THIS IS THE END

Two seasons of hockey blogging was an outstanding experience. But life is full of possibilities - and I will now chase new goals.

Thanks to all of you who contributed to this blog, who criticized it, or supported my thinking on it in a way or another - especially Risto Pakarinen, Jani Mesikämmen, A Theory of Ice, Rikard Ekholm, Ossi Naukkarinen, Paul Kukla, Doogie, Vesa-Pekka Rannikko, Maija Hirvanen, Antti Saloniemi, Ilkka Virjo, Rami Nummi, my Liigapörssi and EA/NHL 'team' Jukka Juhala & Mikko Viitapohja, Riikka Turtiainen, Essi Linberg, Ny tid, Kontur, and Hilda Kozari, without forgetting the University of Art and Design Helsinki (Pori Department of Art and Media), Helsinki University (Aesthetics, Semiotics), and the University of Uppsala (Aesthetics) for giving me the opportunity to talk about hockey in an academic context.

I promise to not be the Selänne of blogging. It is over now - though I never won anything!

GOING WELL FOR AESTHETICS

A beautifully playing and dancing Malkin has now made it to the finals - as Pittsburg won Philadelphia (who, without Forsberg, is less artistic than last year).

Russia surprised Canada, and everybody else too - by taking home the World Championship title. We might be witnessing a new era, with Russia on the top for a while.

Could an aesthetic hockey fan wish for anything more? The Russians just do it better - from an aesthetic point of view. Their stars truly are the Brazilians of hockey.

For those who read Swedish: an essay publication on hockey in print is out in Kontur, the literary supplement of Ny Tid. (Here is a link to the 'electronic version' (with the permission of the editor in chief).

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Russian Puck Artists!

International hockey journalists have for years thought that Finland will not be a medal contender. This year is different, but who cares, Finland does it in nearly every international tournament. Olympic silver 2006, runner-up at the 2004 World Cup, silver 2007 and bronze 2006 in the World Championships games... Why do hockey journalists look so much at rosters? They seem to know, for example in the NHL, that the rosters don't count, but they way a team plays. It is strange that professionals know every year that the Red Wings are dangerous, but not that Finland is dangerous together with Canada and Sweden as a national team. Look at past medalists. Russia takes a medal now and then, but when you look at history, it is clear that their team is not on the same level. The same with the Czech Republic. The IIHF World Rankings seem to be a good way to know every year quite well who's going to make it.

I've been thinking that this is about winning. Having one superb season makes a player a star - something you cannot aquire by playing six in a row 'just' well.

The same applies to national teams. Sweden and Canada have won lately - often against Finland in the gold match - and the Czech's did it in the beginning of the millenium. Finland hasn't won, so it will have to have a really great roster before it could be counted in even as a medal contender. Russia? Could it still the old Red Machine from the 1980 affecting hockey journalists? I hope it is just the fast skating stars... North American hockey enthusiasts talk every year about the US as well, but well, your own team always looks better than the others... No one believes in the US here in Europe, I suppose - if not this year, and in the future, following the rising new generation.

These symbolical auras of the teams affect too much people who write about hockey, I think. That's natural, of course, but something hockey journalists should be conscious of.

Anyway, tonight Finland plays against the Russian puck artists - the most aesthetic hockey team on earth. Russia in hockey is close to what Brazil is in soccer. I hope Finland wins, but before that I'd like to see a couple of Picasso-like shots by Ovechkin (sadly Malkin is in the NHL playoffs, and Kovalchuk can't play). Actually, I don't believe Russia has any possibilities to win. Too much solo playing, every year - and no team ethics.

AESTHETIC NEWS FROM THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP TOURNAMENT

I've been watching the World Championships again.

Aesthetically thinking, tournament games have for a long time been the worst around. There are too many teams for a good tournament, so we suffer.

Many games are just about one good country shooting even over 60 times, at the same time as the worse country just keeps on defending. The latter first kills the game, and then in the end its players get frustrated, sometimes even violent.

But, well, on the other side, teams like Latvia, Norway, Belarussia and Ucraine are really challenging big countries. They win too. In this way the tendency has to be accepted. 5 years ago I think they mostly just destroyed the games.

The next step? They will win, from time to time - with grace?

INTENSIFIED ATMOSPHERE, INTENSIFYING INTERPRETATION

Playoffs are known to be intensive. So do Olympic finals. For a long time I thought that whatever the players do, it looks intensified when you know that the stakes are high.

Well, when there is a trophy in the sight, the games look more intensified than usually. But after the last Olympic final, where Finland lost to Sweden, I decided for good that intensity is seen in the game only partially through interpretation. The stakes were high, but somehow the game wasn't stimulating. You could see tension in the moves of the players, but that was all. It was easy to analyze how much intensity the fact that they were playing for Olympic gold had to give experientially – as there was not much more to it. It was enough for a good hockey watching experience, of course.

But, whatever dramatic incident would have created a peak experience very easily. In games like that it is enough if one key player gets bruised or a goal is not accepted - to heat up the ice and the audience.

It is in these games, as well, where charming and disturbing personalities start to affect us more than in ordinary games. Saku Koivu's sportsmanship and fighting spirit becomes extra beautiful – especially when he is one of yours. Mats Sundin's smile becomes horrifying for the fans of his enemies. And all fights, all critical decisions made by the referees, and everything which usually feels significant, becomes ecstaticly or painfully important.

The level of intensity is from the beginning to the end higher in playoffs and finals, but experiential peaks go even more higher than the usual. The atmosphere, even during dull games, is loaded, so that anything can take you (or the players) even dangerously high or low.

When this feeling resonates from man to man in a crowd, it can create a tsunami of energy, where mass psychosis and aggression can take place. I am happy that ice hockey, though it is a violent sport, has not made its audience yet barbaric in the way which has haunted European soccer. Does hockey culture reinforce a higher consciousness of the spectacle nature of the game? At least NHL games are more entertainment shows than any soccer matches could ever be. Or is hockey just less anchored in the identity of violent sport fanatics? Could the architecture and the nature of the venues (indoors, outdoors, etc.) used for these sports make a difference?

Whatever the answer would be, I am happy that many IIHF enthusiastic European hockey stars have already dropped out from the continuing NHL playoffs. That will, if anything, raise the level of intensity in the coming World Championhips.

HILDA KOZARI ON ICE HOCKEY

Lately I've been asking colleagues and friends to contribute for the blog. Though I still have some perspectives I'd like to bring forth myself, I thought it would be refreshing to get some totally different approaches as well.

Here is the first text published here written by a guest. It focuses on the olfactory sense:

Hilda Kozari is a Helsinki based Hungarian visual artist working with olfactory sense.

Living over ten years in Finland, somehow I just never got to an ice-hockey match. Shameful or not, but be an excuse that I am really not a sport consumer. My first-time experience was this year in Toronto. During my visit I was invited by a professor of English literature (player for 15 years herself) to the rehearsal of a women's ice-hockey team. Already the little local stadium as a retro-beauty with painted dark blue and red signs was worth visiting. I am as far as possible a person who would be able to judge the way they played, but for me it looked energetic and good. I was mostly impressed by the sound and the coldness. I don’t like cold, but I fancy the fresh breath of it. In television those games are theatrical compared to the real stuff. As I joined my friend in the changing-room, I had an interesting sense experience completed. Instead of the only expected smell of sweat, the accessories / equipments (or how to name them?) of ice-hockey provided the dominant olfactory sensation: jersey, cotton, all sorts of plastic and some mysterious materials evaporating in the steam from the hot showers mixed with deodorants. The changing-room is also the place where you can see the hard player transforming into a caring, laughing, soft-bodied woman. At that spot the line between fake and real is absolutely clear.

For Hilda and her work, see these
WARC gallery and Sauma exhibition links.

2 YEARS

I just realized it is 2 years since I started my 'freak' project on hockey aesthetics. Though most (permanent and visiting) readers are not into it, I'll report a bit on the academic side of it. I have here tried to write about aesthetic issues so that everybody could get the point, but in the academic world I have all the time worked on a more scholarly, theoretical minded work as well, which in the end, as I see it, will become a series of research articles or a book.

I have lectured on hockey at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, University of Helsinki, in a hockey seminar organized by the Open University of Tampere - and on tuesday I will talk about hockey aesthetics at Uppsala University (thank you for the invitation and broad-minded acceptance of my (in aesthetics) strange interest, Lars-Olof Åhlberg!). The first theoretical publication (in Swedish, too) is on its way in the spring, and hopefully I could finish the book manuscript (in Finnish, probably) during the autumn.

