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.