Waiting for the Quails to Come

Last weekend, the Pens played two games. Both games were sloppy (which is troubling in its own right), but in the first, the team played with some passion against their longest-standing rivals and won; in the other, it looked like the cast of Night of the Living Dead had taken the ice. Zombies make surprisingly bad hockey players, as it turns out, and the Pens lost to a team in last place in the conference. Watching my team lose is always aggravating. It doesn't matter how much I yell at the the TV, how many times I counsel the coaching staff telepathically to "Bench Martin!" (counsel I have since rethought after seeing Tuesday's game), or how much I want the men on the team to start playing like they adults instead of petulant little boys. Nothing I can do, sitting in my living room, is going to jumpstart my team (lucky jerseys and superstitious rituals aside). This is, I think, the most frustrating aspect of fan-dom in any sport. It's difficult enough to watch the team you've placed your hopes in, the team whose players you've come to "know" (in that sense that celebrities are "known") and care about, the team you know can succeed if it would just get its shit together--it's hard to watch these people fail. But the real kick in the teeth is the utter helplessness of it all. When I consider the situation rationally, it seems absurd that I would place my happiness--even if just for an evening--in forces that are so completely beyond my control. At such moments, I seriously question why I put myself through this season after season, instead of spending that time and energy on the things I can control.

To an extent, the situation reminds me of Samuel Johnson's 1750 essay in the Rambler, sometimes titled "On Spring." Here he extolls the wisdom of a friend who placed all his hope in the advent of Spring: "if his health was impaired, the spring would restore it; if what he wanted was at a high price, it would fall in value in the spring." Noting that "spring, indeed, did often come without any of these effects," Johnson nevertheless felt that this "friend" had found a rather fortunate way to navigate the pitfalls of hope and desire, arguing that

It is lucky for a man... when he turns his hopes upon things wholly out of his own power; since he forbears then to precipitate his affairs, for the sake of the great event that is to complete his felicity, and waits for the blissful hour, with less neglect of the measures necessary to be taken in the mean time.

The claim here is that a man who places his hope in something out of his control will be happier because he won't make the mistake of trying to work towards the thing he hopes for--a course of action that, as Johnson says in his poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes," always leads us into the "snares" of "the clouded maze of fate." Johnson was generally a pessimist when it came to human happiness; he argued more than once that, while hope is an inevitable human emotion, it will just as inevitably lead to disappointment in every case. Our best course of action is palliative--we contain hope and its destructive potential by putting it somewhere where it won't do any harm. By placing our hopes in things beyond our control, we simply live our lives with an eye to the present, taking care of what we need to do and not worrying about whether our "spring" will come.

As much as I detest the pessimism of this, Johnson's argument isn't, I think, without merit. On game days, it's maybe a bit easier for me do my work without worrying about whether it's making me happy or not, simply because I'm looking forward to that evening. And, like the Spring Johnson's friend hopes for, the cyclical nature of the hockey season means that, even if one game passes without the outcome I'm looking for, there's always another game to look forward to, or another season. In that sense, by being a fan, I give myself something to look forward to at all times that isn't dependent upon the vicissitudes of my own life. On bad days--those days when I fuck up everything I can control, or when everything else I can't is going against me--having a game to look forward to gets me through.

But Johnson's friend always managed find happiness in Spring in part because Spring never really existed in the present for him: "he always talked of the spring as coming till it was past, and when it was once past, everyone agreed with him that it was coming." The same is not true for games, and ultimately Johnson's ideas about placing hope in "things wholly out of [our] own power" don't account for the kind of soul-crushing anger that, for instance, led some Vancouver fans to riot last Spring. For them, the fact that a new season was coming after the Canucks lost in game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals--the most devastating defeat a hockey fan can experience, I think--really didn't matter, because the frustration of the loss was, at the moment, too consuming. I can't talk about a game "as coming till it [is] past": the game itself is an event that I experience as it is happening, and my happiness or frustration at the outcome is likewise experienced in the present, not as something already gone by. And given how destructive a bad result can be--I've never rioted, but I've certainly found myself too angry to work for an evening or even sometimes for the next day--Johnson's formula seems like it can only work if we can ignore the hoped-for event when it actually arrives, in order to cast its arrival perpetually into the future. This constant deferral of hope also means a constant deferral of happiness--and for Johnson the pessimist, that's the point, since in his account looking for happiness is a long wait for a train that doesn't come. But any fan who has watched her team win the big game will tell you happiness is not some illusory phantom; the joy of seeing our team win is why we watch. The frustration is the cost of that joy. But that means that the game can't be just a safe receptacle for a potentially destructive desire; the game is more likely to engender those destructive emotions than contain them. And so it seems like, in placing our happiness is something "wholly out of [our] control," we're leaving an awful to chance.

