by Adam Gopnik
As someone once said, the central point of rugby is to survive it. And that’s where an ambiguity begins. Ice hockey is a hybrid, even a freak — what botanists call in a very different sense a “sport” — seeming to belong to the association football family, it also belongs to the rugby family, while the other contact sport that feeds into it is lacrosse — also an “association” game, one in which team play in passing is paramount, and it is also the other acceptably violent sport of the time. (The hockey rule, not held in common with association football kinds of games, that there is space behind the goal is a carryover from lacrosse, and it gives hockey a distinctly strategic character.) The DNA of hockey, its combination of being the most flashily brilliant and speedy of games and at the same time the most brutal of contact sports, comes from that doubleness — from the reality that what Creighton was trying to create when he first codified the rules of hockey in 1873 was a form of rugby on ice, played according to rules inflected by lacrosse.
Hockey’s rules have changed and evolved since then. When Creighton first invented (or consolidated) those rules, there were no forward passes — just like rugby, where you can carry the ball or shift it backwards but can’t pass it ahead. Not only its explicit rules but also its implicit spirit recall that brutal and yet most gallant of games. And, like rugby, hockey is (or pretends to be) a self-policing sport. Rugby is brutal, but pointed as much to the shared party after as the triumph of one team. It rewards comradeship, penalizes selfishness, and has its own unwritten internal rules to mitigate its violence. There are right ways to tackle and wrong ways, and since the point of the sport is that after-party, the rules are enforced by the social group. So hockey — both grim and graceful, brutal as much as balletic — belongs both to the family of association sports, of control sports, and to the rugby family of collision sports. Its history, in a sense, is the struggle to see which of its two parents will determine its legacy.
Two parents . . . and two solitudes? We think of that time and that place — Montreal at the end of the nineteenth century — as one of two parallel encampments, of a British and a French establishment living apart from each other in a kind of gloomy splendour, the French establishment dominated by an extremely hidebound pre–Quiet Revolution Roman Catholic Church, while the English-speaking Scottish establishment, gloomier even than its counterparts back in Scotland, has McGill University at its centre. As a boy I recall the twin grey cathedrals of those cultures — the Dominion/Sun Life Building and St. Joseph’s Oratory — dominating the skyline of that beautiful mountain-island city. (Both were built a bit later, but they still exemplify the embattled bulwark culture of those who made them).
In one way we expect sports to mirror the social arrangement of their society. But sports are a hammer as much as a mirror, breaking social conventions as they invent them. Baseball was shaped by nineteenth-century Irish and German immigrants to the United States, who gave the game its character, but it later acted as a conduit for Jews and Italians, who entered the game to take on Americanness. Sports preserve the pressures of the era that they’re made in, but they alter some of them too. Hockey reflected the social order of late-nineteenth-century Montreal, but it disturbed that order too, in healthy and invigorating ways.
For there was a kind of free-valence atomic shell at play in Montreal life at that time. Between the pious French and the prosperous English stood the Irish, who occupied two positions at once, in a way that would prove potent for the making of the winter game. As English-speakers they were in one way aligned with the anglo elite. But they were also Roman Catholics, and that meant they were educated with (and sometimes married to and buried alongside) the French. To be Irish was to have a kind of double identity. On the one hand you belonged to the English-speaking minority and on the other hand you despised your masters in the English-speaking minority; you were a fellow worshipper with the French-speaking majority but at the same time you were reluctant to identify with the French underclass. When you played hockey, you wanted to beat the Brits at McGill . . . but the way to do it might be to look for help from the francophones across the hall. And so the Irish played a central role, in some ways the central role, in the invention of ice hockey. The old flag of Montreal, which showed an impress quartered among the French, Irish, Scots, and English, was exclusivist (we would now need to include Greeks and Portuguese and Jews and Haitians) but it was not false. Ethnic rivalry, and coalitions of convenience, made a city culture.
