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

Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1995 by Earle, Neil

The ambivalence about Team Canada that was building up across the country is best expressed in theatrical terms: the footlights were definitely down; the spectators were very much part of the action, and they were angry. One of the dimensions of popular culture is the pleasurable opportunity sometimes presented to vent feelings of rage or frustration at an object of disapproval. Sneering at politicians or at inane commercial advertisements on television are classic examples. Oppositionality -- having it both ways -- is an earmark of the popular. The mass audience treasures its freedom to pick and choose, to mediate between alternatives, to have it both ways.

On 8 September 1972, the Vancouver fans chose revenge. The feverish fourth game in British Columbia saw Team Canada crushed 5-2. Worse, it was a loss Team Canada perhaps made inevitable by drawing two rather silly minor penalties in the first 10 minutes. The "home" part of the series had ended with the Soviets holding a commanding 2-1-1 lead. The final four games were to be played in Moscow. Ken Dryden later related: "It seemed as though it had all slipped beyond us." Then came an unusual chain of events. First, the players, seared by the reaction of the Vancouver fans, steeled their determination and decided to "win it for themselves."(f.38) Second, what Horace Newcomb has called "the aesthetics of television" began to emerge as a factor in its own right. According to Newcomb, "The central symbol of television is the family ... a tightly knit circle." The perennially popular situation-comedy format is television's stock in trade: "The smallness of the television screen has always been its most noticeable physical feature. It means something that the art created for television appears on an object that can be part of one's living room, exist as furniture. It is significant that one can walk around the entire apparatus. Such smallness suits television for intimacy; its presence brings people into the viewer's home to act out drama."(f.39) Television, claims Newcomb, has a bias for intimacy: "Television is at its best when it offers us faces, reactions, explorations of emotions registered by human beings. The importance is not placed on the action, though that is certainly vital as stimulus. Rather, it is on the reaction to the action, to the human response."(f.40)

Not action but reaction -- an interesting thesis. That wild night in Vancouver did not end with Team Canada's loss. Something else happened. Television beamed the spectacle of a totally believable Phil Esposito--his "sadeyed, washed-out face, bathed with the sweat of the world," in Dryden's words -- speaking "heart to heart" with the Canadian public. Esposito, who had emerged as the unofficial leader of Team Canada, had his moment of personal angst captured in close-up by the camera as waves of frustration convulsed his countrymen. Yet Esposito treated the audience to what television does so effectively, some would say too effectively: the personalizing and humanizing of a complex, mass spectacle: "To the people of Canada, we're trying our best.... The people boo us. We're all disappointed, disenchanted. I can't believe people are booing us. If the Russians boo their players like some of our Canadian fans -- not all, just some -- then I'll come back and apologize. We're completely disappointed. I can't believe it. We're trying hard. Let's face facts. They've got a good team. We're all here because we love Canada. It's our home and that's the only reason we came."(f.41)