Ellen Etchingham

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Pull Together

Posted by Ellen Etchingham under Analysis, Awk-warrrd on Nov 26, 2012

Roman Hamrlik (#44) receiving the last hug he will ever get from Troy Brouwer (#20).

“I am disgusted. We have to push Fehr to the wall to get the deal. Time is against us. We lost 1/4 season, it is $425 million. Who will give it back to us? Mr. Fehr?

“There should be voting between players. Four questions – YES or NO – then count it. If half of players say let’s play, then they should sign new CBA. If there is no season he should leave and we will find someone new. Time is our enemy.”

- Roman Hamrlik, as reported on Puck Daddy.

Let’s start with an obvious point: Hamrlik isn’t wrong. Regardless of how you feel about his decision to say it- which we’ll be talking about for a thousand words after this paragraph- his position is completely valid. The players are losing money by holding out; many of them are losing the last season of their career. As many observers have noted, time is their enemy. Hamrlik, who is 38 years old and has already lost over a hundred career games to labor unrest, is a natural spokesman for that contingent of players who is losing far more in this battle than they can hope to win. He’s honestly speaking his interests, and it’s extremely likely that a substantial faction of the PA feels the same way, because Lord knows they have the same interests and not everyone is so altruistic as to sacrifice a year of professional hockey opportunity over HRR percentage points. As far as raw information goes, these comments are nothing more than the confirmation of shit we already knew.

And yet, although uncounted dozens of guys probably nodded along while reading Hamrlik’s rant, so far all of them save teammate Michal Neuvirth have swallowed their discontent and kept their mouths shut. Why? Fragmenting the PA would be the easiest way to get what they want: a deal signed and the game back on the ice. If fifty guys came out together and said, we are prepared to take whatever is on the table right now, they’d be instant heroes in the eyes of many fans and certainly in the eyes of their owners, and they’d undermine the solidarity that allows Fehr to conjure leverage out of air. If getting back on the ice is your highest priority, then it’d be supremely logical to do as Hamrlik did and let your grievances fly.

But (almost) no one does.

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The High Peak and the Broad Base: Or, Who Gets to Define Hockey?

Posted by Ellen Etchingham under Hockey Culture, Hypothesizing on Nov 23, 2012

I don't have any good pictures of my own rec hockey, so here's one of hockey in Taipei.

Hockey bloggers have different attitudes towards comment threads. Some never read them at all, some track them obsessively. Some think of them as opportunities to get in touch with their audience, others see them as troll-ridden sewers. However, it would probably be fair to say that most people who write about hockey on the internet are not especially influenced by the comments they get. Which is a shame, because sometimes the comments are asking exactly the right question.

On my previous post, where I lamented the lack of prestige and resources available for women’s hockey, the commenters challenged me in the best possible way. Why, many of them asked, does the status, or lack of status, at the highest levels matter so much? Most of us will never get to that point; most of us never expect to get there. We don’t play for fame and fortune, we play for the love of the game. So why should it matter that girls don’t have the same wild fantasies to dream on that the boys do? You shouldn’t be playing for wild fantasies anyway. You should play for the more prosaic charms of the rec league: fun, fellowship, community. The rest is dust and air.

It’s a great point. There is no necessary correlation between what can be achieved at the elite level and the whys and hows of play at the ordinary level. Beer league hockey doesn’t exist for the same reasons pro hockey does, and therefore there is no reason that  beer league players should care about the weird customs and biases of the NHL game. The inherent sexism of peak hockey- like other non-inherent but still controversial practices like finishing checks, fighting, or playing through pain- shouldn’t mean sweet fuck all for the hockey most of us make.  The NHL should be irrelevant

And yet, somehow, it isn’t. Rightly or no, the NHL echoes down the tiers of the sport. On this continent, it exerts a powerful influence over the definition of hockey that no other group or institution can match- not any other league, not even any national association.

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Asterisk: A Post About Women’s Hockey

Posted by Ellen Etchingham under Rant on Nov 19, 2012

Women's hockey offers few monetary or social rewards, but on the bright side it is full of badasses.

“Are you coming?” she asks. “On Saturday?”

The question is pointed in a particular direction, but it’s meant for the whole dressing room. Unfortunately, sans context, nobody knows what exactly it means, and the response is a mixture of open confusion and distracted fidgeting. On the far wall, a dark-haired woman with a thin face looks up from her sock-taping and asks the question everyone is obviously thinking: “What’s Saturday?”

“The Furies game. At the ACC.”

“Ohhhhhhhh yeah,” says the room, immediately buzzes into five or six distinct discussions about the game. We all got the email, with its faintly proud, faintly pleading subtext: we’ve got this big game, please please please come out, we need a crowd, we need to show the Leafs they made a good decision, we need to matter, just this once.

“I thought that was next weekend?”

“Nope, it’s this Saturday.”

“You know, I’ve never been to the ACC.”

“Really? You should go. It’s… nice.”

“You should go to support them; they’ll never get to play there again. Dream come true.”

“It’s free anyway.”

“The games are usually out at the Mastercard Centre. Ten bucks, not bad.”

“How’s the level of play?”

“It’s good. It’s fast.”

This entire situation is odd. The women I play with aren’t fans. They don’t watch hockey, unless it’s other matches in their own league or other teams in the same tournament. They love the game, of course, but they love in their own bones and muscles, not mediated by pixels and popcorn. Those mythical hockeyists who don’t give a fuck about the NHL? I have met them and they are me. Or, maybe me twenty years from now, after I’ve reconciled myself to life on the margins of hockey.

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How to Give Up

Posted by Ellen Etchingham under Editorial on Nov 16, 2012

Blake Geoffrion, in better times. (Hockey: where "that time a guy grabbed you with a stick and shoved you down and the ref caught you" actually does constitute "better times")

The worst thing about playing pro hockey is this: the end might come at any moment and there’s a good chance you won’t even see it coming.

