I have been a fan of the Montreal Canadiens
ever since I was able to sit upright (presumably on a diaper) and appreciate
the emotion of both the broadcast and the people in the room, laughing at my
every reaction. Barely two years old, I
have a vague recollection, supported by testimonial, of watching and
celebrating the Stanley Cup victory of 1986 with my parents. They said it was
the first time I wasn’t fast asleep by eight-thirty; it was, inconsequently, also
the first time I was exposed to cursing. Since then, my fixation with the Habs
has been unflinching and my relationship with the sport of hockey remains most
intimate. When the old Montreal Forum
closed its doors in 1996, I was on the ice during the final public skate with
Andrei Kovalenko, Vincent Damphousse, Marc Bureau and Stephane Quintal. Eleven years old, I was tacitly aware of the
solemnity of this relocation. The team’s history lives forever, but that
history’s place would cease to exist
in that building.
What now occupies the interior of the
Forum’s shell, the Pepsi Forum, an entertainment-shopping-dining complex
housing an AMC 22-theatre and surrounding affiliates, honours the past in a
superficial way. That is not to say that
I disagree with the conversion of the building into commercial space – a far
better idea than knocking it down or turning it into condominiums. Nor do I have any complaint regarding the
design of the interior and its rather coliseum-like layout. The Forum thrives as the direct extension of
the Alexis Nihon shopping centre in an undervalued Shaughnessey village of west
downtown. Adjacent to Dawson College and down the street from Concordia, with a
student neighbourhood in the middle, the Forum occupies an optimal location to
capitalize on the student flaneur.
I will not bother looking up details on the
initial conception, planning, design and construction of the complex, when all
I want to say is that whoever was responsible for all of these phases had a
chance to make a meaningful tribute not only to the city’s most celebrated and
iconic amphitheatre, but a place where history was written, where community was
galvanized, where spectatorship held hands with both author and voice, a place
of protest and insanity, and perhaps most importantly where individual and collective
memory still roams to this day. Instead,
accompanying the banal attractions are wall decorations
that look as if they were thought up five minutes after the designer read Roch
Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater and
completely missed the point.
Place
of Insanity
Following the Canadiens’ near sweep of
Gretzky’s Kings in the 1993 Cup finals, many took to the streets. The city was in such elation that Montreal
had reclaimed its historic hockey supremacy that rioting erupted among Montreal
fans, which eventually led to looting and vandalism. Nowhere in the present complex is there a
testament to the effect of the Forum as a repeated exhibitor of moments so
powerful and so profound that those in attendance often break down, displacing
rationality. Instead, sitting near the
top of a small scale replica of a sloping section of Forum seats is a life size
coloured statue of what the responsible visionary probably understood was the
quintessential hockey fan: a rather corpulent, cartoon-like man with a hat, leaning
forward in a spirited cheer (possibly celebrating a goal or reacting to a
scoring chance), tipsiness moulded onto his face. He occupies one of the seats in this hockey-themed
public rest bench; the rest are vacant, inviting you to sit anywhere you like
in the entire section. To me, this man
is a flimsy representation, the hollow archetype beer commercials overemploy. At least in commercials, the men use beer and
hockey as excuses to fraternize and reaffirm their Canadianness. This replica looks both lonely and dislocated
from all that he could potentially stand for.
Place
of Politics
Not unlike the example of the Stanley Cup
riot of 1993, but started for a completely different reason, the famous Richard Riot of 1955 broke out right
inside the Forum during a game. The riot
was a public reaction to a unique succession of events: Maurice Richard was
suspended by then NHL president Clarence Campbell for the rest of the season
and the playoffs for having punched a linesman; Campbell then attended the next
Habs game at the Forum – a big mistake – and was greeted with a shower of food
followed by a dose of teargas. The mentality of the mob takes over, not pure
but motivated irrationality; this is
a classic example of the workings of passionate politics in session at Quebec’s
plebeian National Assembly. Where is the
evidence of this, today? The current
Forum interior shows no signs of ever having held the bulge of mass dissent
between its walls, of seconding as a public affairs forum (its name rings
truest in this sense).
Place
of Heroism
Apart from a metallic statue of Richard (sitting
on a bench, supposedly waiting for his shift during a game, calm, collected,
and in no way contextually linked to the fan sitting six rows behind him and to
the left), there is a mural painting tucked away in a quiet corner of the
ground floor. It allegorically
juxtaposes Richard’s image with that of an actual rocket surrounded by Stanley
cups, two gymnasts, Bruce Springsteen, the front entrance of the old forum, and
currently available diversions like bowling, cinema and billiards. What do these things have in common?