But it may be that this leaving things to chance is exactly the allure of fanship in the first place. In Robert Browning's poem "Caliban upon Setebos," Caliban reflects that both joy and grief "derive from weakness in some way":

I joy because the quails come; would not joy

Could I bring quails here when I have a mind[.]

I'm only slightly less reluctant to espouse Caliban's worldview than Johnson's, but Caliban nevertheless makes an interesting point here. Absolute control is also, Caliban theorizes, absolute impassibility: the divinity that does "all it hath a mind to" "feels nor joy nor grief." The ability to feel joy or pain at all relies upon our limitedness, on the fact that there are things beyond our control. And this makes sense. When I achieve something, it makes me happy not just because I achieved it, but because it wasn't inevitable that I would achieve it--it had to be possible for me to fail in order for it to have been an achievement at all. In this sense, when I talk about focusing on those aspects of my life over which I have control in order to be happy, I'm really only talking about things over which I have some control. It's really the contingency of the outcome that makes its achievement a source of joy or pain. And if that's the case, then placing my hopes in something that is entirely beyond my control starts to make a kind of sense. If the condition of human happiness is human limitedness, then the experience of watching the game desiring a specific outcome but with no ability to effect that outcome is the experience of the condition of happiness in its most emphatic form. I imagine it's the same feeling that attracts people to gambling on slots or horses. In cases when we feel like we have control over an outcome, when we achieve something, we get to feel like we've overcome contingency, which is a powerful feeling--or rather, a feeling of our own power. But in those situations in which we have no control, when something we desire happens despite our lack of control over it, we get the opposite feeling--the sense of our own powerlessness. But when it all comes out all right, that powerlessness feels like a good thing. Our biggest vulnerability suddenly feels like an asset. 

Investing emotionally in the outcome of a game I'm not playing is a way to experience the limits of my control as pleasurable--at least sometimes. When the Pens pull out a big win with no help from me, it maybe makes it easier to deal with the fact that I don't really have control over quite a lot of things in my life. It means that, even when I'm not in charge, things sometimes go right. The cost of that experience is recognizing that sometimes things can also go wrong; but precisely the fact that it could go either way is what keeps me watching in the first place. It is, perhaps, a lesson in perspective: a lesson that the quails may or may not come when I want them, and a reminder that the joy in their arrival is the surprise.

There are a lot of "I"s in "Team"

Since the end of last semester, I've been neglecting this blog, in part because of end-of-semester things--grading, holidays, preparing for a new semester, etc.--as well as a research deadline I had to meet. But, truth be told, I've also been in something of a "hockey funk" due to the losses--of both games and personnel--the Penguins have suffered over the last month and a half. Crosby is out again with "concussion-like symptoms." Letang, another favorite player of mine, is also out with a concussion. Jordan Staal is now out of the line-up. With these losses, watching the Pens has, of late, been a bit painful, and so I have to admit that I've just been less interested in watching games and following the season in the last month and a half. Now, as a fan, my love of "my" team is not supposed to wane when my team is missing key players; if I'm a Pens fan, then I'm supposed to care about the Pens no matter who those Pens are. Whoever puts on the jersey is "my" team in any given night. But these injury-laden stretches, and the subsequent changes in team play that result, raise questions for me about what a "team" really is, and the extent to which one can really be a fan of a "team," as opposed to a fan of individual players.

The mentality behind team sports is supposedly all about the subordination of the individual to the larger whole. "There's no 'I' in 'team.'" "It's not the name on the back that matters; it's the logo on the front." From the perspective of the players, I can see that this is a useful mentality, within limits: the point is that team success should supersede individual success, and when individuals on the team play with this mindset, the team wins. The quintessential example of this is the career of Steve Yzerman. In his youth playing in Detroit, he put up insane offensive numbers, but his team saw very little success. It took Scotty Bowman coercing Yzerman into playing a more team-oriented, defensively responsible game for Yzerman's team to win in the post-season: Stevie's individual numbers went down, but he and his teammates become Stanley Cup champions. The Washington Capitals might also be an instructive case. Critics of the team in the recent era have blamed the team's inability to find post-season success despite spectacular regular-season offensive numbers on the fact that it has too many "selfish" players--that is, players more concerned with their own scoring than with "team play," which means taking fewer risks of the kind that create individual glory. (Just as Samuel Johnson said that Shakespeare would lose the world for a pun, some critics of Alex Semin might say that he would lose the Cup for a goal.) Individual players might win games for their team on occasion (see, e.g., Malkin's play for Pittsburgh in the third period of this afternoon's game); but real success--which in hockey means raising the Stanley Cup in June--requires a team mentality.

