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A double review with Canada's Game: Hockey and Identity

Edited by Andrew C. Holman

On cold winter afternoons, my brother and I would often head to the frozen pond behind my grandparents’ house for a game of shinny. Using frozen cow manure as a puck, we fought a neverending sibling grudge match on ice. If we lost the puck in the reeds, it didn’t matter — there was plenty more manure to be had.

Sometimes at night I would head back to the pond and just skate under the stars. Out there in the farmlands of rural Nova Scotia, the Milky Way seemed to glow with the light of millions of stars. It’s a memory that sticks with me, three decades later.

Over the years, I, like many Canadians, have fallen somewhat out of love with hockey. Check that — professional hockey. It’s become too corporate, too mercenary, too … well, American. After reading a pair of new books on hockey, I’m convinced that
I’m not alone in my sentiments.

Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada to the Second World War, edited by John Chi-Kit Wong, and Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity, edited by Andrew C. Holman, are both collections of academic musings on various aspects of hockey and its influence on the Canadian identity.

The arguments and analyses in both books are sound, and I can’t question the various writers’ enthusiasm for breaking the game down into a series of motivations, metaphors, and meanings. After all, it’s what academics do.

But do essays such as “Confronting a Compelling Other: The Summit Series and the Nostalgic (Trans) Formation of Canadian Identity” truly get to the heart of our collective passion for the game?

Part of me — the part that remains a seven-year-old boy skating under the stars — wonders whether the magic of the game is somehow lost amid all this analysis.

Sometimes, the secrets of the game can only be revealed by experiencing an end-to-end rush, by gripping a stick and letting it rip, and by shouting, “he shoots, he scores!