The frozen rink breeds a warm heart

David Sherman

In between the endless reports of ignorance, cruelty, hate, in between the beer commercials and ads for 4-wheel trucks and SUVs plowing through mountains and swamps that no one watching is likely to do, there is reprieve.

There is beauty and magic. There is humanity in some of its finest forms -- grace, speed, athleticism and tradition. In the frozen north we were weaned on it. We take it for granted but now, more than ever, it’s worth taking a breath and appreciating it. It’s hockey, not at all the commonplace we grew up on.

Today, it’s an oasis, an escape, a frozen island of anything but calm, but a place of peace, a cable-fed panacea for the world’s incalculable ills.

Like great art, great hockey transcends the everyday flood of misery. Like great art, it’s born of youthful obsession. When it’s great, teams of young men and women flying, it’s beautiful to watch.

Yes, when it’s only a bunch of men or women swathed in bright, often silly, sweaters and pants, stockings taped to their legs, hiding a layer of plastic armour, chasing a puck like a dog does a bone, better to read a book.

But, when played at its best, like a great painting, you can stare at it for hours, days, years. Mundane and mediocre art, you walk right by. But Puccini, listen and forget the world. 

The best of the best -- comics, actors, composers, guitar heroes, blues artists and, yes, hockey players -- begin as children. Obsessive, from time to time compulsive. Their mission is the impossibility of perfection.

For every million ambitious, a few hundred “make it.”

Art is part of a country’s identity. Cold and ice made hockey part of us. Montreal Canadiens in their “tricolore” can be Finns, Russian, Czech, American. But when they wear the uniform, they’re ours. Their success, their travails are ours.

And, whoever wins, it won’t change your life. Just might alter your mood. And distract from the horrific news that has become our daily diet.

If you can share watching the hour on ice with your kids, partner, friends, it builds relationships, a counterpoint to the ugliness that surrounds us. As well as reminding us humans can be incredibly impressive as opposed to the newsworthy heinous, cruel and murderous.

The world has been in worse places than today. History is besmirched and engraved with the incomprehensible, the barbaric, the blood-stained. Most of those who lived through the worst of times are gone. Today we face the calamitous, amplified by the rabid breeding of the tiny microchips so that, yes, indeed, we “got the whole world in our hand,” the weight of which is often more than we can bare.

Every utterance of the ignorant, the incorrigible, the hateful, is spread in nanoseconds. The more horrific the better to seduce our eyes and thoughts to be curated by data merchants. Chaos and inhumanity, terror and death, are profit centres.

Of course, we all know, and always have, there is relief in art – the brushstrokes of the masters, past and present. In the swelling of the symphony playing the timeless or the five-piece blues bands that sing the blues to soothe the heart.

In spell-binding dance, mesmerizing great films and theatre, pages of great authors’ work, a walk along the seashore and embrace the towering, humbling waves, the curtain drops on the ravages of the everyday.

We have taken for granted the sport most of us were weaned on, beamed to us from the earliest days on radio or black and white television or before, when 50 cents or a buck or two might buy you entrance to the hallowed arena where artists of a different sort could take your troubles away.

Hockey was in our blood, a diversion from the everyday of work and child care, balancing a budget that often wouldn’t balance, praying to find a safety net when none existed.

Today, hockey takes on a different tenor. It is a multi-billion-dollar business, where tickets are not a few bucks but a few hundred. Through the same technical magic that has put a beaten and beleaguered world in our hand, hockey has invaded our homes on wall-sized colour screens, where the sweat on the faces of young men who often have yet to shave, not only enthrall us but, more importantly, can make the world go away.

Hockey is like no other sport. Played on ice by players flying on meat cleavers laced to their feet, there are no constant respites like the three or four downs of football, no 15-20 seconds between each pitch of a baseball, where the other 16 players on the field wait. And wait. And wait. Basketball players trot, stand and tussle for 20-40 minutes of court time, passing and shooting, throwing elbows and 3-point baskets. They wear no pads and there are no walls to be thrown into. Compared to ice hockey, it’s a walk in the park.

Players, to use hockey’s latest vernacular, don’t get “exploded,” meaning bones and sinew crushed into walls or hit flying down open ice at 20-30 kms/hr by someone sailing at similar speed.

The plastic armour, the helmets that wrap heads, do little to protect the brain and organs from rattling around rib cages and cranial cavities. Ligaments, tendons, muscles, joints would wave white flags if they could.

Pucks of frozen vulcanized rubber are shot from carbon fibre composite sticks, the better to shoot at upward of 150 kms/hour. Pucks break bones, shatter faces, end careers.

Players play in 40-second shifts and shuttle all game between ice and bench to catch their breath, a necessity since the game is played at full speed. If you can’t outplay your opponent, you can exhaust them.

Hockey has always been a benign escape from the everyday, but today the everyday is a 24-hour news cycle of rage, cruelty and stupidity, fomented by the despicable metastasizing south of our border. And, to keep it from eating our brains, us mortals find relief in hockey, a sport that takes a lifetime to learn and a body beyond what mere humans can endure.

Hockey is not only not for the meek. Today, it is not for the normal human. The speed, the violence, the balletic skill, the endurance demanded to play even 20 minutes a night, is beyond human.

But, more than all that, it is a lesson in what humans are capable of, an escape from the ugly to the magnificence of us bipeds, a reminder that not all is stomach-turning. Grace and beauty, as the Olympics will also demonstrate for a couple of weeks, will overcome.

When the season is done, those who moments earlier stopped just short of decapitating each other, shake hands and go home to their families. In between they might take a moment to tell a reporter or 20 of their failures, their ambitions, their determination to do better. Or they will share with the press and us, their joy of fulfilling the dreams they had as children, when they learned to skate as they learned to walk.

It is what humans can be, reserved for the sheets of ice, the widescreen and the expensive stadium seats.

But, unfortunately, rarely the seats of power.