Gratoony the Loony: The Wild, Unpredictable Life of Gilles Gratton
260
Gratoony the Loony: The Wild, Unpredictable Life of Gilles Gratton
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Overview
Gilles Gratton was not a typical pro hockey player. He refused to don his equipment and man his net if the planets were not properly aligned. He skated naked at practice. He created one of hockey’s most famous goalie masks based on his astrological sign. He fought with coaches and management, speaking his mind to his detriment. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll ruled his life, not stopping pucks. Truthfully? He never really wanted to be an NHL goaltender; he wanted to be Tibetan monk. And so, he quit hockey to seek enlightenment.
Now, in his autobiography, Gratton teams up with author Greg Oliver to tell his wild and at times, yes, loony story: from his early days in Montreal, where his brother Norm Gratton became an NHL player, too; through his stints with the OHA’s Oshawa Generals, the Ottawa Nationals and Toronto Toros of the rogue WHA, and the St. Louis Blues and New York Rangers in the NHL.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770413375 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 10/03/2017 |
| Pages: | 260 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
GROWING UP
A line from the movie The Accidental Tourist has stuck with me through the years, and it perfectly sums up my childhood. William Hurt is talking to his wife, Kathleen Turner, not long after their son died, and he says, "I endure. I'm holding steady." That was me. In French, it's malaise de vivre, a sickness or trauma over living.
Some would probably label it depression, but it wasn't exactly that. Another way I might say it in French would be mal-etre which could translate as continual unease in being alive, or angoisse existentielle, which means existential angst.
My childhood was very difficult because of all the questions I had. I was very surprised to end up in this body. What am I doing on this planet? I especially had a hard time pretending things were important, and still do. You win the Stanley Cup, but what does it mean? People skate around, they kiss the Cup. What does that mean? It means fuck all. It's partly insignificance, like the fact that there are more stars in the heavens than grains of sand on a beach. In the grand scheme of things, being a good person, treating your wife and kids and other people well, means far more than winning the Stanley Cup.
When I was a kid, that was my main frame of thought. "What am I doing here? Why did I end up in this body?" I was in utter anguish, and would wake up in the middle of the night and just sit at the kitchen table for hours, thinking.
I never did talk to anyone about the way I was feeling, because I didn't want anybody else to feel like I did. I thought that if I told them the way I felt about life, the universe, how lost I was, it might affect them and make them feel the same way. That's why I kept it to myself. I certainly never talked to my parents about it, because I didn't think they would understand. These were very deep, existential thoughts. Today, there is a lot more help available — people to talk to — but when I was growing up, there wasn't.
The best way for me to get away from the suffering was to participate in sports. In the winter, I would skate from morning to night, only taking breaks for meals, and the city rink was right in front of my house. I wouldn't even take my skates off when I came in the house. I'd sit on the stairs still wearing them, eat, and then head back. At dinner time, I'd take them off, rub my feet for a while before dinner, and head back out.
My goal was to exhaust myself. In the summer, it was tennis or baseball, and I would play all day. If there was no one to play with, I'd throw a ball against a wall for hours. Physically, if I was exhausted, I could find peace; with my brain too worn out to dwell on my thoughts, I could sleep.
It was really hard to go through life and pretend that I cared. If we played hockey or baseball, and we won, I had to act happy. But I wasn't. I was indifferent to it. It made no difference. What difference does it make when you're II years old and you hit a home run to win a game? What difference does it make when everyone dies?
I've struggled for years trying to figure out where all these thoughts came from, but have never found a satisfactory answer.
My parents, Fernand and Thérèse, were raised on farms in the Ottawa Valley about a mile apart, on RR I8 between Casselman and Saint-Isidore, about an hour's drive from Ottawa itself. My dad never went to school. All he knew was working, whether on the farm or later at Standard Brands in Montreal, where he was a machinist.
The five Gratton kids were all born in Montreal. There's Jacques, born in 1949; Norm in 1950; me, born July 28, 1952; Claudine, born in 1956; and François, born in i960.
Despite my angst, I do have some fond memories of growing up. In particular, we used to visit my grandparents almost every weekend until hockey started taking over; our holidays were in the Ottawa Valley too — we never took a vacation anywhere else. My grandparents on my mother's side were named Castonguay. My grandparents on my father's side lived one farm over from my Castonguay grandparents. I never liked going to my Gratton grandparents when I was little, and as soon as we got out of the car me and my brothers Jacques and Norm would run over to our Castonguay grandparents a mile down the road. They were just wonderful grandparents. In the summer we loved spending time on their farm.
I was too young to help much, but I can remember my brothers doing chores around the farm. I would often sit on my grandfather's lap while he drove the tractor. He would be driving, but I'd have my hands on the wheel. We'd be pulling a wagon, and my father and my uncles would be tossing hay onto the tractor. It was a big family; I got time with my uncles, aunts and cousins.