Hockey, as we’ve seen, is first played by the students of McGill as winter rugby, and as members of the anglo elite in Montreal, they begin with a monopoly on it. But then the Irish kids down in Pointe Saint-Charles need a winter sport to play as well, and so they form an Irish hockey club called, naturally, the Shamrocks. At this time the idea of Catholics playing sports with non-Catholics is one that the Catholic Church in Quebec tries hard to discourage. Indeed, the whole idea of sport is frowned on by the Church hierarchy, who actually try to ban tobogganing in 1885. As a consequence, organized hockey is slow to spread among the francophone majority. Yet, because there is a kind of implicit alliance between the Irish and the French in Montreal, based on their common Catholic education, you begin to get French-Canadian kids playing hockey for Irish teams.
It’s not at the street level that hockey gets passed to the francophone community — the neighbourhoods are still too separate for that — but at the Catholic college level, at Collège Sainte-Marie and Mont-Saint-Louis and Saint-Laurent, and then largely through the tutelage of the Irish students. In 1894 and 1895, though the student body at Collège Sainte-Marie is heavily francophone, the hockey team at Sainte-Marie is entirely Irish, and only slowly does it begin to become more and more francophone. The first kids who come to play are from mixed marriages, and even today historians have a hard time being certain if a name represents a francophone, mixed, or Irish family background. The Kent brothers, Stephen and Rosaire, for instance, play for various teams at the beginning of the century, but Rosaire, with his French first name, seems to play exclusively for French teams, while his brother Stephen goes back and forth. The circumstances, at least the sporting ones, are more mixed than the clichés of solitude quite allow for.
Although hockey is passed from the Irish to the French in the colleges, the game seems in francophone neighbourhoods to have some of the aura of a street sport: a game played at high speed for fun with an emphasis on individual skill — much like African-American street and playground basketball in U.S. cities in the 1940s and ’50s. An awareness grows that on the French-Canadian side people play with a particular kind of flare, and eventually two teams, the National and the Montagnards, emerge (the Montagnards began as a snowshoeing club, which gives them their name). The new clubs are successful enough to get their own rink in the East End — at the corner of Duluth and Saint-Hubert, just north of Sherbrooke Street — and become the first Quebecois hockey teams.
One of the fascinating things that happens in the history of hockey in Montreal through these crucial crucible years is that there is a constant awkward dance among the Shamrocks, the Montagnards, and the National for the allegiance of their players. In 1898 the Montagnards include a Proulx and a Mercier, but also a Cummings and a Conrad. If anyone wanted to make a great Canadian movie — the great Canadian movie — it would be all about the hockey love triangle among the Montagnards, the Shamrocks, and the McGill Redmen in Montreal between 1900 and 1903. On the one hand all the prejudice and bigotry that kept these communities apart still existed, and at the same time there was an irresistible attraction, through the medium of this new sport of hockey, towards assimilation and joint effort — towards collaboration, in every sense. Sport, as I said, acts as a mirror for our divisions, but it also acts as a hammer that destroys them, if for no higher reason than that the tribal urge to defeat the enemy in surrogate warfare is stronger even than ordinary social bigotry.
At a crucial moment in 1903, two of the stars of t
he Montagnards, Louis Hurtubise and Théophile Viau, were incited to “cross over” and play with the Irish Shamrocks, who were in a senior, professional league while the francophone team continued to play in the intermediate league. The potential betrayal was a six days’ wonder in Montreal. Could these kids leave the Montagnards for the Shamrocks — a much more visible team, playing as they did in the Victoria Arena — and do so without betraying their national identity? True, they would help the Shamrocks beat the rival English teams, but they would also be crossing over from one allegiance to another, from east to west. For a week or two Hurtubise and Viau, a speedy winger and a rock-solid defenceman, had the whole weight of national identity on their shoulders: if they left the Montagnards they would in effect become symbolic Irishmen; if they stayed with the Montagnards they would remain ghettoized within the narrow precincts of the French-Canadian, Church-dominated culture and remain intermediates forever. We can only imagine the pressure on these two kids — improve your lot or declare your loyalty?
