A Humble Game Preview

Because every now and then we all need a little narrative.

Ladies and Gentlemen, there are many dull Tuesdays in a season. In fact, if I may speak freely, I would say that the games of Tuesday are often the dullest games of the week. Despite the valiant efforts of our friends at Reseau des sports to pump us up for the Tuesday game, we often find ourselves nodding off a bit during the commercials, our minds wandering this way and that, to thoughts of work or household chores or whether we ought to get around to Breaking Bad one of these days, our interest scarcely stirred by our Habitants vying against some middling Sunbelt team. Saturdays, those are the nights of the big matchups, and even Thursdays, which we like to think of as the ‘pre-weekend’, get some good games. But Tuesday… Oh, my friends, Tuesday is often uninspiring. How well I know it.

But this Tuesday is different, for this Tuesday we have the privilege- nay, the honor- of watching what is certain to be a great confrontation the likes of which have not been seen in many a month. For tonight, kittens, we will see not some dull Panthers or listless Wildlings, no no no, tonight we face the single greatest threat to our beloved Habistan, a danger nascent, but nevertheless, very very real, a franchise opposed not just to our team, but our very way of life.

Five years ago, they rose within a breath of the Stanley Cup, only to be thrown back on the brink of victory by a Hurricane from the East. Defeated, they slunk back to their bleak tundra, bloodied and battered. There, they lurked in darkness at the very bottom of the League, eking out a few meager points by occasionally raiding the other vulnerable teams in their division. Occasionally a broken, terrified defensemen would be picked up fleeing south, half-mad with despair, but otherwise little was heard of them for many years, save in June when they would emerge briefly to kidnap any young men from the surrounding junior teams high-ranked and slow-witted enough to fall into their clutches. Many thought they were gone forever.

But now they have returned, bursting forth from the frigid wilderness like a swarm of flesh-flies from a fetid wound, ravaging the West with their maniacal child-army. They have clubbed Penguins, pillaged Capitals, vanquished Kings. They have taken over the standings in one quick, savage burst, silencing their doubters and mocking their detractors. Still, questions remain: Are they strong enough to achieve victory on foreign soil? Are they virtuous enough to keep the goodwill of the hockey Gods? Is it possible to go to the playoffs with a team incapable facial hair? And who, I ask you who, has the cojones to look these brutes in the eyes and make them regress?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the team so talented they have Swedes to spare, the ape-men of Alberta, the terrors of the tar sands, the franchise with the most to prove and the least to lose, our not wholly welcome guests, the EDMONTON OILERS!

On the other bench, we have an ancient royal line. For generations they ruled the NHL with speed and grace, icing roster after roster of heroes. They claimed the Cup so many times that other teams forgot even what it looked like, inscribed so many of their own names across its surface there was hardly space for anyone else. From their island metropolis, they watched other franchises sprout, flower, and die, saw the League around them expand and contract and expand again, yet never released the Cup from their hands for more than a few seasons. Dynasty after dynasty they ruled, cold, imperious, and implacable as the river around them.

Now, though, their power wanes, and their fans grow restless. The Cup, once their personal coffee mug, has not been seen in their arena for nearly two decades. They struggle valiantly, year after year, but manage only to hold their noses above .500, and slowly they begin to realize that the age of heroes is past. There will be no more dynasties. Once great and now merely sufficient, they cling proudly to their lineage and their honor, the only things remaining that hold them apart from the rest of the great mediocre mass in the middle. Between them and their former glory stand a legion of ignoble teams, shameless tankers and hoarders of picks, men who see no method to win except to lose and feed off the charity of the League. If they are to have any hope of holding sweet Stanley ever again, these usurpers must be put down, and a better way proven.

Mesdames et messieurs, I give you, the only team in the League with Stanley Cup toe rings, the lords of the Laurentians, the sultans of the St. Lawrence, the weakest generation of the greatest hockey team the world has ever known, the home team, your MONTREAL CANADIENS!

