“Henderson scores for Canada.” It is said that anybody who had a pulse in Canada on that September day in 1972 knew the magnitude of that line delivered by iconic sports broadcaster Foster Hewitt. In the inaugural eight-game series between Russia and Canada, the Canadians battled back from a deficit to tie the series 3–3–1. In the eighth and final game, the hockey world witnessed a seesaw battle of two nations whose different political and cultural societies defined the world. Democracy and Communism. With the game being played in Moscow, the odds against the Canadians were overwhelming. Paul Henderson’s shot with thirty seconds left won the game. Schools were shut down, work absentees were everywhere, as our whole nation watched it on CTV, witnessing and sharing in an inexplicable joy.

Worshiping other trivialities, my family was one of those rare Canadian families who did not know, understand, or care about the passion, patriotism, and pride that won that game for Team Canada. In Montreal they say “Hockey is life.” I never knew or cared what that meant. It was only later on when I met a man whose very existence was a personification of all those things that I understood. In my little girl’s world, I was yearning for a father. Early on we thought we found that man; he was a hockey player, but hockey and Canada are only a part of this story. This is a human story.

While others in the North Vancouver, British Columbia, suburb of Delbrook were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, Jack McKenna came home to a crib on the snow-laden third day of that January adorned with his first wooden hockey stick, a gift from his uncle, “Uncle Mac” MacGregor Whately, a Canadian hockey legend. Whately, a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, was a “behind-the-scenes driving force,” for the assemblage of that force’s team that won the 1948 Olympic gold medal in hockey. Although deadlocked with Czechoslovakia in a round-robin record of seven wins and one tie, the Canadians prevailed with their “goals for” and “goals against” averages.

McKenna’s neighbor Jan Drobny, who had fled from Prague in 1968, always felt that political intrigue, not sport, “took the gold medal out from under the Czechs.”

“Mr. Drobny, you know not of our special Canadian resiliency and strength of purpose.”

“So you think it’s something spezial?”

“Born out of our hard winters and pioneer spirit,” Mac would tell his good friend, who’d craftily made his own escape from the communist country by bicycling over the Germany border as a teenager.

Whately, before serving his country in wartime, made himself wealthy by selling encyclopedias door-to-door. “There were only two Canadians who had the moxie and drive to make money doing that…Jack Kent Cooke and myself.” Whately would often share “that fact” with any listener, modestly placing himself in a category with the wealthiest man in North America. He later made millions as proprietor of the original Canadian hockey equipment company, Hoquet. Hockey and Mother Canada ran blood-red in the veins of the Whatelys.

Jack’s dad, a tavern owner in South Vancouver, succumbed to lung cancer when Jack was an infant. Every picture of him in the family home that lay in the shadow of the North Shore Mountains foreshadowed his short-lived years, as “Cleary” McKenna was never without a cigarette in his mouth.

Cleary’s family had moved from County Wexford when he was three. To “Grandpa McKenna,” who cherished the “intrigue of God’s oceans,” immigrating to Vancouver, a city surrounded by saltwater, was as good as being close to the Irish Sea. It was imbedded in the McKenna men that a few hours on a Sunday staring out to the English Bay was all the recreation a man needed, along with some “inspiring words from the greats of Eire.”

“Other than reading the great Irish authors, Kavanagh, Behan, Joyce, and Shaw…a man should be indulged solely in his work and support of his family”—so barked the indomitable Grandpa McK. If a man ever “worked himself to death, that would be your father,” according to Jack’s mother, Marguerite Whately McKenna. When Cleary passed, Marguerite sold the tavern, financially supporting the family as a registered nurse at nearby Lions Gate Hospital, and emotionally supporting Jack and his brother through her unabated encouragement of their hockey years. Jack inherited his love for books from his mother, as she had an intense devotion to their education, and particularly to their reading and appreciation of literature.

The McKenna and Whately marriage was a unique mixing of families with patriotic fervor. The Whatelys had the innate sense of drive and labor, but there was an acceptable form of recreation—very acceptable. The Whatelys added the passion for hockey. Hockey, Family, and Canada were the altars they worshipped upon. Marguerite convinced Cleary to name Jack’s older brother “Preston.” It came from the name of the Preston Rivulettes, a renowned all-women’s hockey team in the thirties. She didn’t want that name that stood for grace, strength, and independence to be forgotten, at least in her family. In their early childhood, both boys’ true home was the ice rink. The Whatelys were from a long line of rigid Scottish Presbyterians, but that religiosity was not as rigidly devoted for them as what went on within the parameters of a hockey rink.

Uncle Mac, opinionated, irascible, and self-admittedly “a tad stubborn,” had the respect of Jack and his brother, as he naturally fell into the role of surrogate father to them. Before the boys were teenagers, they knew well the great noble history of their mother country, Canada. They were also treated to special morsels of what some of the neighborhood boys would call “Uncle Mac’s patriotic paranoia.”

Gathering the boys on the back porch and spitting out words of anger, Mac grizzled, “You young ones should know how Hollywood slighted the heroes of Canada in their greatest movie ever, The Great Escape.” With the boys’ eyes ablaze with fire, Mac would go on, “The World War II escape blockbuster failed to mention the one hundred and fifty Canadians who helped dig the escape tunnels, including the legendary ‘good friend’ Royal Canadian Air Force pilot, Wally Floody, who orchestrated the whole plan.”

Whately would get especially emotional when he spoke of how nearly two thirds of a force of five thousand brave Canadian soldiers were “sacrificed at Dieppe, France, so the Allied Forces could two years later succeed at the Normandy Invasion.” While Mac tried, like most Canadians, not to show enmity toward his neighbors south of the border, he questioned the appreciation America showed their valiant neighbor to the north. Often in the eighties Mac would explode to anyone listening about the “lack of respect Canada received when their diplomat got a few American hostages safely out of Iran during the Iranian hostage crisis.”

“Would those cowboys do the same for us if the situation were reversed?” Mac often queried.

Mac’s affinity for both the game of hockey and the spirit imbued in it were legendary. “Don’t think you boys are going to grow up without piano lessons,” Mac famously once told his grandsons. Using the wall of Mac’s Steinway piano before either of them reached nine as a makeshift goal, Jack and Preston had permission for what Mac referred to as his “piano lessons.” By the time Jack was nine, it was clear he could outshoot and out-defend his older sibling in even neighborhood play. By the time Preston was twelve, he was no longer even interested in playing hockey with friends, and certainly not in the major junior leagues.

When he was young, Jack could never understand why his older brother he looked up to so much bowed out of the game so early. Jack’s favorite picture from his youth was one his mother took at Grouse Mountain when Jack was five. In it Preston was all dressed in his hockey gear, and he was holding Jack tightly, tying his skates for him. Jack remembers the mountain, the mound of snow alongside the ice pond, and, most importantly, the memory of the momentary closeness he shared with his brother. That closeness was as fleeting as the frost that fell in a late Vancouver winter.