If you were making this movie in anglophone Canada, you would have Hurtubise and Viau play with the Shamrocks, where they would Overcome Obstacles, and then all would band together to beat some American team. And if you were making the movie in Quebec you would have Viau and Hurtubise, after their flirtation with false anglo Irish glory — room here for a lovely Franco-Irish romance — go back to the Montagnards to assert their national identity in face of the temptations of assimilation. And if you were making a real documentary about what actually happened . . . they would take turns, playing on both teams at once, in the best Canadian way. For that seems to be what did actually happen: the best surmise in a murky story seems to be that they played a bit for one team and then a bit for the other. Canadianly, they found a compromise that involved never actually having to choose, keeping a dual identity and playing occasionally for both sweaters. The controversy does not so much come to a crisis and climax as just drift away in the cold winter air.
And in a broader sense, this sinuous unfolding compromise of styles and skaters sneaking back and forth across lines, never resolved but routinely companionate, is what gave hockey its identity. It was the merging of manners — the rugby-based style of the McGill team; the very rough-and-tumble, brutal, and in some ways brutal style of the Shamrocks; and the increasingly pass-oriented creative style of the Montagnards (what we call river hockey, though really born on frozen back-alley rivulets) — that gave composite hockey its strong identity.
In 1909, when my own beloved Montreal Canadiens are invented, they are, I will say to my great disappointment, far from being a kind of growth upwards from the Montreal street, a straightforward commercial enterprise on the part of English businessmen who want to find a way of getting the dash and allegiance of the Montagnards without actually having to pay the kids who are on the Montagnards. So the Canadiens are invented as an imitation national team, as a kind of exploitation of the loyalty and allegiance that the indigenous team has already invented. (The Habs do wear, briefly, the striped rugby-style uniforms that were associated with the Montagnards; these were later revived in their centennial season, perhaps as a tribute. I wear one now to their games.)
That’s how pro hockey is made, with all the elements that we can still see today. It is in part an improvisational game played on a frozen street, in part a brutal game of rugby at high speed, in part a form of soccer on ice. All these elements get mixed with residual British ideas of fair play and self-policing schoolyard justice, which produce both the long handshake lines at the end of playoff games and the sometimes ugly sense that the players should settle it themselves — a sense unknown to the supposedly more anarchic but actually more authoritarian American games, where one punch gets you thrown out by the ref. Hockey is both a city sport and a clan sport, a modern melting-pot sport that retains an archaic tang of my gang here versus your gang there. The most creative of sports that a single original mind can dominate, it is also the most clannish, most given to brutal tribal rules of insult and retribution. And it is the play — the compromise, one might say — between clan and creativity that still gives it its character now. It’s still this game, with its tightly wound strands of tripartite DNA, that we love.
Why do we love it? Why is this game so good when it’s not being degraded and diluted by greed, violence, and stupidity? Hockey is not in my blood, but it is in my sense of the beautiful.
Now, I am a sports fan. Those who know me best will tell you that I am a sports fan almost before I am anything else, before I am a scholar or student, almost before, or more than, I am a writer. I would play every sport if I could, though I can’t, and I watch all sports because I can. If it moves, has a score and a man in stripes with a whistle following it, I am there. I was at every Montreal Expos home opener for twenty years; my first piece in The New Yorker was about them, and there is still a hole in my heart where they once lived. I have followed the New York Jets in American football for forty years and blog about them intensely every week during the season. Basketball, the native sport of my adopted city of New York, is one I’ve followed since I moved there, and I would say unhesitatingly that the most spectacular athletes I have ever seen are Julius Erving and Michael Jordan. Nor do my passions end at the ocean’s edge. For me the most thrilling walk in the world is along London’s King’s Road from Sloane Square to Stamford Bridge on a grey Saturday in early spring to watch the Chelsea Blues play. My heart follows the French national football team from World Cup failure to World Cup triumph, and certainly if I were asked to name the most amazing game of my experience, I would unhesitatingly answer that it was watching France beat the New Zealand All Blacks in the World Cup of rugby in 1999.
