Hudson Williams, left, and Connor Storrie in Heated Rivarly.HO/The Canadian Press
At every holiday, my brother-in-law’s partner comes over and apologizes for not being able to talk shop with me.
“I don’t really watch sports,” he says. He says it sadly, as if it’s something he wishes he’d developed an interest in as a child, like the oboe.
But this year, he wanted to talk hockey. He’d gotten there via Heated Rivalry, which I haven’t seen and imagine as Santa Barbara set in Flin Flon.
Was hockey really like this, he wanted to know. And hockey people in general? And what did people in the sports media think about the show?
I could only tell him what I know. That if he’s asking me if the players are all in steamy, secret love with each other, then the answer is yes, absolutely. No question.
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I like talking sports about as much as bus drivers like talking carburetors, but we had a lovely to and fro about hockey as a cultural object. It occurred to me that after a period of retreat, hockey has started moving forward again.
If you had to pick a nadir for hockey in this country, it was probably the summer of 2022. That’s when this newspaper published details about a slush fund Hockey Canada had set up to pay out liability in lawsuits, including ones involving sex abuse. Much of that money came from children’s registration fees.
If someone was paying me to tank a successful business, I could not come up with a better way to do it.
After that, hockey became an all-purpose screaming pillow. You got a problem with the way we do things in this country and need something concrete to illustrate that frustration? How about hockey? There was no -ism (misogynism, racism, etc.) you could accuse it of that would not stick.
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The people who liked the game still liked it, but they were less inclined to advertise the fact. Being into hockey was no longer automatically seen as a mark of good character.
As with most hysterical declines, this one was oversold. The sport was never in any danger in Canada. Like football in America or soccer in most places, too many people have a chunk of their self-identity wrapped up in it. But there was the possibility that it receded to the edges of public life, still watched and participated in, but no longer an aspirational activity.
Then Trump Vol. II was released. The political fashion swung from reactionary and new to reactionary and old. Hockey was back in, along with the federal Liberals, staycations and whisky distilled in Gimli, Man.
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After years of terrible luck, everything lined up quickly for hockey: Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20; the U.S. imposed its new tariff regime on February 1; that same night, fans in Ottawa booed the U.S. anthem before a Senators-Wild game; two weeks later, Canada and the U.S. put their best teams on the ice for the first time in a decade at the 4 Nations Face-Off.
Had the 4 Nations gone off a six or seven weeks earlier, it would have been derided as cash grab (which it was). If they’d waited another couple of months, the initial shock would have steamed off.
Instead, the tournament landed in the sweet spot of Canadian anxiety and rage. People needed a way to express their frustration. Politicians weren’t able to and our intelligentsia is non-existent, so hockey stepped up.
Our best hockey players understood their role here. They aren’t talkers, plus just about every one of them is compromised by the fact that he makes a fortune in America. The most useful thing they could do was fight and win, which they did.
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A supplemental thank you goes to Wayne Gretzky, who gave everyone a hate object to direct their scorn at. This was the separation with the past that any reconciliation requires. Canada had decided to stick it out with hockey, for the sake of the kids, but it was giving up on Wayne.
All of a sudden, it was no longer cool to rag on hockey as an ancient artifact of a less enlightened Canada. I’m sure some people still feel that way. They just aren’t emboldened any more.
The rest of the NHL season was nothing special, and then Heated Rivalry showed up.
I haven’t watched it, but I’ve read plenty. What one is most struck by is that for all the volume of conversation around it, very little of it has to do with hockey itself. Hockey isn’t even the subtext. It’s the pretext.
This is how you make anything cool. Put it in the background while a bunch of impossibly attractive, scripted characters carry on in the foreground. It’s how Mad Men made nostalgia for the fifties a thing, and convinced people to get into advertising just as that business was pointing its nose at the ground.
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If the NHL could buy this kind of soft adjacency to the heart of the internet hive mind, it would, but it can’t. It can only be given to it as a gift.
For the most part, hockey players haven’t said anything about the show, which is the right marketing strategy (another thing the NHL can’t buy). Attempting to talk about it without sounding like either a caveman or a try-hard is impossible. Just let people assume. They’re going to do that regardless of what you say.
Hockey’s hot roll continues in a few weeks when the Milan Olympics starts up. I’ve been trying to come up with the best possible outcome for Team Canada from the perspective of national revival. I think it’s losing a tight one against the U.S. in the gold medal game.
That would make another 4 Nations (or something like it) more likely. It would create a four-year-long revenge fantasy going into French Alps 2030.
Most importantly, it would make hockey an underdog again. Not too much of one. No one wants to follow a loser. But were they to lose, Canadians would begin to think of Team Canada as they think of themselves – roughed up by recent history, but not knocked out. That like the game itself, Canada is still swinging.