Just wanted to draw your attention to Nick Paumgarten’s Talk piece from the New Yorker on Sean Avery, “The Most Hated Man in Hockey.”:

(The promised further pondering of Knocked Up, Man-Children and fairy-tale dudes in distress still coming this weekend.) The profile of the New York Ranger comes after the incident above, in which:

Avery made agitator history, in the third game of the Rangers’ best-of-seven first-round playoff series against the New Jersey Devils, by inventing a new idiot technique. During a Rangers power play, he positioned himself in front of the Devils’ goalie, Martin Brodeur, to block his view of the puck—a standard tactic known as a screen. Avery, however, turned to face Brodeur and, ignoring the play, began waving his arms and his stick in Brodeur’s face. Brodeur attempted to peer past him, but Avery carried on, even after one of his own teammates skated up and told him to cut it out. The Devils, shorthanded and desperate for a win, couldn’t indulge the urge, acute as it must have been, to knock out Avery’s teeth, especially when, a moment later, Avery put the puck past a seething and distracted Brodeur. Goal. Avery’s ploy had been unorthodox, unprecedented, and, as players and sages would declare afterward, “embarrassing” and “bush”—akin, maybe, to doing pushups over the twelfth hole at Augusta while an opponent is putting for par.

The NHL ensured the jumping jack tactic would be a one-off, however, since:

The next day, amid Pan-Canadian outrage, the NHL issued a decree, informally known as the Sean Avery Rule, or the Nitwit Rule: no more doing that, whatever it was.

The incident aside, however, the piece is a handy introduction for non-hockey fans to “the agitator,” a hockey player whose primary roll is to piss off opponents both to throw them off their game and to provoke a (possibly diproportionate) reaction from them that will land them in the penalty box. As Paumgarten notes, it’s a role without an apparent analogue in other sports. It does, however, have analogues in life, and especially in politics.

I’m thinking primarily of gadflies, a tradition both noble and ignoble. There’s the Chicago Seven, Michael Moore (especially in the TV Nation era), Ralph Nader…

In history and pop culture, I can think of the agitatation as a sort of heroism modelled on Spartacus — and running through male archetypes such as R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cukoos Nest. The goal of the agitator is not to persuade an opponent to change his or her mind, but to expose their worst tendencies and create an argument; not to lead a revolution, but to create the conditions in which one might conceivably take place.

In Toronto, the most treasured example that springs to mind is the late Tooker Gomberg, who ran a spirited but no-hope campaign for mayor against the then-untouchable Mel Lastman. Today, Lastman is thought of as a shameful punchline, and Tooker’s glove-throwing antics are, I think, an important part of why we remember him that way. Rest in peace, Tooker.

Obligatory note: Yes, of course, women are agitators too. Lots and lots of them. It may be a prouder tradition in feminist history than anywhere else, since historically agitating was one of the few independent methods of creating change available to women. And I, for one, am kind of tickled to think of Sean Avery as the Emma Goldman of hockey. We should start calling him that. I think he might even take it as compliment.

More in Act Like A Man | Sphere: Related Content | Blogs Home | Current Issue | SUBSCRIBE »

Posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 1:06 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.