ACADEMY AWARDS

The Academy Awards are here again - but were are the Hockey Academy Awards? The best team wins, but in the end, why wouldn't we celebrate the artistic side of the game?

To start with:

The most beautiful goal of the year?
The most innovative assist of the year?
And for goaltenders: hottest save of the year?
Best play off beard?
Goal celebrations?

Ice girls (uh, this link is way too hot for an outfit fetishist like me...), jerseys, checking... The list could be extended.

Hockey can never produce anything as shockingly beautiful as the NBA slam dunk competitions - that's avant-garde! - but it would do no harm to use one evening of the year to celebrate the aesthetic side of the game.

(Pic: Malkin celebrating, at Rushockey.com)

LOOKS, PERSONALITIES - AND BACK TO SPEED

Already classical internet culture in Finland: plastical surgery for Olli Jokinen. Do not misunderstand. There is (nearly) nothing mean about it. In Finland Jokinen is a hero, though he has been overshadowed by older players with big hearts (Saku Koivu, Teemu Selänne) and goalies with God-like seasons (Kipper 2005-2006, Bäckström 2006-2007).

It is just that Jokinen, as a media personality in Finland, has been more of the John McEnroe than the Björn Borg type - though he has changed his ways in later years.

Talking about somebody who is such a perfect visual (and technical) hockey player to the extent that he is close to be a drag - take a look and remember to follow Russian puck artist Alexander Ovechkin (Dan Rosen really makes a point here). Who cares about Crosby, anyway? The hottest forward these years is Russian - and now we are talking both about playing and 'being a star'. In the NHL there is just this old myth going on about 'the next' Canadian... Russia had great teams and astonishing individuals already during the Soviet regime. Time to change story as the world leaks in to the world's biggest hockey league?

Well, okay, every country needs its myths and mythical personalities... Checking out what Swedish, Finnish, Italian, and North American sites say about what's going on in hockey makes one sometimes wonder how much interpretation there actually is at stake. There is always something to say about the players of your own country.





(Pic from Dan Steinberg's D.C. Sports Bog)













Back to an old theme:

Take a look at my earlier text on Speed.

Karhuherra (Jani Mesikämmen), a Finnish hockey blogger (sadly for most of you he writes only in Finnish), wrote about the magical moment when some individuals have the talent to kind of slow down the game. Some of us (Foppa?) just have a half second more to make a move than other players have, when the going gets though, fast, and chaotic...

As Karhuherra says controlled chaos is one of the highlights of today's playing. Sometimes chaos becomes uncontrolled, and intensity is lost. The flow becomes endless shooting and skating from side to side. Karhuherra is right, I think, in pointing out that playing close to the thin line to chaos is one thing which increases intensity and tension, and makes the game satisfactory to watch. And he is right to point out, that sensing this is always better at the rink - though I think camerawork is becoming better and better. I have already written about camera technique and its slow development, but look at this piece.

Painting, Pin up, and Sculpture

Read Mike Morreale's article on David Arrigo - if you are interested in how hockey can be portrayed in mass friendly painting.

If you are a heterosexual male with enough mainstream taste (which I might lack), these photo posters could make you hot - and if you have a jersey fetish, they'll probably kill you.

Sadly, hockey has not yet that much been in the focus of hard core artists. I have only encountered one work which I can really stand for - not just as a hockey fan, but as a critic, ex gallerist, and philosopher of art. It is created by Vesa-Pekka Rannikko.



Padding (2006; 72 x 60 x 42 cm, body-tinted plaster) is delicate, beautiful, and expressive.

RETRO?

Nostalgia is an attitude, a way of appreciating culture, and what else? In hockey nostalgia means endless discourse on Gretzky, old pictures with 'nostalgic' colors (or for some even better: black and white ones), and comparing old days with the game of today.

Retro culture, which thrives on nostalgia, has become more and more important everywhere. It is just sports which have been a bit slow to catch up. In music we hear old hits repackaged. And bands have already for ages produced videos and pictures where they look like groups from the 1970s, 1960s or 1950s. Especially the last years have made it easy to produce retro culture following the fact that the ways of manipulating sound and image have become easier. And we kind of enjoy it more than we used to do. We are as well more conscious of popular history than ever. We find vintage pin up (Dita von Teese) hot, and there are loads of films on old films (Tarantino - hey, if some of you guys know him, please manipulate him to do a violent '1970s hockey film' on the 'Broad Street Bitches' with Pam Grier and Uma Thurman as forwards Roberta Clarke and Diana 'The Cunt' Schultz, without forgetting Daryl Hannah as a hot, bitchy, corrupted, and alcoholic coach - and John Travolta as a Zamboni driving pervert who gets beaten up by the girls).

I know, there have been games where players have used historical jerseys (a fetish for some people), but wouldn't it be great to have fan posters of Mats Sundin (congrats for passing Maurice "Rocket" Richard on the all time goal list!) and Alexander Ovechkin not just in old jerseys, but without helmets (that's what I love in old hockey pics!), and the colors made up so that the photos would look like they'd played in the 1970s. Use some stylists too. NHL players are stars. Treat them with Visual Respect.

SPEED

Speed is essential for hockey. As long as there are rules preventing huge, violent defencemen from crushing fast and techical forwards (if NHL would just learn a bit more from Russian hockey...) breaking through and skating fast to the enemy goal gives us one of the most intense aesthetic peak experiences in hockey.

Constant speed would not be very aesthetic, as it is rhythm which makes it all stimulating - the way the game changes pace and direction.

In his dromology, philosophy of speed (and visual culture) Paul Virilio discusses speed and acceleration as dominant aesthetic phenomena in today's world. (If you start reading him, remember that he accelerates the 'speed' of his texts as well!) Landscapes roll outside of car windows, the aesthetics of contemporary films and TV programs is based upon a high speed (action, fast cutting), and information runs through virtual highways within seconds when something important happens.

Speed has strangely, though, not gained as much more relevance in sports as in other fields of culture. Visuality is the key to understanding trends in contemporary sports. In some cases visual pleasure is acquired by seeing fast movement, as is the case in rally or the NBA, but more importantly, I'd claim, visual pleasure is today gained by seeing 'spectacular events'. That's why sports like snowboarding are hot.

Though the pace is of course higher in today's hockey, old hockey (as well as soccer) looks somewhat faster to me than today's playing, maybe because skating was less interrupted by checking (or am I only dreaming? It sounds like a paradox, as there were more fights at that time.). This is a visual phenomenon, not a question of speed, and one which is interesting - though I would never prefer the old game to the contemporary. As a contemporary I feel that the game looks just like it should right now. And that's probably how it will go. Year after year hockey will look like it should, as the game and me keep getting older - and the speed of the world will always feel somewhat comfortable for us living in it.

BACK TO BERTUZZI

Though I mainly want my hockey journalism the 'good' old way, any cultural territory which is marked by only one type of discussion becomes stale, antiquarian, and unintellectual. As my dream is that the world of hockey writing could be as rich as the world of writing on music - blogs have helped here a lot - I have to raise my hat for Ken Austin of Hockey Narrative, who turned back to the old Bertuzzi & Moore incident (read my 'Platonic' analysis of it), and had the guts to argue that defending Bertuzzi's violent act by saying that he gained 'orders' to take revenge on Moore is of the same type which has been use when for example ex nazies say they just followed orders. Only individuals make ethical decisions - whatever your coach or your teammates say - and I am happy someone helps the hockey community to understand this very basic issue.

I hope Ken keeps up with the good work and helps to increase both the ethical discussion of the sport and the way to do it through well based arguments (not only rhetorics, which are often more in use).

PLATO - AND BERTUZZI

Though the mass media of ancient Greeks were primitive, people were as worried about their effects as we are now. We find already Plato (428/427-348/347 BC) supporting control and cencorship.

According to Plato, when Gods were described or pictured doing immoral deeds, this had bad effects on young men.

Greek Gods were nothing compared to the absolute God(s) of the Christians, Jews, or Islam. They had their weak points, and their lifes, though divine, were fueled by basic human desires (hate, love), and this challenged Plato’s model of an ethically supportive society.

Though there were sportsmen in Greek antiquity, they were not ‘stars’. In fact there were no stars at all before the 20th century, if we insist on talking about stars at all the way we do now. In the 20th century modern, technologically advanced mass media became central for a culture with focus on information and entertainment. Elvis would suddenly sing in every home (and raise thoughts about sexual ethics), and Marilyn got her face in millions of tabloids around the world.

