In Praise of Pests

Watching the Montréal game this weekend, I spent a good part of the game both laughing and swearing at my computer screen, mostly at the play of P.K. Subban. Subban is a somewhat controversial figure in the NHL. Since his debut in 2010, including a strong playoff performance in which the defenseman scored 8 points in 14 games, Subban has been both praised for his energetic play and offensive ability and denounced for defensive irresponsibility, diving, and overweening cockiness. Race undoubtedly plays a role in Subban’s love-him-and-hate-him image—Subban is black in a sport that still markets itself largely to a working-class white demographic—but Subban’s play also puts him squarely in that category of player reviled across the league but indispensable for most teams’ rosters: the pest. I love pests.

Pests are the players who try to goad other players into making stupid decisions—whether a bad play or a bad penalty. The pest's techniques are wide and varied, and range from not-quite-legal actions behind the play (little slashes, cross-checks, face-washes, etc.) to mostly-legal insults and taunts between whistles. Pests are not enforcers; their job is not to fight, though they sometimes do. The point is to get the other player to sit for 2 minutes in the penalty box while the pest skates off to pester another shift, not to trade penalties by engaging in fisticuffs. Neither are pests, strictly speaking, goons. Goons are out there to hurt people, to take players out of the game and to intimidate the rest. A pest that isn’t doing his job can slide into being a goon—see, for instance, Matt Cooke’s play in previous seasons. Because of their often reckless and irresponsible play, goons are a liability on the ice. A good pest isn’t. In fact, the best pests are capable of putting up solid offensive numbers while aggravating the hell out of the other team (see, e.g., Claude Lemieux). Nothing rubs salt in the wound quite like having the guy who’s been chirping at your team all night also score an important goal.

In my academic work, which focuses largely on religious poetry, I have always been drawn to the satanic characters: Marlowe’s Mephistophilis, Shakespeare’s Iago, Milton’s Satan, etc. What I love about these characters is that they create chaos. Their job in the story is take a stable structure and to turn it on its head, to insert chance and contingency into fate so that the unexpected becomes possible. In this sense, they are very much the anti-heroes, the antagonists to the heroic narrative-builders I mentioned a previous post. As much as they seek to tear apart the structures that make the world of a story coherent, they are nevertheless necessary because they introduce uncertainty to the plot. This is the reason why artists have long been drawn to the devil, why Blake’s Satan once mused that a “true poet” is “of the devil’s party”: these figures introduce creativity to the world—they make it possible for a story to end more than one way. They do this not so much by breaking rules (though this is usually the root of their transgression) but by constructing a different set of rules that conflicts with those that govern the world they live in. The Satan-figure thinks the world should be different from what it is, and consequently he always sees the world differently.

The allure of the pest is, for me, much the same. Pests can be game-changers because they operate according to a slightly different set of rules than the players around them. I’m referring less here to the official rules of the game than to the unofficial “code” that governs player behavior. Breaking the official rules can be amusing—I can’t help but laugh when a player gets away with a convincing dive and draws a penalty—but it can also mean wandering into goon territory, and that’s too dangerous to be funny. The hockey “code,” on the other hand, is less about avoiding injury and more about playing in a suitably “manly” fashion. Force is acceptable, but never guile. Taking a man out of the play by slamming your body into his is good, clean, hard work—as long as the other guy had the opportunity to see the hit coming. Sneaky little trips or stick-grabs, however, are considered dirty: these mean getting ahead not by hard physical work, but by subterfuge, by clever plays that the ref can’t quite see. Someone who plays by the “code” knows that enforcers don’t fight elite scorers (that is, you’re supposed to pick on someone your own size, or at least in your own pay-grade), and a man who picks a fight is expected to finish that fight. All of this is framed, at least negatively, in terms of masculinity. The player who dives is a “bitch.” A player who annoys but won’t fight is a “pussy.”

The joy of the pest is that he doesn’t care about the code. One of my favorite examples of legal pestering from the last two decades was Esa Tikkanen throwing kisses at opposing players during the 1994 playoffs. Not only was it a bizarre and hilarious thing to do, but watching players land in the box over their latent homophobia seemed a bit like justice. Sean Avery is another good example. A man who defies gender stereotypes and an advocate for gay rights off the ice, Avery on the ice doesn’t seem to care whether he lives up to hockey’s standard of manliness, whether he’s diving artfully or picking a fight only to do his best impression of a ragdoll. (Unsurprisingly, as I’m writing this during the Pens-Rangers game, someone on my Twitter feed has called him a “little bitch.”) Avery’s ability to rewrite the rules reached nearly sublime heights in the 2008 playoffs, when it occurred to him that there was no rule preventing him from standing in front of the goaltender, facing him, and waving his stick in the air as a distraction (it worked, too). That no NHL player before Avery had thought to do this is a testament to the power of the hockey code; that Avery was creative enough to think around that code and pester the New Jersey Devils into submission (the Rangers eliminated the Devils from the playoffs in 5 games) is a testament to the game-changing power of the pest.

