Sports Biblio Digest, 12.9.18: Hockey’s Rich Global History
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Willie O’Ree; Seattle’s Hockey History; More Funding for The Athletic; Baseball and Localism; A Baseball Card Mural in Arkansas; Pioneering Owners of the NFL; 1978 Steelers; 1980 Phillies; A Landshark at Ole Miss; Football Art; Michael Calvin
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The matter of Canadian identity suffuses the sport of ice hockey, far beyond its national boundaries.
What was known initially as “the Montreal Game” in the late 1870s and early 1880s became the forerunner of the modern sport that quickly spread to the rest of the country and pockets of the northern United States. In areas of northern Europe, a similar game on ice, known as bandy but played with a ball instead of a puck, was also taking root.
When the continents came together for an exhibition tournament at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, the Canadian game prevailed in the organizational sense, paving the way for hockey to become an international phenomenon.
Those key developments set in motion the evolution of the National Hockey League and the spread of the sport down to the grassroots. In “Hockey: A Global History” (University of Illinois Press), Stephen Hardy and Andrew C. Holman detail how Canadian ways influenced the sport everywhere it’s played, and how those influences gradually in turn transformed how the game is played, especially today at the elite level.
The authors are academic historians who have written previous books about sports and hockey history, and their narrative also examines the challenges that racial and ethnic minorities and women have faced in trying to play the game, especially in North America.
It’s an accessible, engaging tale of how quickly hockey caught on in the latter part of the 19th century, as other team sports were being codified at the dawn of the Industrial Age.
Players and fans alike were drawn to organized sports, the authors write, as a counter to rote factory and mechanical work:
“Hockey appealed in ways similar to hiking or bicycling. It offered a moment of physical and mental freedom. As much as coaches and managers imposed order on play, the greatest uncertainties caused by slick ice, round pucks and surrounding boards meant that the players still ruled in ways that were far less evident than in baseball or American football.”
But the game those players enjoyed outdoors didn’t really take off until it was moved to indoor rinks and organized by resourceful promoters and business owners. Their ethos was one of amateurism (for the players, not them, of course), which they thought would “protect the spectacle from the specters of hard liquor, gambling and crowd violence.”
While other fields became more professionalized, hockey was a bastion of amateurism into the early 20th century. The growth of the game also coincided with the development of Canadian national identity. The authors make note of scholarship concluding that hockey and lacrosse became Canada’s national sports because “they appealed to late Victorian Canadians precisely because the contests seemed to reject imperial imperatives.”
Like baseball in America, hockey:
“ . . . became a symbol or icon of Canada’s existence, common currency that represented connectedness for many diverse people in a fragmented nation. . . . A game and a nation grew together.”
This eventually would come to include French Canadians, who forged their own identity through hockey, especially as the Montreal Canadiens dominated the first half-century of the NHL.
After Antwerp, and as the NHL was evolving, Canadian exports of players and coaches to Europe ramped up the growth of the game there. Only in England had the Canadian game been undertaken in a serious fashion before that, but between the wars it became more popular in Scandinavia, Switzerland and Russia and parts of eastern Europe.
Bunny Ahearne was the controversial British head of the International Ice Hockey Federation for decades, but his drive pushed the European game to greater competitive heights. A different hockey brand emerged as a result, and in the first two decades after World War II, the gap between the continents was vast.
While in Canada, “hockey became the country’s pride,” in the Soviet Union, the vaunted Red Army team was becoming one of the most powerful in the world. Amateurism was an afterthought, as the Soviets dominated the Olympics and international game while the Canadians and Americans sent college-age and junior teams to the slaughter.
A Russian team met Canada in 1972 in the first-ever Summit Series, at the dawn of what Hardy and Homan call “corporate hockey.” The NHL had finally expanded beyond its Original Six, Bobby Orr came on the scene and the sport was more visible on television. Everything was becoming more professionalized across the board.
This age, the authors also note wistfully, was when hockey began eroding at the grassroots levels. As the pro game became more global, with the arrival of European players in the NHL in 1980s and the marketing shift of the NHL headed south, the youth game was marked by a decline in skill and an emphasis on competition, often from overly ambitious parents. Even Orr lamented this, as organizations sprouted to teach the basics and keep the game fun for kids.
Canadian anxieties grew as Russians, Swedes, Czechs and more Americans came into the NHL, and as their own teams lost their grasp on the Stanley Cup. It’s been 25 years since a Canadian team won an NHL championship, but the natives were enthralled in 2010 when the home side, made up of NHL megastars, prevailed in the Vancouver Olympics.
Hardy and Holman acknowledge that even with the sport’s rich global history, and the Americanization of the sport in business and marketing areas, hockey is at its essence Canadian. They ask at the end of their well-informed book if this will continue to be the case, but the answer appears to be affirmative, rooted deeply in the past century or so they have examined:
“It is clear that Canada’s special place in the social construction of hockey remains uncontested—at least in the short term. Today, in no other country does this sport continue to mean so much to so many—as a pastime, as a rite of passage, a patriotic symbol, or as a metaphor for national life (as hackneyed as that sounds).”
