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.

The Politics and the Art of the Game

Last Thursday, I had a difficult decision to make: stay home and watch the Pens take on the arch-rival Capitals (long-time Pens fans will tell you that the Flyers are the Pens' real archrivals, but I think enough hate has built up in the Sidney Crosby-Alex Ovechkin era between the two teams to call this rivalry "arch"), or go out to see Dave Zirin screen and then talk about his documentary, Not Just a Game: Power Politics, and American Sports. This was a genuine dilemma for me: do I go hear a man talk about the benefits and drawbacks of sports--a topic that, as this blog attests, I've been thinking a lot about lately--or do I watch the sport itself, and analysis be damned? I'll admit too that part of my reluctance came from the fact that Zirin doesn't tend to say much about hockey. But my husband, who knows how to provide perspective in these situations, reminded me that the Pens will play the Caps at least twice more this season, whereas Zirin doesn't give talks here that often. So out the door we went.

Zirin's basic point in the documentary is that, despite people's general hostility to the notion of "politicizing" sports, sports are already deeply political in this country. In particular, professional sports are used as a platform for selling the U.S. military. Anyone who has ever watched a football (or, though Zirin did not mention this, hockey) game will have seen some kind of military presence, whether it's a "military appreciation night," prominent sponsorship, or Air Force jets doing a fly-over before the game begins. The most damning evidence of how the military politicizes sports in the documentary was the case of Pat Tillman, the NFL athlete who, after 9/11, enlisted and was later killed in Afghanistan. Zirin's film shows how the military, in concert with the NFL, used Tillman's status as a professional athlete to mythologize his "hero" status, to the point where Tillman's real heroism--his outspoken opposition to the war he had come to believe was illegal and immoral--was covered up with a bogus story about his death (Tillman was killed by "friendly fire," but the story told about his death initially was very different). Going back at least to Jackie Robinson, our goverment has had a long history of using athletes to promote a particular political agenda. But the ability to use sport politically cuts both ways; if the government and leagues can do it, so can the athletes themselves. The rest of the film went on to look at how athletes have (and have not) used sports as a platform for various forms of political action, ranging from John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists during the American anthem in the 1968 Olympics, to Billie Jean King and the "Battle of the Sexes," to Scott Fujita's advocacy of gay rights.The point is that sports have political significance whether we like it or not; the only question is what political position they are serving.

Back in my first post, I mentioned that part of the guilt of watching hockey for me grows out of the way that hockey, like all professional sports, is used to promote military agendas. What I enjoyed about the documentary was that it demonstrated how these sports can also have a positive political impact--that is, how professional sports have become a platform for people to stand up for the rights of the oppressed. But the question that remained in the air, and that was brought up more than once in the Q&A that followed the screening, was whether the potential benefit of professional sports outweighs the costs. Aren't professional sports better at promoting militaristic ideologies--which seem to go hand in hand with the sacrifice-the-body, take-one-for-the-team, for-the-greater-glory mentality that is part of allure of team sports--than they are at speaking out for minorities and against war? Can't we get the community-building benefits of sports fanship out of watching our local high school team play, while losing the militaristic nationalism and the outrageous fiscal burdens? Do we really need sports--or at least professional sports--at all?

Zirin's answer to this line of questioning was to reference the claim that sports are the new "opiate of the masses" and to say, "Who doesn't need a little opiate from time to time?" His point is that watching professional sports makes people happy, and, in a world that's already pretty tough for the average Joe, we shouldn't deny ourselves that happiness. I thought this was a weak answer--not just because it seemed contradictory (how can you work so hard to pull back the curtain on sports ideology and then tell us to enjoy its opiate-effect?), but because it seemed to speak so poorly to Zirin's obvious passion for sports. This reminded me of a Radio Lab episode, "Games," my husband had played for me. In the first segment, the hosts spoke with Stephen Dubner about his childhood love of sports. Late in the interview, he makes the claim that sports have "almost immeasurable value." The hosts press him on this, asking for clarification, and Dubner's answer is that sports are a "proxy for all our emotions and desires and hopes" and give us "war where nobody dies." My husband and I debated what this really meant for a while, but ultimately I think Dubner's answer is somewhere between Zirin's answer and the claim that sports are a form of sublimation: in sports we have an outlet for both our hopes and our aggression that comes without consequences. Certainly, we might say that such sublimation is useful--better to get out our animal aggression yelling at the refs or playing a game than by hitting random passers-by in the face. But it takes, I think, a fairly poor, Johnsonian estimation of human nature to call sublimation of this sort "immeasurably valuable."  Dubner, like Zirin, speaks lovingly of sports. I do not believe that they are for him merely a receptacle for hopes and dreams, somewhere our emotions can be placed to keep them out of trouble, just as I don't believe that Zirin watches sports because they drug him into contented complacency.

I don't mean this as a critique of either Zirin or Dubner. Both are, I think, trying to deal with the question of the value of sports in the terms that remain in our culture the dominant determiner of value: use. What political purposes does sport serve, or can it serve? Of what emotional use is fanship? These aren't bad questions--not by a long shot--but what they'll always miss is that sports, like art, also contain an element within them that is not "useful," that is not about "use" at all. Take, for instance, the following:

Scoring a goal is "useful" for your team; it makes you more likely to win the game. But, if you're just talking about use, it doesn't matter how you score--it can bounce off your butt or an opponent's face, and it's still useful as a goal. The reason these are the top goals of 2010-11 is because they're more than useful: they're beautiful. When someone scores like this, it really doesn't matter what team you follow--even if you're a fan of the opposing side, you get excited by goals like these, because they're just so damned amazing. If one of your own players scores a goal like this, for a moment it doesn't matter if your team is still down by 3 goals with 5 minutes left in the final period: what you've just seen isn't about winning or losing the game. In this sense, moments like this in sport perhaps transcend all that makes it political, or at least those aspects that make it badly political: us versus them, winning versus losing become meaningless distinctions in these moments, and are replaced by a new community comprised of all people who love the game. But precisely because such moments go beyond use, they are hard to explain as "valuable." These are the moments that make us love the game, that we hope to see every time we watch; what value they have consists in the extent to which we are drawn to them in the absence of any specific purpose.

Artists and philosophers have been trying to account for what makes art compelling at least since Aristotle. What the millenia of discussion and disagreement have demonstrated is that it is not an easy matter to pin down. I think something similar compels us to watch sports, at least in part, and so this aspect of the game--the aspect that makes people not just analysts but fans, that makes us love what we analyze--is similarly difficult to do. None of this is to deny Zirin's thesis that sports are political--they clearly are, just as much art is political. But what is most compelling about it, the reason we watch, is not the political purpose its serves. Politics are useful, about promoting a particular vision of social order, about trying to make things happen for specific purposes: this is the value of politics. Sports are not only useful, and therein lies their value.

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.