Game 8: Where I Am

When the Habs begin to play, I am still lost in the final, restless dreams of the morning. Sometime during the first period, I will dredge myself from bed and embark on that awful ritual known as ‘starting the day’. My boys are taking faceoffs and laying checks, and I am processing myself for public presentation: contacts, shower, clothing, shoes, headphones and out the door. When the puck drops on the second period, I am walking down HePing East Road, devouring a wasabi rice ball and dodging impatient scooters. During the third, I am leading a line of bleary toddlers in my most stirring rendition of ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes’; and by the time the marque finale is well and truly finalized, I am sitting down to Circle Time shouting, TIGER! We CANNOT eat our shoes! CANNOT!

In Montreal, game night was my most beloved ritual. Lacking a TV of my own, I went out to watch. The night would be black already by 7:30, that sharp deep black of real winter nights, against which everything shimmers, and I would make my way to one of the row of Greek cafes on St. Viateur. There among a crew of loud, chunky guys speaking any number of languages I didn’t understand, I would luxuriate in hot espresso and sweet biscotti and the near-miraculous unfolding of the plays. And on the walk home, with only the crunch of my boots and the whisper of my own rapid voice to keep me company, I would imagine the first draft of my post-game recap.

This is my one great regret about becoming a diaspora fan. I cannot properly watch the games. The other side of the world is not what it once was, thanks to the miracle of the internet, but it is still something. To watch the Canadiens, over here, involves a careful juggle. All day long I have to avoid the scores, which means most general-interest Canadian sites, as well as Habs blogs, Facebook, and sometimes my own email. When I get home, it takes three to six hours for the damn thing to download, by which time it might well be too late to actually watch. A busy week, for either the team or myself, means a backlog of games two or three deep. I am hopelessly, perpetually lagged from the rest of the Habistani community.

Sports fandom is largely a community of routines. The team schedule, and the media schedule that goes with it, structures a portion of your day, a portion somewhat smaller than work, but no less consistent. It’s part of what makes the bond so strong- whoever you are, whatever your class or age or race or lifestyle, if you are a fan in the home city, you are doing similar things at similar times. You are reading the same papers with your coffee on the same morning, you are tuning in to the same radio shows at lunch time, you catch the same analysts on the same regular programs, and of course, you sit down to watch the game at the same time. News and information travels your world by predictable routes. If you know something, chances are ten percent of the fans in the same city knew it at the exact same time, an hour later thirty percent will, and by the following morning, everyone who cares to know will be talking about it.

This shared habitus is powerful. It’s part of what gives you the sense that you know these people, although you’ve never met. It’s what makes How about that local sports team? such a reliable conversation-starter. When I was in Montreal, although my French was poor, I always knew what was buzzing through the common discourse. It was not a matter of learning or reading or studying, it was simply a matter of being and hearing, for everyone who was passionate about hockey- no small minority of people- was plugged in to everyone else, and the topics du jour were universally discussed. A friend once quizzed me on how I could ‘know’ what other people in Montreal thought about so-and-so’s play, and the question seemed ridiculous. Of course I cannot know exactly what one person might think, but how could I not know what everybody knows? Everybody knows what everybody knows.

Now, cut off from that, I have to piece together an awkward routine of my own, and it’s a lot of work for comparatively little reward. I get my hockey-theory fix on Western Conference blogs, who can be relied upon to make no reference to the Habs, and during those brief hours when I am fully caught up with the games, I scour site archives going back for days to deduce how my brethren have interpreted what I have just seen. My life consists of periods of complete hockey isolation interspersed with pockets of total hockey immersion, and I become grateful for the reprieve of Taiwan hockey, which is of poorer quality but at least can be experienced in real time.

A lot of expatriates lose all substance of NHL fandom. They retain a sort of ghost of an allegiance, but it’s mainly a sartorial thing- a few pieces of licensed gear to be dragged out in nostalgic moments, or as a kind of trap to lure other expats into conversation… So you’re from Edmonton? The team loyalty survives as a component of identity, but not as a practice. A casual NHL fan in Taiwan probably couldn’t name half ‘their’ current team. What it means to them, if it means anything at all and has not simply become a thoughtless vestigial custom, is entirely personal: a trace memory of who they were when they were home.

But even among those whose fanaticism dies hard, watching the games is usually the first thing to go. Partly it’s time pressure and partly it’s computer space and partly it’s just a lack of social cues, but… there’s something else too. The games are different. They feel grayer. It sounds ridiculous and quasi-mystical and maybe it is, but one feels it starting slowly and growing with time until it becomes undeniable: the game watched recorded in Taipei is not wholly the same game watched live in Canada. The same events take place, of course, but it’s almost like watching a reenactment. What should feel organic and spontaneous takes on a stale, rote feeling, as if the players are just going through the motions for your benefit. It is not really happening.

