Suffocated by Hockey–and Loving It

Sports Saturday

 As two championship-starved hockey-rich cities prepare to square off in the Stanley Cup finals (Chicago and Philadelphia), Ljubljana English Department’s Jason Blake once again reflects upon the meaning of hockey for Canadians—and upon the omnipresence of stereotypes about Canadians playing hockey.  While he was distraught at seeing the last Canadian team (the Montreal Canadiens or “les Habs”) bounced from the playoffs by the Philadelphia Flyers, he took consolation in the fact that Philadelphia actually has more Canadian players, and definitely more Francophone players, than Montreal.  As Jason noted in an e-mail to me, he likes how, in the National Hockey League, you can never tell where someone is from—such as “all those New Englanders with French names.”

Jason writing about hockey reminds me somewhat of James Joyce writing about Ireland.  He feels both suffocated and defined by it.  Stereotypes that others have about Canadians playing hockey can be aggravating except in those occasional situations where they are comforting.  Jason finds it refreshing to encounter American stories about discovering hockey since, in Canada, hockey isn’t discovered—it is the air everyone breathes.  Or as one commentator quoted by Jason notes, “every Canadian male has played hockey at some age or ends up believing he has.”  You can read more of Jason’s writings about hockey in his new book, Canadian Hockey Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2010).

By Jason Blake, Dept. of English, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

When this post goes live early Saturday morning, I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic, heading home to Toronto before bussing it to an academic hockey conference in Buffalo, New York. There I will listen to papers with titles like “Hockey, Beer, Opera and Cross-Dressing: A Perfectly Normal Representation of Canadian Masculinity” and “Checking In: An Analysis of the (Lack of) Body Checking in Women’s Hockey.”

I will also eat Buffalo chicken wings. Not because it’s what you’re supposed to do there, not because Obama famously did it a few weeks ago, and not at all because I’m trying to make some wry, unfunny joke about the city. I haven’t had chicken wings in years, and this trip simply reminded me that I should eat some while I have the chance.

Before I write about stereotypes and hockey, here’s a recent scrap of kitchen dialogue:

(Me) “By the way, I finally bought my plane ticket to Toronto.”
(My Wife) “You never told me you were going to Toronto.”
“Huh?”
“You never said a word about Toronto.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.”
“But I’ve been talking about this hockey conference non-stop for three months…”
“Conference, yes. Toronto, no.”
“But the conference is in Buffalo…”
“I know.”

If you’ve forgotten that Buffalo is right on the border and that Toronto is the most convenient big airport in the area, you’re probably as confused as I was for about thirty seconds. “Isn’t it obvious that you fly to Toronto?” is what I was thinking. “Why fly to another country to get to the States?” is what she was thinking.

My bus ride to New York State makes economic sense, though it will lack the pizzazz of the journey portrayed in Steve Lundin’s 2004 When She’s Gone. In that rollicking hockey novel, two Canadian brothers fly to Scotland and travel by canoe (goalie equipment in tow) to Wales for a tryout in Cardiff. They have to portage through London. The title refers to the death of the narrator’s mother and, less directly, to the departure of the Winnipeg Jets for Phoenix.

The young narrator is full of feisty opinions, as we see when he reflects on the Anaheim Might Ducks – calling them “the final humiliation of Canada’s game, the theft of our myth nearly as horrendous as some Canadian blathering on about baseball.” This line is comical because anybody can blather about baseball.  Canadian writers like Paul Quarrington (who died too young this January) and W.P. Kinsella have blathered on quite successfully in classics such as The Life of Hope and Shoeless Joe.

Quarrington’s King Leary revolves around an octogenarian sometime hockey star with an enormous ego. At one point the ancient Leary listens in horror to an American professor analyzing hockey, treading on his turf so to speak: “And the lad from Minn. starts talking about the origins of hockey. . . . I figured it was just always there, like the moon.” Leary has some sort of national pride, plenty of ego, but little capacity for reflection on the game that makes up his entire buffoonish Canadian identity.