What these players bring to the game for spectators is unpredictability. Because they don’t see the rules the way everyone else does, there’s always the possibility that they’ll do something no one has seen before. As a fan, I find this exciting and often pretty amusing. It’s not that I have a problem with the hockey “code,” or with the rules of the game—without rules, it wouldn’t really be a game—but I appreciate those players who are willing to think and play a little bit differently, who make the game surprising through a little bit of devilry.

On Teamwork

My mother came to visit for Thanksgiving, which meant that Wednesday night I was out at dinner instead of watching the first two periods of the Pens' game. I made up for my truancy by dragging my mom and husband to a nearby sports bar after dinner to watch the third period (which, as it turns out, was the only period worth watching, anyway). My mother was a good sport about it (as she is about most things), but her tone was only half-amused when she asked, "What is it with you and hockey?" It's a good question--one I've asked myself quite a few times (usually when failing to do my research during the playoffs). I don't think there's just one answer.

My mom told me that I've always like hockey, but I'm pretty sure that isn't true. I can trace the obsession back fairly far: the Canucks' cinderella-run to the finals in 1994 brought me to the NHL (along with Pavel Bure's jaw-dropping speed and Adonis face), but before that I remember watching St. Dom's high school win the state championship (also in '94), the U-Maine Black Bears winning their first-ever national title in '93, and a year before that that the first Mighty Ducks movie. It was a series of compelling stories that gripped me in my early adolescence; like the song that was always on the radio that one great summer in college, such things seem to become a part of us, grafted into us during our growing years, and they seem inevitably to become life-long objects of affection. 

But I can remember a moment before that, too, one that had nothing to do with a good story. And I think this was the moment I became a hockey fan. I know it was not the first hockey game I'd ever been to, but it was the first I remember. My father would sometimes take me to see pee-wee games (I think the son of a friend of his played), and one evening when I was around 9 my father's old high school team was scheduled to play after the kids had left the ice. I don't think we even stayed for the whole game, but that didn't matter. What mattered, weirdly enough, was the pre-game warm-up. The away team came out first, I assume, though I don't remember much about them. But then the home team, the St. Dom's Saints, came barreling out of the tunnel--this is what I remember. They were led by their goalie, who was a pretty big dude already, made bigger by the oversized mask and pads. To my nine-year-old eyes, the man was a colossus. And he moved fast. The rest of the team followed like they'd been shot from a cannon.

What hockey I'd seen before that evening was either played by young kids or played on TV; this was the first time I'd been present to see near-adults take the ice, and I was in awe. Men that big should not be able to move that fast, and yet they flew around their net effortlessly, a combination of power and grace that my young self had never seen before. And then, suddenly, these giants stopped as one, reversed their direction, and began skating the circle backwards. It wasn't the skating that amazed me; it was that they did everything in perfect unison. In a few years, I'd know that there was nothing astonishing or unusual here--this was a typical warm-up, and of course skating backwards in a circle with the team is not exactly an exotic skill for a hockey player. But nine-year-old-me was floored. The speed and size of the players had impressed me enough, but when they all changed direction at once, I felt like I was watching an inexorable force. If each individual seemed larger than life, the unity of their action made them almost god-like in my eyes.

My last post talked about the value of the hero, the story of the "one great man." And this is half the allure a sport like hockey has. But, as all of its heroes are quick to point out, hockey is a team sport. Though a star can sometimes put a team on his back and lift them, no star alone is enough to create a winning record (just ask Rick Nash). Ultimately it's teams, not heroes, that win championships. Part of the beauty of hockey is the beauty of cooperation, of seeing 20 people pulling together in the same direction to achieve a goal none of them could reach individually. In a game like hockey, where despite positional differences everyone is expected to play both sides of the puck, this cooperation is not the machine-like efficiency of the assembly line--you do your job, I do mine. Instead, a "team effort" on the ice means that everyone is chipping in to do whatever needs to be done given the circumstances, whether it's a forward getting in behind their sprawling goaltender to make a save, a defenseman joining the rush up ice to create some offense, or the whole team, when the opposing net is empty, working to dish the puck to the one guy who's struggling to score. Some aspects of this are, I think, politically relevant and interesting, and I may get into that later; and there's also a lot more to be said about the particular kind of teamwork we see in hockey, which privileges improvisation and creativity more, I think, than in some other sports. But the point for now is simply that the other side to the narrative aspects of the sport--to the drama of individual heroics--is a game that is not based in individual story-lines but in relationships on the ice, on the constellation of individuals who are working together by working for each other. This is the side of hockey that made its first impression on me as I watched that group of young men come on to the ice as a team, and it's what first made me fall in love with the game; it was the first time I realized how much bigger people could become by acting together. 

