Review: A priestly ministry on hockey skates
(iStock)For Canadians of a certain age, David Bauer, C.S.B., is a household name.
Father Bauer is the Basilian priest who created Canada’s first national hockey team in 1964. Before then, the homeland of hockey had never built a national program and had long struggled in international competitions. Historically, the country’s best local adult team represented Canada at the Olympics or the World Championships, depending on the year—with mixed results. Bauer coached the Nats, as they were nicknamed, in international competitions for much of the 1960s and oversaw the national team program for much of the next quarter century. Made up entirely of university students, the Nats competed against the world’s best.
Bauer believed that sports should be a source of uplift—a character-building enterprise and a pathway to education. A staunch advocate of amateurism in the Olympics and other international competitions, he clashed with powerful forces in Canada that sought to permanently professionalize international hockey.
Before Bauer, few Canadians questioned the idea that the National Hockey League formed the pinnacle of the sport. This pious priest from Waterloo, Ontario, who as a teenager turned down an N.H.L. contract to get a university education and pursue a religious vocation, offered an alternative vision of the sport’s highest aspirations.
Bauer died in 1988 and has slowly but surely fallen out of view in Canada just as amateurism in athletics across North America has come under fire on numerous cultural fronts. In the United States, he is strikingly little known except to a few, historically minded hockey cognoscenti.
Matt Hoven, the author of Hockey Priest: Father David Bauer and the Spirit of the Canadian Game, a fantastic new biography of Bauer, will help to remedy this oversight. Hoven, an associate professor of sport and religion at St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, shows the interplay of spirituality and sport in the world that Father Bauer helped create.
The language of personal growth now permeates competitive sports, whether amateur or professional. In Hockey Priest, Hoven rightly credits Bauer with helping cultivate a contemporary vision of sports that emphasizes the impact of athletic competition on the competitor. For Bauer, the national team would bring Canada together by serving as its athletic ambassadors—these excellent athletes would be good ambassadors and good scholars (players for the national team had to be enrolled at a university).
Canadians took great pride in the talented and tenacious teams he brought to the Olympics—twice in the 1960s—and to several world championships. After years of falling to amateur-in-name-only teams from the Soviet Union and other European countries, the Nats found their way to the medal stand on several occasions.
Hoven also demonstrates the extent to which the N.H.L., particularly its two historic Canadian juggernauts, the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs, viewed Bauer’s team as a threat. During the 1970s, a “Team Canada” of professional hockey players, organized by the heelish Alan Eagleson, a player agent turned players’ union representative who was later convicted of embezzling money from his clients, displaced Bauer’s team as the country’s representative in international hockey for much of the decade. As a result, Canada did not participate in Olympic hockey in either 1972 or 1976, when professional athletes were still barred from participation.
Bauer was displeased with the way these professionals represented Canada. He concerned himself as much as anything with how his players’ behavior reflected on their country and themselves, rather than with the final score. Conversely, “the direction of Team Canada was markedly different from Bauer’s approach,” Hoven writes. “Team Canada took on the personality of Eagleson: scrappy, crude, emotional, and bitchy.”
For readers unfamiliar with the contours of the Canadian hockey system, Hoven clearly and concisely teases out its particulars in the opening chapter, setting the stage for his analysis of Bauer’s challenge to the supremacy of the National Hockey League and the country’s hypercompetitive minor hockey system.
The author situates Bauer’s vision of sports within the tradition of his order, the Congregation of St. Basil, which incorporated athletic competition into its educational and spiritual model, a Catholic variant of the “muscular Christianity” that greatly influenced Protestantism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. St. Michael’s College School in Toronto may have been the castle keep of Basilian aspirations to uplift the entire person. Not only is this secondary institution one of Canada’s best independent schools, it is also a perennial power in youth sports.
In 1961, Bauer coached St. Mike’s to a Memorial Cup championship, the national title of the Canadian Hockey League, the country’s system of junior hockey programs. Over time, the near-professionalization of junior hockey in Canada proved too much for St. Mike’s, which dropped out of the top level of Ontario junior hockey shortly after its 1961 title, citing the length of the season and amount of travel as detrimental to its players’ education. St. Michael’s hockey continues, along with its fantastic programs in virtually every sport, but exclusively in interscholastic competition.
Refreshingly, Hoven’s portrait of Bauer is that of a man in full. Other renderings of the hockey priest have sometimes presented him as a lifelong Boy Scout. In Hoven’s hands, we see a man whose mortality is evident at every turn. Drinking and, particularly, smoking get the best of him physically. He was often concerned about his weight and his family’s history of heart problems. He was preoccupied by fears of an early death and global affairs far beyond his control. The stress of his work and travel schedule clearly wreaked havoc on him. Bauer lived to be 63, but deteriorated rapidly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer early in 1988.
The heart of Matt Hoven’s biography of Father Bauer is the dozens of interviews he conducted with veterans of the Canadian national team, primarily from the 1960s and the 1980s, when Bauer took on a primarily managerial role with the organization. Decades after playing for Bauer, these players reflect on the profound influence he had on their lives. Many went on to careers in professional hockey. More significantly in Bauer’s mind, the young men he mentored on the ice became a cadre of leaders in Canada’s next generation—educators, lawyers, doctors and civil servants.
Hoven notes that at Bauer’s funeral Mass, one of the readings came from the Letter to the Colossians, “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things of the earth” (Col 3:2). This verse offers a clear encapsulation of the ethos that Bauer brought to his sporting ministry. Competition on the ice was an extension of a larger and more profound struggle of the spirit. Hoven shows how the men that came under Bauer’s charge consistently came out on top in their respective struggle.
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