June 26, 2007

by Nancy Dowd

First,  I want everyone in Slap Shot Nation to know that I do not participate in any profits from merchandising.  My endorsement of the Mad Brothers has two reasons: one, I like the Mad Brothers. They have the guts to be legitimate,  not rip-off artists.  For all of you who have bought the fakes, mefiez-vous.  Buy only the real thing. And, two, I like their web site.  In the words of Reggie Dunlop paying tribute to that legendary small town newspaper sports reporter, Dickie Dunn, Madbrothers.com has "really caught the spirit of the thing." 

Alex and Mathieu asked me to write something for you fans.  I am humbled by that request but I don't want to bore anyone.  What do they want to know, I asked.  How you got the idea for Slap Shot, they replied.  I am not certain any writer can answer that question factually.  Slap Shot is fiction, and fiction is not fact.  Does anyone know where ideas come from?  But here in hindsight is how I think I got the idea. Next year is the thirtieth anniversary of Slap Shot's release.  There has been a lot of water under the bridges of  Flood City.  Maybe we should start with where I got the idea.  Or where I was when I got the idea. And when. 1974-5 in Los Angeles, California. Very far from the Charlestown I created. Very far from the Massachusetts mill town where I was born and grew up and which I had survived and escaped.  As far as I could get, in fact. 

The 1970's for those of you who missed them were a fabulous time to be young and brave. Rules were meant to be broken.  Make it up as you go along.  Use your imagination.  Healthcare plans, multi-national corporations, globalization were not on the map. They lurked beneath, of course.  But life and what to make of it were up for grabs.  And there was a tremendous feeling that all was new and beautiful if you had the nerve to make it so.  A war was raging in the background, as another does today, with the difference the draft no longer exists.  The opposition to that other war had given an entire generation the will to break the rules.  Our President, Nixon, had quit one step ahead of a prison term.  One can always  hope that might happen today.

I had my masters from UCLA , and by the happiest irony, my closest friends there were and are Quebecois.  You will find their last names on sweaters in the picture and in the script, Drouin, Morisset, Lussier.  My father was as old as the century.   He wrote endless self-serving letters which I generally disregarded. One letter caught my eye.  He had visited my brother who was playing minor league hockey in Pennsylvania. Of course, he was appalled, but I was no longer buying into my father's social aspirations. Like many American men of his generation, my father saw his children as extensions of his own ambition. We were supposed to be on an ever upward American trajectory, starting with my grandparents, the noble starving Irish immigrants, moving on to my parents, the allegedly hard-working first generation of the American Dream and then on to their children - one putative writer and one minor league hockey player. Huh?  Things had not worked out as he had hoped.  The soaring rocket  had veered off course. The girl who had graduated from a fancy college, with a year in Paris, and was supposed to marry well was looking, in his own terms, like a railroad worker in jeans and a blue work shirt.  And the son, the name carrier, was playing minor league hockey on a loser team in a loser town. If my mother doesn't figure in this narrative, she was lost in a drug and alcohol induced haze.  In other words, we were the awful truth of the American family two hundred years after the founding of the republic.

But like the founders, I was determined to be free.  I wasn't going to be a Greenwich, Connecticut housewife married to a stockbroker who commuted to Manhattan so that he could bring home the bacon while I raised over-indulged brats who would repeat the cycle.  In my 1950's suburban/mill town childhood, I had seen enough desperate  housewives to last a lifetime.  So when I read that my college educated brother was playing hockey in some dump of a mill town in Pennsylvania and my father was shocked, I thought oh spare me. The team and the town made him recall his own hardscrabble youth in Springfield, Massachusetts where the minor league hockey games were so rough that the brawls spilled out into the parking lot.  "Old time hockey," he wrote.  "Toe Blake, the great Eddie Shore."  I was getting on with life.  I had no time for an old man's reminiscing. Soon I received a call from my brother whom I barely knew.  My parents marriage had ended years before splitting the four of us down the middle.  It was midnight LA time and I was at the house of a bad news boyfriend. Three AM in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and my brother was drunk.  The bottom line of the conversation: his team was to fold or be sold.  I asked: who OWNS the Jets?  He had no idea.  And at that moment I knew I was going to write the screenplay that would become Slap Shot.  I had never been to Johnstown, never seen my brother play, never met his team, but I had my story.  Owns. Owns. Many of you know that scene by heart.  In the 1970's it was important - well, it's always important - but then it mattered to know who owned you.  That question had been my pre-occupation for years.  I didn't want a destiny, received ideas.  I refused to be a 1950's zombie.  I didn't want to be owned.  It was incredible to me that my brother did not know who owned his team.  If you didn't know who owned you, what did you know?  You see, if I were going to be free, I had to know everything.  I did not want to stumble around in the darkness and waste my precious life.  I had to know the truth.  At all costs.  That was me. So I wrote an outline of a story about a man desperate to stay free as the Chrysler plant moves ever nearer.  And I went home as it were. I bought a cheap ticket "back east" as they say in California, back to a rusting mill town, back to lowered expectations, back to narrowness and shuttered minds, back to everything I had run from.  And I wrote Slap Shot.

But it was you made Slap Shot a classic.  There was no merchandising when it was released, and I was treated by the critics as the cinematic anti-Christ, polluting the vocabularies of upstanding American youth.  But you stood by Slap Shot for three generations.  You bought the videos (even the horrific release with the cheesy computer music), you bought the DVD's, you wore the Halloween costumes, hosted the Slap Shot parties, memorized the lines, and laughed and laughed.  That is the real measure of a motion picture, not the opening weekend grosses.  When an object is embraced by a popular culture, it takes on a life of its own.  Thanks to you,  Slap Shot has that life.

So, my old friends, in closing I want to evoke those deathless words spoken  by the immortal player coach Reg Dunlop nearly thirty years ago: "Don't ever play Lady of Spain again."

Nancy Dowd