You might say that that applies to all of us. No one knows the day nor the hour, right? Any one of us could get hit by a bus tomorrow. There is a level of chaos inherent in existence, and some of that chaos is potentially fatal to both livelihood and life.

But be realistic: the chances of a random, catastrophic accident befalling an ordinary individual are pretty small. For most people, the changes that might wreck us are the kind of changes we see coming a little ways off. If I work a dangerous job, I know the moments when accidents are most likely and what direction the risk lies. If I have a health problem, I know a fair bit about my trouble, treatment, and eventual prognosis. Maybe I couldn’t tell you precisely what will lay me low or when, but I could probably give you the gist of it. The risk in my life, and likely in yours, is within the realm of predictability.

The risk in hockey, however, is not wholly predictable, and often unpredictable in sudden and devastating ways. In fact, given all the rules, all the training, and all the padding, the most horrible damage is often of the accidental variety. The game provides equations for expected damage- the puck to the nuts you risk from facing down a slapshot, the concussion that’s likely to result from having your head low in the presence of Raffi Torres- but there is so much trauma left outside the arithmetic of risk. Taylor Hall never laced up his skates thinking, tonight perhaps a teammate will stomp on my head with a skate blade. Richard Zednick never thought, well, sometimes you battle along the boards and your carotid gets cut open, that’s just part of the game.

And I rather doubt Blake Geoffrion expected that a perfectly clean, ass-to-body hipcheck would leave him with a hole in his skull the size of a silver dollar and a hole in his hockey future the size, perhaps, of forever.

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Bobby Dump-In

Posted by Ellen Etchingham under History Lessons on Nov 09, 2012

Even years later, Bobby still sometimes had to resort to less than glamorous plays.

Somewhere in your knowledge of hockey, there is a line. This line sits on a particular date, although chances are you couldn’t say exactly which date it was; it was too long ago to remember, and back then you weren’t counting anyway. On one side of this line are the things you know personally: the games, players, editions of teams and incarnations of the League you yourself have followed through the course of your life. On the other side are all the things you’ve only heard about in stories and montages, things that were over and done before your time. One side of the line is memory. The other is myth.

Memory and myth engender two fundamentally distinct types of response. Players we remember ourselves are familiar creatures, we love them like friends or hate them like rivals. No old legend can ever arouse half the same tender affection we feel towards the men who inspired us as kids, even if those men were, objectively speaking, average practitioners of the game. But similarly we feel entitled to dissect and critique the players of our own time, no matter how great they were. Fans of my generation are fully capable of abjectly venerating Wendel Clark and snarkily deflating Wayne Gretzky, despite the obvious skill deferential and the certain verdict of history. And that’s fine. In fact, it’s one of the privileges of “being there”, in the game, at a particular moment- the right to reimagine the grand narratives of hockey through your own idiosyncratic experience.

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Wings, and Synthetic Bodies, and New Skates

Posted by Ellen Etchingham under Confessions on Nov 05, 2012

Hockey skate nerd quiz! How old are these skates and to whom do (did) they belong?

It wasn’t a hard shot. There are no hard shots in adult women’s non-competitive beginner shinny. Okay, maybe one, but she doesn’t use it much, out of a sense of decorum or maybe just not giving a fuck. Beyond her, though, there a couple of accurate shooters, a few quick shooters, and a great number of terrible shooters, but no one who sends a puck flying in high or heavy. On defense, I’ll get in front of anything. Why not? There is no shot in this hour capable of denting my layers of plastic and foam, providing I have the ovaries to face it square.

So when I deflected a puck off my skate and pieces of black shrapnel scattered across the ice, it took several long seconds for me to figure out what happened. At first, dumbly, I thought the puck had broken. But then I remembered that rubber does not work that way, and looked down, and saw the pink of my toes peering back up at me.

My skate had shattered. Not just cracked, but shattered. The goalie was busy fishing up chunks of plastic from the crease and other bits hung by tenuous threads and specks of glue from the sides.  My toe cap was gone.

Huh.

I didn’t know such a thing was possible.

“I’ve never seen THAT happen before,” said the goalie, sympathetically, as I skated alone towards the doors.

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List: NHL Teams Ranked by Scariness of Name

Posted by Ellen Etchingham under Lists on Nov 02, 2012

The Toronto Maple Leafs are the least intimidating team in hockey for a number of reasons.

In the beginning, when the hockey gods created hockey, all teams had very boring names. Like, for example, the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. Or the McGill Hockey Team. This is because old-time Canadian hockey had the most rigid, rigorous, passionate commitment to boringness you ever saw in a sporting culture.  Remember, this is the sporting culture that took about eighty years to get comfortable with the idea of raising your arms after a scoring a goal. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that there was never a team called the Toronto Group of Hockey Players.

Anyway, after about twenty years of calling hockey teams by the literal name of the organization, people started getting marginally more creative and calling teams after the rink they played in, giving us charming names like the Victorias and the Crystals.  This, in turn, gave rise to a brief fad for symbols of ethnic origin (the Shamrocks), local industry (the Creamery Kings), and ridiculous wealth (the Millionaires).  But then it wasn’t until the expansion of the 1920s that hockey discovered intimidation, and team names were never the same after. The new American teams didn’t have silly names like “Senators” and “Maroons”. No. They were Bruins and Pirates and… okay, well, Quakers might have been a mistake. But the point stands: for nearly a hundred years now, teams have tried to come up with names that have been in some way frightening, imposing, or intimidating.  Some have succeeded better than others.  And so, I give you, the teams of the National Hockey League, ranked according to scariness of name:

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