Staying Puckish
Willie O’Ree, the first black player in the NHL, has finally been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame at 83, and a forthcoming documentary details his life and long efforts to improve minority participation in the sport;
The National Hockey League is returning to Seattle, which won the very first Stanley Cup championship but lost its team soon after. In spite of all that, the city has a noteworthy history with the sport, as league officials are eyeing a potentially dynamic Pacific Northwest rivalry with the Vancouver Canucks;
A Few Good Reads
At the very good localist publication The Front Porch Republic, a wide-ranging rumination early in the baseball off-season about the game’s purported decline and comparisons to growing, hyper-globalized basketball and soccer, favorites with young American hipsters. To which writer Nathan Washatka says: So what?
“No matter how immersive and impressive digital technologies become, people will always be drawn to real and physical encounters with other people. And right now, in 2018, baseball is unsurpassed in its ability to offer such encounters to Americans.”
Wish I had seen this post, also from The Front Porch Republic, about Paul Dickson’s Leo Durocher biography before last week’s newsletter; Michael Stevens gets to the heart of the book and its subject far better than I ever could;
In Hot Springs, Ark., a 160-foot-high baseball mural has been erected to note the city’s self-proclaimed status as the “Birthplace of Spring Training.” The figures are of Honus Wagner (on a T206 card, natch), a 1933 Goudey Babe Ruth, a 19523 Topps Jackie Robinson, a ’53 Topps Satchel Paige and another of Lefty Grove crafted by a team of artists. The mural is connected to the city’s Historic Baseball Trail;
Known as one of America’s great baseball towns, St. Louis also has been a soccer hotbed for decades, long before the sport grew in popularity, especially in the the same Italian neighborhood that produced Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola;
It’s been 40 years since the Pittsburgh Steelers became the first NFL team to win three Super Bowls, and Bob Labriola, who writes for the franchise’s website, has put together a terrific four-part series on that magical season;
At espnW, poet Aimee Nezhukmatahil muses about her time as a high school football mascot, and weighs in on Tony the Landshark, the successor to the Johnny Reb persona at Ole Miss, where she teaches.
Media Notes
ESPN’s “SportsCenter” is getting back to its highlights-and analysis roots after an ill-fated social commentary phase, and executive Norby Williamson admitting that the one-signature program on the flagship network lost its way;
At the conservative City Journal, a lengthy diatribe by senior editor Stephen Malanga against the mix of sports and identity politics at The New York Times. While at times preachy, I agree with a good bit of this, including the conclusion that readers “seem to yearn for the traditional sports coverage that dailies around the country typically offer;”
At Deadspin, Diana Moskovitz rails at journalists outraged by the saga of Kareem Hunt, claiming they don’t know what domestic violence is;
Gregg Easterbrook, author of several NFL books, is irritated that TV announcers and analysts aren’t more conversant in analytics, and urges fans to turn off the tube and tune into the radio;
The Oakland A’s had a tremendous season on the field, reaching the wild-card playoffs, but are scrambling to find a local radio partner after a bitter breakup that included some social media nastiness;
Axios reports that The Athletic has raised another $40 million, mostly from Silicon Valley investors as it ramps up its North American sports platform to include more podcasts and audience and data resources to drive subscription growth. That would make it around $70 million raised, but the company isn’t saying much about how much revenue it’s generating.
With journalists in nearly 50 markets in the U.S. and Canada, The Athletic has quickly became what ESPN.com used to be, when it whisked away sportswriters from big newspapers. I subscribe to and enjoy The Athletic immensely. But having been part of another rapid-scale digital entity several years ago within the ranks AOL, I find this more than a bit dizzying.
Pioneering online news outlets like BuzzFeed and HuffPost have challenges trying to figure out their next steps, and while they’re based on advertising and The Athletic is not, they’re all ultimately facing similar issues of luring and retaining eyeballs. Will subscribers to The Athletic keep coming back (supposedly 90 percent are re-upping), and realistically, how much bigger than the current subscriber base (right around 100,000) can get this get?
My guess is an endgame here would be a potential sale, but to whom, and if that takes place, what would be the fate of some really good coverage and the many talented people providing it?
Sports Book News
The Sunday Times of London has named Michael Calvin’s “State of Play: Under the Skin of the Modern Game,” its 2018 sports book of the year. The paper notes that it’s been exactly 50 years since the publication of Arthur Hopcraft’s “The Football Man,” which it describes as “the first book to treat football as a serious cultural and social subject;"
At The New York Times, Jay Jennings rounds up some new sports books that are about a lot more than sports;
If you’re looking for more visual holiday sports fare, Don Leydon’s book “Football Art” is a compilation of his work from 2011-18;
The baseball winter meetings start today, and its very early years are recounted in a new book by the Society for American Baseball Research, with a foreword by official baseball historian John Thorn.
Now Hear This
On Good Seats Still Available, John Eisenberg discusses his recent book, “The League,” which profiles NFL pioneers Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall and Bert Bell;
On Baseball by the Book, the latest author to be interviewed is J. Daniel, whose new book “Phinally!” captures the 1980 World Series championship by the Philadelphia Phillies.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 146, published Dec. 9, 2018.
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