'Sports is the new rock 'n' roll," the cover of the Village Voice announced last week. How Sports Took Over the Culture, by veteran rock and political writer Richard Goldstein, is a meditation on professional sport as the most dominant ritual in American life.
"The Super Bowl," he writes, "is to America what Wagner's Ring is to Germany: a national opera that connects the past to the future, a sacred mediator of the violent, the venal, and the sublime."
With this in mind, I accepted an invitation to take a guided tour of FANtasy, the National Hockey League's new "interactive hockey theme park" in Toronto's Metro Convention Centre. Stuck in a gloomy 300,000-square-foot concrete vat around the corner from Air Canada Centre, the event was mounted to usher in the NHL all-star game this weekend.
Last year, according to the Voice, the American sports industry generated $213-billion (U.S.) -- seven times more than Hollywood, its nearest entertainment rival. In Canada, sports culture also seems pretty healthy, despite the NHL's recent unbailout. The most recent Statistics Canada report indicates that from 1994 to 1996 the Canadian sports industry generated approximately $10-billion (Cdn.) more than the movies.
Wandering around the NHL FANtasy event, the profitable "spirit of the game" is fully revealed. Over five days, the NHL expects that some 100,000 hockey fans will pay handsomely ($16.50 for adults, $9.50 for kids) for the privilege of waiting hours in line to take a shot at a plywood Cujo and have their picture taken with the Stanley Cup.
Hockey, you may have heard, is Canada's cultural glue. More than anything else, the sight of sweaty guys on ice binds us across race, class and language. Given the chance, our best writers, actors, singers and media personalities begin to wax sentimental over the blare of the period buzzers, the sour perfume of locker rooms, the singed notes of powdered hot chocolate, and so on.
It's a cultural metaphor I've been aware of my whole life, but had never really exercised outside of my own imagination. Which is a fancy way of saying I've never played. Given my bookish sports alienation, it seemed somehow fitting that I ended up defending my first hockey net, not in one of the clammy rinks of my youth, but on a sheet of pearl-buffed plastic at the NHL FANtasy park.
This was not hockey, but a simulacrum of hockey. This was me being peppered by 150-kilometre-an-hour foam cylinders shot from a rumbling robot called a "Boni Port-a-puck," while the machine's inventor (a small, halitosis-ridden man by the name of Orlando Boni) and six guys in Gore-tex stood by laughing.
I suck, but it's no disappointment. For me, sports will always be the true property of men. Hockey is a stylized ritual that separates the weak from the strong, or as Goldstein writes, "the men from the sissy boys." That's the beauty of it. No nuanced conversation, no blurry emotional lines, no exceptions -- competitive sport is pure, rigidly structured guy stuff.
Now chill, my fellow feministas, I'm not talking gender determinism, here. If we can agree that our culture thinks of certain qualities as "feminine" and "masculine" (which need not, necessarily, define the sexed mammalian body), surely the grunting symmetry of football and the pre-verbal trash talk of hockey are distinctly boyish conceits.
Unlike most forms of popular entertainment, sports is an abstract equation. It relies on repeated patterns, precise rules and number counts to arrive at a concrete outcome: a winner and a loser. Strictly speaking, a point is not the point. To ask a Leafs fan why he cares whether or not his team makes it into the next round is as ludicrous as asking a physicist why she cares that F = ma.
I know this because I've recently become a fan myself. What began as a wracking crush on Mats Sundin has developed into a passable knowledge of the game. For instance, I've learned that "offside," has nothing to do with the puck bouncing off the boards. And after attending a game in the Air Canada Centre nosebleeds, I've memorized the Leafs fan cheer ( Hit 'em, girls!).
Learning to be a hockey fan cost me dozens of evenings and hundreds of dollars of order-in Pad Thai because, unlike men (who appear to absorb player stats by osmosis), most women actually have to cultivate an interest in sports.
In a world where old models of masculinity appear to be going by the boards, hockey offers a comforting and harmless slice of patriarchy in a sea of therapy flicks and Ally McBeal spin-offs. Perhaps U.S. sociologist Michael Meesner was right when he noted that sports "solidifies the male peer group as separate from females." According to this theory, Goldstein writes in the Village Voice, "behind every rabid sports fan . . . lies a guy with a strong mother and a weak or absent father, clinging to the turf he wrested from the world of women, the ritual he associates with the passage from boy to man."
But walking through the Science of the Game locker room exhibit at FANtasy, this theory seems oversimplified and unjust. Looking at the antique skates and sweaters attributed to men born in Sherbrooke and Simcoe with nicknames like Red, Toe and Busher, my heart goes out to guys who love this beautiful, useless game. I don't mean the "heroes," but the laid-off guys sitting in basement bachelors in Madoc and Moosonee, slugging 50 by the bottle, and watching the all-star match. Defeat does not rest lightly on their shoulders.