Hockey brings Baruchel back home
I wanted to know why, even though I knew. It’s there in his book, after all. Jay Baruchel became a Montreal Canadiens fan because his father — his drugaddicted, alcohol-addicted, somewhat criminal, fierce and tender and broken father — was a Montreal Canadiens fan. We all inherit things. Love of a sports team is sometimes one.
Baruchel has spent two weeks promoting the book, Born Into It, in which he riffs and interrogates and delves into his love of the Habs. He is one of Canada’s best-known actors: that skinny, angular often-unshaven oddball with the memorable voice whose career is a fence line of popular, cult and great work: Undeclared, Million Dollar Baby, Tropic Thunder, the How To Train Your Dragon franchise, This Is The End. He wrote and directed Goon and Goon 2, which had a lot to do with his dad.
And he is a high-profile and heavily profane Habs fan who died when P.K. Subban was traded, who loves Carey Price to the end, who is in love with Montreal’s elaborate edifice of cultural mythology, even as he knows it is part of what weighs the franchise down.
“If you enjoy the romance and the mythos and the history, and being more than a hockey team: being a political, cultural institution, that’s what informs the highs and makes the fun that much more fun,” said Baruchel, during an extended talk on stage at the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts earlier this week. “But as a long-suffering fan ... it is inherently slightly ridiculous.
What’s real? What’s real is trying to be as healthy as you can, relative to how much Arby’s I eat. But eating well, feeding your family, making sure you don’t break the rules, hopefully being a good person: that stuff’s, like, important.
“(Fandom) ... it’s insane to care as much as it is, and I think it’s as real as anything that isn’t real. It’s as real as anything else like that.”
He wasn’t always a fan. Baruchel gave it away when things got bad with his dad; he was fully checked out when they won the Stanley Cup in 1993. It didn’t mean a thing to him. That’s how bad it got.
The road to where he is was long, and it bent. The family moved from Montreal to Oshawa when Baruchel was 5, and it meant he was the only kid in town who wore red versus blue: like a reversal of the iconic book, The Hockey Sweater. As well, he was half-Catholic, halfJewish — half Arab-Jewish — at a white-bread Catholic school. He was different, which as we all know, kids love.
“I was always an outlier, a nothing. And you really have one of two options,” said Baruchel. “You’re either going to make peace with that, or you’re going to try to be like everybody else. And if you spend your life trying to get rid of the other in you, you’re going to be way sadder than if you just accept that I am who I am. And just lean into it.”
Of course, that meant one day he was getting chased home by a big kid named Curtis who was calling him Puerto Rican.
His dad wanted nothing more than a boy who loved sports the way he did — his own father hadn’t attended any of Serge’s hockey games as a kid, and he wanted to do better — but Baruchel wasn’t a hockey player, and loved everything but the games when Serge coached him in softball.
His dad was a fighter, a tough guy, who would hear tales of a home invasion spree in Montreal and would smile and say, ‘F---, I hope they come to our house.’ His son didn’t inherit everything about him. When they moved back to Montreal Baruchel was 11, and he went to the rich kid school in Westmount for a year, where they made fun of poorer kids’ clothes.
“If my life was a movie, and I worked at like a ski patrol,” he said, “the bad guys would all live in Westmount.”
His first day in high school — a rougher one, one of the two worst Anglo secondaries in Montreal — a kid pulled a butterfly knife on him. Baruchel stared him down. He’d seen his dad not back down.
He stayed different. He decided in the 10th grade he wanted to make Canadian films. He was acting professionally throughout his teens, and supporting the family after his dad left. He cut off contact with his father at 15 or 16 because Serge was deep into the bad times, and Baruchel moved to Los Angeles — part-time, always, because Montreal was home — to do Undeclared at19. He was alone a lot in L.A., lost in its vastness, without a driver’s licence, before you could easily order food on the internet, eating Captain Crunch in a bowl filled with Coca-Cola.
“I was always incredibly far from home, and aware of it,” he said. “L.A. is an incredibly lonely city. It’s a very disconnected place.” Serge overdosed on heroin when Baruchel was 21, taking the prospect of closure with him. Baruchel’s L.A.-based managers, Willie Mercer and Marc Hamou, were Montreal guys and Habs fans. And he was welcome at their house anytime.
“There’s a big Canadian expat community in that city, and they all speak hockey,” Baruchel said. “And it was a part of our language in Canada that I was always a bit lacking in. So when I’d see the Habs on TV at my manager’s house or wherever, I was like, s---, I know this. This is life, and this is familiar, and this is home, and this is me. I think this is my thing.”
“And then when Dad passes away, I started watching the Habs almost as a tribute to him, and I haven’t looked back since.”
The last time he saw his dad was at a favourite McDonald’s in Montreal. There was what he calls a coke bar across the street, and he was always afraid he would see his dad there.
“And sure enough, there’s Dad and he’s holding court, and then they all start getting into it, and I recognize my dad’s posture changes, and ... I’m like, so what do I do here?” said Baruchel. “Well, I don’t feel like going and talking to my father, who I haven’t spoken to in four years. But I certainly can’t just leave. So I was like, this is what you do. Sit here in McDonald’s; they won’t kick you out, they’re nice people, lord knows you’re here often enough.
“But just watch. And if somebody swings at your dad you’ll just run across the street and you’ve got his back. And it doesn’t matter that you haven’t spoke to him. You’ll just fight with him, because he’s your dad.
“And then they didn’t. Somebody cracked a joke, and it was all handshakes, and I went home and didn’t say a word to him. I was always loyal and always proud and never got walked over in my career because of my dad. As a Canadian, I’m proud to be early and I’m proud to be polite and accommodating, and I’m proud of all that. That’s how I was raised. And oftentimes people in L.A. or New York mistake that for weakness, and every time, on every job I’ve had in the States, I start out as mom, punctual and polite, and there without fail comes a time where my dad has to show up.”
Serge Baruchel was a damaged man, but once he realized his son was into movies and comics, he leaned into that until he fell over. Sometimes he tried. Writing the book helped Baruchel, without meaning to.
“I didn’t write this as therapy, but therapy came out of it,” said Baruchel. “I don’t subscribe to the theory that my diary are song lyrics, I think you have to do something a bit more with it. But I ended up feeling better about Dad than I’ve ever felt. It was weird: I was able to f-----finally stop being pissed at him. I was able to kind of understand him in a different way. In the movie of my life he’s always talking to the camera and to me, right? And after writing him I was able to see him and me and him talking to me as two different people.
“I won’t forget the ways that he screwed up, but I’m starting to be able to forgive some of it. And there was never a time that I wasn’t proud to be his son.”
He is deeply loyal to the Habs now, even as he asks himself whether it means anything, whether it’s real. But he has decided it’s a part of him, the way millions of Canadians anchor themselves to the local hockey team and fuse it to their identity, not just in Montreal, not just in Toronto, but all across the country. And that’s a part of why.
“It’s something normal,” said Baruchel, his Habs hat shielding his eyes from the lights, towards the end of the night. “It’s something that everybody does, and I grew up not having a lot of that, and when you feel like an alien, and when you’re around and you see these things that are part of everybody’s everyday experience but not yours, sometimes you kind of wish you had that.
“And that’s not a reason to be a fan, but it’s a benefit. Me plugging into the Habs means I get to plug into something that every Canadian can touch, and when you’re weird your whole life sometimes it’s nice to feel normal every once in a while.”
It’s a Canadian story, is what it is. People sometimes recoil from the hockey-industrial monolith, but for many who feel like they want to belong in this country, hockey is a way in. Jay Baruchel is different.
He was always different. He is different still.
But he belongs.