Due to this development, sportsmen (and women, though sadly less) have, together with actors and musicians, become something close to what Greek Gods used to be. They are and often act like ordinary human beings, but there is an aura around them, which makes them somehow different (better, more interesting). We follow what stars do, and we are interested in how they live.

Of all forms of being a star, being a sport star is most connected to the ethical problem in Plato’s model. Though ice hockey stars might sometimes run heavy bachelor parties (the Staals) or give aggressive comments on tonight’s game, they are still sportsmen, and they belong more to a plane of life, which we anchor to our ideals of good manners and ethics, than for example rock musicians do. No Curt Cobains or Ozzy Osbournes survive in the world of sport, and though some people idolize snowboarders who smoke marijuana, these people can only become marginal anti-heros in the world of sport.

Ice hockey players are not school teachers, but we want them to stay cleaner than Snoop Doggy Dogg. Though it is understandable that the rough, physical game sometimes makes you use too much contact, Todd Bertuzzi went too much over the line after something that happened on February 16th 2004. Avalanche center Steve Moore injured Canucks team captain Markus Näslund. Moore checked Näslund in the head when the latter reached for a puck while keeping his head down. Näslund was knocked out for several games due to his injuries, and because no penalty was called, this accumulated aggression in the Bertuzzi Canucks. A classical “bounty” was issued on Moore’s head, and Todd Bertuzzi called Moore publicly “a piece of **”. On a match on March the 8th, Bertuzzi grabbed Moore and punched the much lighter player in the head. They both fell and Bertuzzi brought Moore down to the ice, headfirst, with all his weight, and landed on him. Moore, who did not get help from his teammates, but stayed under Bertuzzi as his fellows jumped on them, got several injuries, for example a “three fractured vertebrae in his neck, a grade three concussion, vertebral ligament damage, stretching of the brachial plexus nerves, and facial cuts” (Wikipedia).

Though Bertuzzi apologized publicly, though he was suspended from the NHL for a while, and though he had to pay US$500,000, he became, as a star, a symbol, which the world of hockey could not tolerate, as it was already critically viewed as too violent in ethically active parts of the society. It was not only that the hockey world needed ethical boundaries for the safety of the players. As important was the fact that a semi-God Bertuzzi had gone mean, and that his actions could not in any way be legitimized.

Bertuzzi is not Mike Tyson, and neither is he Tonya Harding. He played like hockey was played during those years, and he went far, though not normally any further than many others. He is like a cop, who on duty in a violent world went too far. The difference is that cops are just ordinary beings in the eyes of the public, and they don’t entertain the public, but serve them in other ways. Bertuzzi is a media star, and people (sadly) see media stars as belonging to a higher form of life, though they don’t help the society as much as cops do. He had to be suspended, and time had to pass so that he could be accepted again to the Pantheon of hockey. This ethical washing was finished last year, and Bertuzzi got a helping hand because of his injuries: Now people could more easily see him as a normal human being with weak points. In the coming season 2007-2008 Bertuzzi will be back for the first time as what he is, a sportsman, and an, if not positive, at least nearly neutral media star. He deserves it, as he in a way got victimized for the increasing violence in hockey, but he has no possibilities anymore to go over any lines during his career. He is a media God, but one who has already risked, not just his own career, but the whole future of the sport. Three Bertuzzi incidents in a season would kill the game and it could be banned.

Followers of Plato, who insist on seeing the media, and even more, sports, as an ethical model for the everyday, detest hockey’s violent nature, and they are hungry to find a new Bertuzzi. It is not just wise for the game itself, but for its brand, that the new rules have been adopted, and that referees insist on keeping the game less violent. Hockey can take a couple of hard checkings, but if one star would shoot someone and the next day another be caught for using drugs, or even worse, if someone would die on ice in the beginning of the coming season, it would be hard to keep up with a heroic image of the game. And heroic planes of life are what we need, whether we want it or not. People in arts have their heroic painters, people in science have their semi-Gods (Einstein), and this is the way life everywhere in the society needs a mythical, more-than-life dimension. Plato knew it, and he was worried about the art of his times, and how the way Gods were described and pictured in them, and it seems that his thoughts can still offer us a valuable frame for discussing media ethics.

ROENICK'S 500 - AND ARISTOTLE

Jeremy Roenick is about to shoot his 500th goal in the National Hockey League. What if he wouldn't make it? This would become the drama of the year. 5 games, 10, 15... the man would struggle, with the enormous amount of 499 goals behind him, but there would be no release of the growing tension.

If Selänne would have had 499 goals in the end of last season, I am sure he would not have quitted. You want to use that number when you sell something, not to tell people about your accomplishments. And 500 goals is one of the classical milestones for becoming a legend in your post career.

In it, we find the originally Greek aesthetic concept of harmony (mostly used for music). To have 500 or more - not again 599 - is somewhat harmonious.

Stats are knowledge which affect our way of seeing players as clusters of deeds and attributes. Just think: how would you feel about a forward, who would have accomplished 399 goals and 399 assists, who would have played 12 years without making it to the playoffs (it is possible, even a star like Olli Jokinen has already made it to 9), and who would not seem to be able to change these facts? Something would seem to be lacking, always.

I have earlier talked about the aesthetics of stats, then later on the catharsis of shutouts in goaltending, so some words could be said of cathartic experiences in gaining even numbers in stats.

The word catharsis has often been used in American hockey journalism and research as just meaning purifying experience. Most often it is used when we discuss fighting in the rink. Here the point is that it purifies the atmosphere, and sometimes helps 'depressed' players to regain their spirit. It is also said that the audience feels purified when tension is released by fighting (here European audiences are mostly different).

As I have pointed out earlier, catharsis was originally a medical term. It refered to physical purification, but Aristotle psychologized it. In Greek drama there is, after the developing of dramatic tension, always a point when things are starting to evolve towards a solution. The effect of this, release of tension and feeling of getting a purifying effect, is what Aristotle talked about (a more complex, and narrative concept, than the one hockey scholars use about fighting). One can see therapeutic aspects in it.

To use the concept the way it is used in the hockey world, would mean that getting 500 goals done is all there is to say to it. An Aristotelian version of the same would be for example the following. Roenick struggles 17 games, but does not accomplish the goal. He has to take a surgery, and comes back after spending 17 games resting. The audience is not cheering anymore so much, as he is not really playing good games. He has lost it for a while, and preferably he spoils at least one win by fighting or touching the puck in a critical situation so that it goes to the goal of his own end. Then he plays a couple of great games where he shows he is not even trying to get the goal, but is more concentrated on helping his team to win. In the end he does it, against the Kings, in his home rink.

Ah, what a purifying experience... in the end. I hope he does not have to go through that process, though, the history books would just love it - and the audience, in the end, as well.

GOALTENDING - AND KANT

Just a quick look at the NHL.com frontpage tells it all. Goalies are more on the front than ever. Their stats have gained more dominance, and there are feature arcticles and blogging on them on a daily basis. And this is a fact about all major hockey sites and resources.

The game has become more defensive and strategic. People who say that nets should be made bigger to entertain fans (who, as the myth says, want more goals), have not quite followed what has happened in the hockey world. When the game changes, and there are still fans around, the way of watching the game has changed as well.

Not just journalists and people selling the hockey to us – PR, game makers, NHL columnists – but ordinary fans discuss actively management, coaching, defence, and goaltending in a way which used to be reserved for forwards.

A non fan will still see the whole game of hockey as not that beautiful, but as our attention has slowly gone more to stress defence, our aesthetic appreciation of it has of course grown. On hockey sites you find easily “10 most spectacular saves of the week / season” and other types of growing adoration of goaltending. You hear people talking about it in aesthetic terms: saves are ‘spectacular’, ‘beautiful’, ‘unbelievable’, on the edge, or in a way or another visually appealing.

Loosely speaking Immanuel Kant, the father of modern aesthetics, framed the problem of beauty to community in his work. According to Kant, the experience of beauty is a sign of belonging to a community. When we make a judgement on beauty, we aim to say that something is universally beautiful, which on a very practical level could be thought to mean that we believe that other people can see the beauty we see, if they try or have a possibility for it.

Often trying implies of course becoming a member of a community with shared ways of seeing and evaluation. For Kant this posed no problem, as he lived all his life in Königsberg, a then German city which is now a part of Russia – and which, we can be sure about it, was very homogenious at least talking about the people who Kant could have met (at that time you did not mix with people from other classes and there was no shared media connecting them).

