Hockey as Canadian popular culture: Team Canada 1972, television and the Canadian identity

Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1995 by Earle, Neil

There is a festival time in the soul. We dress ourselves up and jump from profane time, time as linear continuation, 9 to 5, week in week out, into sacred time. In sacred time, as Mircea Eliade has called it, we enter the flight of mythic fantasy. We enter again the old tales, we live again the high adventure of the soul. Everything becomes fluid in a shifting landscape; we are Hercules as much--or as little--as our existential selves. We are here and we are there.(f.22)

Sacred time is re-emphasized in the ritual aspects of sport, as in, for example, the lighting of the Olympic torch. Cunningham links the mythos of sport to drama:

Always at issue is man's relation to Being. Is he going to remain a dreamer in the cavern, repeating the round of illusions and pleasure-principle fantasies forever, or is he going to recognize the dynamic patterns behind the scenes which govern his own life.... The drama is itself a symbol, unfolding in time.... The dramatic hero, like the dream ego, acts as our magic double, inhabiting the compressed underworld of the drama, subjected to trials and experiencing incredible delights for our sake. [Drama] immerses us in the emotional experience of growth through crisis.(f.23)

Drama, argues Cunningham, is an acting out, a symbolic participation in ritual. As such, ice hockey's values of actuality and involvement provide an experience with the potential to "wound us with knowledge." In September 1972 technology created an electronically centred national drama, a conclusion attested to by recent developments in popular culture theory.

Many theorists of popular culture refuse to ascribe a mere passive or negative role to the television audience. John Fiske, for example, sees culture-making as a social process. Fiske differentiates popular culture from mass culture. In popular culture, he asserts, the people themselves actively engage in shaping social meanings from the products offered by the consumer society. A hockey stick is a product of mass culture, but a hockey stick advertised by Mario Lemieux becomes an artifact of popular culture. People, in effect, invest mass commodities with socio-cultural meanings. In Fiske's term, "meanings meet."(f.24) The public, as consumers of mass culture, give mass-produced items a meaning that they "decode" from the product. Semioticians speak about "the phenomenon of duplicity," a larger possibility of meanings than is connoted by the obvious, intended meaning.(f.25) Thus, for an item of mass culture -- a three-piece suit, a pair of blue jeans, or a Canadiens sweater -- to become a significant item of the popular culture, a process of mediation must take place. In the Fiskean analysis, the consumer is engaged in cultural production, in giving an artifact of mass culture a meaning which will assure it a place in the public imagination.(f.26) Just as millions of teens had their "favourite Beatle" in the 1960s, so millions of Canadians have been able to identify with Maurice "the Rocket" Richard, Ted "Teeder" Kennedy, Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky, and Doug Gilmour.