Watching Hockey Tonight

(This is the second in, what I hope to be,  a series of posts on the Winter Olympics leading up to Sochi 2014.)


I’m looking forward to tonight’s women’s hockey game between Canada and the United States.
 

Photo by Doug Murray

It is being played at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto.

 Saturday’s game, the first hockey I’ve watched in a while, was truly exciting. 

 To my eyes, Canada really appeared overmatched in the first two periods but roared back to tie the score in the third period.  The Americans eventually won in a shootout.

Tonight’s contest is the last of six exhibition games between the world’s two best women’s hockey nations. Their next match will take place at the Winter Olympics in Sochi on February 12^th.  That game will count.

 In the Olympics, the sport is called “ice hockey.”
 
When I hear the term “ice hockey”, I flash back to a book I read a few years ago. That would be David Adams Richards’s non-fiction hockey book - Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play (Doubleday, 1996.) 
 
Richards won a Governor General’s award for fiction (Nights Below Station Street) and non-fiction (Lines on the Water:  A Fisherman’s Life on the Miramachi). Only two other writers have accomplished this, I believe.

Richards is passionate about the game. And that game is “hockey” not “ice hockey.”  Hockey, according to Richards is greater than ice hockey - the latter being a European invention. 

To Richards’ hockey is “more than a game.”  It can be played with a puck and skates on ice; with a ball and galoshes on the road; or with any combination of the aforementioned equipment.
 
A story illustrates the difference in these two games:

Richards, as an adult, recalls hearing a song by an old black man from Mississippi. The song had been a hit when covered by a white rockabilly singer in the winter of the year much of the action in this book takes place - 1961.  This was the year Richards (and your blogger) turned eleven.

 
But the record company wanted a cleaned up “not so troubling” version of the song.

"But yes, they could profit from it.  They wanted the song.  They did not feel they had to tell you where this song came from.  They did not feel a need to tell you that it came out of a person’s love of a country and gift of life and tragedy when both have been taken away.”

Think of the original version of the song as hockey; the rockabilly version is ice hockey.  Ice hockey was created by those who invent the world for us as they often do.  “They legitimize by deligitimizing.”  

 
For my part, I’m looking forward to watching tonight’s hockey, not ice hockey, game.  It is on TSN at 7:00. 

Watching hockey live /in person is probably the best spectator experience.  So, if you want to be there you can find ticket info at http://www.theaircanadacentre.com/events/event.asp?event_id=1112#sthash.s2kKkiC0.dpbs