Chicago is not an especially parade-happy city. Sure, Chicagoans like floats and chicks with batons, but not nearly so much as we like open streets upon which cars can be driven during all daylight hours. I can remember, vaguely, going to a couple of marching-intensive events as a child, but those might have been in the suburbs. Or in Iowa, for all I know. But I cannot remember seeing one single parade in downtown Chicago as an adult. I don’t think people would stand for that sort of thing, especially not on Michigan Avenue, especially not when we have shopping to do.
But last week, two million people came out to see the Blackhawks bring home the Stanley Cup. No floats or batons or elephants or anything extra, just a bunch of guys on a double-decker bus with their shiny new hardware, a few speeches and a little ceremony.
Two million people.
Not so very long ago the Hawks were lucky to get 10,000 Chicagoans to come out for them. Most nights, it was more like 5,000— 25 percent of the cavernous United Center’s capacity. People who are not from Chicago do not understand how bad it was for hockey there, even a few years ago. The rest of the hockey world looks at the city and thinks, “Hey, Original Six franchise, big sports town, can’t be all that bad.” Some people seem to have this idea that the Hawks were, like the Cubs, beloved losers.
No. (more…)
CHICAGO — “Hey, you! The Canucks f***ing suck! You f***ing suck! F*** you and go the f*** home to Canada!”
To be fair, the 300-pound gentleman waiting in line to buy nachos had a point. What was I doing here? A Vancouver Canucks fan clad in blue-and-green, wandering along the upper concourse level of the United Center in Chicago between periods of Game 5 of the NHL’s Western Conference semifinals, barely managing to squeeze through a 99.99 percent homogenous crowd sporting the home team’s red-and-black jerseys. What was I thinking? And more importantly, what gave me the nerve to show up with explicit hopes of crashing the Blackhawks’ party, where all but a handful of paying attendees planned to clinch a seven-game series that their team led three games to one?
It didn’t help my situation that the Canucks had taken a 2-0 lead in the first period on a pair of goals by defensemen. I’d been careful not to celebrate too lustily after each goal, allowing myself little more than an instinctual yelp and fist pump. It wasn’t that I felt anything less than thrilled to see those two pucks find the back of the net. No, it was the fact that, as far as my eyes could see, I was the only person in section 314 not rooting for the Blackhawks. I didn’t see a single Canucks jersey in our adjoining sections, either. In fact, by the end of the game, I’d picked out a grand total of five other Canucks fans in the entire announced crowd of 22,192 — five guys who’d have my back, and none of whom were within shouting distance. If the worst came to pass, all I’d have to protect me from an angry mob were the three friends I’d come with, the three buddies who’d each dropped $170 US for tickets to this game – Matty, Helen, and Odom – and all three of them lived in Chicago, so who knows?
Showing up to cheer for the road team during the regular season is one thing, but once the playoffs start, you’re just begging for inhospitality. My best friend in middle school, a fellow by the name of Derry, once wore a New York Rangers jersey to school during the 1994 Rangers-Canucks Stanley Cup finals series; he was sent home after recess, covered as he had become with a thick layer of Coke, raw eggs, and various other powdery substances. Another guy I knew in college, a guy named Tug from Cleveland, was such a big fan of the Indians that during a couple of early-2000s playoff series against the Boston Red Sox, he wore head-to-toe Indians gear every day and tried to pick fights with every Sox fan we passed on the streets of Boston (in other words, every single person in Boston). (more…)
It’s two days after the golden goal. What do we know? Canada is the world’s preeminent hockey power. This is not in doubt. It was not in doubt before the torch was lit in Vancouver, it was not in doubt after the initial loss to the Americans, and, shivers of horror aside, it was not even in doubt when the US’s Zach Parise scored with twenty-four seconds left in regulation to send the gold medal game to overtime.