Jeff Klein and Karl-Eric Reif, authors of The Death of Hockey: Or How a Bunch of Guys with Too Much Money and Too Little Sense Are Killing the Greatest Game on Earth, grew up in Buffalo. Despite the city’s admirable hockey tradition, the authors remember exactly when and where they fell in love with the game. If you are Canadian, they argue, “you probably don’t remember the first time you became aware of the game” because “in Canada, the game is always there. It’s in the family, it’s in the culture, it’s in the air.” In our individual histories, it is time out of mind. In the words of International Pen Club president John Ralston Saul, “every Canadian male has played hockey at some age or ends up believing he has.”

This minor delusion is great for myth-making in a myth-poor country, but on the individual level it devalues the game. It is too easy to like hockey if you’re Canadian. You don’t really come to the game so much as it comes to you. There is no choice in the matter if dad makes you play; the omnipresent advertisements telling you that a good Canadian plays hockey must have an effect. Of the non-fans, some, I’m sure, build up a tolerance for it. The rest must have a devil of a time dodging references.

Consider this counter-example from a country where hockey is not always front and center.  In his forward to Breaking the Ice: The Black Experience in Professional Hockey, Cecil Harris describes hockey as “a singular pleasure” in the “predominantly black neighborhood” of his Brooklyn childhood: “There was nowhere for me to learn to play, nowhere to skate, no one to accompany me to a game, no one with whom I could talk hockey.”

Back in Toronto, I often wished many would shut up about hockey. I would be very pleased if it were not always front-page news. Because he had to work at his affinity, Harris showed true sporting dedication – perhaps even eccentricity, that most admirable of human traits.

Here in Slovenia, talking hockey is richer because it is rarer, a little like finding a fellow Esperanto-speaker. When I bought some Canadian dollars at the bank last week, the teller immediately starting gabbing about the Habs’ victory the night before. I’d never had that teller. In Canada, this mini-conversation would not be anything special – and journalist Robert Fulford nails it when he writes, “should you fail to have achieved fluency [in sportstalk] you must nevertheless attempt to stammer through at least a few sentences.” In Celje, Slovenia, the fact that two strangers had both watched the Hockey Night in Canada feed on ESPN was special and not empty masculine banter. (The less enlightened European hockey fans might have been watching the World Championships.)

Brian Kennedy, author of Growing Up Hockey: The Life and Times of Everyone Who Ever Loved the Game, is, like me, a displaced Canadian. He says he knows fandom does not require having played the game, but he thinks real fans should have played the game themselves (even if only road hockey, or in the schoolyard). His litmus question in sunny California, where he lives and teaches, is whether his interlocutor can skate: “To ask the American fan if he (assuming most are guys) ever played is like him asking me if I did – we’re both working on a stereotype that assumes the other’s identity before the fact.”  Just like that guy at the bank who leapt into conversation about the Canadiens just because I wanted some Canadian dollars.

It so happens, of course, that I like hockey, and the banker and I connected. This connection, however, was also a bit discomforting because it was based on a stereotype. As an English-speaking white, I cannot seriously moan about being pre-judged (if anything, English-speakers are treated better than the locals in Slovenia; come and judge for yourself).  And yet I still felt like a walking caricature.  For the length of that brief and enjoyable conversation, I was a Celine-Dion-crooning, maple syrup-guzzling Mountie, stammering out a few sentences in Slovene and enjoying every minute of it.  Had I been buying American dollars, this would not have transpired.

When I’m at the “Hockey on the Border” conference, I plan to ask the American experts some questions. How do they feel about Canadians prattling on about hockey as if we own the game? Canadians complain, with much justification, about the seeming impossibility of getting another NHL team, and the loss of the Quebec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets. But what about the Hartford Whalers and the Minnesota North Stars? Don’t those surroundings have rich hockey traditions? In the reams of hockey fiction I’ve read, there was no mention of those teams. It may seem incongruous to have teams in Florida or anywhere you can’t skate outside, but which NHL city could promise natural ice for the Stanley Cup in June? Does it matter if it’s easier to pretend it gets really cold?

In The Gift of the Game: A Father, a Son, and the Wisdom of Hockey, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Tom Allen, exceptionally, watches his son’s team practice outdoors: “there, in the midst of the largest urban sprawl in the country, we were giving our children what we’d all been told was the true Canadian hockey experience.” The “we’d all been told” suggests that Allen himself grew up playing indoors. The first time I played on a pond was here in Slovenia. Does that count as a Canadian moment? Does a player from New England or Michigan or Minnesota have to dwell on such inanities?