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

Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1995 by Earle, Neil

One could thus argue that Canadians are involved in a form of collective myth-making when watching hockey telecasts. The mass audience polyvalently "decodes" the game. On one level, there is a fairly straightforward hero-worship dynamic at work. Yet there are hidden duplicities as well. Some enjoy the "we're rough, tough guys from the North" message; hence, hockey's violence has never hurt its ratings. Others more likely enjoy the social segmentation noted by Rutherford. ("Where are all the women?" said one wife to her husband during her first game at Maple Leaf Gardens.) Then, as the wrestling phenomenon illustrates, excess possesses its own appeal. The striking uniforms, the crowd noises, the body checks -- these aspects of excess throw into bold relief conventional notions of decorum, propriety and law and order. Hockey's very physicality is part of its appeal. Ice hockey thus represents a multifaceted, rich and duplicitous text, rooted in rural signifiers, the symbolic recall of simpler, more innocent days when life was fresh and bright and bracing and friendship seemed forever. Here are aspects of a northern pastoral that in Canada (at least until fairly recently) was not all myth. Is this hockey's sanctum sanctorum, a locus of that elusive intangible, "the true north strong and free"?

In 1972, then, "meanings met." The series with the USSR stirred potent cultural signifiers. Ken Dryden felt it and wrote at the time: "[A]s far as the vast majority of Canadians are concerned, this series was not conceived in a spirit of brotherhood and understanding but as a means of putting down the Russians and asserting our claim to hockey supremacy."(f.27) The mass audience across Canada functioned as an imaginative sensorium capable of being "wounded with knowledge," of experiencing Aristotelian tragic pity and fear as well as moments of transcendence. In September 1972, the codes and aesthetics of television gave a heightened dramatic spin to a moment of high nationalist tension: an imaginative echoing, metaphorically, of the Greek-Persian wars.(f.28) In September 1972, Canadian television tapped the latent myth-making inherent in all sport:

Sports (offers) cohesion and identity, the mythic model. Because of the powerful visibility of such a model, it has always been used as far more than either entertainment or cultural unifier. It is quickly transformed into a vehicle for cultural values, and we translate the playing field into an image for "real life." The virtues of practice, hard work, dedication, desire, competitive spirit, fair play, "good sportsmanship," and a host of other commodities are pointed out to generation after generation of young people. The language of the games, the initiations into rituals, the formalities of winning, are transformed into mystical moments. Sport is hallowed as holy text.(f.29)

Some 15 million Canadians shared in the vicarious climax when Henderson scored for Canada. Many were to watch the last game at home, at work or at school as -- in some cases -- television sets were brought into classrooms by excited teachers aware that a moment of Canadian history was being made. Scott Young remembered the excitement the series generated in the country: "Nothing to match the excitement of this series had ever happened in Canada; rarely anywhere in any sport. The last time Canada had beaten the Soviets at hockey was in the world championships of 1961 .... Nine years of regular beatings later Canada said to hell with it and withdrew from world competition.... The ultimate ... then and now, is for world championships to be decided by the best against the best; the best, in Canada's terms, meaning professionals."(f.30)