Roundtable: The NHL and NHLPA Partner with the You Can Play Project

April 16, 2013 Leave a comment

Image from: http://cdn.agilitycms.com/nhlpacom/Images/Articles/Content/YouCanPlay-thumbnail.jpg

Roundtables are an occasional feature on Hockey in Society. Roundtables will present brief commentaries from Hockey in Society contributors on pressing or timely issues within hockey and its culture, with the aim of presenting a diverse range of critical viewpoints on the topic under discussion.

On April 11, the NHL and NHL Player’s Association announced a joint partnership with the You Can Play Project, an anti-homophobia initiative started by NHL scout Patrick Burke. The partnership will aim to create a welcoming environment for hockey players of all sexual orientations and to provide educational resources to incoming and current players. From You Can Play’s press release:

The official partnership with You Can Play includes a significant commitment to education and training for teams, players, media and fans plus the production and broadcast of more public service announcements.  The NHL becomes the first major American professional sports league to officially partner with an LGBT advocacy group on this scale. . . .

You Can Play will conduct seminars at the NHL’s rookie symposium to educate young prospects on LGBT issues. In addition, You Can Play will make its resources and personnel available to each individual team as desired. The NHLPA and NHL also will work with You Can Play to integrate the project into their Behavioral Health Program, enabling players to confidentially seek counseling or simply ask questions regarding matters of sexual orientation.

Regular readers of Hockey in Society will know that issues of homophobia in or related to hockey cultures have been a prominent feature on this blog – from the notable recent changes to hockey’s traditionally homophobic culture, to Brian Burke’s strident and public anti-homophobia stance, to the Canadian Conservative government’s downplaying of Canada’s support of gay marriage in favour of publicizing famous hockey victories, to, of course, the emergence of the You Can Play project in 2012. Given this history of critical treatment of LGBTQ issues in hockey and the significance of the newly formed partnership, Hockey in Society is proud to present its second Roundtable on this topic. After the jump, you will find commentary from three Hockey in Society contributors: Courtney Szto, Matt Ventresca, and Alvin Ma. Hopefully these differing views shed valuable light on the issue of homophobia in hockey cultures and spark important debate and discussion on this subject and related issues.

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It’s NHL Trade Deadline Day and the Media Spectacle is in Full Swing

April 3, 2013 Leave a comment

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It is the NHL’s trade deadline today, an event that not only sees players moved from city to city and team to team but that has also become a major television (and new media) spectacle on Canadian sports networks like TSN and Sportsnet. Hockey in Society writers have written about a number of relevant posts about this event and two of these are highlighted after the jump.

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“The Good Ol’ Hockey Game”: The Cultural Resonance of Stompin’ Tom Connors’ “The Hockey Song”

March 8, 2013 Leave a comment

Image from: http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/sports/photos/2013/03/07/940-stompin-tom-8col.jpg

Canadian musician “Stompin’ Tom” Connors passed away two days ago, at aged 77. Connors is a legend in Canadian music, releasing 40 albums or compilations career and penning a number of Canadian country music hits. But it is one song that made Connors a household name across Canada and amongst hockey fans around the world: “The Hockey Song,” a 1973 track, is routinely played at hockey rinks throughout North America and has become, in many ways, hockey’s version of baseball’s iconic “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

“The Hockey Song” is a simple, straightforward ode to “the good ol’ hockey game,” with a catchy sing-along chorus that latches itself in your unconscious and doesn’t let go. It is simultaneously a charmingly hokey Canadiana folk song, with its twangy riffs and lyrical simplicity; and an anthemic, arena-sized rock song that is virtually guaranteed to get 15,000 hockey fans singing along together in a packed stadium. In this sense, it manages to symbolically bridge the paradox of hockey’s mythologized representation as a rural game emerging from the frozen Canadian landscape, evoking images of frozen ponds and ramshackle small town rinks, and its contemporary reality as a multibillion dollar, transglobal entertainment industry.