This is it: the bottom of the barrel vs. the best of the bubble, nouveau riches vs. impoverished gentry, beardless youths vs. big burly men, beauty vs. age, swine vs. pearls, yes, folks, it’s the easy way vs. the hard way, right here on our home ice, this very Tuesday night, battling it out for honor, glory, two points, and four months of bragging rights in my apartment!

It will be epic.

Hockey Ephemera: Cairo, 2009

Sometimes, I thought that half the things in Cairo were lost, and half the people looking for them. The city feels huge beyond measurement or organization, a great agglomeration of buildings shoving each other against the banks of the Nile. They are immense, yes, skyscrapers in stature but not demeanor. The big buildings of Cairo are all faded brown and weary-looking, like thirsty travelers just come in from the desert. And there is dust, dust everywhere, dust in the streets and dust on the buildings and dust in your hair, dust blowing down the wide streets and piling up on parked cars. The desert isn’t only on the ground, it’s in the air. You can feel it, even on the banks of the river, even in the heart of the city. More than feel it, taste it. Every breath.

I did a lot of looking for things in Cairo, and not much finding. I looked through the endless rooms of the Egyptian museum for the golden sarcophagi so fascinating to all the nine-year-olds of the world, but found only endless rooms literally piled with pharonoic statuary, or circled with glass cases of jewels and baubles, everything labeled with fading tags, unreadable scrawls in Latin and fountain-pen. I looked through the streets of Old Cairo for Fatimid mosques and Ayyubid tombs and Ottoman houses, spelunking dank cisterns and sitting in jewel-ceilinged hamams, but I still never found the famed minaret of Ibn Tulun. I looked through street after street of fruit stands and juice bars for the elusive dum (pronounced like DOOOM in your most melodramatic voice), but found only its juice, sweetened and mixed with milk. I have never, before or since, been in a city with so many lost things.

But the first day, I went looking for the ice rink.

I wasn’t sure there even was an ice rink. I had heard tell of it, seen references on deserted blogs and posts on forums five years stale. It had existed, once, but that means little. In hot countries, ice rinks spring up and shut down at an alarming rate. Taiwan, I know, had seen at least four come and go in living memory. Someone builds it, thinking the novelty will make back the costs, but refrigeration is expensive and ice skating is not something that people who have never seen snow take up readily. A rink is a risky business venture, even in a rich country.

Egypt is not rich. A thousand years ago, two thousand, three, before monoculture, when food was precious and oil was irrelevant, Egypt was rich. In ancient times, she was the breadbasket of empires, pharaohs and Greeks and Persians and Romans, a dozen layered dynasties of Islamic rule. But now, like so many nations, she has too many mouths to feed, and not enough green land to feed them. Cairo doesn’t really seem like a city that has time for ice. Ice is something that makes sense for Emiratis, with their bottomless reserves of cash and boredom, their westward looking eyes. Egyptians, I figured, had bigger things on their minds.

It was highly possible that I would never find the rink, or find it thawed and dead, but I decided to look anyway. The quest took us out to Maadi, a comparatively wealthy area where the brown buildings were lower and cleaner, with palms in the gardens. We were looking for a mall, generally pretty hard to misplace, but in Cairo it seems even a mall can get lost. One shopkeeper said it was a block down and to the left, another said right and three blocks farther, and a restaurateur assured us that it did not exist at all. The first taxi driver confused it with a different shopping center entirely, the second had not heard of it, and by the time we finally arrived in the third taxi, I was certain we had come to the wrong place.

It looked deserted. There was a movie theater, obviously still in business but empty, new posters flanking shuttered ticket windows with their bright, vacant grins. Around the corner was an equally abandoned café, the only active table held by two silent, smoking employees. We found ourselves passing through a huge arcade, immense high windows half-open, letting in dry air and the inevitable dust. Some of the machines were on, bleeping and blooping merrily at nobody, but many were dark- broken, maybe, or just turned off to save on energy. There were no signs, Arabic or English or anything else, for any rink.