Watch too many recorded games and it starts to fuck with your sense of free will. This game is finished. Whatever will happen has already happened, days ago, it’s over and done and nothing different could possibly be. But, then again, it was always going to be whatever it was, regardless of my watching, wasn’t it? Live or recorded should make no difference to me, the viewer, for nothing in my attention could make it other than what it is. Was. The victory or loss that I am watching happen already happened, but more than that, it was always going to happen. The illusion, or delusion, is not the feeling of staleness in the recorded version, it’s the feeling of spontaneity in the live version.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again, as the Cylons say.

Like I said, old games, they fuck with your head.

Without that mysterious aura of the original (foreshadowing!), the temptation emerges to watch highlights, and once you go down that road, you never come back. Highlight hockey is a different sport, and once acclimated to it, it’s hard to be satisfied with the full version. Watching a shitty game live, over dinner or at a pub, carries the flush of the new and the warm comfort of community, and even then one is apt to feel that three hours of one’s life have been wasted. Watching a shitty game downloaded, however, it much worse, because you just chose to waste two hours of your life on an awful performance that was already over yesterday. If your team is having a bad year, you’re getting nothing in return for the investment of time and gigabytes. The highlights, on the other hand, take an eighth of the time and provide easily eight times the thrill, a game with no down, no dull, no trap, no long wait for video review, just everything big and fast and dramatic. Highlights are the crack of hockey- they give you such a perfect high, such a concise shot of everything you love in the game, that watching the entire thing just feels like a pointless endurance test. Only the playoffs make it worthwhile.

Every year since I came to this country, I’ve sworn to watch all the games, just like I used to, and every year I’ve failed. Work builds up and social opportunities arise and the local hockey season starts and eventually the backlog of unwatched Canadiens matches seems like a trackless tundra, eight extra hours I’m never going to have, and I give up.

For now, I’m hanging in there- caught up with my watching if not with my posting- and I have hopes that I’ll last at least the rest of the year, if not the entirety of the season. The team is doing well, so at least the discipline isn’t punishing. I compensate for the lack of energy in the recordings by becoming more analytical- trying to trace particular players at length, counting chances, tracking Martin’s coaching habits. I’m getting smarter about the game, if not necessarily wiser. But every now and then, for half a second, some beautiful play leads to a beautiful goal and I forget where I am and let out a little yelp of glee, and… it sounds so small and singular, dying quickly in the damp air between me and the computer screen, a reminder of how alone I am in that moment. Fandom is not meant to be a solo run.

Game 7: A Stereotype Wrapped in a Trope Inside a Cliché

Hockey has, in the past thirty years, become a polyglot sport. There’s hardly a dressing room in the NHL that doesn’t speak four different languages, and many of them have six or seven represented. English remains the lingua franca of coaching and training, and one assumes all players learn enough of the technical vocabulary to understand what they’re supposed to do, to speak the rudimentary on-ice dialect of yelps and profanity, but it’s not only in Montreal that most of the local team cannot speak the local language.

Unfortunately for all the Europeans who come to sell their talents to the NHL, this remarkably multilingual institution is located mostly in North America, which means it serves one of the most chronically and stubbornly monolingual populations remaining anywhere in the world. Despite the persistence of Quebec and the ever-increasing prevalence of Spanish in the United States, a majority of the English-speakers on the continent not only speak no other language, but self-righteously speak no other language, and consider it right and reasonable to expect that anyone setting foot on their soil ought speak to them in that language at all times. It’s a culture where people are blithely indifferent to the difficulties of language-learning and the hardships of a life lived in translation.

The NHL is still, in many ways, a league of language barriers, a fact that is seldom given due credit among the English-speaking fans and media. On many teams, at least half the players, every time they give an interview or record a television spot or do a charity autograph signing, are speaking their second or third or fourth language. Most of them speak it remarkably well. The Swedes and the Finns and the Quebecois generally speak clear, idiomatic English by the time they make the pros. The Czechs and the Slovaks sometimes do. The Russians, however, are rarely good English-speakers when they start out in the League.

Sports language involves a double process of language learning- it’s learning the words themselves, but also the structure of communication. The vocabulary and grammar, which is what most people imagine to be the substance of learning a language, pose no few difficulties in themselves. Words come easily enough, but one language’s typical manner of saying things may be nearly incomprehensible in another. A person pasting the words of a new language onto the syntax of his native tongue is going to come up with nonsense. Hill up have two the horse, as the Mandarin textbook says.

But then there are the idioms, and not just the common idioms universal to the language, but the idioms of hockey. Hockey English is a whole other level of English. Sports-speak is a highly precise, carefully coded dialect, and even native English speakers take a long time to perfect their usage of it. The scene in Bull Durham is the most famous example, but it’s something we all intuitively know: part of coming up talented in sports is learning the clichés and how to deploy them effectively. A Canadian player spends years learning how to talk to people about his play. He is trained in particular phrases and attitudes that appear culturally correct, and even if he does not wholly imbibe such into his heart of hearts, he learns to fake it. To talk about his successes, slumps, struggles, and strategies in the comforting, unremarkable way. Listen to Sidney Crosby talk, for Christ’s sake. The man is the greatest talent of his generation and possibly one of the greatest of all time, and he has never said one single thing about the game that has not been said by a thousand grinders a thousand in a thousand intermission interviews going back to the 1950s.

