1998

20.1

Neil Earle
The Gobal Game: The Internationalization of Professional Hockey and Technological Modernism

The Vancouver Sun was unequivocal. "Canada must win," blared the headline. The reference was to the XVIII Olympic Winter Games at Nagano, Japan, and the hoped-for victory of the Canadian Men's Olympic Hockey Team, ritual revenge for Canada's loss to Team USA in the 1996 World Cup of Hockey. Maclean's magazine was also jingoistic. A caption intoned that hockey is "the export on which Canadians refuse to surrender the patent." "We consider it our game," summarized Joe Nieuwendyk of Oshawa, a defenseman for the Dallas Stars. "Canadians don't deal with losing in hockey very well."

Lose they did, however. Canada extracted revenge on Team USA but slipped to bronze medal honors, just not good enough for a country where hockey, alert Americans once wrote, is a key to the national culture. Yet all is not lost for chagrined Canadian nationalists. This article seeks to outline how a palpable Canadian sense of disappointment with a game that the nation groomed and nurtured reflects the consequences of modernity and late-modernity upon Canada. One of the hallmarks of modernity is "the technological imperative," that is, the large-scale social and cultural effects brought about by the dynamic conjunction of industrialization, urbanization, electric power, mass transport, the dramatic shifting of people and goods and intellectual property across international boundaries. In the words of Eric Hobsbawm:

We live in a world captured, uprooted and transformed by the titanic economic and techno-scientific process of the development of capitalism, which has dominated the past two or three centuries.

. . . Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the end of the twentieth century is the tension between this accelerating [process of globalization] and the inability of both public institutions and the collective behaviour of human beings to come to terms with it.

In this sense, then, it is not the Americans or the Czechs or the Swedes who are marginalizing Canada as a hockey heaven. In large measure this marginalization is a result of late-modernity's technological paradox: as Canada became ever more subjected to the winnowing effects of global market forces, its great national game could not escape. In this heyday of the more open global market it is understandable why the roster of the Detroit Red Wings reads like the roll call of Boris Yeltsin's cabinet. Ken Dryden and Roy MacGregor had earlier written of the implications when the Soviet Ice Hockey Federation decided to bargain with the NHL in the 1980s:

Fetisov drives around Moscow in his blue Mercedes wearing an ABC-TV Calgary Olympics ski jacket. At Archangelskoye, Krutov and Larionov lounge around reading newspapers, Krutov in a sweatshirt that reads "The 40th NHL All-Star Game Edmonton, Alberta, Larionov in one from Quebec City's Rendez-vous '87. . . . Five years ago, their look would have seemed disloyal, but no more. They are contemporary Soviets. They see no boundaries on their horizons. They look outside, not in.

[S]port is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. . . . This mechanization of actions is accompanied by the mechanization of sporting goods--stop watches, starting machines, and so on. In this exact measurement of time, in this precision training of muscular actions, and in the principle of the "record" we find repeated in sport one of the essential elements of industrial life.

1. What can be roughly defined as the colonial or pre-modern period (c. 1867-1917).

2. The early modern period from 1917-1972. This was the era of flamboyant promoters such as "Tex" Rickard of Madison Square Gardens, Conn Smyhte in Toronto and Leo Dandurand in Montreal. Big-league, professional sport first became a vital adjunct of modern life in the 1920s, the time of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. The 1920s were the seed bed of hockey's classic era--the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. This period climaxed with the dramatic Canada-Soviet series of 1972. The founding of the National Hockey League (NHL) in November, 1917 is the marker event.

3. What has been called the global game--our late-modern/world market era of transnational globalism signalled by the Canada Cups, the World Cup of Hockey, and Canada's ice-hockey professionals skating in the Olympic Games.

