Time is running out for Kyle Callendar -- with his long-suffering girlfriend, with the National Hockey League, for which he has been enlisted as an ambassador, and with his dad, who gets the blame for inflicting emotional wounds that haunt a 50-year-old who should have long ago moved beyond them.
But Callendar, a one-time NHL grinder, is in one wicked emotional penalty box, a bitter trap that so often afflicts -- and defines -- those who grow up in the gruff and macho world of small-town Canada, where the biggest dream of hockey parents everywhere is for their kid to make it to the big times, no matter what the personal sacrifice.
Kyle's undistinguished hockey career is long-since over, but under the clubbish rules of the league, he has been thrown a bone. He has been hired as an ambassador who carries "Belle" -- the Stanley Cup -- from small town to small town in an endless promotional tour. In some respects, his post-hockey career resembles that of Eddie Shack, the '70s era Maple Leafs grinder, who was better known for his oversized mustache and the products he flogged than for his accomplishments on ice.
"Unlike (Gordie) Howe, I've never truly been with Belle," Callendar says. "I'd played in the NHL, but never won the Cup. Instead, I'm reduced to memories."
Callendar, however, has neither the carefree sense of humour nor the staying power of the former Pop Shoppe huckster Shack. He's on the edge, as a lifetime of suppressed memories slowly elbow their way into his consciousness. His confused relationship with his emotionally distant dad, his almost abusive neglect of girlfriend Norma . . . engaging in casual infidelities just like the good ol' days in the NHL, his erratic flashes of temper -- they're all building up to an inevitable personal meltdown, which in Kyle's case masks as stress-induced angina attacks.
It all starts to unravel with a personally disastrous trip to Saskatoon. "For the past few years, I'd been content to float, to let things happen to me," says Callendar. In Saskatoon, he gets a great deal less than star treatment, and he is struck with the full reality of his falling status.
The Penalty Box is at once an artfully constructed analysis of the darker side of Canadian hockey culture, and a moving examination of a sensitive man who is rediscovering himself after decades of burying his identity in the pursuit of fleeting fame. For Boomers, like this reader, it is so rich in memorabilia and hockey trivia from the'60s and '70s, it could be used as a Canadian citizenship test. It is also very much a guy's book, unless you're a frustrated woman trying to understand why your man can be so thoughtful some times and at other times act like he has bricks in his head.
In spirit, it follows O'Connor's first published work, 2002's Tip of the Iceberg, a semi-autobiographical memoir that examined his own distant relationship with his father. In both cases, the fictional hometown is Keppel, a thinly disguised Owen Sound, where O'Connor grew up. (Keppel is the name of a former township the surrounds nearby Wiarton. It is one of several insider references that will delight those who know the area.)
Its evocative images reach into the prairies, laid out right in the opening description of Saskatoon ("like a deer that hasn't tasted the leaves of seed lettuce") contrasting that still-humble town to Calgary, Vancouver and Edmonton, "which try too hard to be something they're not."
What makes its melancholic Canadiana interesting is that O'Connor left this country for New York City in the late 1980s, where he now works as an editor for the New York Post. And there are some fun moments, like the imagined Old Timers hockey game in hometown Keppel, where Callendar teams up -- Forrest Gump style -- with real-life greats like Rod Gilbert, Paul Henderson, Bob Gainey and Denis Potvin. Its time-specific detail (and relative absence of more current hockey trivia) make it read like a time capsule of the Canada O'Connor left.
Yet, as the recent developments in the Todd Bertuzzi lawsuit shows, its observations of hockey culture are timeless. Just as Bertuzzi argues his coach encouraged him to hit, Callendar, too, was a player only too eager to take orders if it kept him on an NHL team's payroll.
Is there life for emotionally damaged NHL grinders? O'Connor's book suggests there can be, but the transition is painful, indeed. For the reader, this B-lister's story is at once a biting commentary on the league's values and a sentimental journey through some memories of the NHL in the '60s, '70s and '80s.
The Calgary Herald