We went back outside, and asked the men at the table, who gestured brusquely at some steps that led down from the café. They led to a kind of sunken playground between the buildings, shady, cool. From there were doors, and from those doors, more stairs, and then I felt the air turn that ever-so-slight corner from cool to cold, and there it was.



The only ice rink in Egypt.

By ice rink standards, it wasn’t much. Boards, yes, but no glass, and the kind of freeze bad hockey players encounter in hell. Imagine outdoor ice brought indoors, in a desert, a room held at a temperature barely below standard air conditioning, with- and I swear this is true- a window open. It was scarred and scraped by tracks beyond counting, as if it remembered every stride that had ever been taken on it. A fine powder of ground-up snow covered the entire span, and in the middle of one side was a patch of defiant brown slush. Judging by the shovel and buckets in the corner, somebody did something to try to refresh it from time to time, but it was never going to be beautiful ice.

And yet, it didn’t seem to matter. Although the space was humble, it was clearly cared for. Somebody had taken the trouble to paint rows of incongruous, cheerful sunflowers on the walls, and one end had a little snack counter serving hot drinks and French fries. A row of rusty theater seats- probably castoffs from the cinema above- had been installed along the one side, and at the end, a group of guys loitered around the skate rental counter, chatting and watching the few skaters appraisingly. One girl, seemingly alone, held the boards and stepped gingerly around and around and around, with the determined overcaution of a first-timer. Another paced the middle, back and forth, confident enough not to fall but not enough to try anything more than back and forth. Around her, a figure skating lesson, an agile boy teaching turns and whirls to a smiling girl of about the same age, the two of them gliding deftly around the sludge as though it were an oversized pylon. A mother helping her little girls lace up their skates at the side. For all the inadequacies of the space, it was well-used, and apparently, well-loved.

Taped to one of the pillars, this:



And next to it, near the counter, a corkboard of photos- children and teenagers, in plastic rental skates, shinpads over jeans, helmets over hijab, low nets barely up to their knees, and sticks, and this:



[In case the picture isn’t clear…]

Principles of Ice-Hockey club

1- All the players are members of ice-hockey family.
2- Our goals are not to score but enjoy.
3- All the players are from one nation planet (earth).
4- Remember that winning isn’t everything but having fun.
5- Wear your helmet, makes sure your equipment fits, and use your stick properly.
6- Remember that coaches and officials are there to help you, so accept their decisions and show them respect.
7- At the end, remember that the only way to get goals is to practice, so practice peace with others even through sport, especially Ice-hockey.

Hockey Exegesis #3: The Moth of Madness

(Sure, it’s a totally irrelevant title for this post, but it would have been an awesome alternate title for Perdido Street Station, amiright?)

“You try to block out all the negatives. You worry about all the negatives, you end up in a rubber room.”
- Gary Suter

I don’t know if thinking about hockey has ever actually driven anyone insane. [N.B.: Here we are assuming that, by “rubber room”, Suter means ‘insane asylum’, not ‘New York teacher reassignment center’ or ‘fetish dungeon’. If we’re wrong on that count, feel free to discount this whole thing.] I wouldn’t doubt that the physical and emotional consequences wrought by a life in hockey could lead to certain kinds of mental illness. Depression? Sure. OCD? Maybe, maybe. Alcoholism? Oh yeah. PTSD? Seems reasonable. But those are not ‘rubber room’ type mental illnesses, and if hockey contributes to them, it is probably more through head injuries and social isolation than something as commonplace as worry. I’m not sure anyone, anywhere, has ever actually been driven mad- certainly not rubber room-mad- by worry.