In Canada Learns to Play, Alan Metcalfe documented the importance of the period from 1867 to 1914 for sports culture. It was then that the first leagues and sporting associations were formed, a period of refinement that rested upon a more obscure foundation. In a 1996 monograph titled The Puck Starts Here, Nova Scotian Garth Vaughan challenged the traditional notion of ice hockey's invention by British garrison troops in Kingston skating on the frozen Saint Lawrence. Vaughan argues that hockey developed from a child's game called "hurley" or "rickets" played on the ponds of Windsor, Nova Scotia as early, perhaps, as 1800. Vaughan documents the Boston Evening Gazette's edition of November 5, 1859 wherein a Gazette correspondent pleads to his fellow Bostonians to borrow hockey sticks from Nova Scotia. He also notes that what Canadians call "rickets" is known as hockey in Massachusetts. Vaughan also touches on hockey's constants--the game's violent temper-tantrums, the unreasonable, rowdied partisans, and the moves of officialdom to control it. As Metcalfe confirms, hockey was early viewed as an ideological vehicle for the important Victorian mandate of "taming the rough." We catch a time-capsule glimpse of both hockey's rowdiness and the civilizing ethic in the work of a Winnipeg cleric, Charles Gordon, writing about the turn of the century under the pen name Ralph Connor.

In Glengarry School Days (1902), a series of moralistic and idealized idylls on growing up in the Ontario backwoods at the time of Confederation, Connor included a description of a hockey match in a chapter titled "The Final Round." Pervasive is the Victorian evangelical code of fair play, of life as a field of honour. In the match against a group of roughs and tipplers known as "the Front" Hughie Murray, the minister's son, is tripped and slashed and finally has his ankle his broken. Hughie, however, refuses to leave the ice and hobbles to the rear to serve as the team goalie. His courage inspires his team and after lectures from the local schoolmaster about self-control, the Glengarians score the winning goal in the closing seconds. In Connor's vision, hockey is inscribed into popular culture as a school for manly virtues, sport as a school for life; the ice ponds of Canada as the playing fields of Eton.

Others trace hockey's more official origins to Central Canada, and they furnish a date--March 3, 1875. On that day, Montrealers were invited to watch a version of lacrosse on ice played with a piece of wood, an improvement on the bouncing ball of Hughie Murray's day. The city was entranced. Hockey was seen as just the thing to keep footballers in shape during the off-season. In 1879, using a lacrosse ball with the ends sliced off, W. F. Robertson of McGill University, rented the Crystal Skating Rink on Dorchester Street and a tradition was born. Fans soon took to the fights, cat-calling and lop-sided scores. On February 12, 1883, avid Montrealers invited teams from Quebec City, Montreal, and Ottawa to play "the world championship of ice hockey." The code of the gentleman was soon invoked to normalize this bastard child of Jack Frost and the unpredictable Puck. On April 11, 1884, the Amateur Athletic Association of Canada (AAAC) was formed at the Toronto Fencing Club. In 1884 this august body handed down the definition of an amateur, thus setting up a tension that would bedevil Canada's winter game well after the triumph of professionalism signalled by the founding of the NHL in 1917. This tension between amateurism and professionalism would affect Canada's role on the world stage until well into the 1970s.

Yet dynamic ebb and flow is intrinsic to hockey's swirling geometry, and a sharp-bladed dialectic is typical of its history. For one thing: There was always a rugged countertrend. The game would never prove easy to control as witness the stigma of four deaths on Ontario ice rinks in the year 1904. The dispute about hired hockey players known as "ringers" in the 1890s showed that hockey was already a lively center of controversy.

By the early 1900s technological modernism was working its transforming work. The telephone, wireless telegraphy, the cinema, the bicycle, the early automobile and airplane gave a keynote to the new century and helped set the stage for the emergence of a popular culture of which professional hockey would be an important part. The harnessing of Niagara Falls for hydro power in 1896 was part of "the greatest environmental revolution in human history since the domestification of fire." Now the off-duty masses in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal could come indoors for the fast-moving, bone-crushing game of legal body checks, a move equally popular--if not more so--in the hard-scrabble nickel and lumber mines of the Canadian Shield. In 1910 a mining entrepreneur from Renfrew, Ontario, named J. Ambrose O'Brien, defied the CAAA and the Ontario Hockey Association to shepherd such agile ringers as Cyclone Taylor and the Patrick brothers into the fold of his new National Hockey Association (NHA). The NHA was the NHL in embryo. O'Brien blazed a trail that other well-heeled promoters would follow. For O'Brien, civic pride demanded that his small-town Renfrew Millionaires win the Stanley Cup, and he spared no expense. Finance capital would wrench control of the game away from the upper classes. It was working. The NHA granted one of its first franchises to a team from Montreal, Les Canadiens, who would go on to become the winningest sports franchise in history.

