JOY OF HOCKEY
Longtime Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster Brian McFarlane is closing in on his 100th book, while making some graceful strides in the art world,
Brian McFarlane leans back to take in the entire canvas; his imagining of a Lake Louise pond hockey scene is taking shape, but there’s still a to-do list.
“Every time you look at a painting, you see something you don’t like and want to fix up,” he says, rummaging through tubes of acrylics like a kid pawing a bag of Halloween treats.
There needs to be, he recognizes, more white to make the ice translucent. And then maybe a few subtle black lines where the skates carve towards the goal. Oh, and some bright red, dappled on just right, ought to make the players’ sweaters really pop.
Some 27 years after he last graced Hockey Night in Canada’s broadcast booth, McFarlane is once again providing the colour.
On this afternoon, it’s at the back of Latcham Hall, just off Stouffville’s Main St., where the 86-year-old immerses himself in a weekly art class. McFarlane and Joan, his wife of 62 years, bought a condo in the town north of Toronto about five years ago. To say McFarlane paints pictures is like saying Alexander Ovechkin scores the odd goal.
Despite a tremor in his dominant left hand — he paints by steadying it with his right — and even a few days after a hip replacement, the broadcaster, author and hockey historian remains a whirlwind.
He’ll work on as many as 10 pieces in one session, touching up each one as it lights momentarily on his easel.
“We take weeks to do one and he turns out three or four each Wednesday,” says Diane Ward, another artist in the 55+ Club. “It’s not fair, because they’re good.”
Always something of a renaissance man — writing a hit novelty song, owning a lacrosse team and building a log home are all marked off on his life’s checklist — McFarlane is going through, well, a renaissance.
His artwork, a relatively new endeavour, is selling at community shows. McFarlane figures about 50 are hanging on other people’s walls, some purchased for as much as $500. He is also nearing a significant milestone in the publishing business. His last book, Golden Oldies: Stories of Hockey’s Heroes, was his 96th, including a few updated versions and second editions, and a publisher has asked him to write his memoirs, which he says he is “struggling” to make fresh. After all, he’s already written two of those.
With another dozen manuscripts ready to go in his computer, his quest is to get to 100, though, he concedes, “publishing is just horrendous these days.” Almost all of his books, including his young-adult fiction, are hockey-themed. He’s sold close to 1.5 million books.
That’s impressive for someone who wrote his first one, 50 Years of Hockey, published in 1967, only to prove to his dad that he had it in him. Brian’s father was Leslie McFarlane, a prolific author who ghostwrote 21of the Hardy Boys novels under the name Franklin W. Dixon. Brian planned to write just the one.
“I’ve been with about 15 publishers over the years,” he says. “I think I’ve put them all into bankruptcy.”
McFarlane’s television work made him part of the Saturday night hockey conversation in this country for almost three decades. He started doing colour commentary when the games were broadcast in black and white. McFarlane dates back far enough to have called the game with Bill Hewitt when the Leafs last won the Stanley Cup.
He was also a regular analyst/ interviewer on CBS hockey in 1960 and hosted the NBC broadcasts in the early ’70s. But rather than fade from the game after he was let go by HNIC in 1991, McFarlane’s puck passion remained a constant in his life.
He only stopped playing oldtimers hockey two years ago out of fear of getting hurt. He and Joan owned a hockey museum in Colborne, then Niagara Falls, for a decade; his hockey stories made him a regular on the banquet circuit; and, now, he is dipping into the world of art to create landscapes and evocative outdoor shinny scenes.
“I like to try different things. I’m not very good at any of them but …”
McFarlane calls his painted players “stick figures,” but in their simplicity there is a charming whimsy as they skate under big, vibrant skies. The artist says he is just trying to capture “the joy of hockey” and the sense of fond nostalgia he feels about the game.
“I hope some guys will look at the paintings and say, ‘I remember doing that when I was a kid.’ ”
If his own childhood had unfolded differently, McFarlane would likely have had a brush in his hand his whole life. As a teen in Ottawa, he took painting lessons from well-known artist Henri Masson for 50 cents an hour. But when one of those sessions caused him to miss a football practice at Glebe Collegiate, he felt humiliated at the next workout. “The coach mocked me. ‘Where were you yesterday, McFarlane? We don’t want any painters on this team.’ So I gave it up for 50 years.”