I Sing of Pucks and a Man

I had originally planned that my first several blog posts would cover my early experiences of watching hockey--when, how, and why I fell in love with the game. But then on Sunday afternoon the announcement came that Sidney Crosby was returning to the Penguins' line-up after a 10 month absence due to a concussion (or more likely a couple of concussions) sustained in January of 2011. For hockey fans, and particularly for Penguins fans, this was like a surprise holiday. On Twitter and in the blogosphere, people were calling it "Sidmas." And on Monday night Sid made his return to professional hockey the way his fans (and probably some of his enemies) knew he would but couldn't dare to hope for, scoring 2 goals and putting up 2 assists in front of an ecstatic crowd at the Consol arena.

In the words of Milton's Eve, "such wonder claims attention due."

I was at a local bar with some friends to watch the game. When Crosby came out flying in his first shift, the whole bar just seemed to know that we were going to see great things from the team's captain. But I was nevertheless surprised, when Sid scored his first goal a little over 5 minutes into the game, that I started weeping for joy. I do not cry easily, and still less when I'm in company. So the strength of the emotion Crosby's performance provoked in me caught me off guard. This is just a hockey game, I thought; Sid's great, but he's just a hockey player. Why am I making a fool of myself in public over this?

The fact is that Sid is, in several senses, a hero, and a hero is never just anything. Heroes in the ancient world were demi-gods--sons of mortals sired by or conceived within a divine parent. Ancient heroes thus in a very real sense compass two worlds. Like the rest of us mortals, they have to toil in the dust and dirt; they bleed, they hurt, and sometimes they even lose. But their divine parentage marks them as something more than just mortal. A hero, blessed by a god, participates in something bigger than daily existence, and this gives him meaning, even if he's fighting a senseless war or just trying to get home. He is evidence of a world beyond this one, of divine intentions that guarantee the coherence (if not always the benevolence) of mortal existence.

The world of sports is particularly conducive to the story of the hero, if only because the very best athletes seem also to span two worlds: they use mortal means to achieve things that seem beyond the capabilities of mere mortals. Part of the allure of the sports hero is that we are aware of the extent to which he is self-made--we can see that he had to work for what he has. No one is born with the ability to win face-offs or score on a spinning backhand: these are skills that can only be acquired with practice, and a lot of it. Part of what makes Crosby such an appealing player is his intense work ethic. When he misses a shot in a game, the next practice he will stay late to work on that shot again and again, until he gets it right. When he identifies a weakness in his game, like his face-off performance during the first few years of his career, he spends a summer working on that weakness, turning it into a strength. But the result of his very human efforts is a level of ability that is beyond human. We admire Crosby because he works through all the limitations of mortality to achieve his sublime results. His skill is not acquired through magic; but the skill itself seems magical.

In a more modern sense, a hero is also (to quote the Oxford English Dictionary) "he in whom the interest of the story or plot is centred." A hero is someone who carries a narrative, someone around whom the events order themselves to produce something coherent, structured, and motivated. Crosby doesn't just give us big goals or big wins; he gives us big stories, narratives that seem so perfect that they had to have been written in advance. When Crosby scored the "Golden Goal" to lift Team Canada over the United States in the gold-medal game of the 2010 Winter Olympics--in overtime, of course--the big story was how good a story Crosby had made for us, how perfect an ending he had written. Steve Yzerman said of him afterwards, "He's got a little destiny to him."

In this destiny, the quasi-divine aspects of ancient hero converge with the modern world. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Iris Murdoch talks about the "dissimilar demands" that life places on us, the various conflicts we face that seemingly have no resolution, and she notes that

We tend to feel that these dissimilar demands and states of mind must somehow connect, there must be a deep connection, it must all somehow make a unified sense; this is a religious craving, God sees it all.

