Guest Blogger: Jason Blake – Hockey in Quebec

From coast to coast, hockey is played, watched, loved, and detested—The Same But Different: Hockey in Quebec proposes the sport means something different in Quebec. Although much of English Canada believes that hockey is a fanatically followed social unifier in the French-speaking province, in reality it has always been politicized, divided, and troubled by religion, class, gender, and language.

Coinciding with the Montreal Canadiens’ home opener of the 2017-18 season, co-editor Jason Blake explores the blurred line between hockey and politics in la belle province.

These lines from Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version are guaranteed to split those who are in the know from those who, well, are not in the know:

“Tell me something. You go to a hockey game on Thursday night, you see what’s going on, you know who scored the goals, but first thing the next morning you turn to the sports pages. Why? You think the score is going to be different in the Gazette?”

Spoken by Barney Panofsky’s wife (and delectably delivered by Minnie Driver in the movie version of Richler’s novel), these sarcastic lines are breakfast table jabs. Of course the score will be the same the morning after. Of course such verification is redundant. Barney is clearly a fool for combing the sports pages for information he already knows.

And yet… Minnie’s barb only works if you believe the complexities of hockey can be boiled down to mere numbers. The final score is not the whole picture and we turn to the newspaper not for verification but for an experiencing or re-experiencing of a moment in history. For Barney, it’s a confirmation. I was there.

Roger Angell, who writes perfectly on baseball but redeems himself by also knowing hockey, calls the “box score … a matter of intense indifference, if not irritation, to the non-fan.” But to the initiated, he notes, a few lines of “encompassing neatness permits the … fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy … that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.”

Though hockey is less statistics-happy than baseball, the hockey “reader” still fills in the box-score gaps with imaginative caulking. A two-goal lead blown in the third period? Complacency. Lack of conditioning on the one side. Perhaps grit and determination on the other. Or perhaps it was the slashing penalty taken by Player X at the 2:34 mark. The moral and judgemental possibilities are endless (all that and more from a 4–2 score…).

Fantasizing narratives and histories and deeper meanings out of numbers means turning a lived, exciting, bodily event into text, turning flesh and action into words; it means making sense of a fleeting, dying moment or two on the ice.

Individual goals and games are destined for oblivion or dusty record books. (A year or two from now, how many will remember that on October 5, 2017, the Habs opened their season by downing Buffalo 3–2? How many of us can remember going crazy over a goal or bad call, only to forget the actual goal or call?)

And yet… those forgotten empty-net goals, those unremembered tripping penalties, even those I-wish-I-could-forget seasons (1998, anyone?), trickle into broader histories, into the c-word, culture.

So where does hockey culture start? Where does one draw the line between “pure” hockey events and the rest of Quebec culture? Perhaps you can’t.

As the chapters Andy and I have collected for The Same but Different: Hockey in Quebec show, hockey’s mark on a city covers everything from thrice-told tales about Maurice Richard, murky stories about hockey’s earliest beginnings in Montreal’s collèges classique, forgotten tales of a charity league, hard-to-forget events like P.K. Subban’s multi-million-dollar donation to the Montreal Children’s Hospital and, of course, old debates about nationalism and even a (and thus pre-NHL) row over whether le Canadien should hire another rocket, who happened to be an anglo.

For more details on The Same but Different: Hockey in Quebec click here >