So, I like sports. I really do. But of all these games to watch and play — to play by proxy, which is what true watching is — the most interesting, rewarding, consistently entertaining, difficult, and beautiful is the winter game, ice hockey — when it is played well, as it is too rarely. This estimation, I recognize, of the primacy of ice hockey as spectacle and sport is rare, pretty much limited to Canadians and Russians and adulterated, it must be said, by what John Updike called a “dross of brutal messiness” that hangs onto the sport too. So I want to take a few minutes to show why in this odd judgement I am right, and also why, on the whole, no one else knows it. (That dross of brutal messiness that the great golf-lover saw in it is, as I hope we’ve seen, in part the echo of old city-clan rivalry, made salubrious by being stylized.)
It seems to me there are two things that make hockey the greatest of all games. One is rooted in what it gives to the players and the other in what it gives to its fans. For the player — and for us as vicarious players — it offers the finest theatre in the world to display the power of spatial intelligence and situational awareness. Spatial intelligence is a term that the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner was the first to popularize. His point was that body is inseparable from mind, attitude from analysis, and that there are many kinds of smartness. There is the familiar IQ-test analytic intelligence, but there are also emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and spatial intelligence: the ability to grasp a changing whole and anticipate its next stage. It’s the ability to make quick decisions, to size up all the relationships in a fast-changing array and understand them. A related notion is that of situational awareness: a heightened consciousness of your surroundings and both the intentions of the people around you and their anticipated actions.
Well, hockey, obviously, which is played at incredibly high speed, reveals and rewards situational and spatial intelligence at a degree of difficulty that no other sport possesses. So much so that the greatest of all hockey players, Wayne Gretzky, had, besides his other significant skills as a fine-edge skater, almost nothing else that he’s specifically good at. That is his gift — the gift of spatial and situational intelligence: knowing what’s going to happen in three seconds, anticipating the pattern approaching by seeing the pattern now, sussing out th
e goalie’s next decision and Jari Kurri’s or Luc Robitaille’s eventual trajectory in what would be a single glance if a glance were even taken. Gretzky is the extreme expression of the common skill the game demands.
To watch him behind the net was to see stasis rooted in smarts. I recall games (one in particular, late in his career, against the Canadiens stands out; you can still find it on YouTube) in which he would position himself there, waiting for the other team to make a move. If you went after him he would put the puck perfectly on the stick of the open man. If you left him there he would wait, and perhaps try a wraparound or find a free winger as the patterns of the power play wove and unwove in front of him. It depended on supreme skill held in tactful abeyance — and it was a demonstration that he also scores who only stands and waits.
Anyone who has kids who play hockey knows the phenomenon: there are big, strong kids and smaller, weaker kids — and then there is always one kid who “sees the ice,” who, in the midst of all the flubbed passes and scraped shins and sudden falls, grasps where the play is going next. Hockey is the one game in which, as a hockey-playing savant of my acquaintance says, a good mind can turn a game upside down.
In no other sport can a quality of mind so dominate as in the supposedly brutal game of ice hockey. Hockey is the one game where an intelligence can completely overthrow expectations. (When Gretzky recognized his successor in the still-adolescent Sidney Crosby, it was exactly that quality he was recognizing: not athleticism, but insight.) Yes, no doubt soccer rewards similar skills. A Johan Cruyff or an Eric Cantona has similar situational awareness and spatial intelligence, while we grow disgusted with superior players — like the shoulda-been-great Brazilian Ronaldo — who lack it; but there are eleven men on a soccer pitch and maybe two goals in a game, and the whole thing, despite the sporadic show of “pace,” proceeds at a walk, sometimes accelerating to a jog.