The great-grandfather got back into the art game when he was in his 70s and was looking for something additional to fill his time while wintering with Joan in Naples, Fla. There, he takes lessons three times a week.
In addition to painting, McFarlane says he spends about six hours a day on his computer, researching and writing. He still has a collection of more than 200 hours of taped interviews with players, many of them legends, not all of which have found their way into print. He says through his career, he would carry his recorder and take every opportunity to ask players and team executives to share stories about the game.
“I’d be walking down the street with (longtime coach and broadcaster) Harry Neale for example and I’d say, ‘Harry, we’ve got two blocks, tell me a couple of stories about the (World Hockey Association),’ ” he explains.
“I don’t pretend to be a great writer. But I make it simple and tell the stories the way people tell me their stories.”
McFarlane says that when he was 15, he came up with a list of goals. He wanted to write a book, paint a picture and write a song.
Like any hockey-playing teen, he also fantasized about making the NHL. But even though he landed a hockey scholarship to attend St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. — where he still holds the school record for goals in a career with 101 — he had no illusions that it would lead to a pro career.
The point had already been made clear in junior when, as a member of the Inkerman Rockets, he lined up against, and repeatedly bounced off, future NHL legend Jean Béliveau of the Quebec Citadelles on the road to the 1951 Memorial Cup.
“I couldn’t take the puck away from him,” he recalls. “I tried to knock him down. I couldn’t do that either.”
McFarlane has a sharp wit and, in his writing, he delights in the game’s humour. Along with his insight from a lifetime in hockey, he also displays a fascination with the offbeat, and there are certainly some aspects of his life that fall into that category. Enough, perhaps, to fill another book.
He owned the short-lived Montreal Canadiens lacrosse club in the late 1960s. Legendary hockey tough guy John Ferguson was his coach and general manager.
In a bizarre broadcasting moment, in a highlight available on YouTube, he hustled onto the ice in the middle of a 1974 playoff game to report on a serious, ultimately career-ending eye injury to Philadelphia Flyers defenceman Barry Ashbee. McFarlane walked onto the ice with the stretcher and then, with a portable microphone, did a live interview with linesman Matt Pavelich while Ashbee was being tended to. It hadn’t happened before or since.
He wrote the lyrics to “Clear the Track Here Comes Shack,” a novelty song about Maple Leaf Eddie Shack recorded by The Secrets. It climbed to No. 1 on the CHUM chart in Toronto, stayed there for two weeks and remained on the chart for nine. He purchased three log homes, one of which had been a brothel, in Quebec in the early ’70s and then used the materials to build, with his family, a three-storey home near Grafton, Ont. He also, of course, had a large pond dug for hockey.
In 1960, he became the first Canadian to cover hockey on American TV when CBS hired him. He had just failed an audition to be host of HNIC, which hired Ward Cornell instead. McFarlane did his interviews on skates, another first.
Early in his career, he suffered stage fright so badly that he consulted with a hypnotist in order to get back in front of a camera.
Although he didn’t invent Peter Puck, the animated talking disc, he was involved in its creation and now owns the worldwide rights to Peter. He was banned from the Maple Leaf Gardens broadcast booth by owner Harold Ballard in the early ’80s after taking Toronto captain Darryl Sittler’s side in a dispute with the team. He would spend the next eight seasons hosting games in Winnipeg and Montreal.
Even now, McFarlane is getting a new website running — brian-mcfarlane.com — on which he posts to his blog to get more of his stories out. And there’s a chance Peter Puck will be resurrected by a minor hockey organization in California, so there are phone calls back and forth about that. And he would like to paint more nature scenes, maybe even recreate the perfect bear.
In good health, McFarlane looks and acts as if he could pull on one of those infamous powder-blue HNIC blazers and slide comfortably behind a microphone again.
“Some people might paint a picture; he paints hundreds,” Joan says. “Or they might write a book. He writes a hundred. He’s prolific. It keeps him young.”
McFarlane has always attacked life with broad strokes, using, you might say, the entire canvas.
“I think,” he says, “I was always afraid I’d miss out on something.”
“Some people might paint a picture; he paints hundreds ... He’s prolific. It keeps him young.” JOAN MCFARLANE BRIAN MCFARLANE’S WIFE