Hockeyland

he Bridgestone Arena, home of the Predators, the National Hockey League’s twenty-seventh franchise, is in the centre of the city of Nashville, only a few steps from Ernest Tubb’s country music record store on Broadway, and only a few more from the red-brick tabernacle that from 1943 to 1974 was the home of the Grand Ole Opry. The arena, built for $144 million US, was completed in 1996 and seats 17,113 hockey fans when it’s full. It’s the kind of architecture that looks elegant in isolation: its swoop of a roof, its buttressed base, and the wide plaza of its entrance are about as handsome as a modern “sport and entertainment facility” can be. But in relation to its surroundings, it mostly looks big. There are downtown hotels and a convention centre in Nashville that are not dwarfed by Bridgestone, and some of the construction now under way in the Tennessee capital is on the same proximate scale. But it’s not a fit — at least not with the municipality’s older buildings. There are honky-tonks on the main street — the boisterous country music bars on which the city’s reputation as Music City largely rests — that are not much bigger than some of the many concession stands on Bridgestone’s ground floor.

The arena’s newness looms; in varying configurations, it is the salient architectural feature of many of America’s struggling inner cities. It’s as if the urban quilt of earlier generations — more modest, idiosyncratic, human-sized enterprises — no longer covers a downtown’s increasingly desperate requirements. The musicians in jeans and cowboy hats playing “Heartaches by the Number” for the tourists in bars like Tootsies Orchid Lounge and The Stage don’t generate enough cash flow. But appearances at Bridgestone by the likes of Eric Clapton, or Bon Jovi, or Tom Petty, or the Lipizzaner Stallions, or the Nashville Predators — now, that will keep the juices flowing. So it is hoped.

The pull of malls, and big box stores, and vast tracts of cheaper retail space and cheaper parking has been eating away at places like Nashville for decades, and cities all over America have belatedly responded by installing downtown hotel complexes, convention centres, football stadiums, ballparks and hockey rinks, like massive sets of transplanted lungs. In Cleveland, for example, a visitor will find that the Cleveland Browns, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the Cleveland Indians all play in central venues, none of them very far from the city’s tourist heartbeat, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Whether these emergency surgeries are equal to America’s deeply ingrained anti-urban tendencies remains to be seen.

Some of the civic wounds were self-inflicted. Nashville made a mistake in the 1970s when it dispatched one of its biggest tourist draws, the Grand Ole Opry, to an ill-fated amusement park on the city’s periphery. Opryland usa turned out to be about as bad an idea as it sounds. It was closed in 1997 and became what it probably should have been to begin with: a mall.

The city wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, which is why the Predators weren’t banished to some sprawling equivalence of Opryland. As counterintuitive as hockey was in warm places that didn’t do very much with ice other than pour Jack Daniel’s and Coke over it, it had the advantage of offering family entertainment to regional hubs desperately in need of a wholesome, non-controversial profit centre around which a retail galaxy could be sustained. By the end of the twentieth century, there were not a whole lot of options for downtowns like Nashville’s. It’s not as if a nascar track would fit.

But, like muffins and coffees, things need to be bigger now, and so Bridgestone rises over Nashville’s older cityscape in much the way that Garth Brooks looms over Hank Williams, or a busy twelve-screen multiplex looms over the Roxy, or a Hampton Inn looms over any small, family-operated motel. It looms the way a six-foot, three-inch teenage boy in ball cap and half-mast jeans looms over the declining height of a grandfather who, in his day, never thought of himself as small. Things change in America. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that things are changed by America. Hockey is a good example.

n an average night in the nhl schedule — say, March 16, 2010 — twenty-two teams take to the ice. A matchup of two Canadian teams is the exception to the rule. On March 16, the only game in which both teams were based in the country that claims hockey as its national sport was Toronto at Ottawa. The other three Canadian teams played American teams, and only one of those games (the New York Islanders versus the Vancouver Canucks) took place in a Canadian rink. Nine of the American teams in action that night — Carolina, Atlanta, Tampa, Phoenix, Florida, Washington, Nashville, San Jose, and Dallas — come from places with almost no hockey tradition. They have sports pages devoted to college athletics, to professional football and basketball, to spring training baseball, and to high school playoffs; hockey is almost an afterthought. They are places that have to work as consciously at cultivating a hockey audience — cheap seats, free parking, family specials, non-stop promotions — as they do at maintaining a sheet of good ice from October to June.

On the night of March 16, 2010, the Americans who attended nhl games outnumbered Canadians by almost four to one. Canadians claim to be the more enthusiastic and knowledgeable fans, and much is made in Canada of the preponderance of Canadian players on American and Canadian teams alike. But loud as they are, these protestations have the same flaw: nobody in the United States pays them any attention. Canada speaks to itself on this subject — and when it comes to the entertainment business, as with most others, it is what the United States says that matters.