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Promoting Grassroots Participation while Building the Brand: To What Extent are NHL Teams Community Institutions?

March 2, 2013 Leave a comment

Image from: http://pittsburghpenguinselite.pointstreaksites.com/img/news_article_images/505/57352_raw.jpg

Yesterday’s Globe and Mail ran an interesting article by James Mirtle about the Pittsburgh Penguins’ contributions to grassroots hockey in Western Pennsylvania. For the past four years, the Penguins, and in particular captain Sidney Crosby, have been extremely active in promoting hockey amongst Pittsburgh youth by providing free equipment and on-ice instruction. The initiative, while obviously having a major commercial motivation in terms of growing the Penguins’ business in the long-term, is an interesting example of how professional sport franchises can be more than simply entertainment spectacles and commercial enterprises, and actually invest socially in their local communities.

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Review: “Hockey: A People’s History” (CBC TV series)

February 11, 2013 1 Comment

Image from: http://tv.fally.ro/showinfo/83923/83923-1.jpg

In 2006, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a 10-part series entitled Hockey: A People’s History (HAPH). Adopting the approach used in its popular 2000 miniseries Canada: A People’s History, the CBC focused in this series on the experience of Canadians with the sport of hockey for over a century. Beginning with early ball and stick games played in various societies over human history, the documentary quickly moves on to introducing European ball and stick games played on ice and First Nations baggataway (the forerunner to what became institutionalized as the sport of lacrosse) as the predecessors to modern hockey. After this very brief homage to hockey-like folk games, the documentary discusses the early organization of ice hockey by amateur athlete in Montreal and proceeds from there to focus entirely on the development of hockey in Canada over a roughly 125 year period.

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Teaching a sociocultural course on hockey at the undergraduate level: Thoughts on course content and critically engaging students

January 4, 2013 13 Comments

Starting next week, I will be teaching a third year course to undergraduates in University of Toronto’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education. The course is called “Hockey in Canadian Society” – and yes, I realize that the title is incredibly similar to the name of this blog! I am extremely excited, if a little nervous, about starting the course. I do not have nerves about public speaking or about the course preparation – I have been excited to teach this course for months and so have already spent quite a lot of time on its design – but rather whether I can successfully impart the complexities of hockey’s social construction in Canadian society to undergraduate students.

This post simply offers an overview of the course, my thoughts about engaging students critically with a sport many of them love, and presents a list of sources that students will read. I hope that it may provide a useful resource for other scholars teaching about hockey and more generally provide a useful list of some good academic and online sources about the sport. If you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions please let me know!

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Hockey at the University of Toronto: How the sport has been woven into the cultural fabric of a university for over a century

November 29, 2012 1 Comment

Image from: http://www.heritage.utoronto.ca/fedora/imageapi/default:15044/JPG/JPG.jpg

The University of Toronto (UofT) is Canada’s largest university, with an enrollment of over 75,000 students spread across three campuses in Toronto and Mississauga. It is also one of Canada’s oldest academic institutions, having been founded in 1827. Given its size, its age, and the location of its main campus in downtown Toronto, the university has a long and fascinating history and has been deeply involved in many aspects of Canadian society – including Canada’s most culturally significant sport, hockey.

UofT recently released an impressive digital archive that provides video and photographic material on key events and figures in the university’s history, including people such as Marhsall McLuhan and Margaret Atwood. It also captures many of the more routine, yet meaningful, campus activities. Hockey features prominently, with a search turning up 274 items.

These images of hockey at the university demonstrate how the sport has been woven into the fabric of UofT life for over a century. Of course, this does not mean that it was inclusive of the diverse student base – the subjects of the photos are mostly white, and women, despite playing the sport at UofT since at least the 1910s, appear in far fewer images than do men. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of fascinating material in the archives and after the jump I present some of the more notable images.

