Hockey: Canada/USA, USA/Canada

A Canadian perspective on the big match.

USA vs Canada

(CALGARY, Alberta) - Did you watch the Canada-U.S. gold medal hockey game on Sunday? I didn’t, although I did check updates online from time to time. I am not now, and never have been, much of a sports fan. I see sports as a societal distraction along the lines of ancient Rome’s “bread and circuses”.

Unfortunately, you don’t get any “bread” and the “circuses” are actually profit-seeking businesses, so you’re actually paying for your own distraction. I believe that local sports are the only sports worth supporting.

It’s not that I am oblivious and I haven’t caught a few of the sports highlights. In 1971 the Calgary Stampeders football team won the Grey Cup—the first time since 1948. For reasons that now reside in the mists of time, I watched that game. And when the Calgary Flames won the Stanley Cup in 1989 (that, you’ve probably heard of since 24 of the 30 NHL teams are American) I watched that game, too. For some reason I missed the 1972 game in Russia when Canada defeated the Russians in game eight of the 1972 Summit Series.

When I used to work in office environments I used to give the sports pages a two minute scan in the morning so I was sufficiently “informed” to talk sports. All I ever had to know was a few generalities because, once a sports conversation got started, everyone was anxious to spout—so all I had to do was appear interested and agree amiably with the current issue—whatever it was.

There’s a good reason why many people talk about the weather—it’s an obvious and non-threatening topic. When strangers meet, or people who don’t know each other very well, it’s natural to try to converse about something positive and non-controversial. Hot enough for ya? Good weather for ducks! are the kind of conversation openers that will generate an agreeable response.

Sports usually falls into the same response category. As I aged (like a fine wine), and when my sports façade became irrelevant, people would strike up a conversation with something like: “Did you watch the game last night?”. My response was usually along the lines—“What game?” I didn’t answer in a hostile tone to make the questioner bristle, but it was enough to make it clear that I didn’t know a thing about it.

In the NYT John Branch wrote an article “For Canada’s Faithful, a Gold That Means Most” where he quoted Andrew C. Holman, editor of last year’s Canada’s Game: Hockey’s Identity who said: “Hockey is a medium for Canadians to think about who they are. As important as baseball is to American culture, it isn’t anywhere near the cultural significance of hockey to Canadians”.

On the gold-medal game itself, it’s no surprise it was such a close game because both teams were made up of the cream of the NHL (National Hockey League) so that you had a bunch of millionaire professional hockey players (businessmen, really) skating around the ice. I don’t think it really mattered who won because I think that, if you examined the player roster you would find the majority on both teams would be American citizens. In the stands was our Prime Minister, (and George Bush clone) Steve Harper who cheers for the American way whenever he can.

That’s as far as my sports coverage goes. But it wasn’t always that way. When I was with the Airdrie Echo, I covered sports along with almost everything else.

The sports I covered, of course, were the local scene—Midget hockey, Men’s hockey, that sort of thing. One thing you have to know about local coverage is that the most important thing was to get local people’s names in the paper, even if it was just in passing, like if they were on a team that played, win or lose.

I developed my own technique for covering men’s hockey. I would show up to “watch” the game but my real coverage began afterward in the locker room. I knew some of the guys casually and they all knew who I was and why I was there.

Here’s my trick. I would just hang around and listen to them talk and take a few notes. Joe, for example, would say: “Hey, did you see the way I deked around Jerry and passed over to Fred and he made that shot?”

In my story I would write: Near the end of the first period, in a breakaway, Joe managed to deke around Jerry Smith and pass the puck to Fred who made a spectacular shot on goal which, that time, did not get past Bill the goalie (not quite as stilted as that).

Sometimes, both teams would be in my coverage area, so I would go into the other locker room and do the same thing.

I would write long stories about the game because I had all sorts of comments to make that I didn’t always understand, but they and other hockey fans did, and that was all that was important. Some of the guys praised my coverage, saying that it was the “best coverage” they had seen from the Echo in years.

You just needed to know how to gather news.

Which segues into a story that Mark Twain once told, which I’ll just paraphrase.

He was reporting from the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) and he first recounted his fear of the horse he had hired. He said the horse just stood there, looking like it was planning some outrage. He went around to the front and expressed his relief to find that the horse was only asleep. So, he rode his “animated trance” down to the beach where there was a bevy of lovely native girls frolicking in the surf. “It was a heart-warming spectacle.” The first thing he did was to go over and “sit on their clothes (pause). To keep them from being stolen.”

He looked over at the horse to find that it was asleep again. "Which proves one thing: You can’t rely on the horse to gather news."

(The Mark Twain is from Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Live monologue.)