Basically nothing over and above the fact that they illustrate past and present
uses of the forum’s physical shell in an exceptionally fragmented bricolage. Richard’s facial signature, the intensity in
his eyes, is present but more as an identifying feature than a symbol of the position
he holds in French-Canadian lore. It
seems as if the artist knew nothing more than the fact that this man played
hockey in this building and that people called him the Rocket. The attitude
this kind of work suggests is none other than corporate disinterestedness,
lacking depth of thought in much the same way as the monument to First Nations
peoples on Concordia’s Loyola campus is devoid of authentic vision.
Place
of Community
I have tried visualizing what it would be
like to return to the Forum in its current state as a former Montreal Canadiens
star or even a lifelong fan hoping to reanimate some nostalgia for the glorious
past it housed. Physically, everything
has changed, which is to be expected over the course of an
amphitheatre-to-entertainment-complex metamorphosis. The layout of the long arena has been
supplanted by a circular agora overlooked by four floors of galleries to
enhance merchant visibility and consumer appeal. But something more profound has changed as
well. The compartmentalization of the
indoor space has resulted in a dramatic division of people and interests. Hardly can we call those visiting the forum a
community. There could be twenty-two
different movies to choose from at any given time, restaurants, distractions,
retail stores, that dictate the Forum’s usage patterns and overall social
environment, one that can be summarized in a single word: individual. It is true that, to partake in a pool game,
to go bowling, to eat at a restaurant and to go to the cinema typically involve
two or more people. Contrast this,
however, with an atmosphere created by over fifteen thousand people who all
came for one thing, to participate in one all-encompassing spectacle while in
graceful concert with one another, the chorus of united voices directed at their
hometown heroes and the likely return of the Cup. The monuments of today’s
Forum are as discontinuous as the people who occupy its space.
A
commentator states that “Art has the Louvre, opera has La Scala, and hockey had
the Montreal Forum”.
Would it not follow logically that the 70-year home of the most
successful sports franchise in the world should double as a shrine to its own
legacy regardless of its re-incarnation?
The official museum of the Canadiens resides in the team’s current
arena, the Bell Centre, and contains a collection that rivals the Hockey Hall
of Fame in Toronto in its significance and pride. What the official museum is
missing is its proximity to the place of history. Sure, often it is difficult
to educate the public on the past if you can’t bring the past to the public.
Not in this case, however. Here, history is very much place bound. When on Prince
Edward Island, vacationers visit the Green Gables heritage site because it
stands as inspiration for a story; Lucy Maud Montgomery fictionally placed
Anne’s narrative within that house. Anne of Green Gables is not even based
on true events but a museum is made of the place
used simply as a model. If we knew the
exact former location of Tom Thompson’s Jack
Pine somewhere in Algonquin National Park and it was accessible by modes other
than bushwhacking and canoeing, I’m positive at very least a commemorative
placard would exist, and could actually exist for all I know (I could not locate
anything that proves it). The Canadiens
won twenty-four Stanley Cups at the Forum and are so deeply engrained in Canadian
culture that they have an entire history of nicknames (the Habs, les Glorieux, le Tricolore, the Flying Frenchmen to name a few). It is a shame they have all but been pronounced
dead in their former arena.
The
Bell Centre should take record of its own Habs history dating back to 1996 and
continuing into its bright future.
Despite that the past twelve years have been sparse on notable history
(except for captain Saku Koivu’s Masterton-earning defeat of stomach cancer and
successful return to the game), the Montreal Canadiens of the Bell Centre are a
far cry from the team of the Forum and deserve to be forever connected to the
building they illuminate. Each player is
an author of his own legacy through the records he sets simply by being on the
ice each game, the columns written, the interviews given, and the entire media
event of an NHL game, information that would lose a part of its aura (to borrow Benjamin’s term) if
physically and epistemologically dis-located.
To
reiterate, there are a number of symbolic homages to the past tenants of the Montreal
Forum within its current layout, but most are superficial collages of memory
clips chosen and assembled with little or no regard for context. The floor of the building resembles an ice
surface with centre lines, blue lines, points, goal creases and the face-off
circle painted onto it in arbitrary combinations that clearly display the
developer’s disregard for what is immortal.
On the second floor there are eight display cases, each with their own
semi-separate viewing area, of which the introduction reads: “Forum Gallery:
Souvenirs from some of the forum’s most entertaining moments.” This is telling, for through its stress of entertainment, it reveals the view of
the interpreter who wrote those words (and who most likely planned the rest of
the display): Sport as spectacle is synonymous with other forms of
institutionalized entertainment venues (arcades and movie theatres, for
instance), and therefore should be understood as collectively sharing a
category of significance to Canadian culture. How wrong.