Thus a schoolboy's diversion nurtured amid the lakes and sloughs of the Canadian ice forge was maturing. It was there to be shaped, fashioned, moulded and--like any other commodity--sold. While Conn Smythe honed his coaching skills in the frozen ice rinks of Toronto, out west, in Victoria, British Columbia, ex-Montrealers Lester and Lynn Patrick's Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) orchestrated the first professional hockey game played on artificial ice. That was January, 1912, and by then the game had captured the imagination of Canadians and not a few Americans. This was signalled in 1905 when a team from Dawson City in the Yukon made the 4400 mile trek to Ottawa to challenge for Lord Stanley's mug. Town and country competed with equal relish. In 1907, Kenora, then named Rat Portage, became the last small town in Canada to win the Stanley Cup and the technological imperative was already in evidence. Telegraph and telephone relays stretching across scores of cities and towns became harbingers of a play-by-play form both American and Canadian announcers would later exploit.

Technological modernism, Richard Collins noted, is a powerful solvent of political boundaries. In hockey, the margin of the 49th Parallel was soon pierced by entrepreneurial modernism. Some key events in the story can be quickly summarize. By 1904 Jack Gibson, a Canadian dentist living in Houghton, Michigan, had established the world’s first international hockey league, composed of teams from Portage Lake, Houghton, Calumet, the American and Canadian Soo, and Pittsburgh. Stanley Cup winners refused to play Gibson and his Portage Lakers. In 1917 the Seattle Metropolitans became the first American team to win the Stanley Cup as a vital entry in Lester and Frank Patrick's PCHA. Also in 1917 the National Hockey League was born in a merger of the Quebec and Ontario-based National Hockey Association (NHA) at Montreal's Windsor Hotel on November 22, 1917. The Montreal Canadiens, the Ottawa Senators, and a new Toronto team, the Arenas, could muster the cash to maintain the rinks, pay the players and thus lure the crowds to support the new organization. With the NHL, big-time hockey was reborn, shorn of any remaining Nineteenth Century privileged, upper-class airs and baptized in the spirit of unbridled, monopolistic capitalism. In 1924 the NHL granted a franchise to the city of Boston, thus officially making the NHL an international affair. When Madison Square Gardens' sprightly "Tex" Rickard saw Howie Morenz skate against the New York Americans in 1926, "Tex's Rangers" were soon created to join the Chicago Black Hawks and the Detroit club in the newly expanded league.

From 1917 to 1929 the National Hockey League grew into a thriving ten-team international circuit. Sticks stretched across the American-Canadian border in earnest. Brian McFarlane summarizes:

Many players made their professional debuts, notably Howie Morenz, Nels Stewart, King Clancy, Frank Boucher, Eddie Shore, the Cook Brothers, Tiny Thompson and Aurel Joliat to mention a few. . . . Six-man hockey finally became universal, goalies became free to adopt to any position to defend their goals, and . . . the forward pass was allowed in all three zones. Five of the six arenas which house [1960s-style] NHL teams constructed . . . and for the first time the Stanley Cup came into the exclusive custody of the National Hockey League.