In our case, we might say that someone who watched hockey in the 1970, and would start watching it again now, would have to learn about the new game, and to adjust to new rules, ways of playing – to what it means to be a member of the hockey world today. This implies learning to see what is now spectacular. Hockey in the 1970s was more about fighting and shooting goals. Now the spectacular saves are a number one hit, forwards shoot less goals and they are not very often shot from spectacular angles or distances. Becoming a member of our community, and understanding what is so spectacular about Brodeur or Bäckström, and how that can be more interesting for some people than watching Briere or Zetterberg, could take some time.

When you get the point, i.e. when you understand what hockey now is about, you know where to gaze. And when you think Leclaire makes a spectacular save, you can be sure, that people who watch hockey frequently, think the same about those saves (in most cases). That’s what shared culture gives for its members (among many other things): a shared sense of aesthetic.

Why do people talk so much about goals when they worry about the deceasing audience of American hockey? Why not worry that the media, sports journalists, and people helping hockey to get attention are not fast enough to understand the change in our sensibility? Most people can appreciate the new game, but if we keep insisting on old habits, some of them could maybe miss the point when they start watching it, and turn to baseball or basketball. Help the new members of the audience to appreciate strategy, defence – and most importantly, goaltending!

SKILLFUL, UGLY

As I have many times pointed out, beautiful goals are important for hockey and they are as well an important topic of debate.

Evan Grossman, one of my favorite columnists on hockey, takes up the question of ugly goals in his text Hand ... eye ... puck ... stick ... goal!. He focuses on 'tipping pucks'.

"Some guys score their goals with long-distance bombs from the blue line(,) (o)thers get them by skating around defenses or flashing dizzying stick skills".

As we know, some don't.

"There are (...) a handful of players whose bread and butter is to set up in front of the net and try to generate offense by screening goalies and getting a piece of their stick on the incoming barrage of rubber. This is called tipping pucks. Another way to describe such close-quarter scoring is deflections."

Often you hear fans saying that the players tipping pucks are not really the good ones. The normal dialectics of a conversation on the topic takes the following form: Someone says that a particular player only makes goals by tipping pucks, and says that someone else who shoots beautiful ones is a far more advanced player. Everyone agrees, but someone always remembers to add that hockey is, in the end, about the amount of goals you make. The team which makes more goals wins. The third comment is the one I make, but I seldom here others saying it. You can win by losing, too. What I mean is that you win admiration, the hearts of the fans, and you win in craftmanship by shooting beautiful goals.

Hockey is more and more becoming a sport of individuals. For the first media show us much more clearly what players do, and we can watch beautiful goals dozens of times if we want. The reproduction techniques of today are advanced, and audiovisual sports journalism even concentrates a lot on beautiful or the most dramatic peaks of the games. Teams sell players too hectically, as well, not anymore just after the season, but before the play offs, and lend them to other teams for short periods. Not many players play more than a couple of years in one team. In the long run, what stays, are teams without identity built by personalities, and then we remember individuals who change team once in a while. No wonder that hockey (and soccer) journalism is more and more about individual players, as the essence of teams, and stable rosters, are becoming history.

For Europeans, it is even more absurd. As World Championship tournaments and the Olympics are important, Selänne is every year Finnish, Jokinen is every year Finnish, and so are Kiprusoff, Timonen, Norrena and Koivu - when they are able to participate. But Selänne of the NHL has been playing in Ducks, Colorado, Winnipeg... And when sports journalists write about NHL hockey here, they concentrate on what Finns have done. In Sweden it is the same, just that the focus is on Swedish players. Probably also in hockey oriented cities which don't have an NHL team in North America, fans focus relatively more on individual players than teams.

Well, anyway, Grossman has some nice descriptions for us.

"In many ways, tipping pucks is a lot like standing down range at the gun club. Just not as loud."

I can believe that. Scott Hartnall and Tomas Holmström must be really though guys. If they wouldn't probably have enough savings already, they could easily become a part of the Jackass team after quitting hockey.

But I have never really bothered to think about the special skill needed. Grossman puts it nicely, and I think I now understand more.

"Basically, you park yourself in front of the enemy goal and try to deflect, ricochet or steer a moving puck into the net with your stick. Remember, it’s illegal to attempt to use your skate blade. Lots of the time, tips and deflections come off screaming slap shots, when a player waves his stick blade or shaft in front of the incoming puck, instantly and dramatically changing the direction of the shot."

He even goes on saying that deflection goals are ugly goals scored by ugly men. Well, now we are really holistically talking about the aesthetics of hockey! Thank you Evan! I have to google up Holmström and Hartnell immediately. Can't recall their faces. Ugliness is an aesthetic concept as much as beauty is. If you find a site with a gallery of ugly players - I hope you have noticed my link on 'hot players' (not chosen by me) on the right side - tell me. And this is not me being mean or cynical. A part of the machismo in sports like hockey has to do with an ideology which says that 'men have to look like men', so ugliness is not simply a negative concept in this respect.

THE 'IMAGINED' AND THE 'REAL' GAME

In Ken Dryden's The Game, an experiential journey into the head, heart and soul of one legendary hockey player, we find (in chapter 'Wednesday') a passage on kids' backyard games, which many of us can relate to.

"In the late 1950s, the CBS network televised NHL games on Saturday afternoon. Before each game, there was a preview show in which a player from each of the teams involved that day would compete in two contests, one of which was a penalty-shot contest. The goalie they used each week was an assistant trainer for the Detroit Red Wings named Julian Klymquiw. (...) None of us had ever heard of him, and his unlikely name made us a little doubtful at first. But it turned out that he was quite good, and most weeks he stopped the great majority of shots taken at him. So, during backyard games of "penalty shots", we pretended to Julian Klymquiw, not Terry Sawchuk or Glenn Hall."

In this arbitrary manner kids pick up someone they want to be. More importantly for the topic of imagining to be someone else, Dryden continues later in the following way:

"I was Frank Mahovlich, or Gordie Howe, I was anyone I wanted to be, and the voice in my head was that of Leafs broadcaster Foster Hewitt(.) (...) I screamed inside my head, (...) the hero of all my own games. (...) In all the time I spent there [in the backyard] I don't remember ever thinking I would be an NHL goalie, or even hoping I could be one. In backyard games, I dreamed I was Sawchuk or Hall, Mahovlich or Howe; I never dreamed I would be like them."

Dryden covers as well his early NHL games where he thought 'is this it?', and where it suddenly did not feel that special to be there on the famous NHL ice. But most interesting, one starts to think about how many sports activities are performed by youngsters who think they are someone else. When does this end, and when do young players start just playing, or do they still as adults sometimes think they are someone else?

I am not thinking about veterans like Selänne or Brodeur, but could Malkin sometimes still think he is someone else? Or Crosby? Staal? Probably not. But maybe they still remember the time when that changed. How fast does it change? Is there a long period of dreaming a bit, and at the same time waking up step by step? And does it continue in the head for a longer time if you give up ambitious hockey training and continue playing just as an adult hobby?

Did Wayne Gretzky at some point wake up feeling that he had a nightmare being someone else - realizing he was so much better in real life?

And do stars sometimes, when they shoot a goal, think they are inside the head of 500 000 junior players?

When players are sometimes on the same level, why do kids pick up certain players more easily than others? Do kids nowadays pick up these dream players, not just from real matches, but as well from computer simulations like EA's NHL07? And how do players nowadays get into the heads of youngsters when national tv coverage is becoming more and more marginal in many classical hockey countries? Do kids pick up their alter egos from stats, for example by reading the internet?

Is the real game just a job like any other job? Does someone on NHL ice sometimes think: I am just working here, my life is somewhere else?

And is there life, I mean any other life, when you play for an NHL team (except for the summer break)? Do some players dream about being just an average guy who has time for the family and the kids, someone normal, who would maybe dream that he'd be an NHL player, while he would work safely from 9 to 5 and have free weekends? Do players walk around in their hotel rooms in the evenings, and dream they are John Smith, or even Al Bundy, and enjoy this dream inside their heads, visualizing going out with the dog, or staying in bed with the wife until late afternoon? What actually are the real 'games' of our lives, and what are our dreams we live through our actions? When are we really here, living the moment, with every cell, making the most out of where we are at? So much time is spent dreaming. So much life is lived more mentally than anything else. So many dreams are offered by professional sports, and, I am sure, many dreams are crushed by them.

What dreams do we want to live? Do we want to dream? We enjoy dreaming for sure, but where should we set the boundaries for it?

Who am I dreaming I am when I write this blog? Paul Kukla? Risto Pakarinen? Joseph Kupfer? Or maybe Esa Saarinen? Why am I actually writing about hockey? Do I really dream philosophy could contribute to our thinking and way of experiencing hockey?

