By E. Martin Nolan Including an interview with outgoing Detroit Hockey Association President Will McCants. Take Lyndon East from Greenfield in northwest Detroit and you’ll go through a neighborhood of detached bungalows and then random industrial parks and warehouses. It’s a quiet, non-distinct stretch of road in an often eerily quiet city. To your left…
Sport is a consumptive activity. Winter sports are even more consumptive. The NHL seems to have figured this out and has taken on a myriad of green activities to off-set its environmental impact. As someone who has spent a good amount of time researching corporate social responsibility initiatives the NHL Green program makes my head…
By E. Martin Nolan “Transition is a becoming. In the sphere of logic transition is mute, in the sphere of freedom, it becomes.” -SØren Kierkegaard on the metaphysical ramifications of hockey (20-21) Like your life, hockey is a game of uncertain certainties. Puck possession, while attainable and incredibly important, is always in doubt. So if…
Welcome to Hockey in Society’s Weekly Links post. This feature highlights articles or blog entries that are related to Hockey in Society’s areas of interest and that may be of interest to the site’s readers. Hockey Links Last weekend I reviewed Theo Fleury: Playing With Fire. This week, a few more reviews of the film…
By E. Martin Nolan How to make a civil rights statement with vigor Compare these two quotes: “It has become abundantly clear to me that NHL players, coaches, and management agree completely with our ideals: talent matters, sexual orientation does not. If you can play, You Can Play.” “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded…
Less than two weeks ago, after Joel Ward scored in overtime of Game 7 to lead the Washington Capitals past the Boston Bruins, some hockey fans (many of whom identified as Bruins fans) took to Twitter to hurl racist abuse at the black Canadian forward from Toronto. While many fans of the Bruins and hockey…
Theo Fleury: Playing With Fire is a 2012 documentary that paints an intimate portrait of former NHL player Theoren Fleury. The film, which shares its title with Fleury’s 2009 autobiography Playing With Fire, was screened in Toronto at the Hot Docs film festival, where I watched it on Saturday. Fleury’s story is complex, tragic and…
By E. Martin Nolan The debate over advanced stats in hockey is by now well-established, but it is also still young. The usual positions have been staked out by the usual suspects, with the old school predictably favouring their own intuition and experience while the outsider stats nerds lead a slow insurgency based on numbers…
By Matt Ventresca And now for something completely different… If we are to believe Roch Carrier’s assertion that “hockey is life in Canada” (and that’s a big if), then it only makes sense that we explore how the game materializes in art and culture. In my last post in this space (co-written with the illustrious…
Bodies of Knowledge (BOK) is an annual graduate student conference held at the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at University of Toronto. The conference is entirely organized and run by graduate students (full disclosure: I am on the organizing committee and am presenting, so this post is somewhat self-promotional) and all presentations are by…
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