Is hockey Canadian???

I am not a hockey player. Never was; never will be; but I always wanted to be one. Not the overpaid, runway model, factory made hockey players that we see when we tune into the mighty Hockey Night in Canada on a Saturday night. No, I just wanted to be a hockey player. You know the type, the guy who plays the game just for the enjoyment of it all. I tried, but I had “weak ankles” and couldn’t skate well enough. My on-ice hockey experience consisted of one game, on a very early Saturday morning, way back in the winter of 1966, when I was in Grade 7. My coach, who also happened to be my school teacher, did his best to accommodate my desire to play but, alas, it was not meant to be. One game, 3 shifts and I was done. So my game-playing arena took the form of the noblest of all replacement venues for hockey, the corner of Winslow and Lancaster Streets. which became affectionately known as the Lanslow Arena. My hockey destiny was to be a road-hockey player. I played goal and was pretty good at it. I eventually wore Number 29 in honor of my hockey hero, Ken Dryden, but I was never a true hockey player, or was I?
Hockey had been a part my family and what appeared to be every family in Canada from the 1930’s onward when the fledgling CBC Radio network started broadcasting games from coast to coast. My dad would faithfully listen to and, eventually, watch his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs battle against the ominous Montréal Canadiens. “He shoots! He scores!” is a phrase that is as Canadian as the National Anthem and as recognizable as the red maple leaf of the Canadian Flag. But is hockey still Canada’s game and is it still as relevant to Canadians today as it was back in the 1930”s?
The Society for International Hockey Research, an organization dedicated to promoting, developing and encouraging the study of hockey, formed a committee at their annual meeting in May 2001 to examine the claim that hockey was invented in Windsor, Nova Scotia (www.sihrhockey.org). While they were unable to confirm the true birthplace of hockey, the populous view was, and still is, that hockey is a Canadian sport, no matter where it was invented. In the early days of professional hockey, the teams were primarily located in Canada but, eventually, what became known as the “Original six” took shape, and by 1967, wintery Canadian Saturday nights meant only one thing – Hockey Night in Canada. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians, from sea to shining sea, were glued to their television sets for an evening of the best that Canada had to offer. Yes, hockey had become a part of every Canadian, however an event that ,some still say, has meant the erosion of hockey as part of the Canadian landscape was about to take place.
In the 1967-68 season expansion doubled the size of “the premier professional hockey league in the world” (en.wikipedia.org). This expansion and many subsequent expansions eventually introduced fans to hockey as a big business.
For the average Canadian, big business is less about hockey and more about the staid corporate head offices of Bay St. in Toronto. Unless you are located in a major Canadian city you don’t have the opportunity to regularly attend a major league hockey game and actually see how much of a big business exists around Canada’s game. For the rest of us, we hear about the absolutely astounding salaries that “no-name” players receive, in some cases just for showing up, much less playing a good game. We see the corporate sponsorships that are involved, our view being mostly of the Center Ice surface or the scoreboard time-clock during a televised game, but we do not feel big business prying their hands into our pockets for the $300+ ticket or the $200 “official team jersey” or the $5 hot dog. They are, however, certainly there, at each and every game. Hockey has become the corporate Trojan horse that is National League Baseball, Football and Basketball in the United States. We have welcomed it into our homes via whatever media that suits us, then, without warning; we have been stripped of our National identity to become nothing more than a pawn enslaved to corporate greed. But is hockey still part of the Canadian Identity or has it, in fact, been swallowed up by corporate America?
Let’s look back at one of the best examples, in my opinion, of hockey being the heart and soul of Canadians. The United States’ achievement of placing a man on the moon and bringing him safely home was something that the world watched on television and it became a personification of that country’s national identity but, I believe, everyone in Canada would agree that we had an event equally, if not more, significant to define the Canadian identity. The final game of the 1972 Canada Russia series was every bit as awe inspiring and even, in some ways, a greater achievement for Canadians. I feel that if a poll was taken today in Canada, that everyone who was around in September 1972 would not only remember what they were doing that particular day, but also, what it meant to be Canadian when Paul Henderson slid that 6 ounce piece of vulcanized rubber into the Russian goal. At that very moment, hockey was the definition of a Canadian. Being a hockey player was synonymous with being a Canadian. That is what hockey means to Canada.
There have been many other significant hockey events in the approximately four decades since that series. Each of them, in different ways and to differing degrees, has reinforced the Canadian identity. Subsequent Canada Russia series, women’s Olympic hockey dominance and the first Canadian “dream team” Olympians in 1998 through to the current 2010 hockey Olympians are examples of these. Hockey is Canada’s game; it always was and always will be. Corporate America can certainly seize opportunities to make money from it but they cannot take away the spirit of what hockey is to Canada and Canadians of all ages. They can mask it to the point that it looks like the multi genre, one formula, corporate sport entities of the United States but they cannot take from it what is real.
Is hockey still relevant today? I think that a current Olympic media ad that is circulating the television screens of Canada and the computers of YouTube reveals the answer to that question. It features shots of many Canadians enjoying different levels of the game, from a boy playing hockey with a pop can on a back street through to a stadium filled with fans cheering on their Canadian team. It is interspersed with “He shoots! He Scores!” as well as one rendition of “She shoots! She scores! It ends with the following statement “Let’s make sure everyone knows whose game they are playing”.
You don’t have to be an individual covered with thousands of dollars worth of armor, getting paid a multi-million dollar salary to play in a multi-million dollar facility with 20,000 people watching you to be a hockey player. You just have to pick up a stick, find a patch of ice and a puck or, as I did, find a patch of street and a ball; and play. That is the definition of a hockey player and, that is what hockey was, is and always will be and it is still Canadian.