We lived in a part of Montreal known as LaSalle, in a house my father built in 1948 with the help of my two grandfathers and my uncles; I think it cost him $5,000, money that he borrowed from the bank. More specifically, we lived in an area called the Highlands, where four streets near the train tracks — Highlands, Stirling, Strathyre and Riverview — made for their own enclave. And even then it was split: Avenue Highlands had mostly French-speaking families, Strathyre and Riverview had mostly English, and Stirling was a mix. French was pretty well the language in the area, though. The other side of the tracks was another world. We never played with them, though there were times we crossed the tracks to play sports against them.
FRANÇOIS GRATTON: You could go out of the house in LaSalle, and there were plenty of kids. Everybody was playing outside. There was no colour TV, no technology. Everybody was playing baseball, football and hockey outside. It was full of kids. No one was well educated. Our town was not a high-class town. Everybody was rough.
There were big families all around, and ours was actually small. There were families with eight, nine, a dozen kids. Sometimes when we played baseball in front of the house, it could be 15 against 15. It was a safe, working-class neighbourhood. The mothers were all home, and we'd go home at all times of the day. Hand-me-down clothes were normal, and no one had extra money for extravagances.
My sense of humour developed and showed itself early. Usually in French Canada you get your middle name from your godfather. My brother Norm was Normand Lionel Joseph Gratton, because my uncle Lionel was his godfather. My paternal grandfather, Ben Gratton, was my godfather. But his real name was Bélani. When I first went to school, the teacher asked what our full names were. I thought my name was Joseph Gilles Baloney Gratton, so that's what I told the teacher. She put me in the corner to punish me because she thought I was making fun of her. She called my mom, and said, "Your son is a little bastard because he's only six years old and he's starting to make people laugh." My mom told her that my grandfather's name was Bélani. The teacher apologized to my mom and then things were okay. When your school days start like that, you know you're going to have a weird life. My actual given name is Joseph Jean Gilles Gratton, in case you're wondering. As for the teacher, I saw her in the park just a few years ago, and she still loves to tell the "baloney" story.
When I was about eight years old, I worked at a depanneur, a small grocery store. Claude Bertrand had been my best friend since about the age of five, and it was his uncle's store, and we worked side by side. Claude's uncle gave us a dollar an hour to do all kinds of jobs. We'd help unload, sort things in the basement. It was my money to do what I wanted with, and it felt like a fortune. It was my mom who kept the finances in the house. In fact, I don't even think my father knew how much he made on his paycheque. He was a very quiet man. He would come home on the Thursday and hand his cheque to my mother.
Unlike most other French-Canadian families, our parents were not religious. They went to church but never pushed us into any of that. I think my mom went to make friends who she could play cards with — she loved to play cards and socialize, which was the opposite of my father. She loved to laugh and often gleefully told stories about whatever dumb things her boys had done at school.
Unlike my dad, she was able to show emotion, but our family was not like others. On birthdays, no one really said anything, no one wished you happy birthday, and there certainly weren't presents. When dad got angry, he could be intimidating, but never violent.
DAN BOUCHARD, CHILDHOOD FRIEND AND FUTURE NHL GOALIE: Mr. Gratton was a hardworking man, a very funny man. He had restraint. He would never swear. His favourite saying was régiboire, which was just some kind of a slang, not a cuss word.
We just did our own thing and found out about the world on our own. And because my dad worked shifts, he was almost never seemed to be home. You can tell by the life I had, where I screwed up so many times, that I didn't have any direction.
Here's a good example. There was a monastery on the other side of the tracks with a great apple orchard. It was great fun sneaking in there to steal apples, but then we didn't eat them; instead, we'd throw them at passing buses. Early in the summer when I was nine, though, I fell out of a tree in the orchard. The impact broke my elbow, leaving everything below the joint just hanging there. Doctors had to reconstruct my elbow in three separate operations. It took about a year to heal, and then I had to get the movement back. My two brothers and I slept in the same room, and in the morning when I got up, I would wake them with the cracks of my elbow.
There was a definite lack of respect for authority on the part of me and my friends. I had a buddy Garry McDermid — funny name for a French guy, eh? — and we used to play baseball as teenagers. After a game, we'd climb the lights and, hanging on precariously, take a shit down, listening for the satisfying splat. Or we would go down to the river and grab an eel from the St. Lawrence, and when the bus came by, we'd throw the eel on people in the bus.
Since so few people had cars, we took the bus a lot. I do wonder if the bus drivers had photos of us up at their station. We used to piss on the floor of the bus, especially later at night. Another time, coming back from Montreal — LaSalle was the last stop on the route — we'd been really loud. At the last stop, the driver came down the aisle and told us to get out. We got off the bus but the driver was still giving me shit: "If I was your dad, I'd kick your ass." Garry went up behind him and kicked him in the ass. That allowed me to take off, and Garry wasn't far behind. The driver chased us for a bit, but we picked up some stones and started throwing them at the bus. He then got back in and drove away.