I wake up when someone walking by my office says have a nice weekend. I take a look at my mobile. It is already over eight o'clock, and I should soon be home enjoying my Friday sauna. What a nightmare it would have been to miss that opportunity!

ETHNICITY AND HOCKEY

Like Pavlov's dogs we get conditioned to visual codes. When you see a thousand hot goals shot by a white man, there is something odd about the first 'art goal' shot by a woman or someone who's skin color resonates differently with the jersey. Don't worry, that's natural. And from the positive point of view, at some point when women's hockey had become skilled and competitive, I remember that I once got a positive shock when I saw the first superb goal shot by a woman on tv. The fresh feeling in the experience was not just visual (in fact, you can't always that easily see if the player is a woman, you just know it), it was symbolical, and it felt historical.

Non-white male players have been around for a longer time, but I still remember that as they used to be really rare in Europe, seeing some in the North American teams kind of made me feel that ice hockey was not the same anymore (thank God).

Besides (still) affecting many economical and social structures in a depressing way, race used to condition negatively our views on for example ballet (white), jazz (black) and karate (yellow) - and to some extent, sadly, it still does. It sometimes serves as the base for interpretation. Someone white can't play funk (you'd like it more if you wouldn't see the player), someone black just cannot dance ballet (if he is not a French African), and if you get Chinese food you'd like to know that the chef is Chinese. Race and ethnicity are very important factors in many everyday interpretations, and it this way they govern a lot of aesthetic reality.

Politically correct language has not helped us out of the main problems of race and visual culture: among 10 white players on the ice, yes, we recognize one Afro-American and one Korean born player among them, and this is one way which we at least unconsciously make sense of what we see. We classify people that way with our eyes, which is quite natural, as they look different.

Sadly, for example in Sweden, neo-nazis are more into hockey than soccer, as the latter sport is ethnically more mixed. It is no coincidence that the brand of hockey in intellectual and political circles is not always as good as it could be. Whatever cultural formation we talk about, when it is violent, too narrowly a property of white ethnicity, nearly totally male dominated, and than after this as well connected to these dark sides of ideological race thinking, it has a hard time to get qualified in the eyes of the people working for or actively thinking about peace, democracy and justice. It might be unfair, but that's the way it goes.

Ice hockey people really can't afford being even just ironical about women's hockey nor can anyone afford to not try to support more players with non-white ethnical backgrounds into playing it. That's how the world works nowadays. It is not enough that you're able to see things in a new way, there is a must for all sports to be explicitly open for differences and to look multi-ethnic. At some point when the first big name in hockey comes out of the closet and says he is gay, strangely, many people will start to see hockey as a developing sport. (This happened already in soccer, which has also gained a lot of good brand from the success of women's soccer.)

Those of you who still can't stand these differences, think about hockey. Hockey needs openness and at least marginal change to survive in the society. It needs as well viewers from other backgrounds than the traditional ones. Though you'd be a racist and a chauvinist, for the sake of hockey, try to open those doors. And for you coming from the outside, who feel that you are not really in your own reality among traditional hockey people, please pioneer, please make hockey become more international, multi-ethnic, male and female, and a culturally open-minded game. We need you, and the future history books will be writing about you.

Well, the history of hockey seems anyway to be more multi-ethnic than we are used to think. Read John McGourty's text on Fosty's Black Ice.

PLAY OFF BEARDS

What is the look of the coming few weeks? You know it: play off beards. (Even some fans have them nowadays.)

Soon they are here. And the players look MEAN.

Even those players who play clean hockey take a step closer to being desperados. You just don't look like a desperado, to some extent you become more of a criminal in the society when you look like one. I know this from experience. Last time when I had long hair for a period the police stopped my car a couple of times and checked my driver's licence.

Wonder what an effect it has when 4 hockey millionares go for a ride together late in the evening, and they all look gross, potentially violent (well, hockey IS a violent game), and more just unshaved than self conscious beard fetishists. A team in the play offs can look like a huge hard rock group.

GOAL CELEBRATIONS

When I was a kid I admired Timo Nummelin because of his way of 'playing the violing' after shooting a goal. (By the way, Timo's son Petteri plays nowadays for Minnesota.)

Dances, signs of victory, hugs and other personal and group ceremonies played out after making a goal are an important part of the art of hockey.

There is no special ceremony to be performed when someone makes a goal against you - if the sad looking skating with your eyes turned to the ice is not counted in.

Even if you would just have fallen in love the night before and nothing could take away your high feelings, or if you would feel joyfully relaxed because you would be sure your team is anyway going to win, you can't show it after someone makes a goal against you.

Though you would never have played ice hockey it is easy to understand what kind of situation this is. Sometimes in funerals one as well suddenly does not feel very sad. When my grandmother died, at the funeral I thought about all the happy moments with her, but for the sake of the ritual I kept my head down and covered my smile. The ritual sets the boundaries, not the feelings.

Ice hockey is full of rituals, and as in all tribal traditions (yes, hockey people are a kind of a tribe), you can't break them very much, or if you do, you have to do it in a delicate manner, or be able to justify what you do.

You can cultivate your own personal ways of fulfilling them, and in positive ones, like goal celebrations, there are a lot of opportunities for expressing joy.

Sometimes this comes pretty naturally, and often it just becomes a habit of reacting in a certain way to the goal, I suppose. Mats Sundin looks like a happy bear after scoring. But Evgeni Malkin - number one rookie in goal celebrations - really dances. He is full of joy, and looks like a child (which he still, of course, is). Beautiful to see.

The ritual becomes interesting when you know something dramatic about the background psychology at stake. Think about the way the players hug each other and touch each others helmets. In the beginning of this season, when Selänne and Pronger fans knew that these two men had been enemies chasing each others for years, it was somehow electrifying to see how well they could perform the first helmet touching and hug ceremonies. I could not notice any problems, but when I knew there was a complicated background for it, I kind of saw it in a different way. Had they solved their feelings or did they just perform well? I believe they had solved their 'argument'. When you've played hockey all your life, and when the Stanley Cup is possible to reach with good team play, I believe there is no one you wouldn't learn to appreciate and hug.

SPORT, QUALITY, AND THE ART OF LOSING YOURSELF

I get easily tired of watching TV series. The plots are all the same and though the actors are good looking they (nearly) never make me admire themselves for being good actors (nor do they have enough personality needed to become film stars). Of course the TV series formats do not often even let them shine enough - some of them could have charisma if they'd get into the right film or find the right director - but I think this is what TV mostly is about, about never working for the highest goals. The audience knows this. It turns off its intellect, profound feelings, and hunger for quality. Watching TV one enjoys something which is not so special, but which anyway is satisfactory to some extent. When you want something special, you watch a good movie or read a good book. The same applies to TV news: you'd find better news on some critical site on the net, and most newspapers are definitely on an another level than the average TV news.

The case of sport is different. TV is the main forum for sport, and when we talk about US Nation wide coverage or the international events covered for example in Eurosport, it is always good. We are talking about the best. Because of this I see sport on TV as the highest it has to offer.

Even aesthetically Italian Serie A soccer, the NHL, the NBA, German and British soccer, Olympic track and field and many other events and series are on a high level, but the most beautiful thing about them might still be mental: you know these people are the best in what they are doing, and that year after year they work to get better. This affects your enjoyment of watching them perform. Whatever you are doing in your life, and whatever you aspire to do, you can somehow reflect on this through sports, as there are people who are developing something to an extrem level, and who have to win themselves before being able to win anything else.

This is one way to watch sports, hockey included, and I belong to the part of the audience doing this. In my aspirations in philosophy, yoga, love, and living life to its fullest (somatically, intellectually, ethically), there are countless of inspiring, even hot role models to think about, but sport provides me with a spectacle where I see people winning themselves and aiming higher, and it makes such a difference to all the cooking programs, nice but not in the end very profound TV series, and other programs and broadcasts mainstream media has to offer.

As a team game hockey can even be seen as breaking the ego structure of western (wo)man. No team which takes home the Stanley Cup can afford to have players who think just about themselves. It is about losing yourself for the team, and for the delicate, highest stage of the sport, where inches, seconds, and the smallest possible differences matter, and where you can't reflect on it all too much when it happens - as you just have to let go. Like surfers on giant waves, gurus in deep meditation, philosophers revealing new ideas, lovers losing themselves in the act of blurring boundaries between two people, or firemen saving people from burning houses, hockey players have to lose themselves to make it to the other side.

STAR, SUPERSTAR, LEGEND

On many occasions during the season 2006-2007 there has been discussion on who will be the next player to enter the NHL Hall of Fame. In addition to this very concrete question, there are as well debates about more vague 'nominations'.

