The next month, January 1966, in “Dylan: An Explosion of Poetry,” published in Maclean’s, Peter turned to music. He had attended a Bob Dylan concert in Toronto’s Massey Hall the previous November, and the show had changed his mind about rock and roll, which he had once judged “too loud, too boorish, too dull.” To complete his research, he flew to New York where, in Greenwich Village, he listened to bands that blended classical music with rhythm and blues. His trip convinced him that this “New Music” was “the most vital, exciting art form in America,” for it boldly mixed folk music, one of Peter’s favourite genres, with 1950s hard-core rock as well as blues, jazz, and country. Dylan’s innovation, Peter explained, was to add to New Music his haunting and poetic lyrics; these in turn gave voice to disenchanted youth and its preoccupation with racial injustice. The British music critic Kenneth Allsop was right, Peter concluded, to call Dylan “the most remarkable poet of the sixties.”
During the mid-1960s, Peter collaborated with Trent Frayne on Great Canadian Sports Stories: A Century of Competition, which was published in 1965 as part of a series of books published in anticipation of Canada’s centennial. Pierre Berton was editor-in-chief of the series; Frank Newfeld, art director; and Ken Lefolii, managing editor. In their generously illustrated book, Frayne and Gzowski covered sports from horse racing to figure skating to hockey. Among the short articles was one on Marilyn Bell’s heroic swim across Lake Ontario in 1954, one on Tom Longboat’s victory at the Boston Marathon in 1907, and one on Sandy Somerville’s first-place finish in the American National Amateur golfing championship of 1932. While each chapter was the result of collaboration between the two men, the prologue was Frayne’s, and Peter wrote the impressionistic epilogue entitled “The Changing Styles of Watching and Playing.” Canadian pioneers, he argued, had little time for playing or watching sports. By Confederation, however, Canadians had become spectators. To celebrate Confederation on July 1, 1867, Torontonians took in a lacrosse match between the Toronto Lacrosse Club and Six Nations Natives from Brantford, Ontario. Spectator sports peaked between 1945 and 1965, but only hockey, Peter maintained, continued to attract spectators. Baseball was “a dead item in Canada,” and boxing was “staggering against the ropes.” Even Canadian football, he claimed, was at the end of a boom period that had begun in the 1930s. Horse racing, like hockey, drew crowds, but Peter wondered if it was only on-track betting that kept people coming to the races.35
However, there was some hope — as attendance declined, participation increased. “In 1965,” Peter claimed, “more Canadians were engaging in sports more than ever, and their interests ranged from volleyball on Vancouver Island to skin-diving off Newfoundland.” Sports equipment sales were up. So popular was curling that, he predicted, it might soon rival hockey as Canada’s national game.36 Golfing and sailing were increasingly popular. Skiing, too, was on the rise. Canadians had more leisure time, more expendable cash, and at the same time, Peter speculated, “the first excitement of televised sport” was wearing thin.
In the last half of his four-page text, Peter singled out Bobby Hull, who was, according to Peter, “indisputably the finest [hockey] player active in the game.” Hull combined bits of his famous predecessors — “the speed of Morenz and the instinct for goals of a Richard to the strength and control of Gordie Howe.” What Hull added to these qualities was “a sheer joy” in playing. According to Peter, he skated “with the abandon of a prairie twelve-year-old set free on a frozen river.” Although he was “a remarkably clean and gentlemanly player,” he sometimes belted the opposition “just for the thrill of the contact.” And he derived his greatest pleasure, Peter thought, “from the pure motion and excitement of the game.” Off ice, he engaged in farming, fast boats, and scuba diving “with the same swashbuckling enthusiasm” he brought to hockey.
To accompany the article, Peter chose a photograph of Hull standing nonchalantly against a background of an ice-blue sky. Photographer Horst Ehricht had taken the shot at thigh level looking upward to a bulging torso whose hands tenderly hold a fishing rod. The hockey star, as if unaware of the camera, peers at a distant object.37 The photograph had already appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1961 where Peter must have seen it, and perhaps clipped it for future use. Copyright belonged to the photographer, but Peter never did seek permission to use it.38
After Harry Bruce had quit Maclean’s in September 1964, he was appointed managing editor of Saturday Night. Almost immediately, Bruce hired Peter as the magazine’s sport columnist. In the November issue, Peter gave seven reasons for scrapping the Olympics, including the fact that professionals were excluded, as were hundreds of millions of Chinese. To replace the Olympics, Peter suggested annual world tournaments focusing on specific sports.
In April 1965, Peter expressed his distain for professional boxing. In fact, he believed that Cassius Clay, the world champion, was “a publicist first and a fighter second,” a premature judgment that he later modified. His sports column in May was a review of several books on horse racing — Trent Frayne’s history of the Queen’s Plate, published in 1959; Bert Clark Thayer’s The Thoroughbred; and a collection of articles called The Fireside Book of Horse Racing. In June 1965, Peter was vexed because Sports Illustrated had refused to take a stand on the colour barrier that kept qualified “Negroes” from competing in the annual Masters Golf Tournament at Augusta, Georgia, an objection that was probably ahead of its time in sports journalism. In July he turned to soccer, which he had already written about in Maclean’s two years earlier, and in much the same manner. He liked the “mosaic” quality of the game. In Toronto the most predominant flavour, Peter deemed, was Italian. In August he wrote about Bill Crothers’s victory at the Toronto International Track Meet over Peter Snell, his greatest rival in the half-mile run. And in September 1965, the sports columnist was back to golf when he wrote about the Canadian Open of that year, starring Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, “golf’s most exciting twosome.” October found Peter arguing that “baseball is just as Canadian a sport as, say, golf.” He even threw out the possibility that baseball was the only game played from Atlantic to Pacific in Canada.39
In November 1965, Peter’s sports column for Saturday Night presented Barbara Long, a sultry twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker, whom Peter called “the most interesting sportswriter to appear on the scene in some time.” She wrote for The Village Voice. Peter liked Long’s “loose and easy” style of writing, and the fact that she always appeared to enjoy her subject matter. “She writes with a kind of cool,” Peter explained, “that lets the essential humour of most sports shine through.” She loved describing sexy male athletes. Long also wrote about a pool hustler, Nine-Ball Mike, for whom the game was “his whole identity, and he had to play every day.” Peter’s article was accompanied by a beguiling photograph of Long. He had never met the woman in person, but he seems to have fallen in love with her photograph, and with her “nice laugh” when he interviewed her during a one-hour telephone conversation. In the article, Peter mentioned Norman Mailer, whose piece on the first Sonny Liston– Floyd Patterson fight had influenced Long. Peter also referred to Tom Wolfe, who once observed that Long’s style was “a cross between H.L. Mencken and William Burroughs.”40 Peter concluded the article with the hope that he could convince Barbara Long to attend a hockey game, presumably in company with the sportswriter of Saturday Night.41
In January 1966, Peter wrote about the creation of a new trophy, the Vanier Cup, named after Governor General Georges Vanier. College football, too long ignored, according to Peter, would now gain a greater following.42 In February, Peter was back to heavyweight boxing, which was becoming “more and more ludicrous.”