In Canada, hockey's hold on the audience in the pre-global era was nothing short of a phenomenon. By 1963 the television audience for "Hockey Night in Canada" had grown to about 3.5 million English Canadian viewers and an astonishing 2 million Francophones. This was hockey rampant, an impressive percentage of hockey devotees for a nation of about 18,000,000 people. The 1960s game with its limited teams, its formalized play, its more average-sized players making slightly above average salaries held the attention of almost one in three Canadians. The NHL was an international league but one still made up mostly of Canadian boys from Saskatoon and Flin Flon, Timmins and Trois Riviere. It was a game that could be easily comprehended and--in the era of Jean Beliveau and Doug Harvey, Frank Mahovlich and Bobby Hull--one possessing the aerodynamic elegance of a Boccioni sculpture. All of this would change in the 1970s as hockey began to enter its late-modern, global era. For though Saturday night was Hockey Night in Canada till 1976 when the audience dropped to 2.8 million viewers, all was not well across the huge Dominion. Canadian teams had not won a gold medal at the Olympic Games since 1952 and many fans were dismayed. As governments and rival political systems intruded into the game of Conn Smyhte and Tex Rickard, hockey's third era arrived.

It began innocently enough with the federal election of 1968. Then, Liberal candidate and eventual Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, promised Canadians a task force to deal with Canada's poor standing in international hockey. In 1954 the Soviet Union had scored an upset victory over Canada at the World Hockey Championships. This was repeated in the 1956 Winter Olympics. The Soviets had early grasped the propaganda potential of sport. After the 1960 loss at Squaw Valley to the United States, Canadian popular opinion was on edge. The iron-clad ban against professionals--a legacy of Victorian and Edwardian Canada--was blamed for this poor record. Even Father David Bauer's Canadian National Team of hand-picked amateurs carrying the maple leaf overseas from 1963 to 1969 earned no gold medal even though they won over many hearts with their clean, crisp precision play. In February, 1969, the Department of National Health and Welfare initiated events that would eventually result in a new, non-profit organization, Hockey Canada. Alan Eagleson, the controversial Toronto lawyer and a rising power from the NHL Player's Association, became chairperson for public relations. Hockey Canada soon clashed with the CAHA over jurisdictional matters and began to enter negotiations with the other hockey superpower, the Soviet Union. An exchange of visits between Trudeau and Soviet premier Alexi Kosygin in 1971 led to a proposal for an eight-game Canada-Soviet series to begin in September, 1972. Hockey would never be the same again. Though some 15 million Canadians would share in the vicarious climax surrounding Paul Henderson's series-winning goal in September, 1972, the NHL suffered a serious loss in prestige that autumn of discontent. "A little piece of all of us died today," commented Team Canada coach Harry Sinden after his team's humiliating 7-3 loss in the series opener.

Bardic Television, an offshoot of the popular, made the event all the more memorable. Foster Hewitt himself declaimed before Game Two that he had never felt such tension at a hockey game. The emotional intensity of the 1972 series stunned the participants. "Some of them were never the same," Tony Esposito told a CBC-TV interviewer. Frank Mahovlich refuses to discuss 1972 to this day. The Soviets weren't supposed to be that good but they were. Yet the very nail-biting intensity of that fall classic whetted the appetites of Canadians for more of the same. The NHL, though slow to come around, took note. The sixty-five-year symbol of the best in hockey was in trouble.

Prime-time televised hockey had been oversold to the American market after the NHL's expansion to twelve teams in 1967. Expansion meant demands for higher salaries, and the arrival of the aggressive new World Hockey Association in 1971 fed the frenzy. While the public image of hockey-players began to decline, the television game did not take off at the level expected. "American audiences found the game confusing, scores too low, the play too violent--or not violent enough," wrote Paul Rutherford. "The goons were taking over in professional hockey, a victory symbolized by the Stanley Cup success of the Philadelphia Flyers a.k.a the 'Broad Street Bullies 'in 1974."