Take for example the one about Sidney Crosby, lately. Is Crosby a superstar or just a star?

What does it mean when we say someone is a 'superstar'? And what do we actually mean by 'star'?

There are a lot of stars in the NHL. Some of them are stars for the whole league, and some of them only in their division or for the fans of their home team. Some players are stars in their home country to the extent, that even if they aren't big in the NHL, they make the headlines whatever they do.

For example Ville Peltonen, who has played well, but not excellently for Florida this year, has been so great in international tournaments - take for example the fact that he shot 3 goals against Sweden in the World Championship finals 1995 when team Finland won gold - that he is a star in Finland. Whatever he does, Finns are always interested in him, but he is far from a star in the NHL.

In a small country like Finland or Sweden, of course, you cannot be a superstar. The scene is so small that you are star, or then you aren't, but you can't be a superstar. A superstar is a special kind of star on a very big scene.

In a public discussion about the league we do of course mostly speak of people who are stars for the whole league and the international audience. Hmm, wait a second. There are stars in the NHL who don't have any international stardom. If they aren't from Europe and if they haven't played for Team Canada or for the US in international tournaments, they might be not that well known outside of the NHL. Of course all the biggest stars of the league are already international ones, too. But if you aren't really big in the NHL, you have to work for your international stardom.

It is also easier, I'd say, to become a star in the NHL by playing for a Canadian team or a classical theme of some hockey city in the Northern part of the US, than shooting goals somewhere where there are more alligators than snowflakes.

And, if you are Canadian, but play in the south, you can more easily become a star as well. The reason? The most fanatic live hockey fans of the NHL live in cities like Detroit, Chicago, or (anywhere) in Canada, and the most fanatic fans are of course the ones who motorize the most intesive debates and fan events in hockey. They praise their home teams and they follow closely what their fellow countrymen do in the south.

I guess Hossa, Jokinen, and Frolov would be bigger stars in the NHL if they would play for the Red Wings, Canadiens, or the Canucks.

Anyway, there are a lot of stars around. I'd say at least 40 players are active stars. Then there are stars who are now having a bad year, or the second bad year in a row (how many can you have before you are an ex star?). The latter ones need still only a couple of great games, and they will immediately start to shine again. Once acquired, stardom stays potentially with you the rest of your career.

It is important, that a star has some really excellent years behind him. Stardom is acquired by accomplishing great deeds, not by just playing well. To score 32 goals in the season for 4 years in a row can make you a home team star, and of course audiences everywhere will appreciate your playing, but to become a star it is a better idea to shoot 50 goals every second year, and then only 14 the other seasons. Still, a player shooting 32 goals every year will start to shine more when he gets over the increasingly magical numbers of shooting 300, 400 or, then 500 goals during his career (this makes you already nearly a kind of a legend, and at least an icon for your team).

There is of course, still, a star aura which belongs to young, starting players (Malkin now, for example - Crosby is already on the side of basic stardom). The role is then a bit different. You are viewed as a young star, not anymore promising but shooting a lot of goals, someone who's development shows star quality, and who raises questions like "will this player shoot 500 goals during his career?". The playing of a young star is being watched in a way, which includes speculations about his future. Judgements are made a bit differently because promising playing is maybe not always the same as good playing.

I have already talked about the following in "The Catharsis of a Shutout" (posted 26.11): goalies gain stardom by not just having a high saving percentage, but by winning with shutouts, and this applies even more to superstars and legends...

A star is not the same as a legend. What is a legend? To be a legend is something tied to time. You can't become a legend in three years, it craves a minimum of, say, 10 years, and if it is such a short time you've been playing on the top, you have had to accomplish quite a lot. Most legends play excellently for 15 or preferably 20 years to become legends.

An icon is quite close to a legend. But the difference is that an icon is always active as a player. A legend can be an ex-player. Gretzky and Messier are legends, but not icons of any team anymore (if not Gretzky in the role of coaching Phoenix, or in some historical way (historical icon?) of old fans of the Oilers). Mats Sundin, besides being a star, is an icon for the Toronto Mapple Leafs, without forgetting his role in team Sweden.

But superstar? As a normal star, and icon, a super star is still active - and he is in his prime, or then he has not had many years after his best years. For example Forsberg is close to not be a superstar anymore, because last year was not anymore his real prime, and this year is too filled with injuries. Forsberg is a superstar in hockey, and will be even next year, even if he would not accomplish anything remarkable. But he is still already close to become a legend, which will happen when he retires.

Superstars are bigger stars than normal stars. They accomplish more. But there is a limit to it. Crosby is right now so big as a player - just look at the stats and take a look at some goals he has been shooting lately - that making more points and playing better will not make him a super star, if he does not start to get close to break stats records.

The question about his superstar quality has to do with something else than just being in some way the best (most points, and some beautiful goals). Do we really feel Crosby is a superstar? He has his fans, but being a hockey superstar is something else than being a superstar in pop music. You have to accomplish more than fans. Crosby is close to it, but he'll have to play the whole year like he has played the beginning of the season. He might have to play, say, three 100 points seasons in a row, or to shoot 60 goals one season. Something is still lacking, and that can be seen in the fact that people discuss if he is a superstar or not. You don't discuss that when you talk about Sakic, Forsberg, or Jagr.

Even saying that someone is a good player is tied to longer periods of time. After three good years you play one not so good season, but everybody will be saying that you are a good player. When you become good in people's eyes, you can have bad years, and that attribute does not get lost. Good playing accumulates through the years, and some excellent or superb accomplishments do that as well.

Anyway, one becomes a superstar because of accomplishments, but to become a legend is often a bit different. Legends often gain symbolical strenght following problems they face. They are more like old time heroes we know from folk tales. A superstar often becomes a legend, but to be legendary is easier if you have some drama in the story. Of course there is Gretzky with his simple career, but fighting cancer and winning it, making a comeback after years of struggling with health, or being an especially high spirited player or a real gentleman helps you to become big as a media personality. In the end, personality might help a star to become a superstar to some extent, and people love even more to tell tales about the strange, humble, or even twisted personalities of legends. Malkin had a good start for his story (he had to escape Russia) and watching him celebrate goals - he really laughs - he will become a bigger legend than Crosby if he just plays like he did in the start of his NHL career. He even made history by scoring in his six first games in a row, and these special accomplishments help players to become superstars and legendary more than 82 good matches per year could ever do.

And when you are old, and close to finishing your career, people look at your playing in a different way. After two years from now Sakic and Selänne will be shooting only 10 goals per year but when they'll do it, people will gaze at the good job made by a legend (did I see his last goal?).

And when you finish, something strange happens. It is a bit like being a visual artist and dying. Your 'work' becomes more interesting, and suddenly your bad sides are not anymore recalled as much. Gretzky's, Messier's and Yzerman's stories are bigger than life: who'd care for their bad days and bad sides? Their sticks are not worth as much as the paintings done by important dead artists, but okay, their work is not in the stick, but in what they accomplished with it...

And you look at the playing of a star a bit differently from other players. You await more, you concentrate more, and if someone is a beautifully playing superstar like Crosby (or a challenger like Malkin), you gaze at his playing with an intensity you don't have for the others, because you know, that there goes the van Gogh of Hockey in our era. The same happens in museums. You stop by the painting of a well known artist, because you think there could be something special in it, even if you don't yet understand it... So you hockey fans, don't ask anymore why the name of the artist is so important! Though Forsberg does not play a superb season right now, every time he touches the puck, there is magic on the ice, because he is Forsberg, a superstar who will become a legend.

NO HELMET, NO LOGO

One of the greatest things about history is that it provides us the pleasure of nostalgy.

Nostalgy can be twisted. One might get stuck in believing that everything was better 10 years ago. Aesthetically nostalgy is still more often based upon enjoying an aesthetic difference. It is always rewarding, and always a bit romantic to see how things used to be. If things would always look the same, gazing at history would not be that interesting.

And what we have now cannot be seen without a strong connection to what is currently happening, but old pictures can be more easily enjoyed from a formal point of view. We know this from monuments. A fresh monument for winning a war makes you think about the war itself, and whether you'd like the war or not, its monuments have an ethical, economical, and maybe even personal dimension (any close ones involved?). But when we go to London's Trafalgar Square or visit an old Italian city centre, the monuments there are just beautiful, though they would have initially symbolized power and politics.

For the feeling of nostalgy it is important that the difference is historically somewhat accurate. You can create a beautiful dress for a science fiction film, but if you know (and maybe even remember) that a dress has been used in real discos in the 1970s or on the streets in the 1980s, the experience is different.

