The Canadian identity

So this is how WE are different.

In the never-ending quest to nail down a Canadian identity, hockey always comes to the fore. We embrace the game more passionately than anyone else, which is a reliable way of spotting one of us in a crowd.

But that’s not really the sum of it. There are hockey-mad people in Minneapolis and Magnitogorsk and Mannheim who could argue with real authority that they come by their affection just as naturally and organically as do Canadians.

Where we diverge is in using this one sport as a mirror, in viewing events inside and outside the rink and choosing to see in them something fundamental about ourselves.

That’s a Canadian thing, and it has never been more evident than during this past, strange summer of ghosts, with three enforcers dead by their own hand, with the future of the best player in the game blowing in the wind, and with a lost team somehow finding its way back to Winnipeg.

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Sad and troubling, and joyous; and nowhere else, with no other sport, would those sorts of stories have resonated in quite the same way.

The English sometimes wring hands over their international failings in soccer, the game they invented, or over the pervasiveness of foreign talent in their domestic league. Americans occasionally stew over steroid scandals in their National Pastime—or over brain injuries and sad, cautionary tales like Dave Duerson’s suicide in their real National Pastime. But those are passing concerns and occasional political hobby horses—nothing more.

With hockey and no other sport, in Canada and no other place, crises real or imagined resonate deeply, and the temptation is always to extrapolate, to see something fundamental about our character in the national game and those who play it.

Win an Olympic gold medal and all is right with the country. Lose a big international tournament or two, and it’s time for a Royal Commission, a minute dissection of the lack of skill development among tykes and atoms, a painful acknowledgement of all we have done wrong.

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The prospect of an NHL team leaving some sunny, shinny-indifferent locale in the United States and coming to Canada isn’t merely the shift of a single franchise operated as part of a New York–based sports entertainment company from a money-losing street corner to one where it can’t help but turn a profit. Rather, it is a kick back against cultural imperialism, against the loss of sovereignty over our fishing grounds, and especially against the Gretzky trade. (Jim Balsillie, who during these trying days for RIM must be a bit relieved that he isn’t also facing the challenge of making the NHL work in Hamilton, knew exactly what he was doing when he pushed the Make It Seven button.)

By contrast, you won’t find a whole lot of Americans who believe that the Montreal Expos becoming the Washington Nationals had anything to do with reclaiming their birthright.

The big one right now, though, is violence: the violence inherent in a contact game, the sideshow violence of hockey fights, which is interpreted as a barometer of our civility—or alternatively, as our American friend Mike Milbury so succinctly put it, of our “pansification.”

The deaths of Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, and Wade Belak were immediately connected (in some cases, disingenuously) by those who wanted to make a point about hockey player depression, or hockey player drug abuse, and especially about the perennial hot button that is fighting in hockey, in a way that implied anyone who has enjoyed a scrap has blood on their hands. The sadness was so deep and the chorus was so loud that the pro-fighting, anti-pansification crowd was left temporarily silenced.

Sidney Crosby’s concussion fit that narrative as well: here was the greatest talent of his generation laid low by two unpunished head shots, and what were we going to do about it? How could we have allowed that to happen? What is wrong with our game—which is a whole lot like asking, “What is wrong with us?”

Meanwhile, last Saturday night, a lot of those same Canadians presumably tuned in with no pang of conscience to watch rising mixed martial arts superstar Jon Jones beat up and eventually choke out Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson in UFC 135, an event in which bloodletting and concussions are all but guaranteed, in which the competitors certainly assume considerable risk to life and limb, and in which the primal desire to watch two people pound on each other for our entertainment was fulfilled.

That’s different, because that’s not hockey. And we’re different because when it comes to hockey, the cliché rings true: we have made it more than a game.