The national game for super humans

David Sherman

It’s opera on ice, but here it’s only beginning when the fat lady sings. And she’s not always fat.

On these frozen stages, there is no poison poured into ears, knives stabbed into backs. Only somewhat civilized cross checking, spearing, elbows to the head, with occasional jabs, roundhouses and uppercuts.

In our national sport of ice hockey, the poetry is in speed and precision; the drama is of winning and losing, the pain is of defeat as well as of tortured bodies.

Humans are not constructed to move at almost 40 kms/hr and be slammed into walls or each other, the brain not meant to bang around inside the skull when the body moving at that speed hits an immovable object or another body coming at it at similar speed. Skin and bones not designed to stop frozen rubber moving at 100 kms/hr.

A game like no other, here the best players, like virtuoso musicians, begin as children and obsess on it for the rest of their playing days and often beyond, coaching, scouting, managing, unable to let go of the passion or the culture of arenas, dressing rooms, buses, planes and gyms, where bodies are built, rebuilt and repaired year after year, season after season.

Played on skates, hockey is easily the fastest and most difficult sport. When players fly and passes click, it’s also ballet. Skate like you’re with the Ice Capades, hit like you’re a football player, make shots like a tennis player with a smaller stick hitting a smaller, harder object aiming for an even smaller target that moves. The net is immobile but there’s a goaltender pumped up with pads that shrinks that target to often less than a few inches. Unlike tennis, when you shoot you might be carrying a 100-kilo opponent on your back as his teammate is hacking at your arms or and legs. Not for the faint of heart, easily discouraged or bruised.

The speed and beauty, even the violence, is entrancing.

Like most professional sports, millions begin their path a decade before puberty. And, like all professional sports, each year only a handful get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow they’ve imagined every day of their young lives.

About 1.5 million play organized hockey, about a million in North America, as many in the U.S. as in Canada. There are an estimated 35,000 professional spots here and overseas. Some pay peanuts, some pay tens of millions.

For most the rainbow vapourizes. There is no pot of gold. For the majority of even the elite of university and multiple minor leagues, the cheers become faded echoes, the celebrity turns to obscurity and yellowed pages of a parent’s scrapbook.

For hockey fans, the drama is in wins and losses. Not only of games, seasons or playoff series, but of careers and dreams, mirroring our careers, our successes and failures, our lives.

The heralded rookie turns out to be a bust. The unheralded kid turns out to be a superstar. Some are born with the magic and spend the rest of their playing days trying to buttress it, fighting time, the million who want your job, the angry mobs of journalists and fans who have little patience for failure, the chronic pain and injury, the recurring self-doubt.

Perhaps us mortals have seen enough failure and expect our heroes to be exempt from the inevitable. After all, can those who play this game on ice, surrounded by boards, protected by armour of polycarbonate and muscle, threatened by titanium and fibre sticks, pucks, ice, walls and steel, really be human?

Professional sports is no game. Hockey extracts about $6 billion and growing from sales of tickets, TV rights, merchandise and over-priced hot dogs and beer. For owners and sponsors winning is big money.

The big money has taken a bit of the romance out of the game. Hence, superstar pug, Brad Marchand, captain and Boston Bruin chief resident belligerent, found himself traded to Florida when his age and salary no longer fit into team plans. Marchand found, as most athletes today, they’re heroes to fans, but only pawns or pieces of meat, as one pro football player put it, to owners and management.

We grew to love the game on Saturday’s Hockey Night in Canada on our national networks, CBC and Radio Canada, voices of Foster Hewitt, Danny Gallivan or René Lecavalier and the Esso happy motoring jingle -- ear worms still burrowed in our aging brains.

In some homes it might’ve been one of the few times the family sat together and shared an experience. In Canadian legend, it was a subject to share with friends around a hot stove during a brutal Canadian winter, the same bitter cold that forged the mettle of hockey players weaned on fabled frozen ponds.

Nibbling away at the heritage are computers and microchips and the new science of analytics.

Computer chips buried in players’ equipment and sensors built into pucks send thousands of signals a minute. They track everything a player and puck does, down to the bathroom breaks of the former.

The computers then spew reams of statistics. These are transcribed for journalists and broadcasters, both real and pseudo, to fill space and time. The game’s elegance and beauty are broken down to numbers, a tiresome excuse for analysis.

Today, stories on a game or series will often open with a run-down of identical numbers provided by teams’ press relations, cheap filler like bread crumbs in sausage. For sports nerds, it’s a gold mine. For hockey fans, it’s bafflegag.

Beauty and grace, speed and courage don’t translate into how much time was spent in the offensive zone and how many shots were taken from the slot as opposed to the “half wall.” Or how a player’s eight shots from outside the circle and no goals doesn’t quite describe the frustration of player and fan. Numbers don’t sweat, shed tears, or clench teeth.

Players are bigger, faster and more skilled than ever. They tend to come from wealthy families who can afford the elite training elite athletes need. More come from American universities that have invested more in their hockey programs. More come from the U.S. than ever before as the American fan base grows, a result, say cynics, of the violence of the game and the fact the vast majority of players are white.

I’d like to believe it’s about more hockey being a celebration of what humans can achieve and endure, win or lose. No matter politics or income level, we can revel in it.

In sports, there’s always a next year.