Archive for the ‘History Lessons’ Category

The title of this post is a quotation from Randall Maggs’ “Different Ways of Telling Time”, which can be found in Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems.

When I ask people what games I should watch out of the past, people mostly recommend the great works of their own favorite team.  Bruins and Flyers fans give me dates out of the middle 70s, Devils and Red Wings fans sing the praises of the 90s.  But everyone tells me to watch the 80s.  And within the 80s, everyone tells me to watch 1987.  Even people who couldn’t care less about the Oilers, even people who hate the Flyers, even people who, like me, were too young that year to really understand hockey- everyone, apparently, knows that this was a great series.  It is one of those rare moments in NHL history for which there is a swell of nonpartisan nostalgia.

No matter how widely beloved the game, though, I’m always afraid I’ll miss the hook.  What older fans remember is not always apparent to me, and often the thing that catches popular memory seems small and inconsequential to my eyes.  Do I really care if this goal was waved off?  Or that call was bad? Why should it matter to me, ten-twenty-thirty years later, if it’s not my team, if it’s not my long-nursed grudge?

At some point, all old hockey just looks… old.  Watching an historical game is always a process of cataloging the quirks of the era, and often it’s hard to get beyond that. Ah yes, 1987, when moustaches were unironic and mom jeans were still for moms. No ads on the boards! No jerseys in the crowds! No suit on Craig MacTavish! The announcers have heavy, unrepentant East Coast American accents, not the smooth Midwestern tones of standard broadcast English, and when they say “Coffey” it comes out Caw-fee. The Northlands Coliseum has its own weird symbol at center ice, not the Oilers teardrop. The only festive gestures in the whole building seem to be a few clusters of blue and orange balloons, average size, like you might get for a child’s birthday party. I can just see the event planners now: “This is the Stanley Cup Final, boys, game seven. It doesn’t get any bigger than this. I think, just this once, we can spring for a helium tank.”

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Lester Patrick c. 1907, i.e. about four years before founding the PCHA. Now let's all feel old and unaccomplished.

Lester Patrick is an important guy in the history of the NHL. As a young man, he was one of the first professional players to openly defy the amateur code. He sold his services at a premium to teams from Brandon to Montreal, and is said to have been the first defenseman ever to score a goal. As an old man, he was the first manager and coach of the New York Rangers, building the American expansion team from a boxing promoter’s plaything in 1925 to a Cup-winning team by 1927. If you’re going to make a list of guys who invented modern hockey, Lester Patrick is like top three. Maybe, by some standards, top one.

But although Patrick was born in Montreal and played several years in the NHA, although he would go down in history as the architect of a venerable Original Six team, his greatest contributions to the game weren’t made within the confines of the NHL. Unlike other early NHL figures, your Conn Smythes and Art Rosses, Patrick wasn’t just a manager and a coach. He didn’t just shape the tactics of the game. He shaped the structure of it, developing many of the rules we now take for granted as essential to hockey. Lester Patrick honestly, literally, directly, for reals, no hyperbole, revolutionized hockey. But in order to do it, he had to found a rebel league.

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A picture postcard of the Duquesne Gardens, one of the largest hockey rinks in North America c. 1904 and home ice of the IHL's Pittsburgh Pros. From the Collections of the Pennsylvania Department, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

The NHL has survived for 95 years. That is, if I may say so, a very long time for a professional sports league to survive. So long, in fact, that we here in North America are apt to occasionally confuse the NHL with hockey itself. It’s been so dominant for so long that its product often seems like the only meaningful version of the game on the landscape. It seems terribly, inevitably, depressingly permanent.

But the NHL does not represent the whole of hockey in North America. Not now, and not in the past either. Other leagues have been, and are still. Many of these alternative leagues have been somehow less than the NHL- minor leagues, junior leagues- but others have occasionally challenged the NHL and its direct forbears for control of elite level men’s hockey. And, in fact, often these other Leagues have done more to push the development of hockey than the NHL ever would. Anything so big, so wealthy, and so solid tends towards the conservative. Sometimes it needs to be threatened from outside in order to change.

In this time of instability, when the NHL cannot seem to make peace with its players or among its owners, when it feels so secure in its dominance that it can threaten not to play the game at all and still be assured of keeping it’s audience, I thought it might be nice for us all to spend some time contemplating some of these other leagues. We don’t have one now, and we might never again, but, you know, it would be a grand thing to try.  Even if it failed, even if the NHL crushed it like a bug after two seasons under its immense cloven hooves, it would still, just for a minute, scare them. Nothing forces a business to get its shit together  like the spectre of a little competition.

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Terry Sawchuck, makin' saves and terrifyin' spectators.

It’s a Monday at the end of July. The sun is hot and yellow, the trees are full and green, there’s beach volleyball on the television and dandelions on the lawn.  The neighborhood patios are full of women in floaty sundresses and men in unflatteringly short shorts.  Every green space more than three feet square has some size of children playing some variation of soccer.  There has never been an afternoon more summery than this one.

You know what this day needs? It needs a 9-minutes hockey montage from 1967 inexplicably set to a Tijuana brass score!

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In the Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five, there’s a scene where Billy Pilgrim, after the war and before he gets kidnapped by aliens, is watching a war movie backwards. Not that he means to watch it backwards, but sometimes he gets unstuck in time and things go the wrong way. So the way Billy sees the movie, all these shot-up American planes full of corpses fly over Germany, and other planes come along, pulling out the bullets and bring the dead to life. Then the fixed planes fly over cities in flame and rubble and they vacuum up all the fire, suck all the destruction into metal canisters in their bellies and take them back overseas, where women in factories carefully dismantle them, chemists turn the explosives back into minerals, and miners bury it all in the ground. Seen in reverse, every war movie is about people healing, building, and freeing each other.

Some stories are better backwards.

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