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.