Canada is the global hockey hegemon, this is certain knowledge. We know this, as certainly as we ever know anything about hockey, which is to say we are somewhere between 60 and 80 percent sure. Yes, for the past thirty years, there has been a consistent stream of excellent players from other countries. The Soviet system, through massive investment and militaristic discipline, managed to produce a top end of players who could compete with the quality of players Canada used to find by trawling frozen ponds with fine-mesh nets and picking out likely looking seven-year-olds. There has been a legion of elite Russians, Finns, Swedes, Czechs — even the occasional lonesome American — who, in an individual contest, if there was such a thing as an individual contest in hockey, could best virtually any single Canadian sent against them. Any country with systematized talent scouting, a well-funded training and development program, and frozen water has it in them to grow a great hockey player, even a team of them.
But hockey, if you care about objective things, is a longue duree game. You’ve gotta look big — careers, decades, generations — to get at the truth. And the bigger you look, the bigger Canada is. Canada has more players skating on more rinks across more cities than any other country; there are more Canadians making more money filling out the ranks of worldwide professional hockey leagues than any other nationality. Everything in hockey that is most, greatest, or oldest belongs to Canada or Canadians. Count it all from the beginning — all the championships, all the goals, all the stars, all the innovations — and no other country compares. Everyone knows this. It is so known that it’s a cliché, a stereotype, a joke; it’s so well-known that non-hockeyish Canadians are sometimes angered by it. Canada has produced a great many good and worthy things, but hockey is its showpiece. It is the spectacle Canada performs for the world.
Yet still, somehow, despite all that, it sometimes becomes a matter of one game.
It shouldn’t, really. One game is a matter of luck. One game is bounces, deflections, moods, moments. The Canadian Men’s Olympic team would have to be playing the Turkish Women’s Under-18 team to guarantee a victory in advance. A game like Sunday’s gold medal match? There were at least thirty players crossing that ice who have it somewhere in them to break a game open, on the right night, with the right bounces. Even granting, as a matter of course, that the Canadian team was objectively superior in talent to the Americans, they only win that game maybe fifty-seven times in a hundred. If, as postulated by Hugh Everett, the timeline does indeed bifurcate with every possible outcome of every possible choice, then that Big Game shattered time into a metric bajillion little bubbles of possibility: somewhere out there in the sprawling multiverse, the Americans won 8-0 on a Joe Pavelski hat trick and Patrick Kane is dancing around his bedroom wearing nothing but a lumpen gold medallion over his bits. Absolutely anything might have happened. (more…)
I admire how restless Jeff Lemire seems to be. Look at the career trajectory the Toronto cartoonist has charted for himself, look at how urgently he’s laid down every penline and brushstroke — you get the sense that this guy needs to tell stories. In 2007, following a Xeric Foundation grant and a self-published debut, Lemire released Tales From the Farm, a coming-of-age story that finds parallels between hockey, fatherhood, and superheroes. Another two volumes followed in what became his Essex County trilogy, each growing in ambition. Upon their completion (Top Shelf published all three as one massive collection last year), Essex County had become a multi-generational family chronicle that pieced together the lonely lives of kind-hearted brutes, pensive boys, and determined women.
Lemire’s cartooning is expressive without calling attention to itself, pointing instead toward the importance of plot, setting, and character. After Essex County, he created The Nobody, a loose adaptation of The Invisible Man that leavens Wells’s masterpiece of misanthropy with the addition of a sympathetic narrator (a teenaged girl). Vertigo, one of comics’ big-name genre-fiction imprints, released The Nobody, and is also publishing Lemire’s monthly title Sweet Tooth. The series, featuring an antlered boy “hybrid” and his grim survivalist companion, is something of a post-apocalyptic take on the cartoonist’s concerns with small towns and family units, and the allegiances formed and broken within. To discuss his rapidly expanding body of work, Lemire graciously set aside some time to chat on the phone with me. (more…)
best seo forums: Thanks for sharing such an brilliant post. I make sure to visit this post regularly. keep sharing more and more..
Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
Jefry: I do not really like to read a story like a novel or a real story but I think this is very interesting and need to be read
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
Mark: It’s not just in Canada, it seems all over artists don’t get the local recogtnition they should. I was in Malaga where Picasso was born and it is much different, but then he is...
Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
Djzklj: Pretty interesting article, despite that I don’t wanna make a voyage there
Sanyo Seiki: I love this game! Very addicted! Sanyo Seiki