So Suter is certainly being hyperbolic here, but let’s give credit to his experience: he clearly feels as though there is some kind of anxiety in hockey so deep, so debilitating, that he might possibly be driven insane if he indulged it. I mean, it’s one thing to say that it’s not productive to linger over bad performances, to feel regret or embarrassment, to worry about one’s future. That stuff might be a waste of time, but it’s not going to get you put in a straight jacket. What is it about ‘negatives’ that could make a player think, “Man, I can’t let myself go down that road. That way lies madness.”

Here’s a hypothesis: one of the things that makes hockey remarkable is that its gamestates are highly fluid and incredibly recursive [N.B.: I use the term ‘recursion’ with reference to the linguistic concept, not necessarily the mathematical one]. Every single play in hockey contains within itself numerous antecedent plays that contributed to both its appearance and its result. Here’s an example: A winger is coming into the offensive zone with some speed. He carries the puck down his side, but rather than taking a shot, he goes around the back of the net and comes back up the other wing, where he finds himself in a crowd and, after a bit of shoving, loses it to the other team. Could have been a scoring chance, but wasn’t. Why?

First impression blames the winger himself: it looks like he outskated his brain and wasn’t thinking fast enough to get the shot off at the right moment. Second impression gives credit to the opposition: the other team’s defense were covering the shooting lanes too well, he didn’t have any good angle. Third impression blames his teammates: nobody else got back fast enough to provide an opportunity for a pass. Fourth impression blames the coach: the forwards couldn’t get there in time because they’d been back too deep on defense, because of the system they’re taught to play. Fifth impression credits the other team’s offense: the forwards had to be deep on the backcheck, and were tired out as well, because of their opponents’ impressive cycling on the attack. Sixth impression blames the right defenseman: he made a giveaway in the neutral zone that allowed the opposition to go on the attack. Seventh impression…

Causation in hockey is like a polygamous genealogy- every event has at least a couple of proximate causes, which in turn have several earlier causes, and still further causes before those, going back beyond the last faceoff, beyond even the beginning of the game, back to the frosty childhoods of the players and the papery whims of the general managers. Like Laurie Juspeczyk, every scoring chance is a thermodynamic miracle, the single perfect child of a vast swarm of interlaced threads of probability and possibility, chaos and causality.

When things are going well, no one worries too much about this infinite recursion at the heart of the game, because when things are going well, it looks miraculous. At those times, the chain of causality looks like a well-oiled machine, just clicking and clacking along, tic-tac-toe from one victory to the next. It elicits admiration from the fans and a self-satisfaction from players, who are (of course) pleased with the way it seems to realize all their greatest plans and best intentions.

But then, sometimes, the machinery breaks down. One day it was humming pleasantly along, and then suddenly there’s a kind of a cracking noise from somewhere deep in the gears, and a poof of smoke comes out, and the whole thing starts wheezing and grinding, and then finally just… stops. And then they go inside, the coaching staff, with flashlights and power tools, and find a lot of things don’t look so good- some parts have gotten old, others don’t really fit completely right, there’s dust accumulated in this corner, oil pooled in that one. Of course, they can’t all be The Problem, or the machine would have failed long ago, so which is it? What stopped the works?

It’s very hard to see. There are too many moving parts, too many possible causes all interlaced with each other. When a hockey team breaks down in a bad game or a bad run, the problems tend to compound each other minute by minute, day by day, until it’s impossible to discern causes from consequences. Player A’s stopped scoring- is he the problem? If he is the problem, is it an issue of conditioning, or a personal problem, or a flu bug? Or is it his linemates? Did one of them start doing something different? Has the coach been matching him against the wrong opposition? Is it just that there have been a lot of road games? Or a lot of injuries? Or just plain bad luck?

Try considering all those possibilities for every player on every team that hits a rough patch. That is the way madness lies. There are too many possible recursions, too many branches in the lineage of the streak, too many gears in the machine. Start microanalyzing hockey failure and you might literally never stop. It could become an obsession, the sort of thing that leads people to hole up in dank one-room apartments, walls pinned everywhere with newspaper clippings and hand-drawn charcoal diagrams, different colored yarn strung from one to another to another, huge oversized painting of a fanged Gary Bettman in a gilt frame, until one day the landlord comes banging on the door with two cops behind him, and all you can do is babble nonsensically about diamond penalty kills and empty-net scoring rates, and they drag you away to… you know. At some point, a line must be drawn. This far, no further.

