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.
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