The Russians are doubly disadvantaged when they come into the NHL in terms of their communication skills, and it’s hard for them to catch up. Some do, some never do, and part of it may be disposition, but part of it is almost certainly language-learning ability. We are conditioned to expect this hockey-speak. It is what sounds ‘normal’ to us, and a player who speaks it competently- regardless of his actual talent or personality- sounds perfectly ordinary. A player who doesn’t speak it, however, will sound strange. Off. Peculiar. Eccentric. There is a particular blankness common to people who are trying to fake their way through a conversation in a foreign language that they only half understand. Trust me, I know this expression, I’ve deployed it across three continents and three second languages, and I’ve had it shot back at me in equal measure, and it’s exactly the expression of a twenty-one-year-old Russian player being interviewed after a game. They aren’t monosyllabic because they’re taciturn and mysterious. They’re monosyllabic because they literally, on two different levels, don’t know what they’re supposed to say. Ovechkin, happily malaproping his way through ESL learning, is a singularly brave person. Few people, in any profession, speaking any first language, are so willing to sound ridiculous on camera.

And so the Russians get called ‘enigmatic’.

‘Enigma’ is the Winston-Churchill-approved hockey code word for ‘Russian and inconsistent.’ The word strikes players in inverse proportion to their English abilities. Virtually no Anglophone anywhere in the NHL is ever called enigmatic. Every now and then a Finn or a French-Canadian gets the designation, but it’s primarily reserved for Russians and Czechs. Similarly, no Russian ever gets described as ‘a character guy’ who’s ‘good in the room’- because those qualities we judge based primarily on spoken language ability. But Lord knows, if you’ve ever had a Russian player who was good sometimes but not always, you’ve had an enigma on your roster. It’s an acknowledged stereotype, but it’s often one that people will defend as honest and legitimate. At this point, the Russian proclivity for mysteriousness is an agreed-upon fact in North America, exemplified by players from Afinigenov to Zherdev

Since Alexei Kovalev moved north, Andrei Kostitsyn has been Montreal’s enigma-in-residence. It’s a useful thing to have on a hockey team, an enigma. For one thing, if you’re a hockey writer and you find yourself short of material during the February doldrums, a what’s-up-with-that-enigma column is always good for 750 words. But an enigma is also the easiest way to stave off the creeping horror that your team is not really all that good. Because we have a black box on the first line! Who knows what bottomless potential might be held within! If only we had the key to unlock this secret! If only someone could unravel this mystery, we would have… well, we don’t really know, but something pretty damn good.

Andrei Kostitsyn came into the League in 2006, and he showed runs of talent, but a lot of inconsistency, which is not at all remarkable. In fact, it is utterly typical, so typical it should be almost boring. Lots of young players are inconsistent for their first three or four years. Some players are inconsistent forever. It’s a goddamn hard game to play consistently, for Canadians and Americans and Russians and Finns alike. But a player who can talk about his struggles and his development in the language and clichés we’ve come to expect is quite sympathetic- just a kid tryin’ to find his stride and adjust to the NHL game. Chris Higgins played this role for years in Montreal, and people may have found him frustrating but no one ever found him enigmatic. Higgins knew how to give a great interview.

But Kostitsyn, being Russian and not knowing how to give even a passable interview, has never been just a young player struggling to find his level in the League. No no no, he’s an enigma. He’s a mystery to be unraveled, an onion to be peeled, a black box in need of unlocking. People have had endless fun positing hypothetical ‘keys’ to his strange, strange behavior (the best, I think, and by ‘best’ I mean ‘most creepily inappropriate,’ was the suggestion that he’s a Chernobyl child, and therefore developmentally disabled in some peculiar way that allows him to be an elite-level hockey player but prevents him from playing consistently on the first line, which has got to be the most awesome form of radiation-induced-developmental-disability one can have.) Now he’s hot and playing well, and apparently there’s been some sort of magical solving of the riddle. Eventually he’ll get cold again, and I give you… oh, let’s say 4-1 odds we’ll see a spate of articles lamenting, oh-the-mysterious, oh-the-inscrutable. Kovelev got the ‘mystery’ treatment for his entire tenure in Montreal, and it apparently never occurred to anybody in Habistan (including me) that he was just an aging and chronically inconsistent dude.

Russians are not enigmatic. They’re just people from a different culture, who grew up trained in an utterly different hockey idiom, and (shock!) sometimes people from other cultures, while making their way in a foreign land, find it difficult to express themselves in a clear and natural way. The fact that they seem mysterious is a function of our own ignorance as much as anything they do. There might, indeed, be strange and peculiar Russians out there- the Glen Anderson of Magnitogorsk- but before we deploy the enigma (article) machine, we owe it to them to try to find a good translator first.


(And no, Google-translating Russian web pages does not count. Google-translate is a universal mechanism for making everyone sound ridiculous in every language.)