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REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
| David Whitson and Richard Gruneau, eds., Artificial Ice. Hockey, Culture and Commerce (Peterborough: Broadview Press 2006)
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| ALMOST A DECADE and a half ago Richard Gruneau and David Whitson's landmark study Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics provided a trenchant analysis of the game's development as a commercial enterprise, confronting hockey's iconic stature within the Canadian cultural universe and its reinforcement of hegemonic influences within the contested terrain of class, race, and gender. This edited collection, drawing on recent scholarship in the field of sport studies and revealing the contemporary fascination with invented allegiances and the politics of cultural production, is a worthy sequel, deepening our appreciation of the ideological weight and contested meanings associated with hockey's place within broader constructions of Canadian identity. The dozen essays included here are divided into two sections: the first entitled "Hockey in Canadian Culture," the second "The Political Economy of Hockey." |
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In their superb introductory essay, which surveys and contextualizes writings about the game over the past half century, Whitson and Gruneau challenge the widespread assumption that hockey represents a 'natural' expression of Canadian identity. Rather, the contributors address hockey as "artificial ice," i.e. as a cultural construction which served a number of different purposes over the years and promoted the interests of some Canadians at the expense of others. Along the way they confront the weakening of assumptions about hockey as a signifier of Canadian nationality, and the ways in which hockey nostalgia naturalizes corporate capitalism and other vested interests. In so doing, they suggest, the hockey myth interferes with dreams of a more inclusive and democratic future. |
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Jean Harvey's lead essay analyzes the altered meanings associated with professional hockey in Québec over the last century and the erosion of hockey's privileged place in French-Canadian sporting culture in recent decades. Harvey focuses on the Montreal Canadiens, how they came to serve as standard bearers of French-Canadian identity in the years between the construction of the Montreal Forum (1925) and the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, and how subsequent changes in Québec society and within professional hockey weakened the relationship between the club and the people of Québec. Hockey expansion, the introduction of the universal draft, the establishment of the Québec Nordiques, the influx of European players to the NHL, and the corporatization of hockey identities all contributed to the process. But what makes this the most powerful essay in the collection are the connections Harvey makes between hockey and larger processes of social transformation within Québec: les Canadiens, he suggests, served as an important rallying point for French-Canadians in an age dominated by the ideology of survivance; but more recently – as Québecers reflected confidence in their ability to run their own economic and political affairs and as Francophone cultural life blossomed – hockey became but one way to express French-Canadian assumptions of nationhood. |
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The essays that follow further deconstruct exaggerated and essentialist claims about hockey's embodiment of Canadian nationality. Brian Wilson analyzes whether hockey is a powerful expression of identity for Canadian youth amidst the global cultural processes that affect them, and asks whether hockey marginalizes youth who do not share in the Canadian hockey experience. Mary Louise Adams focuses on the gendered and racialized nature of hockey. She argues that the naturalistic hockey myth and the idealization of shinny – the so-called "game that belongs to all of us' – privileges native-born white men and a "pernicious sense of male entitlement: to space, to status, to national belonging." (71) Julie Stevens and Robert Pitter also focus on gender and race issues. Despite the growth of female hockey and the bounce in popularity that accompanied the Canadian women's Olympic gold medal in 2002, Stevens argues, women have not been able to mount a significant struggle to influence "the values and future direction of the women's game; nor is it clear how women might exercise a greater degree of control...under current circumstances." (98) Pitter looks at the hockey experiences of Blacks and Aboriginal peoples over time, and how class and race serve as systemic barriers for non-whites who imagine a professional hockey future. In the remaining essay in this section Michael Robidoux and Pierre Trudel jump into the debate over body-checking in minor hockey. They show how the romanticization of hockey's rugged masculinity trumps not only scientific evidence about injury risks associated with body checking in younger children, but also the mission statement of Hockey Canada to provide a safe and enjoyable environment for kids. |
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The second half of the volume focuses on the commercialization of hockey, changes in the hockey labour market, and the continentalization and globalization of the game. The initial essays in this section are less engaging than the earlier ones, more matter of fact and descriptive, and their conclusions somewhat predictable. Mark Rosentraub addresses the difficulty small-market teams have in
"playing with the big boys," and compares the different strategies that major league baseball, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL employ to share revenues, enhance competition, and to balance the interests of owners and players. Robert Bellamy, Kelly Shultz, and Dan Mason cover familiar ground in looking at the place of hockey in the United States, the evolution of the game in an evolving television and media marketplace, and the viability of the NHL's sunbelt strategy. The remaining essays by John Hannigan, Hart Cantelon, and Julian Amirante are fresher and more engaging, however. Hannigan looks at the move from Maple Leaf Gardens to Toronto's Air Canada Centre and the relationship among commodified sport entertainment, community allegiance, and discourses of nostalgia. Hart Cantelon analyzes alterations in the hockey labour market that have accompanied globalization, and the continuing assumptions about the superiority of Canadian hockey and of the NHL. He addresses as well the feasibility of a European 'superleague' emerging in the future. Julian Amirante's concluding essay looks at the creation of transnational sporting and entertainment audiences, comparing and contrasting hockey and soccer, and calls for a historical understanding that situates sport within the broader process of global capitalism. |
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In sum, this is a pathbreaking set of essays written for the most part by sociologists and social theorists. It represents the most sustained critique to date of the corporatization of hockey and the mythologies that sustain and naturalize hegemonic authority. However, while effectively deflating the exaggerated presumptions of hockey mythology, the collection is rather less effective in explaining the game's continuing broad appeal. Are we to assume that fans of hockey, or of any sport for that matter, are simply cultural dupes, unaware of the competing interests and ideological manipulations that are part of its making? There is a tendency here to see hockey fans as the prisoners of nostalgia, robbed of agency because of their own "false consciousness" (although that phrase is never used). There is much truth, of course, in the proposition that sport has often served as a handmaiden of racism, hypermasculinity, militarism, and capitalist hegemony. Yet sport is all of that and more, and has been so over time. Hopefully, the essays in this important critical collection will encourage further sustained historical analysis of the complex processes that fashioned hockey's development over time and its prominent, though hardly uncontested, place in Canadian sporting life. |
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COLIN HOWELL
Dalhousie University |
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