Hockey on a pedestal

It was one of the more comical scenes during the recent world junior championship.

Hockey had taken over the Albright-Knox Art Gallery on Elmwood Avenue - yes, cynics, there is beauty to be found in Buffalo - and the crowds were, for the century-old art museum, unlike anything ever before seen.

It wasn't just the numbers - waiting lines, even, for parking spaces - but the noise, the children, the colourful logo-driven dress and the way "patrons" hurried, sometimes breaking into runs, between exhibits.

The reason was obvious. The gallery had strategically placed its tandem hockey exhibitions - one celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Buffalo Sabres, the other showing off various NHL trophies, Stanley Cup included - at separate ends of the long, low complex.

To get from one to the other, visitors had to pass by much of the gallery collection - justifiably famous for its works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Winslow Homer, Jackson Pollock, Man Ray, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol - and, to put it mildly, there wasn't much interest.

Some stopped to giggle at Warhol's famous Campbell's beef noodle soup cans. A few parents hurried their youngsters in full Sabres gear past the nude sculpture of the buxom woman. The names in their heads were not of the artists on display but of the photographs they just viewed at one end - George (Punch) Imlach, the French Connection, Tim Horton with long hair - and the beauty they were racing to at the other was all silver and shiny, exhibits that could not only be touched but photographs were encouraged.

The gallery staff stood by and watched in amazement. Big crowds, little interest. A clash, so to speak, of two cultures.

And yet, was this art gallery not the perfect venue for a hockey exhibition? The game, after all, is as much, if not far more, a part of popular culture as Warhol himself so far as Canada and certain northern U.S. centres like Buffalo are concerned.

How else, in Canada, do you explain 80 per cent of an entire country tuning in last February to the men's gold medal in Olympic hockey, another 7.5 million watching the Canadian women take gold, nearly seven million watching a bunch of teenagers play Russia for the gold in junior hockey that week in Buffalo?

To think hockey is not a major player in Canadian culture is to be naive in the extreme. It finds its way into the language (politicians stick-handling, skating on thin ice), song (Stompin' Tom Connors to The Tragically Hip) and movies - in Barney's Version, which on Sunday won a Golden Globe Award, Barney's mind loses its grasp on everything but the most minute details concerning his beloved Montreal Canadiens.

And yet there are those who will still deny.

Recently a letter arrived from an outraged reader who wanted to know what on earth could possess The Globe and Mail to run a "hockey" story on our sacred front page. A sampling follows: "It boggles my mind to think that there are people out there with your job: writing about sports. Anyone with an IQ over -500 must surely understand that day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, any sports game is essentially the same thing, every single time.

"I mean, you would have to be a troglodyte to be entertained by a piece of rubber being slapped back and forth by a bunch of overpaid Neanderthals. … Aristotle talks of mimesis. It seems that sports 'writer' after sports 'writer' simply mimics the person before him. Whether it be voice or print, you're all the same. You're a dime a dozen and the masses are so stupid as to put sports and its players and its 'writers' on a pedestal that it's now front page news. What the hell does a sports 'writer' even contribute other than a completely useless opinion regarding even more useless subject matter?

"What is so spectacular about hockey anyway? If you've seen one game, you've seen them all. You'd have to be, well, completely void of brain activity to choose a profession in which you 'write' about Neanderthals slapping a piece of rubber to one another.

"Good God, what happened to intellectualism?"

How intriguing that such a wild letter would arrive in the same week that the Hamilton Spectator's Steve Milton, a life-long sports writer, would publish a compelling five-part series on the role the national game has on the national culture.

Milton examined every imaginable source - books, poetry, movies, art - and talked to experts and academics in several countries before coming to the conclusion hockey is, in fact, an essential facet of the northern culture.

It has, however, suffered from the twin handicap of intellectual snobbery from many who do not play the game and the anti-intellectualism of so many who do - the result being hockey has long been a cultural power rarely recognized and barely analyzed.

It begs the question: Had the Albright-Knox Art Gallery been able to display Warhol's 1984 portrait of Wayne Gretzky alongside the Campbell's soup tins, would they have stopped racing by?

Of course they would have. And perhaps even lingered long enough to realize that, like it or not, hockey is a significant part of the culture in this part of the world.

With as much right to the front pages, when deserved, as any other facet of that culture.

Roy MacGregor's column on hockey appears regularly on Tuesdays and Saturdays.