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The New York Islanders, the Barclays Center, and the politics of sport arenas: Winners and losers in the “Battle for Brooklyn”

October 24, 2012 4 Comments

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The New York Islanders are moving to Brooklyn. When the Islanders faceoff in their first game of the 2014-15 2015-16 NHL season, it will mark an exciting day for the franchise as the team celebrates its move to a new arena in a new part of town. What Islanders players and fans may not know is that the opening faceoff will be taking place on the exact spot where, less than 10 years earlier, former Brooklyn residents lived before being forcibly evicted by the State of New York to allow a billionaire to construct the Barclays Center.

While fans of the Islanders may celebrate the end of constant discussions about the future of the Islanders, and while owner Charles Wang may welcome the possibility of expanding his team’s brand into the hip and gentrifying borough of Brooklyn, it is also important to consider the politics behind this move and the arena that the Islanders will now be calling home. This post examines the history of the Barclays Center, and the social movement of Brooklyn residents who tried, but failed, to save their homes and businesses from being seized to construct the arena, in light of the political significance of professional sport in the borough.

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Roundtable: Weighing in on the NHL Lockout

October 1, 2012 1 Comment

Image from: http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/sports/photos/2012/09/13/bettman-fehr_940-8col.jpg

We are pleased to introduce the first Hockey in Society Roundtable, a new feature at Hockey in Society. Roundtables will present brief commentaries from Hockey in Society contributors on pressing or timely issues within hockey and its culture, with the aim of presenting a diverse range of critical viewpoints on the topic under discussion.

Simon Darnell – “Cartel Contradictions”

The current NHL lockout – like most labour disputes in professional sports – is so off-putting for the ways that it co-opts us into caring about a fight between the extraordinarily rich. This is ‘Billionaires vs. Millionaires,’ goes the familiar refrain, and the average fan is alienated given how impossible it is to relate to the stand-off.

Still, this doesn’t stop fans from trying to do just that. For example, if you read the comments posted on any e-story of the lockout over the past few weeks (I know, but I can’t help myself), you undoubtedly read something like this:

“Imagine if you owned a company and the employees took home 57% of the revenue. You wouldn’t stand for it!”

Followed shortly thereafter by something like:

“Yeah, well imagine if your boss gave you a raise and then demanded it back three months later!”

Applying real-world labour politics to the lockout in this way would seem to be a logical heuristic exercise, save for one important detail: The ‘real-world’ doesn’t apply here. In fact, the enduring legacy of the lockout should be to remind all of us 9-5ers of how dramatically far removed we are from the labour structures of professional hockey.

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It’s Hockey in Society’s One-Year Anniversary!

September 25, 2012 Leave a comment

This is just a cool picture (from: http:/cbc.ca/gfx/images/sports/photos/2009/01/16/pond-hockey-pic-306.jpg)

One year ago today, Hockey in Society launched with its inaugural post. The past 365 days have been a very exciting time on the blog, which has doubled from an initial writing crew of three to a group of six contributors and has seen 127 posts made. We hope to add to this writing crew in the coming year in order to expand our content and diversify the voices being represented on the blog.

I hope you, the reader, have found the blog to offer an insightful and original take on various social and political issues in hockey. All of us sincerely appreciate your readership and comments – please keep them coming in Year Two!

In addition to our readership, I would like to extend a big thank you to the many people on Twitter who shared our posts and to bloggers who linked to our website from their blog. The latter group includes Spector’s Hockey, Puck Buddys, Super Fan 2.0, Left Hook, Raw Charge, Lighthouse Hockey, Nucks Misconduct, Silver Sevens, and Puck Daddy. This site has grown in large part to this support and I would like to extend my sincere appreciation for this support from the hockey blogosphere.

After the jump, some stats about Year One at Hockey in Society and an overview of some of the best work from our contributors. Please check it out and enjoy!

Sincerely,

Mark Norman

Editor, Hockey in Society

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