For most of us, that line ends up being, de facto, the next win. Once things the machine is going again, we stop worrying so much about the why of the breakdown. But some breakdowns are especially bad, and therefore especially hard on the sanity. When Suter said this, he was in the middle of the worst season of his career. It was January, and he had just scored a goal to secure a last-minute tie with the Red Wings. It was the first goal he’s scored in nearly two months. Once he had been nearly a point-per-game defenseman, sometimes better. That year, 1996-7, he would finish with 7 goals and 28 points.

Suter had been in the NHL for twelve good years, but he was getting into his mid-thirties, and the past two seasons had been rockier than their predecessors. He was a player on the downward slope of his career, surely he knew that much, but suddenly it was looking like a very steep descent indeed.

I imagine that for a player, the experience of a sudden decline must be like a sort of personal losing streak, except the gears grinding together are his own joints. Things that once synchronized seamlessly- hands and feet, muscle and bone- start to syncopate. Somehow, he ends up a half-step behind and a split second too late, and wonders why. Some new injury forming? Some old one not fully healed? Not enough time spent on training? Poor diet? Bad sleep? Stress? Age?

Could be all of those things. Could be none. Could just be luck.

Better not to think about it.

Not thinking about it kept Gary Suter in the NHL for another five seasons. And out of a rubber room indefinitely.

Unnatural

The Toronto Football Club is not very good. I don’t know enough about soccer- yes, I will call it ‘soccer’ throughout, because I’m American and that’s how we roll- to know that, but in case I missed it, the season ticket holder insists on telling me.

“Just look at this mess. Fuck! No, no, no, nononono, FUCK! What was that?”

The season ticket holder hates the TFC. So far, in this game, they’re up 1-0, which as I understand it means there probably aren’t going to be any more goals in this game, so he ought to be happy, but his commentary is one long string of profanity and pain, as though every kick of the ball was a kick to his own personal balls.

“This isn’t even football. I’ve seen football. I saw AC Milan once. THAT is football. This is shit.”

As crass as he is towards the team, the man is perfectly polite to me. Even friendly, in that nice-drunk way, and trying- I think- to be helpful. But right now, I am trying really hard to learn to like soccer, and he is not making it any easier.

“This is shit. These guys, they don’t know how to play football. But it’s cheap. Cheaper than the Leafs, right? Cheaper to see this crap than that crap.”

“Something you don’t want is too expensive at any price,” I suggest.

“Hah. You’ve got… FUCK!! WHAT THE FUCK? Oh, my God, I don’t know why I even come here.”

My ticket was free. I think it was still too expensive.



I want to like soccer. It seems like the sort of thing I ought to like. It is the sort of thing that people of my genre- overeducated, underemployed twentysomethings who’ve seen a bit of the world- generally like, especially the males of the species. I would probably be much more popular with the gentlemen if I was into soccer.

But I’m not just after popularity and free drinks. For me, the real appeal of soccer, the reason I wish I could love it, is that soccer is natural. It is not, despite its reputation, an especially beautiful game, but it is a very organic one. Other than one tiny little gimmick and a few painted lines, it is a perfectly prototypical team sport. Field, ball, goal, bodies, done. A game could hardly be simpler and still be a game.

It is this simplicity that makes soccer universal. Soccer is for everyone, everywhere. You can play a relatively accurate approximation of soccer on a farm or in a ghetto, on a mountain plateau or a desert valley, from tropical jungle to boreal forests. No other game is so relatively egalitarian, so accessible, so easily appreciated across cultures and climes. I feel like an appreciation of soccer would tie me in, somehow, with the rest of my species.

