Now Is the Winter: Thinking about Hockey ed. by Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison (review)

When I got my mitts on Now Is the Winter: Thinking about Hockey, I promptly flipped to the appendix scanning for any reference to my cherished Ottawa Senators. My search proved as disappointing as Alexandre Daigle. There was not a single mention of the Sens. When I read the collection of essays the lockout was in full swing; I was desperate. I was even prepared to settle for an Alexei Yashin reference, even a positive one. Beyond a couple of passing allusions to the club’s financial woes, there was nothing; even the paper on Jonathan Cheechoo omits the Sens (although he was traded north the year the book was published)! The collection, to put it frankly, is as devoid of Senators as the House of Lords in the summer.

This is precisely the sort of retaliation Now Is the Winter encourages. The essays are the product of the Canada and the League of Hockey Nations Conference, which was organized by Jamie Dopp in 2007. Needless to say, the participants did not resolve their critical problems (nor did a game of shinny), so they went into overtime, if you will, by compiling articles that expanded upon the conference’s central themes. The introduction, penned by Dopp and Richard Harrison, is endearing. It combines their unabashed love of the game with serious critical inquiry by including hockey-loving anecdotes and winking allusions to favourite stars and players. Rather than ‘zamboning’ the tension, they self-consciously embrace it: ‘The writers in this collection have all experienced the beauty, the exuberance and the occasional violence of the game of hockey, most of them directly, at one time or another, on the ice … the writers here have all responded to the game whether played or watched not just with feelings or physical effort but with questions.’ Anyone interested in bringing ice and skates to the Ivory Tower is a fan, and they are correct to foreground this subjectivity in an oh-so-postmodern fashion.

Like a game of shinny at the local outdoor rink, Now Is the Winter includes a mishmash of styles and methodologies. The scholars hail from several disciplines, which creates an eclectic mix; there are articles on regionalism, nationalism, ethnicity/racism, sexism, and marketing. The versatility and diversity is one of the collection’s strengths, although the analysis tends toward disciplinary idiosyncrasies. It would have been nice to see scholars offer different perspectives on a single issue, but such a structure may be asking too much from a collection of essays.

As with any match, there are a couple of stand-out ‘players.’ Stephen Hardy and Andrew Holman’s ‘Periodizing Hockey History’ is particularly strong, and the editors rightfully position it as the first article (the starting centre?). Their thesis is that hockey has always been a ‘globalized’ sport and that an analysis of its evolution shows how various leagues, styles, and rules influenced one another, and how, most notably, the ‘Montreal game’ – which the NHL is based upon – eventually became the dominant genre of hockey. Surely Prime Minister Stephen Harper will cite their superb essay in his (now legendary) history-of-hockey monograph; for anyone else enamoured with stick and puck, it is essential reading. The cultural studies articles – on regional identity, nationalism, and spectacle – are the weakest in the collection, mostly because they analyse what most sports fans already intuitively understand, or at least those who have taken a humanities class in university. They deserve credit for putting into words what many self-conscious fans have discussed over beers or Don Cherry’s incoherence during intermission.

Here is the game summary: Now Is the Winter is glorious reading for anyone interested in hockey. The essays effectively balance self-conscious subjectivity – there is, after all, a paper about Edmonton Oiler fans who hate Chris Pronger – and sound scholarship. But like any multidisciplinary collection of essays originating from a conference, the book is slightly unbalanced. This, surely, is not...