It was the same in school. There were many teachers I told off. In the third grade, I started going off the rails a bit. Almost every day, I'd have to stay late to copy out 300 lines of "I won't do this or that ..."
Not all of the gang was like me. My buddy from the store, Claude, was level-headed, which resulted in a 35-year career as a landscape architect. When we were six, we were out on the tracks in front of our house in the winter, and we found a bottle on the track with liquid in it. I said to Claude, "We should drink it." He said no way. He was not the adventurous one. I put the bottle to my nose to smell it, and my nose started to burn — it was acid. I had a hole in my nose for years, and there's still a mark there. He saved my life, because I was going to drink it.
Even when it was something as important to me as hockey at the rink across the street, I couldn't resist being a little shit. The rink was lit up until 10 at night, and after that, the man who ran the rink, Mr. Kostik, would go out to flood it. Me and my buddies would goof around with his hose, and often he'd run after us. We'd have the hose pinched so it wasn't working on his end, and when he got near us, we'd let it go and it would spray everywhere. But then after a while, we started helping him, shoveling the rink and helping to flood the ice.
During the summer, baseball was the game. There wasn't a proper diamond in the park, but that didn't matter. Kids would just come and go during the game, and it just seemed to run all day. We didn't need adults organizing us. I actually got pretty good, mainly playing left field. The Montreal Expos once called to invite me to a camp, but I had committed to hockey by that point.
There have been many moments through the years where I have wondered about different paths my life could have taken, and I am most curious about what could have happened had I followed my love of music.
I was 12 when Beatlemania struck. Me and my buddies all bought guitars, and we played Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. I never took lessons; we learned from each other. We had some books that had the chords. Then you'd learn a riff from one guy, and then something else from someone else. I had a really good ear for music, and could play just about anything having just heard the song.
CLAUDE BERTRAND: We jumped into Beatlemania. The British Invasion hit LaSalle, on Montreal's west side, but in the east side it was more French, with French artists. We learned English from the Beatles. We did not really understand the words that we were singing, we didn't understand the lyrics.
We were obsessed. The only albums I'd buy were by the Beatles. I had my hair cut like the Beatles. At first, John Lennon was my favourite, but then it became George Harrison — especially when the Beatles broke up. I thought John's energy with Yoko wasn't any good. As for Paul McCartney, I thought his music was just garbage. The Beatles did play in Montreal, but I was too young to go.
My parents weren't musical, so I don't know where my brother Jacques and I got our talent. He was a tenor and took music lessons, which meant my parents bought a piano when I was a teenager so Jacques could practice his scales. I can still hear his booming voice filling up the house, and I learned the songs of French crooners like Charles Aznavour and Gilbert Bécaud. Next thing you know, I sat down and just started playing the piano. It was second nature. Again, I never took a lesson. Like with the guitar, if I heard something, I could play it.
We were a real garage band, and one summer we teamed up to move the piano to the garage too. My mom would come out when she'd had enough and threaten to turn off the electricity. The cops used to come around at one in the morning and tell us to settle down a bit, because the neighbours were complaining. We'd stop for a bit and then we'd start again. When they came the second time, we'd stop for good. We did a few of our own songs, but mainly it was covers of Beatles songs. We got only a handful of gigs, including at my sister's wedding.
Through the years, I continued to play music with my buddies, just hanging out and shooting the shit. On the road, I might have my guitar with me, or sit down at a piano in the hotel lobby. I even recorded a few things, though I know I have a terrible voice. One of the songs I recorded was called "Symbiotic Angel." I did it in the late 1990s with Claude Bertrand. I'm way better at the music than I am with the vocals.
Jacques also learned about astrology from his music teacher. It's a funny thing — she was teaching him singing and astrology. I learned from him and read all his books. It just grew from there, and I started reading about astrology, meditation and the occult. I found that as I got into it, I could guess people's astrological signs just from the way they behaved or the way they talked, and sometimes even from their physical appearance. It's usually quite easy.
So here I was, a decided oddball right from the start, with a fascination with subjects that most people never get into, let alone as a kid. Instead of pursuing the freewheeling lifestyle of a musician, I went into the established, traditional world of minor hockey, never thinking there would be the possibility of one day playing in the National Hockey League.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Gratoony the Loony"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Gilles Gratton and Greg Oliver.
Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION. A Lion in Winter1. Growing up
2. Put the Little Kid in Net
3. General Gratton
4. Norm
5. Going National
6. They Call Me the Streak
7. The Loony Takes the Stage
8. Beat Me in St. Louis
9. The Count of Manhattan
10. Back in the USSR
11. Imprisoned in New Haven
12. Seeking Enlightenment
13. European Vacation
14. A Second Life
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTERVIEWS
STATISTICS