I Stole This from a Tragically Hip Song: Stories of Bill Barilko

Home , Bill Barilko, Fifty Mission Cap, Fully Completely, Gord Downie

I Stole This From a Tragically Hip Song: Stories of Bill Barilko

Stephen Swain University of Western Ontario “Bill Barilko disappeared that summer; he was on a fishing trip. The last goal he ever scored won the Leafs the Cup. They didn’t win another till 1962, the year he was discovered. I stole this from a hockey card I keep tucked up under my Fifty Mission Cap.”1 With these lines, The Tragically Hip’s lead singer Gord Downie sums up the essence of the Bill Barilko story. At the very least, Downie captures the part of the story deemed important enough to go on the back of a hockey card commemorating Barilko’s overtime goal in Game 5 of the 1951 Stanley Cup Finals.2 And yet this obviously isn’t all there is to the story of Bill Barilko. More importantly, there is more than one story of Bill Barilko and more than one way to tell the stories of Bill Barilko. This article examines some of the stories of Bill Barilko, and how these stories are told. More importantly, it examines why these different stories are emphasized, and how by examining the multifaceted whole, we learn not only about Bill Barilko but about the people telling the stories. In Is There a Text in This Class? Stanley Fish discusses what he refers to as “interpretive communities.”3 These interpretive communities are the basis for different interpretations of a text. It must be acknowledged here that Fish is coming from the school of literary theory and not that of history, let alone sports history. I don’t feel that this invalidates the application of Fish’s work to the realm of sports history. Instead, I think that acknowledging the ways that history functions as a text allows us to examine how histories are written and, perhaps more importantly, how they function in society. For Fish, membership in interpretive communities helps people form their interpretive strategies. Members of different interpretive communities will have different interpretations. People belong to multiple interpretive communities, all formed through different experiences and backgrounds. To demonstrate the con- cept, Fish discusses differing interpretations of William Blake’s “The Tyger,” one of which claims “that therefore the answer to the poem’s final question—“Did he who made the Lamb make thee”—is, beyond all possible doubt, No.”4 The other says that “There can be no doubt . . . that The Tyger is a poem that celebrates the holiness of tigerness.”5 For Fish, the fact that the same poem produced such radi- cally different interpretations points out the difficulties in claiming that there is

The author is with the School of Kinesiology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Room 2225, 3M Centre, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

152 I Stole This From a Tragically Hip Song 153 one way to read any given text. The same argument can be made about history, because one’s perspective influences how one interprets historical events. Some interpretations can be rejected, just as Fish argues that certain literary interpretations can be rejected. But other interpretations need to be evaluated as plausible and appropriate, depending on the arguments involved. What is important to take from Fish is the belief that there are different ways of interpreting a text and, although we might not agree with or endorse those interpretations, it is still important for us to engage them. Before I begin discussing the different stories of Bill Barilko, I feel it is neces- sary to provide a slightly more detailed discussion of the basics of Barilko’s story than “Fifty-Mission Cap” provides. Barilko, born in Timmins, Ontario, played hockey. More specifically, he played professional hockey for the Toronto Maple Leafs from 1947 to 1951, winning the Stanley Cup four times in that period. In 1951, he went on a fishing trip with a friend, Dr. Henry Hudson, in Hudson’s plane. They never returned. The Leafs won the Stanley Cup again in 1962. In June of 1962, the plane was discovered in Northern Ontario, with the remains of Barilko and Hudson still strapped into their seats. In 1992, The Tragically Hip released Fully Completely, their third full CD, which featured the song “Fifty-Mission Cap.” There, in a nutshell, is the bare bones version of Bill Barilko’s life. Of course, if this were all there was to tell, this wouldn’t be much of a article. Instead, the rest of this article will explore different stories of Bill Barilko, determine what perspectives the authors bring to the stories, and attempt to understand the motivations behind the interpretive community that would create a particular story of Bill Barilko. As such, I have examined various media accounts of Bill Barilko, including newspapers, magazines, books, and, of course, popular music. This article is not an exhaustive examination of the stories of Bill Barilko. Further, this article does not attempt to address all the different ways of telling the stories of Bill Barilko. That would run counter to Fish, who argued that “there is at present no way of ‘looking’ or reading (and remember, all acts of looking or reading are ‘ways’). . . . This does not mean, however, that no such strategy could ever come into play, and it is not difficult to imagine the circumstances under which it would establish itself.”6 Although Fish is referring to the dismissal of a possible Eskimo7 reading of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the point holds true for different interpretations of history. While, at the present time, it would be quite ludicrous to suggest that an East Asian reading of the story of Bill Barilko is needed, that does not mean that such a reading will never be valid. So I do not claim that the stories of Bill Barilko addressed in this article are the only stories of Bill Barilko. They are simply the ones I have chosen to address, as I believe they are the most vivid. The first story of Bill Barilko is the one that starts, quite literally, at the begin- ning, with his birth. Bill Barilko was born to Steve and Feodosia (Faye) Barilko, two Canadian immigrants of Ukrainian origin.8 As a result, Barilko can be consid- ered to be Ukrainian Canadian and is listed in Sokolyk’s Their Sporting Legacy: The Participation of Canadians of Ukrainian Descent in Sport, 1891–1991. For Sokolyk, the purpose of the book is to provide a record of the contributions of Ukrainian Canadians to Canadian sport, and it traces both sports clubs founded by and operated for Ukrainian Canadians and Canadian athletes of Ukrainian descent.9 As Sokolyk writes, “This then is the story of those who were a credit to their sport and who were bound by a common thread, their ethnic heritage. It is a story of