But this does not mean that "the team" is some entity on its own, separate from the individual players, and nothing makes the significance of the individuals on a team apparent like a stretch of injuries. At times like this, coaches and players talk a lot about "sticking to our game" and playing their "system." But a "system" rises and falls to the extent that it fits the specific players on the rosters. Dan Bylsma's system in Pittsburgh works with the grit, speed, and skill of the individuals on the team. The Pens' (healthy) roster involves a few highly-skilled offensive stars and a lot of hard-working, fast supporting players. Offensively, the supporting players win pucks and create space which allows the skilled stars to do what they do best. But, as the last few weeks have shown, the system doesn't work nearly as well with a different roster composition: minus some of their top skill-players in the latest stretch, the Pens have been shooting plenty, and scoring little (the previous two games are starting to turn things around--but this is because the skill players are finally starting to execute, not because the supporting cast has started finding the net). The grit players can get the puck on the net, but they don't necessarily do it so well--that is, in a manner that will get it past the goalie. What's missing right now is several of the guys with the sweet hands and the genius-level hockey sense to make the impossible passes that fool goaltenders, to find the loose pucks no one else can see, and to be in exactly the right spot when the puck bounces across the goal-mouth. The specific losses to the Pens' roster means that their system hasn't been working as well because the "team" doesn't exist outside its specific, individual members.

It seems like it should be obvious that a team is made up of individual players: no individuals, no team. But the whole logic of fanship ignores this obvious reality. Fans who only become fans when a team is playing well are called "bandwagonners," which is not a term of endearment: the idea is that a "real" fan sticks with a team through good times and bad. But does it really make sense to say that the team in good times is the same team during the bad times? Were the Pens in the 2003-04 season, when they finished in last place in the league, the same team that won the championship in 2009? If the style of the team is so heavily dependent on the individuals who play on that team, then does it make sense to be a "fan" of the team regardless of who those individuals are at any given time? Does the concept of a "team" that persists through time--through trades, drafts acquisitions, call-ups, retirements--cohere in a meaningful way?

In the end, I think the question of fanship comes down to two different meanings of the word "fan": one in which the allegiance is really to a city or a place--I am loyal to whatever group of individuals is wearing black and vegas gold simply because we all share an area code, and they fight for the glory of my town--and the other in which the allegiance is to an ideal of the sport--I'm a fan of the Penguins because they play the style of hockey I most like to see. And these two ways of constructing fanship entail two different concepts of "team." In the former, the "team" is a stable concept independent of individuals and unified by place; in the latter, it's an unstable concept that is highly dependent upon the specific individuals on the roster (and the coaching staff). Ultimately, I think prefer the latter understanding of the "team" because it is the one that considers "team"-ness from the perspective of the actual sport. If I root for a team because of its location, then I'm not really rooting for my team because the members play hockey, but because their victory represents my victory through a mutual identification with place. I can see how there might be certain benefits to this (I can see some dangers, too), but it's not an allegiance that has anything to do with whether hockey is being played well; really, it's not an allegiance that has anything to do with a love of hockey at all, and looks more like patriotism or nationalism. But a team's identity as a hockey team relies entirely on the individuals that comprise the team. In this sense, there are lots of "I"s in "team"; the "I"s are what make the "team."

I'm aware that eventually this way of thinking about the meaning of a "team" runs into a version of Sorites paradox: how many individuals does a team need to change out before it ceases being "this" team and becomes "that" team? The Penguins now have no individuals in common with the Penguins in the 1980, so it's easy to say that these are different teams. But what about the 2008-09 Pens and the Pens now? What about the Pens in November and the Pens now? I've been arguing on the basis of the Pens' play during their most recent slump that the Pens aren't quite the same team they were earlier in the season; at the same time, I keep watching the games, even though my interest has diminished a bit, and I keep wanting the Pens to win--I must feel like this team is at least something like the Pens I love. And, to complicate matters, it seems like some individuals matter more than others. Losing Crosby, Letang, and Staal deals a heavier blow to the team "identity" than would losing Vitale, Martin, and Dupuis. If all of this is true, then the team isn't simply reducible to the individuals on the team. Or is there simply a range of kinds of team I can root for, so that we can say that there have in fact been as many different teams that we've called "the Penguins" since the 2008-09 season as there have been roster changes, but all of them have fit within my definition of a hockey team worth watching?

I don't have any conclusions to reach here beyond the fact that our usual ways of thinking about a team are inadequate to the reality of the game--at least insofar as we're interested in the game, rather than in local pride. Fans who deride other fans for a lack of loyalty are, I think, overlooking the importance of the individuals they purport to root for. At the same time, those who dislike team sports because of their resemblance to an uncritical nationalism make the same mistake as the loyal fans, neglecting the extent to which a team sport like hockey showcases individuality rather than effacing it. Hockey players are not interchangeable parts in a "system": a system only works if it fits the individuals who are executing it (just ask Bruce Boudreau). What makes hockey--good hockey--so enjoyable to watch is that it shows that individual talent and creativity is not exclusive of group unity; at hockey's highest level, each creates the other.