Yet transnational capitalism and dynamic market forces would have their effect. The 1972 series showed that hockey's devoted fans were right: hockey made superb television spectacle. Some rate the Montreal-Red Army game of December, 1975 as one of the best games ever played--clean, fast, poetry in motion. Then, the sight of Wayne Gretzky feeding Mario Lemieux to clinch the third Canada Cup series in September, 1987, echoed Paul Henderson's clutch heroics of 1972. Thus, as the Cold War melted and Moscow looked west, it was inevitable that the NHL would look across the Atlantic for a brawn pool to replenish their North American talent. By the late 1970s the first East European players appeared. In 1989 the Russian-born Sergei Priakin, a twelfth-round draft choice of the Calgary Flames, skated for the last two games of the schedule. In 1990 Russians Victor Krutov, Igor Larianov, and Sergei Makarov formed the KLM line. Meanwhile Pavel Bure, the "Russian Rocket," became the first Vancouver Canuck to score fifty goals, in 1991-1992. The old order had changed--once again! The global game had arrived. Ironically, the organization formed to boost a Canadian presence in world hockey--Hockey Canada--had created a more exotic, more multicultural but less Canadian NHL. Once again--as in the 1890s and the disputes over "ringers," as in Ambrose O'Brien's push towards professionalism--market forces led the way. The blue line met the bottom line in earnest. Salesmanship was once again triumphing over national borders. Eric Hobsbawm had it right:

[T]he globe is now the primary operational unit and older units such as 'national economies, 'defined by the politics of territorial states, are reduced. . . . The stage reached by the 1990s in the construction of the global village...had already transformed . . . important aspects of private life, mainly by the unimaginable acceleration of communication and transport.

The longer, punishing seasons tended to favor strength over skill, privileging rugged wingers such as Claude Lemieux and Brendan Shanahan, forceful storm troopers adept at winning the fierce races down the boards and the elbow-jabbing struggles in the corners. This, in turn, set up all the more "the adrenalin game," one in which the nervous energy summoned for all-out short bursts of intense physical effort reinforced hair-trigger tempers. Though skill still matters, small teams are more likely to be losing teams. Fan accountability matters less than ever in the global game. Season ticket holders--mostly corporate clients--replace ardent loyalists. Few seem to care any more about the anonymous mandarins and faceless corporations who control the teams. The fiery, less self-conscious era of "Tex" Rickard and Conn Smythe is largely gone. Image and promotion and the spectre of a hockey team being only part of a larger conglomerate's concern means that the front office matters more than it did in the days of Gordie Howe and Maurice "the Rocket" Richard. Yet hockey, writes Scott Young, veteran sports writer for the Toronto Sun, has historically reflected the culture in which it was played. Thus, in the era of late-modernism, player contracts, free agency and the barracuda-like lawyer loom as large as the score-board.

The global game has its compensations. Few would deny that a hockey universe that includes a Jaromir Jagr or a Teemu Selanne or a Pavel Bure reflects somewhat the spirit of Hughie Murray and Howie Morenz. Still, for many thoughtful Canadians, the hockey losses at Nagano--the shocker of the U.S. women's team copping the gold from a highly-touted Canadian women's entry as the final cruel cut--has led to more nationalist soul-searching and calls for reforming a style of hockey long on beef and brawn and short on skills and creativity. Montreal novelist and sometime hockey critic Mordecai Richler regularly laments the end of "stylish play-making, and tic-tac-toe passing," and he excoriated Team Canada's captain Eric Lindros after Nagano as "superego rather than superstar." Maclean's magazine ran a cover story on May 18, 1998, critiquing the one Canadian identified as the archetype of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em hockey, Don Cherry, boisterous color commentator of Hockey Night in Canada. Hockey writer Roy MacGregor scored Cherry as "the single most destructive influence on the development of Canadian hockey." That may be extreme. Yet others would agree with Cherry's predecessor and former Toronto Maple Leaf player and coach Howie Meeker who cast Canadians' minds back to the chances lost since the inception of the global game. "I'd say 1972 was the time to start taking it more seriously," stated Meeker, "after the Russians showed us how to play the game." An even more perceptive comment was made by Hall of Fame goaltender and hockey philosopher Ken Dryden in 1989. As the global game caught on, spurred by the technological imperative that makes return matches possible and inevitable, Dryden warned that for the Czechs, for the Americans, for the Canadians, there are no final victories. There is only the next round.

Karl McNeil ("Neil") Earle
7948 Glenties Way
Sunland, CA. 91040