Within the perspective of human existence, we are confronted daily with discrete moments that do not appear to add up to a larger whole, to a continuous narrative that makes sense of life. As narrative-making creatures--this is, I think, a big part of what it means to be human--this incongruity is deeply unsettling, and creates an emotional need for something beyond ourselves--what Murdoch calls a "religious craving," and what may often manifest itself in religion, though not necessarily so. In the man with a destiny--in the hero--we get a vision of the world that does "make a unified sense," one in which we can almost believe that there is some meaning to be found in the world beyond our own, limited, mortal perspectives.  The hero does not necessarily make us believe in God; but he fulfills the "craving" for a unity, the desire for the world to make sense, even if we can't see it.

When Sid came back--after all set-backs, after all the rumors about retirement, after all the speculation about what kind of player he could even be after such an injury and such a long time off--when he came back and played like he'd never missed a beat, the coherence of his narrative was restored, and with it some sense of order in the universe. It doesn't matter that Crosby is "just a hockey player," or that he is "only" playing a game. That game, and his way of playing it like it means something, speaks to a larger human need--for meaning, for stories, for some things in life to work out the way it seems they should. The stars aligned for us fans last night, and for a time all the uncertainties we face, all the incongruities, conflicts, and dissimilar demands of our lives, all of these faded before the certainty of Sidney Crosby's destiny. When he scored that first goal, the world made sense.

Guilty Pleasures

Hockey has, for a long time now, been my guilty pleasure. As with most guilty pleasures, the emphasis falls heavily on the "pleasure" end of the equation, with the word "guilty" mostly just serving to indemnify my interest against justifiable criticism. I don't hide my love of hockey. My office on campus has hockey posters hanging in it. I talk with our department secretaries and my students about the Penguins regularly. I think part of the reason I got my current job was that I was able to carry on a cogent conversation about Sidney Crosby (clearly, I really did want to live in Pittsburgh). So I have never been a "closeted" hockey fan; my interest (more accurately, my fanaticism) is well known, and I don't generally feel the need to hide it.

But I was raised Catholic, and the one part of that upbringing I embraced more than anything was the guilt. The word "guilty" in "guilty pleasure" is for me only mostly a joke. When I take the 2 1/2 - 3 hours to watch a hockey game, or spend my mornings reading over the hockey news, I can't help but feel like I'm "wasting" time when I should be doing something more productive or meaningful--reading, grading, preparing for class, researching my next project, etc. Part of this is just what it means to be an academic (we get a lot of "free" time--that is, time when we aren't required to be in a specific place engaging in a specific task--but that's also our work time; eventually we start to feel like all "free" time should be spent working). But part of it is also a sense that hockey isn't a "worthy" thing to spend time on--that it's ultimately meaningless, or, even worse, actually pernicious, a vehicle for corporate agendas and militaristic ideologies. And when we're talking about the NHL, where minimum wage is $500k and players are paid as much as $10 million a year (I'm looking at you, Kovalchuk), it's hard not to say that the league represents, or is at least a part of, what the 99% are protesting against--rightly--right now in cities across the world. This isn't something I can defend--it's not something I should try to defend. And I can't deny that I'd probably get more work done if I watched less hockey. It is thus a source of guilt.


But I also think that there's something to be said for loving something--pretty much anything--intensely without regard for whether it has some larger meaning. Recently, I was rereading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters for a course I'm teaching, and I came across this passage:

The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.

The speaker here is Screwtape, a demon, who is instructing his nephew how best to corrupt human souls. I don't believe in the devil, but I do believe in what the devil means. Part of human good has to be our capacity for enjoyment, for love, for appreciation. And that, it seems to me, must mean that there is something inherently worthwhile in acts of pure enjoyment, regardless of the significance of the thing being enjoyed. To paraphrase (and take a couple of liberties with) Oscar Wilde, if we are going to care about something useless, then we should care about it intensely. It is maybe the pleasure I take in watching hockey that can redeem the guilt.

So this blog is my confession. In part, I mean this in the Catholic sense--to confess is to seek absolution, relief from guilt. But I also mean this word in its older sense. The Latin root of "confess" is the verb fateri--to acknowledge, own, or manifest. This is a particular kind of speech that doesn't just communicate but declares, in order to transform what is declared from an inner reality into a reality in the world at large. To confess my love of hockey here means to intensify it, to make it more real, to "own" it. Instead of spending less time on this "meaningless" pursuit, I'm going to spend more, and see what happens. I want to see if a labor of love can turn a "guilty pleasure" into a different kind of pleasure, and to see if loving a thing enough can make that thing worth loving.

This blog is part thought-experiment, part love-letter to the most irrational love I have in life.