man went on to say that this particular song had been one of his son’s favourite songs. Tom Cochrane replied that he would most definitely be singing “The Boy Inside the Man”. He then asked for the son’s name so he could give a shout-out while introducing the song. It was then that the man confessed that his son had been killed in a car accident. Needless to say, this news caught Cochrane off guard. The two men talked some more which allowed Cochrane to glean the fact that the boy who had lost his life had been a hockey player who had received a scholarship to play at a university and that he had been killed coming back from a practice. The death of this young man (whose identity Cochrane has never revealed) obviously devastated his family but it also caused the whole community to grieve as well. That conversation reverberated around in Tom Cochrane’s heart and mind for some time afterward. Knowing how tragic the death of any child is but also how intertwined are the dreams of hockey with our Canadian identity, Cochrane knew that he had to practice his own form of musical therapy so that he could carry on with his own life. So he locked himself away in a cabin in the woods (how stereotypically Canadian is that?) armed with nothing more than a pen, some paper, a tape recorder and a guitar and wrote a song that became “Big League”.

“Big League” has gone on to be one of Tom Cochrane’s greatest hits. It was a Top Ten hit in Canada, as well as in the U.S. “Big League” has become the default song that is played any time a young hockey player is killed which, unfortunately, has happened at least half a dozen times alone in Canada since the song debuted in the late 1980s. The most recent example of this happened when the Humboldt (Saskatchewan) Broncos junior team’s bus was involved in a highway accident with a transport truck. That accident claimed the lives of sixteen people. Tom Cochrane released an updated charity version of “Big League” with all profits going directly into a fund that was established for the families of those who were killed, as well as for those who survived but required medical care. It isn’t everyday that the idea for an anthem comes to mind but it did for Tom Cochrane that day in North Bay. I am sure he must feel a certain sense of emotion each time he plays “Big League” live at a concert in any hockey arena in Canada. The emotions it generates are ones that so many of us can appreciate.

I distinctly remember the outpouring of emotion that swept the country in the aftermath of the Humboldt tragedy. At homes all across the country, people symbolically left their porch lights on and placed a hockey stick in front of the door of their homes in memory of those who set out with dreams of playing in the big leagues but never returned home. In my classroom, we discussed what had happened because there were many of my students who played hockey themselves or else had siblings who did. The kids had great questions and, as kids often do, they understood more than most adults would give them credit for. We created our own paper hockey sticks, coloured them in and placed our own messages of condolence on them and then taped them to our classroom door. “Sticks out for Humboldt!” was the saying at the time. That’s what we did, along with so many other Canadians, too.  I will close with a comment that was made by Toronto Maple Leaf player Mitch Marner the day after the Maple Leafs had been eliminated from the playoffs. When asked if he still saw himself as being part of the team next season after all of the disappointments he and his teammates had endured, Marner replied that he would obviously want to come back because of the passion of the fanbase. To paraphrase his quote, he said that in Toronto (and across Canada) they treat hockey players like Gods. There is a lot of ego in a statement like that but there is also a lot of truth. As Canadians, we hold hockey in high regard. The language of hockey is spoken everywhere in this land of ours. Those who rise through the ranks of our local ice hockey associations take us all along for the ride. It is as emotional an investment that we make as a country. In the end, hockey is just a sport. It actually, truly is just a game. But, in Canada, it is as close to a national religion as we have. And those young kids who make it to the big leagues are viewed as Gods and heroes for playing this game. It is not a question of it being right or wrong. It is just who we are as Canadians.

The link to the official website for Tom Cochrane can be found here.

The link to the video for the Humboldt Broncos charity song “Big League” by Tom Cochrane and Red Rider can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to the official website for the city of North Bay, Ontario can be found here.

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