It’s played once a game in every arena, an honour only O Canada can equal on the playlist.
Though Stompin’ Tom Connors didn’t put as much thought into its lyrics and music as his other Canadian culture classics, The Hockey Song endures more than a half century later.
Part ballad, part anthem, part crowd-rouser, it’s the essential three-period summary, wrapped in 2:10 of vinyl, its chorus celebrating “the best game you can name.”
As we hear it every Leafs and Marlies home game, pick it up on TV timeouts through the NHL and Europe (last week, Irish fiddlers broke from traditional jigs to play it at our neighbour’s 75th birthday), let’s stomp around the archives of its creation and duration.
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“Not a complicated song, but it spoke to the Canadian spirit,” said Duncan Fremlin, a banjo player in Connors’ group before the singer’s death in 2013 at age 77. “Our band, Whiskey Jack, still plays it, recently at Koerner Hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music, part of Moses Znaimer’s Idea City. Think of 1,000 of the intelligentsia in Canada, clapping along to The Hockey Song. Tom had to be up there smiling somewhere.
“When he was alive, of course we played it every night on the road, usually near the end to induce an encore. People asked for it by name.”
The culminating line “the puck is in!, the home team wins!, the good old hockey game” would be slightly changed to the local club’s name of whatever town the band was in.
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No recording artist drew on raw Canadian content more than P.E.I.-born Connors — Bud the Spud, Sudbury Saturday Night, Tillsonburg and Big Joe Mufferaw are among his 300 songs and numerous albums.
For many of us, he’ll always be 60 feet tall, slamming his boot down to Algoma Central 69 in a small-town pub for the groundbreaking IMAX film North of Superior when Ontario Place opened in 1971.
In that era, Leafs, Canadiens and Canucks games on small TVs were the backdrop in those rustic watering holes, amid cigarette smoke, trays of draft and clanking stubby beer bottles. It’s where Connors turned his thoughts to a simple depiction of the national pass-time.
“They storm the crease like bumble bees”, “the goalie jumps, the players bump” and “someone roars, Bobby scores” were strung together.
“I tried to write it in a way where I was in an arena and hearing it myself,” Connors told Postmedia in 2002. “It took its life from kids who heard it in arenas. A lot of NHL players have told me that they grew up with it.”
His son, Tom Jr., picked up the story in 2018 when he and The Hockey Song were chosen for the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
“Once my father moved to Toronto and played the Horseshoe Tavern, some of the (late ’60s and early ’70s) Leafs, would come over after games, have a few brews and listen to him. They might have inspired him to write it. He became a bit of a Leafs fan, too (having been raised on the Habs in the Martimes). As long as a Canadian team wins, that’s all that matters.
“He’d sit at the guitar and pick away to keep the callouses on his fingers going. His melodies were always very simple, two or three chords, because to him it was all about the lyrics, the story-telling.”
But The Hockey Song suffered the same fate as many in Connors’ catalogue, unable to get sustained airtime on Canadian radio. It was a battle he pursued through the ‘70s and ‘80s to keep big-ticket commercial American records from dominating the Canadian market.
Though rarely heard upon release, The Hockey Song sustained a pulse through Connors’ travelling shows and even found a dedicated U.S. following via the weekly Dr. Demento novelty record radio show.
As canned music gradually eclipsed traditional organs in arenas, the 1992 expansion Ottawa Senators began playing The Hockey Song to balance rock ‘n’ roll clips between whistles. Audiences loved it, including new Leafs coach and country music fan Pat Burns, who requested it for Maple Leaf Gardens in the year his team lasted three playoff rounds.
Around that time, Connors had gone back on the road for his first major tour in 13 years to support a new album.
“Six months, 75 towns,” said Fremlin, who was initially Connors’ tour manager and became band leader. “Just insane travel. But Tom and I hit it off with a shared love of music and political views.”
Fremlin, now 75 himself, is certain Connors would be an even bigger advocate of The Hockey Song and his body of work today, given Donald Trump’s blarney about Canada becoming the 51st state.
The black-hatted Connors always brought along his stomping board, an eighth of an inch piece of basic plywood, to help him keep time and, decades earlier, placate stage managers angry that his cleated boot heels tore their carpets.
“Gordon Lightfoot used to tell Tom that board was just a gimmick – but a damn good one,” Fremlin said. “When (the late columnist) Earl McRae made fun of The Hockey Song being fit for only the ears of hillbillies in the Ottawa Valley, Tom came out for a show there with Earl’s picture taped to the board.”
The Hockey Song was covered by many singers and groups through the years. Tom was also willing to discuss it being adapted as the new Hockey Night in Canada opening theme when rights to its iconic instrumental expired in the early 2000s.
“He used to say the royalties from that song alone paid for his new rec room,” Fremlin said with a laugh about Connors’ Georgetown, Ont., man cave, replicating a small-town bar with a perpetually stocked fridge.
Fremlin also recalls Connors in his favourite chair in the basement furnace room, strumming The Hockey Song among others with the band, above the din from a noisy old oil heater, while playing chess and sipping beers.
“Though he was famous, he was the most unpretentious man you’d ever meet.”
Fremlin told us he just heard The Hockey Song this past Saturday at a U of T-MTU men’s game at Mattamy Athletic Centre, where Connors once played it live before the original Gardens closed.
Tom’s son also played a lot of hockey growing up and teammates knew his connection whenever it played.
“It’s neat being part of it,” Tom Jr. said in 2018. “Some people think it’s corny, but I’ll tell you, he nailed it, makes you feel like part of the game. It’s going to last hundreds of years, as long as hockey’s played. The style of play might change, but the heart and soul of the game is still in that song.”
Nine hundred game Leafs veteran Morgan Rielly was once asked how often he’s heard The Hockey Song’s opening line of “Hello out there, we’re on the air …”
“Millions of times for sure. Going to games when you’re younger, going to junior games, watching on TV sometimes, and we hear it (at Scotiabank Arena).
“I’d say it’s the song I know best in terms of lyrics.”
CONNORS LIFTS LORD STANLEY
The Stanley Cup, so prominent in The Hockey Song as “all filled up with a chance to win the drink,” made an appearance during one of Stompin’ Tom’s largest live performances.
“It was July 1, 1993, we were at the Canada Day celebrations in Ottawa,” Fremlin recalled. “The Montreal Canadiens had just beat the L.A. Kings for the Cup, which we didn’t know at the time would be the last win by a Canadian team.
“We were going to open with Tillsonburg (“my back still breaks when I hear that word”), but decided on The Hockey Song instead. “
What Connors and the band didn’t know was that festival organizers had asked the Habs to send the Cup to Parliament Hill for the show. The trophy was wheeled out in the middle of the song by a white-gloved ‘Keeper of the Cup’ from the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“Tom walked over to the Cup to lift it,” Fremlin said with a laugh. “But he’d been drinking all day and because it was so heavy, we all feared he’d raise it over his head, lose his balance, fall and break it.
“But he handled it fine. He was so excited to have it at that moment.”
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