When I look at old pictures of hockey players, two things hit me immediately: outfits and the lack of helmets.

There is something romantic about old hockey outfits, not romantic in the sense that I'd like anyone to wear them when I go dining, but something which has to do with old time sports spirit.

This is more a problem in international hockey, I think, as the NHL is more sensitively branded and sponsors make themselves seen and heard in other ways. In December 2006 Team Finland played a part of their game against the Czech Republic in the 1966 Team Finland outfits (the old main ice hockey rink of Helsinki had its 40th birthday). One could immediately see how much more beautiful the old outfits were. It had a lot to do with less visually dominating sponsor logos. Money is needed but it made me think about sponsorship. Is there not any competition in creating more beautiful logos or special logos which would be used only in sportswear? I think the audience would appreciate the effort. It seems that aesthetics ruled more in the old outfits.

I know that there are plans right now to change hockey outfits, but sadly I don't think we'll ever see the physical forms of the players anymore because there are so much more pads all over them. The human body is beautiful, especially when we talk about athletes in motion (that's why I like to watch women's track and field), but hockey has developed to be too rough and effective for letting players go for it with less pads.

To helmets. How could players ever play without helmets? Even goalies played without masks until 1959! From the start of season 1979-1980 everyone entering the NHL had to wear a helmet, so through the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s the helmets started to become rare, until the last bareheaded warrior, Graig MacTavish, left the rinks in 1997. (By the way, get Jagr a better helmet, he plays with a 1980s style Jofa which is a bit risky...)

It is of course just positive that players now have helmets and that their health is well secured, but somehow it looks cool, and more human, when you see a picture of an ice hockey player skating and you can see all his facial expressions and his hair is in chaos while he skates fast.

If women’s hockey would have had a history on a high level already in the era before the helmets, it could have been easier to get a good start for it and find a lot of audience. Males are such hair fetishists. Wonder how women who think male hockey players are hot have survived the change? Well, maybe those female fans who were around when nobody had helmets are not anymore that interested of the whole question...

Male or female, you see how people really look when they don't have helmets. It is easier as well to gain an aura of a star if the fans can see your facial expressions. Look at photos of soccer, track and field, or tennis players. They show so much facial expressions and there are so many popular sports photos where the hair of the athlete is somewhat funny or sexy. Maria Sharapova and Manon Rheaume - I adore you! But I wouldn't, if I hadn't seen your hair.

People look more like personalities with their hair exposed. Should we increase non helmet action in hockey? Are warm ups without helmets enough?

Aesthetics and erotics. We need a good control of the outfits and a possibility to show off the personality - in every sport!

MORE ON FIGHTING IN THE RINK

In Hockey, Aesthetics, and Violence, an earlier (10th of November) posting on this blog, I discussed hockey fights to some extent, but a resent posting on a blog I found on Kukla's Korner, written by, a(nother) KK member, Christy Hammond, gave me some new inspiration to deal with the topic.
Keep Fighting in the NHL is a clever text with historical depth.

Commenting the fact that a violent game between the Atlanta Trashers and the Washington Capitals on the 22nd of November 2006, where 176 penalty minutes were given, seemed to attract more audience to the following game, Hammond argumented on the behalf of fighting in hockey by doing a historical overview, which I think was a good move, as fighting in hockey is so often discussed without any profound relation to the history of the sport. Or, well, people say that fighting has always been a part of it, but that is not yet very illuminating...

Hammond writes that "(s)ince the inception of the NHL in 1917, fighting has always played a role in the sport but has seen a steady decline since the 1980s. Games like this one have caused fans, players, coaches, and the media to question the future of fighting in the sport and whether it innately and ethically belongs in the game," and continues by asking a philosophical question: what do we really mean with fighting in the NHL?

"Typically, a fight occurs when two players from opposing teams square off with their gloves dropped in order for one player to avenge a bad hit or slash given to his star teammate by an opposing player. In the average fight, a player may get a split lip, black eye, or at worst a broken nose, but no serious injuries result since these fighters learn to protect their faces and are already outfitted with protective pads underneath their uniforms. “Under players’ rules, fist-fighting in hockey is considered a form of sanctioned violence that is different than other unsanctioned violent acts like striking an opponent with a hockey stick. It works as a form of social control that has a moderating effect on other potentially serious unsanctioned violent acts between players” (Kerr 316). Aside from calls made by the referees, fighting is a way to police events placed out on the ice during a game and has been happening in the league since 1922."

Hammond explains also why fighting stayed as a part of hockey, and the reason was the classical American one (and no problem with that, it often helps good entertainment to develop): money.

"Since 1922, fighting has been a critical part of the NHL: “In 1922 Rule 56 was introduced which regulated but did not ban ‘fisticuffs [fighting],’ instead giving the guilty party a five-minute penalty rather than a suspension or expulsion. The owners saw how much the fans loved the violence and saw dollar signs” (Bernstein 4). (...) One observer argues that for hockey fans a hockey fight can act as an avenue for psychological release, which helps explain why fighting is so popular among fans: “Fighting is a necessary release not only for players but also for the pent-up emotions of the crowd. Konrad Lorenz, one of the foremost experts on animal aggression, has written that catharsis can be achieved by the spectator as well as the player. Lorenz sees the cathartic experience as ‘the most important function of sport’” (Jones, Ferguson, and Stewart 75). Fighting is such an emotional action that it can energize the crowd, jumpstart a slumping team, and even spur them on to victory in a game."

Well, here we have, again, the Aristotelian notion of catharsis, but I think catharsis is here more far away from its original notion, than for example when we talk about the experience of a shutout. Having a catharsis meant originally going through a process, which developed and then relieved tension, and which then, following this, gave a purifying feeling. The original notion was made about Greek drama. A fast fight suits this term even less than my way of adopting the term from Greek drama to modern hockey drama (but I know, the word has for a long time been used in a variety of ways and applied to a variety of issues). What is the same in these ways of using the term is of course the purifying effect gained. But we should maybe differentiate these ways of using the term, when we talk about sports. One way of having a cathartic experience in hockey comes from some kind of drama, accumulating tension, and then releasing it (this notion is more classical), and another way of using the word could point to just all kinds of purifying experiences (including the more narrow way of using the term).

By the way, on creating spirit and energizing a team: Is spirit a kind of aesthetic experience? Is it something related to fictional experience, which sometimes gives you energy (a good movie does that)? Of course it is not fictional that you can win the Stanley Cup (at least not in the beginning of the season), or that you can come back to the game when you are losing it 4-6 and you have only 7 minutes left to play. But you have to believe in something, not that it necessarily would happen, but that there is a possibility for it to happen if you work hard. The interesting thing is that a group of people can develop that together, and that the feeling of it can help them to achieve goals. Entertaining movies use special effects and show stimulatingly beautiful people to help their audiences to forget the everyday, so they would try to believe at least playfully in other worlds. Maybe hockey fights do the same to the players, just on a bit more realistic level (we cannot get Alien or Predator here, I suppose, but we can still win even if it looks so bad right now, because Marty, hitting Joe there, has so much energy and a hunger to win)?

Quoting more of Hammond's work: "Fighting continued in the NHL and gained popularity well into the 1950s. At that time, the most well known player of the day started what became known as the Gordie Howe hat trick, which consists of a goal, an assist, and a fight. (...) Twenty years later in the 1970s, the Philadelphia Flyers intimidated the entire NHL with their incredibly physical play, which led them to be called the Broad Street Bullies (Bernstein 45). This team’s style of play resulted in the league adding a rule called the “third-man-in-rule” to curb fighting by allowing referees to eject any third player from the game who enters into a fight (Miller and Heika). By the mid 1980s, there was, on average, one fight per hockey game (Allen). It was at this time that the number of fights peaked and since then has been steadily declining to its current low of three fights for every 10 games played (Singer)."

Some ethical choices were made by the league later:

"The NHL (...) added a(...) rule to help discourage fighting in 1992 when it created the instigator rule, which gives “additional penalties to a player judged to have started a fight with an opponent who didn’t want to scrap” (Miller and Heika)."

Of course this is still not enough on the behalf of fighting. The fact that the league has an long history of it, explains a lot, but it is so much harder to say what the role of fighting is in the black box of ice hockey. Hockey without any contact or fighting would not feel like hockey, but neither would an average of 45 fights per game.

