Did you ever play the game?

 

“Did you ever play the game”?

 No phrase is a lazier dismissal of the media’s role.

No words are simpler to ignore, and mock, for reporters.

No question reveals more about relationships and beliefs in the hockey world.

The hockey world loves this type of discussion. We prefer to engage an activity sharing its root with percussion and concussion. Too often we pummel viewer, listener, reader and each other with our unexamined ‘truths’. Precious few of us care about dialogue. There is little interest in bridging gaps, in going across difference. Ideas are used to identify and strike at opponents. These points of irritation, frustration, confusion, and anger are beautifully expressed by that simple dismissive question.

Instead, I wonder if we can create a dialogue across these differences. What does this question reveal about a player’s understanding of the business of hockey? How does its easy dismissal illuminate tensions inherent in a reporter’s role? Can this question speak to the position fans take in the complex relationship underlying coverage of our game?

First, and most obvious, this is a childish F-you from the players. It is an expression of frustration at the uninitiated questioning and criticizing their expertise. It’s an absolutely understandable lashing out at reporters who continually impugn the motives of players with the benefit of slow-motion replay in a game played above the speed of thought. Hockey is rarely a game of conscious effort. Yet players are expected to provide simple, clean and straightforward narratives that explain their actions each game.

For the media, ignoring this phrase is understandable and hard to justify. Presumably reporters ask endless questions because players have some insight you don’t get from the press box. If someone told you they lived with Mountain Gorillas in the Congo would you dismiss them by saying, “I understand, I watch a lot of National Geographic specials”? Everyone understands that embodied experience is important. We all get that media representations are filtered realities. But that doesn’t mean the media have to capitulate to a childish expression of superiority from players. The media has a key role that no others can perform.

The hockey media are intermediaries, trained to examine and interpret the game for easier and more enjoyable digestion. Depending on your beliefs, desires, background and mood this is a constant game of Goldilocks – some analysis is too simple, some is too complicated and some is just right. When players dismiss reporters so easily they are ignoring multiple realities of this professional game. Only a few thousand current and retired players know what it is like to play the game as they do. The rest of us need help to understand. And hockey players need the content provided by large media corporations to sustain and grow the game, and their salaries. Like it, or not, reporters and players are in a dysfunctional, symbiotic relationship. Neither exists, as we know them now, without each other.

The relationship of fans is the most complicated. There is no pretense of objectivity. Fans aren’t attempting to intellectualize a game for the consumption of others. We rarely recognize players as fellow labourers enduring their own daily grind. Fans are lost deep in their own ‘forest of symbols’ when they experience the game. Personal histories, beliefs, and complicated feelings about labour and capitalism are mapped onto hockey at various times. This makes understanding this relationship tricky.

However, fans roughly split themselves in two regarding the phrase discussed above: those who align themselves with the players; and those who don’t. Some of us see the player as the central hero in this story, harassed by lesser men. We align ourselves with the heroic ideal of a hockey player, even if we have more in common with the broken-ankle-skating bloggers from Jersey. These fans revel in the labourer telling a pencil-pushing, white collared Poindexter to shove it. We ignore decades of evidence that the blue-collar ethic of hockey is only a story now. It is part of hockey’s own history. And reporters are most like the blue-collar labourers grinding out their tenuous work contingent on the money and whims of players who have been receiving special treatment since they were kids.

Other fans align themselves against the players. Or, more correctly, they align themselves against most players. Every fan has at least one hockey player sized blind spot. These fans have a complicated relationship with hockey players and the game. They see players as rich and spoiled kids who are lucky to play a game for a living. They’re not wrong, generally. But, these fans have different aspirations. They see billionaire owners as the true elites in the game. They see media, business and teams as part of the same production. Players are mere widgets in their factories. In this tale, the owners of the means of production are the heroes. After all, without them no league would exist and there are plenty of nearly as good hockey players ready to go.

Obviously, this split in the fan base is a straw man argument of the flimsiest construction. But, these broad portrayals speak to a fundamental divide that affects the relationship between fans, the media, and players in a profound way. The primary distinction made in the hockey world is between being a player and not being a player. Each individual draws that distinction for themselves. And, to complicate things, others map their distinctions onto you as well. This is why John Scott, an NHL player under contract, is derided as a non-player by so many in the media. Fans get caught in this game of mismatched designations too.

I stopped playing competitive hockey in Junior ‘B’. More precisely, the hockey world stopped me from playing any longer. Sadly, I still consider myself a player. I understand it’s ridiculous. I can’t intellectually justify such a position. But, my ego doesn’t care. It was built on the unattainable dream of being a five-and-a-half feet tall NHL goalie. I won’t do the psychological work to unravel that childhood nest of hurt feelings and dreams. It means I align myself with players more often than not. But even that alliance shifts with circumstances and each invocation of feelings. I watch hockey to feel. I may try and intellectualize some thoughts after the game. But, during the games I am all beer-fueled excitement, and, being a Canucks’ fan, sadness.

At any moment I am a complex mess of seemingly contradictory beliefs. I am a hockey player at my core, who clearly isn’t. I see NHL players as the heroes of our story, but believe their merits are genetic predisposition, fortunate circumstances and outright luck as much as hard work. I know the media is unnecessary for our game, but understand they are vital for my consumption and understanding of it. This is why dialogue is so difficult in the hockey world. Understanding and going across difference means exploring self, situation and system in more detail than a kid’s game probably deserves.

What ideas, history, and symbolic baggage do you bring to the game? What does the question “Did you ever play” make you feel?  Can you understand the frustrations of a hockey player who uses it? Do you get why journalists dismiss it so easily? Should they? Should you?

Is dialogue worth trying?

Or, do we want the consumption and participation in hockey’s peripherals to reflect the game—a concussive battle of wills.