Unfortunately, the exact same things that make soccer universal are the things that make it boring. Soccer is people running around a field. I have seen people run in a field before. I have run in fields myself. Running in fields is utterly commonplace, wholly unremarkable. It is devoid of interest. Yes, okay, professional soccer players run better than me, and kick better than me, and suchlike, but that fact remains that running and kicking are very plain activities no matter who does them.

Oh, they say, but the strategy. If only you understood the strategy, you would enjoy it. This might be true, but it’s true of anything. If I spent enough time watching kabaddi, I would start to understand the strategy, and more time beyond that I would probably start to feel invested in it. Everything in life has a strategy, everything is interesting if you look at it long and hard. I could become a connoisseur of vanilla, if I wanted to be. But I don’t want to be, and neither do I want to force myself to appreciate soccer. It’s just not worth the investment of time and willpower necessary to appreciate the subtle nuances of fundamentally dull things.

Hockey is the only sport I do not find boring, and I fear that speaks to a severe character flaw, because hockey is not natural. It is, in fact, the most unnatural of games. It requires a lot of people, and a lot of very detailed rules about zones and contact and faceoff locations, and an absolutely enormous quantity of stuff. Weird stuff, too. Skates and sticks and a puck and, strangest of all, ice. Proportionally speaking, almost nobody in the world has even one of these things, much less all four, and that’s just the absolute beginning. To play properly takes about twenty people, each with a dozen pieces of equipment, and nets, and boards, and glass, and more nets, and a Zamboni. Yes, this is the sport where you need a special kind of vehicle just to maintain the playing surface.

It’s kind of gimmicky, really, all these things, and in most of the world, that’s what hockey is: a gimmick. A rich man’s novelty. The cost of all those things is astronomical even by Western standards- in an unfrozen land, it’s unimaginable. Most people, in most places, could not even dream of hoping of thinking about one possibly playing hockey. In hundreds of countries, hockey is permanently, inevitably, profoundly exotic and elitist. Only the very privileged, by birth or by wealth, get to play hockey.

I wish hockey could be for everyone, the way soccer is, because I think it would be good for everyone to have it. There are things a body can do in hockey that it will never do anywhere else in life, things so much more beautiful than ‘the beautiful game’, things so much more remarkable than running and kicking. But that will never be. It cannot be.



Once upon a time, there was a place where hockey was natural, where the ice happened on its own and everybody had a few sticks lying around the basement and an arthritic uncle with an old pair of skates to hand down. They tell me it was so, once. But the accretion of things has changed that considerably. They begin as improvements and rapidly become necessities, and then improve year upon year in quality and sophistication, always moving towards more. Hockey is a technological sport, and as it progresses it quickly consigns the paraphernalia of previous generations to obsolescence. Everything needs to be bought, and bought again, and again, and again, from the sticks to the rinks themselves, and in fact the puck might be the only thing much the same today as it was in our parents’ time. Even in its homeland, hockey has completely outgrown nature, the real game pulling further and further from its organic beginning, until they become nearly two different things. The resemblance between the simple hockey of the beginning and the ever-advancing modern game has become so faint as to be almost indiscernible. It persists, to the extent that it does, through memory and imitation, and little else.

One of the tangential benefits of becoming Canadian, I’ve often thought, would be that my hypothetical children would get to learn to play hockey in sweaters, on ponds, the way I never did. Mythic Canadian Childhood, toques and all, with pompoms even. But I don’t know if anyone actually learns it that way anymore, or if that’s just something adults pretend on the occasional cottage weekend, a self-conscious, nostalgic tribute to the Olden Days. Probably my kids’ first experience of hockey will be getting shellacked head to foot in plastic and foam, then whistled through an hour of skating relays and horseshoe drills, and me in the stands wishing against myself that they love it, but not too much, because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to afford children who are serious about hockey, heaven forbid good at it.

I really need to learn to like soccer.