I wasn’t surprised when Alpo Suhonen called me one fall morning two years ago, He often called me to talk about his new ideas – and there were a lot of them.
I was stunned, though, when he asked me if I’d be interested in writing his biography. After all, I had been the one who’d been urging him to write one for years, ever since I first heard his fantastic, and fantastical, stories while working on another book with him almost ten years ago. We were supposed to be working on his philosophy of coaching, but more than once or twice, I realized I was listening to Alpo tell me about his adventures, the places he’d been to, and the people he’d met. (The list is long and you’d know all the names, but let me just say “David Bowie”).
By then, we had also finished another book – on Markku Kanerva, the Finland football manager – and I knew Alpo was working on his next one about performing and sports. It’ll bring together everything he knows about hockey, theatre, and philosophy, especially phenomenology.
I thought I knew what I was getting into. After all, to me, he has been a central figure in Finnish hockey for as long as I can remember. I was in the stands when Team Finland won the 1978 European Championship after a 6-5 OT win over the Soviets, with a fresh-faced, 32-year-old Alpo behind the Finnish bench. I remembered how he stepped down as the Team Finland head coach in 1986, and immediately became a pariah (for life) in some Finnish hockey circles, and how I, in 2003, told a reporter I was a disciple of the Alpo Suhonen school of thought.
She didn’t ask me to explain it, or to elaborate. We both knew what I meant.
Alpo’s world is humane, creative, anti-autocratic, and anti-violence. (He famously opted for a non-military service in Finland where most men serve in the military).
I also knew Alpo had saved everything, from old posters to poems to old game notes. There was going to be a lot of material for me to work with.
I said yes.
I knew Alpo’s reputation had gone from wunderkind to rebel in Finland, and I also knew he felt mistreated by the Finnish hockey circles, and justifiably so. He had been called names for most of his career – “communist” being a favourite – and even his rise to the top of the hockey world as the first European head coach in the National Hockey League was pooh-poohed as stroke of luck, a favour by a friend, disregarding the fact that Alpo’s first visit to an NHL training camp had been in 1982 – almost twenty years before he was named the head coach of the Chicago Blackhawks, which made him an overnight sensation thirty years in the making.
Also, he liked red wine. No real hockey person drinks red wine. That’s for sissies, and actors. Didn’t he also like jazz and the theatre? Weird.
With all that, I got to work, with a singular goal in mind.
“Don’t mess this up.”
At first, I tried to find a clever way to tell the story, something wild and crazy, but then I decided that the best way to tell Alpo’s story was just to tell his story, not try to be too fancy. I wanted to show everybody what I knew. That Alpo was a 60s kid, that he had found his worldview at a very young age, that he was a sensitive man with a poet’s soul, that his hockey accomplishments were remarkable, that he was underrated as a hockey mind, that he had been ahead of his time for decades, that he’s well read, and that he’s been consistently searching the meaning of life since he read Sartre as a teenager.
Last year, I drove to Alpo’s apartment and loaded three large plastic boxes into my car. Alpo had gone through his extensive archives and chosen the items in the boxes for me to use. There were diaries, journals, press credentials, photos, memos, even the official order to report to his non-military service. I read the Jack London book Alpo had read as a kid, I tried to learn Samuel Beckett, I listened to jazz, I read Sartre, I even read Fernando Pessoa, Alpo’s favourite poet.
I didn’t show anything to Alpo until I had written a full manuscript.
I didn’t tell him I had found poems he had written in the 1980s, I didn’t tell about all my interviewees as I sat with his former players, colleagues, bosses, partners, and friends, listening to their stories about their lives with Alpo. I did dozens of interviews with people close to him, and we spoke dozens of hours about his life and career. I laughed, I cried.
One person said Maya Angelou’s poem about people never forgetting how others made them feel made him think of Alpo. Another called him generous, while a third told long anecdotes about their wild lives as young men. Some friends admitted that they didn’t quite understand his philosophical thoughts, others second-guessed some of his career choices, but they all agreed that he was one of a kind.
Writing about another person, diving into someone else’s life can be scary, but I hadn’t thought much about what it would like for me to jump into Alpo’s life and I still can’t believe the level of trust Alpo showed me.
I also hadn’t really considered what it would be like for Alpo to re-live his life’s key events, or worry about the same old criticism to return. When I sent him the manuscript, he posted a photo of it on Facebook, with the note saying, “Not sure I have the courage to read it.”
It wasn’t a joke.
I’m pleased with and proud of the book. There’s no way a 300-page book can contain anyone’s life, let alone Alpo’s, but from what I’ve heard from readers, they now understand him.
That’s all I wanted.
For Alpo.