Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity (review)

Canada’s Game is a welcome addition to book-length treatments of a most popular Canadian institution – hockey. Despite the variety of topics and the number of books on hockey in Canadian bookstores, scholarly monographs on the subject are surprisingly few. In this collection of selected essays from a 2005 scholarly conference on hockey, editor Andrew Holman, a professor of History and Canadian Studies at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, has done a masterful job of problematizing a preoccupation of those studying Canada: What is Canadian? Using hockey as a means to answer this question, Holman argues that identity is contextual and subject to interpretation. To that end, Holman has divided the book into three sections offering different readings on hockey and identity.

Each of the three chapters in the first section examines a different incident that illustrates the tensions and problems in discourse on Canadian identity. As in any valuable scholarship, these chapters raise questions. Gillespie’s re-examination of the 1936 Olympic hockey fiasco leads one to wonder about the politics in amateur hockey at the time. Who voted for what and why? Similarly, Hyatt and Stevens’s interviews with Hartford Whalers fans hint at an imagined community of fandom in hockey that transcends national boundaries. Does this hold true in other sports?

Section two is truly innovative in the ways it illuminates Holman’s argument about the social constructiveness of identity. Using Canadian fictional works on hockey, the authors of each of the three chapters examine how popular fiction portrays Canadian identity, although one wonders whether identity as depicted in the novels is more reflective of their creators’ perceptions than those of hockey fans or the Canadian public. In his analysis Dopp cautions against a single Canadian identity because Canada has never been a homogenous society. Skinazi further suggests that identity is not inherent. People like Leslie McFarlane helped to shape it as his work influenced later writers of children’s hockey fiction.

Four chapters in section three delve into the commercialization of hockey through the lenses of spectatorship and facility, the language of hockey, facility as a cultural symbol, and the political economy of hockey. An especially welcome addition to the literature is Dennis’s chapter on the Montreal Forum and how its cultural significance has been appropriated for commercial profit. If there is a lack of serious studies of hockey, such works on hockey in Quebec are even fewer. By using the Forum as a lens into Quebec’s history and development as a society, Dennis’s study is immensely important, not the least because the Forum had been a shrine for so many hockey enthusiasts. On the other hand, for a section that focuses on the commercial aspects of hockey, it is strange to find that two of the chapters contain no references to literature on business or economics. Moreover, Harrison’s use of hockey as a basis for Canadian exceptionalism will, no doubt, generate debate.

As with any edited work, the chapters in Canada’s Game vary in quality. On the whole, the book does what it sets out to do – offer different readings on Canadian identity. In isolated incidences copy editing could be better, although the errors are not substantial distractions. Care should be taken about some claims. Ammirante, for instance, asserts that the collapse of the reserve clause was due to the 1960s ‘US court rulings against the validity of the reserve clause in baseball’ (192). If he is referring to the Curt Flood case, which he does not identify by name, the US Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiff. In fact, the reserve clause’s demise had more to do with the professional baseball union’s methodical testing of the contract via bargaining.

As Holman states in the introduction, there has been a difference in the perception of what being ‘Canadian’ means for the intelligentsia and for others. Part of the problem, it seems, lies in the difficulties of disseminating academic...