From a long term economic point of view, the television audience is more important than the people who show up at an arena and buy hot dogs, beer, and perhaps a souvenir windbreaker or hockey puck. But the crowd is still an essential element of the sport. It’s not the gruff, subversive voice it used to be: the grumbling of knowledgeable curmudgeons in fedoras, their un-amusable lips clamped around their White Owls, who would no more clap because they were told to than they would wear a souvenir ball cap, a team jersey, and a pair of high-top Reeboks in public. (What grown men, many of whom are clearly grandfathers, wear to hockey games in the southern United States is enough to make you long for the return of the leisure suit. There is, possibly, no worse look than jeans, jogging shoes, and an oversized nhl jersey on a man old enough to remember who Rocket Richard was.) But the voice of the crowd remains the voice of the game — the spirit, in many ways, still embroidering the action with its own distinctive commentary: a roar of approval when the home team scores, a groan of disbelief when a puck somehow doesn’t rise over the outstretched pad and into the empty side of the net.

The enclosed arenas intensify these sounds, just as they amplify the sounds of the game itself: the thud of bodies against the boards, the rattling crack of a puck against the glass, the satisfying thunk of a nice pass. Sometimes the noise is loud — almost deranged with excitement — and sometimes it is oddly quiet, as if hundreds of hushed conversations are taking place at a convention of funeral directors. The shifting back and forth from one extreme to the other, and the variety of shadings between the two, once had its own ever-changing pattern, like the musical commentary improvised by the organist at a silent movie.

We don’t hear those sounds as much as we used to. If we’re watching the game on television, someone is either telling us what we are seeing or explaining what we just saw. You’d think they were getting paid by the word. And if we’re watching the game in an arena... well, my experience is that in an arena you can’t help despair of humanity during any part of a game that doesn’t actually involve the playing of hockey. The operative assumption seems to be that the people who attend hockey games can’t sit for thirty seconds without being entertained, solicited, or told what to do. What with the cheerleaders, and the in-the-stands personalities (people who appear to be airbrushed in real life), and the mascots, and the Kiss Cam, and the opportunities to win T-shirts and pizza coupons and a ride on a Zamboni, not to mention the 110 decibels of heavy metal music the nhl assumes its audience favours, enjoying the game’s more subtle acoustic pleasures isn’t easy.

Still, nobody could conceive of a televised hockey broadcast that did not include the “oooo’s” of a near miss at the goal crease, the shouts of outrage at a referee’s missed call, or the eruption of cheers when the home team scores. It’s the kind of thing that academics can be counted upon to say — and that Don Cherry can be counted upon to ridicule — but it’s true: the noise of a crowd at an arena is the Greek chorus of the theatre of hockey. And ever since the 1967–68 season — the year the nhl’s expansion began — that chorus has become increasingly, now predominantly, American.

Companies such as Tim Hortons use hockey’s Canadian mythology to sell their products. Broadcasters such as ctv (during the Olympics) and cbc (the rest of the time) use it for exactly the same reason. Politicians such as Stephen Harper find it an easy emotive note to hit — an especially useful prop for a public figure whose emotional range, to borrow from Dorothy Parker, runs the gamut from A to B. The military sees Canada’s hockey mythology as a symbol of patriotism (recruitment ads for the Canadian Forces appear next to the schedule on the nhl’s website), and Canadian arenas, aping their American counterparts, regularly celebrate the attendance at a game of a uniformed “hero” — a word used indiscriminately and further diminished by being regularly attached to hockey players in the fictions created to sell double-doubles, beer, and cordless drills. If there were a Canadian equivalent of “America the Beautiful” — an oversight of Bobby Gimby’s for which I can only be grateful — hockey rinks would be where it would be sung.

But these are all only fantasies. Hockey, by almost any measurement (other than the method by which one might calculate the commercial value of Canadian sentimentality), has been transformed during its forty years in the digestive tract of American consumerism. It hasn’t come out as an American sport — not yet. But it is a sport that has become an American entertainment.

t was in March that I visited Nashville. A few days earlier, I’d seen the Philadelphia Flyers play the Florida Panthers in Sunrise, Florida, and after Nashville I was off to Glendale, Arizona, to see the Phoenix Coyotes play the Anaheim Ducks. It was a quixotic, southern swing — simultaneously a doomed search for some warm sunshine and an intense reaction, not to the Winter Olympics, but to the jingoism that surrounded them. I’ve always liked hockey, and I’d always been curious about professional hockey in the Sunbelt. Now I was doubly curious. I wanted to see what it was like to watch a hockey game without being obliged to feel that it had anything to do with patriotism. I wanted to watch a hockey game without anyone telling me that “it’s our game.” I wanted to go where nobody cared one way or another about Canada. I couldn’t have chosen a better place than the United States.