Hockey Culture

Your white parents love hockey because of its "culture," because of its "classy" "class-act" players who put "the team before themselves," because of its unrelentingly self-effacing public image, because of its emphasis on "tradition," because if a skater is not skating hard enough, they won't be skating for much longer.  Your white parents love hockey because it's, basically, not basketball, with its "egos," its "thuggery," its "selfishness," its "bling," its "disrespect," its "classlessness."

The contrast is clear as day, at least to the eye of the average, probably otherwise decent baby boomer.  Hockey culture stands for teamwork, discipline, perseverance, grit, humility.  Basketball culture embraces the wild (black) individual who alternates between whining about calls and bragging about dunks.

It would be perhaps too easy to characterize one of these games as conventionally "conservative" and the other as the conventionally "liberal."  And yet, the NHL's contemporary #metoo moment, with several players and ex-players telling stories of abuse from coaches, of insults and violence, of a top-down culture of constant hostility, truly bears out that dichotomy.  The men of the NBA-- "narcissistic" as they might be-- respect each other as equals.  The men of the NHL have a hierarchy: there are managers and coaches, who treat their underlings like children-- who kick players on the bench, who ask stars to rank their teammates, and then surreptitiously share those lists with teammates-- and there are players, who accept this treatment as part of the "culture of hockey."

What the NHL has been advocating for years is the nightmare Republican ideal of a clean and functional family.  From the outside, everything looks peaceful and harmonious, with a wise but firm patriarch figure directing his spawn toward purpose and success.  But those on the inside know that this apparently delightful arrangement is actually based on fear, coercion, intimidation, and physical abuse.  The leader here does not earn his (and it's always a "he") authority through a careful understanding of and constant communication with his followers, but rather treats his authority like something God-given and unquestionable, something that must be accepted by others at any cost, something that he will happily use as a cudgel (if he has to).

You can see this scenario play out in nearly every facet of "hockey culture": in its disparagement of its adult players expressing anything but solemnity about their individual achievements ("a bunch of jerks"); its blatant refusal to engage in any question that has even of whiff of "politics" (coach John Tortorella joked that he would "bench" any player who tried to "take a knee," a la Colin Kaepernick); its reflexive unease when confronted with "the other," especially in the form of black and female athletes (see the abuse leveled at "cocky, trash talking" P.K. Subban throughout his career); its defensive posture about fighting, which is regarded as a noble clash of fearless warriors, and not two young people volunteering to inflict permanent brain damage on each other; in the sometimes hilarious (and now, we might say, ominous) terseness of its players, reticent to give any information about their team's performance other than "we've got to stick to our game."

It's a curious phrase, "sticking to your game."  Players will use it when they are taking a three goal lead into the third period, and they'll use it for three-goal deficits, too.  It's a strategy for success that couldn't possibly be endorsed by any credentialed expert in, say, mental health.  You wonder how many times a player has really wanted to say, "You know what?  Fuck our game.  We've got to change it up.  We need to do things differently.  This current system is garbage."  How many times they might have wanted to, and didn't, because in the NHL, father knows best.  And father doesn't give a single little shit, stop complaining, or else.