A weird thing is that fighting is virtually non-existant in European hockey. What if the interest to see violence is something which will always be local, a North American phenomenon? Are European hockey fans attending the matches more because of hockey skills (though they'd attend boxing matches to see fighting), and many American fans because of the show and the violence? It is not a simple question to answer, because many people who really admire the way hockey is played with grace by its greatest, enjoy fighting as well. But definitely, as American hockey is more about money than its European counterpart (where a lot of Olympic type of idealism also occurs, though it is a professional game), choices are maybe more made also following needs outside of the game, i.e. the interests of the not that fanatic hockey fans, who just want to come and enjoy a fight once in a while. This dialectic of pleasing the big crowd might have slowly made hardcore hockey fans feel that fighting is a natural part of hockey.

Well, of course this way of arguing could be applied to European hockey as well. Euro hockey might have been following intensively some mainstream ethics of the society, which condemn sports violence... As Euro hockey has more relied on support by the state (at its peak during the Socialist system, but as well in the Nordic countries like Sweden and Finland), and as the Olympic spirit has had more impact on the sport in Europe, hockey has needed society's ethical support more than in America, where commerce has ruled.

Getting back to Hammond, she names some people talking about the following, and I have seen this argument before: Many people say fighting protects star players - fighters are policemen you don't want to meet, so you don't tackle too badly the star - but, hey, how do the star players survive European rinks? North American rinks are all the way more violent, and it sounds just like more violence would be added to get less violence... It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it might not be that of course, as the culture of hockey in America might be so much more violent in depth... And when violence is central for a cultural tradition (the old way of bringing up kids, boxing, drinking in rough bars), people feel it is normal. You don't want to go to a violent bar in the shady part of the town without a strong, mean looking buddy, but you don't start discussing bar violence in newspapers because of it, and you think boxing is too violent, because, hey, it IS boxing...

European hockey can here in fact be used as an example to understand hockey in North America too. Long series of games are played in European leagues without a need to sustain the audience's hunger for entertainment with fighting (some people say that because there are so many NHL games, the season needs some extra spice, but forget this argument). Though less games are played during the season, the World Championships are seen integrally as a part of the season (and the Olympics, once in four years, more than in America), without forgetting tournaments for the best club in Europe and Euro Hockey tournaments for the biggest hockey countries in Europe. So the difference in the amount of games is maybe not that big after all... Interestingly some people in America have written also, that they don't consider hockey fights to be as essential for Olympic hockey. Many of us seem to have two tastes, a way of enjoying Olympic hockey (the Euro way to do it), and a way of enjoying NHL hockey... It is not one, but many hockeys we already can appreciate.

Well, so much has now been just about fighting, so let's get back to the main motivation to write this blog, aesthetics. I am wondering whether Americans see fighting as more aesthetic as Europeans do? Or is it just that they want to have more peak experiences, which the mixed up feelings gained from fighting in the rink can give?

E.M. Swift wrote some time ago for Sports Illustrated, that although he is in pains to admit it, he misses "the good old-fashioned hockey brawl. (...) That intellectually indefensible, primitive, testosterone-laced donnybrook that on a nightly basis used to separate hockey from all other sports. I miss the passion on display when you mix skateblades and fists."

Different from many other authors on hockey, Swift writes out some own, pretty crazy memories, which he tells in a way which might help to understand the experience of participating in a hockey brawl...

"Heck, I was a participant in a hockey brawl in college that would have made the Knicks/Nuggets fight look tame. Princeton-Colgate, no less. 1972. It started in the penalty box and ended with the game being suspended and one of my Princeton teammates charging into the locker room with a fistful of hair from a Colgate scalp. "Look! Bloody roots!" he cried triumphantly. Who cared that we lost the game? The Colgate athletic director at one point was leaning over the boards whacking a Princeton player with a stale Italian sub. No one on either team, or in the stands, ever forgot the spectacle we created that night."

Well, I can believe that... but once again, this just reminds me about cultural differences. I enjoy boxing, K1, thai boxing, but too much fighting in hockey is a real challenge to me - as it is to so many European hockey fans, though they think the NHL is the best and most interesting league in the world. Still we conceive some fighting as essential to the game. There is a great blog in Finnish, which has opened my eyes to some cultural aspects of game violence, called Jäähyaitio, but I see that this is less a question of just liking fighting or not, and more one associated with what we in depth conceive of as hockey. Here there seems to be an endless amount of positions, ranging from the love for brawl hockey to something closer to women's hockey (is there a discussion about violence in women's hockey too? I don't know).

Swift, in fact, calls one hockey fight a "visual feast", and as I have been writing that hockey fights are not very aesthetic, I just have to wake up now... There are many different ways of enjoying art, music (from hockey AC DC to high class chocolate advertisement Mozart), and films, and there are many different rewarding ways of enjoying hockey. To learn about that, and the fact, that they sit deep, as everybody is so sure that he / she knows what is essential in hockey (!), and that all these ways of perceiving hockey are really satisfactory in different ways, is important. There is a variety of deep logics of hockey, one could say, and I think there is a lot to learn from their aesthetic sides too.

I wish I could enjoy hockey in all possible different ways. Now I only possess two skills, to enjoy Euro hockey in my way, and to enjoy NHL hockey in another, but over-defensive playing, skill competitions, and hockey fights: here I come! I have time and interest to learn new forms of aesthetic pleasure. One day we'll sit down with Swift, have a glass of good Californian red wine, and discuss the visual beauty of hockey brawls. At that time, if everything goes well, Swift might have learned to enjoy Euro hockey as well, and we can have a long chat about the rich range of beauty hockey offers us. And who knows, when this happens, even hockey skill competitions might have become a real sport, and there might be tournaments with just fighting in hockey gear (in the ring or in a small size rink?). The world of sport is in an endless process of development, getting wider and richer with time, and so are the tastes of its wide and hungry audiences.

BIGGER NETS - AND THE AESTHETIC DISCUSSION ABOUT THEM

My first reaction to the discussion, whether the NHL nets should be made bigger to increase the amount of goals was a bit conservative, but when I got over it, and took the role of a cultural theorist (with the help of some good texts written be hockey enthusiasts, two of them quoted here), I remembered that what we think hockey essentially is, is just a historical product.

This raised ideas on even broader issues.

The concept of art, and the way we want to consider some objects art and not objects of everyday life or sport, is just 250 years old - and as we know, the whole concept of sport is also a modern product. 19th century figure skaters performed more in winter circuses than in sports venues. Ballet became adapted to the world of art - partly just a coincidence - but the same could have happened to figure skating, as it was a homeless practice for a while before finding its home in the developing modern institution of sports. Just think about how figure skating would have changed, if it had found its home in the arts! After some decades we would have seen performances which would have been as complex as modern dance pieces are now.

Like figure skating, even hockey could be a sport where points would be given following beautiful moves. Just think about Karate katas or fight sequences where one karateka has to show in a coreography how he would take care of 4 opponents, or to be more focused on ice hockey, think about hockey skill competitions: it could happen some year, that they would start to gain success. We would just need somebody to organize skill competitions in a new way, and maybe the participation of two or three stars. After a decade the sport could already have more status, and some players would concentrate more on skill competitions then traditional real hockey. First this would be done by players who would not grow up to be big enough in size but who would have learned the skills needed during their junior years. Later on, if success of the sport would become permanent, many players close to retiring would probably take up the challenge and continue their career in that way, a bit like 5000 and 10 000 meter runners start running the marathon when they get older. In the end, we'd need many stars to go for it. Who would you like to see in well organized skill competitions? Forsberg, Selänne and Jagr in their old days competing in skill and technique... Hmm... still not THAT interesting right now, but if skill competitions would develop a bit, who knows? The point is that history is full of small changes, which later on start to feel very natural. The hockey we play now is just a historical product, and its nature follows many coincidences.

In the development of sports anything can happen, and as rinks are of different size in Europe and America, and as skating is more important in Europe and contact more important in North America, and as the way of playing hockey differs already in so many other ways as well, why wouldn't hockey go on developing in a different direction in North America? There is American football and rugby, as well as there exists a form of Australian football - and don't forget that soccer has something to do with these games as well. If one has nothing against helping different ways of playing ice hockey to become two (or why not even three or four) different sports, there is no reason to make a problem out of this, but a couple of those changes will of course make Northern American ice hockey soon a game played only in America and Canada.

Well, back from too much philosophizing to the issue of bigger nets...

Jarome Iginla talked against making the nets bigger, and his quote found its way to hockey and sports media around the world. Iginla said he was not convinced that making the nets bigger would be the answer to the problem (which is: how to get more audience).

"I think a lot of people want that to be a last resort because it changes records and things," Iginla said (Canadian Press 20.12). Iginla, a member of the NHL's competition committee, has his word in the development of the process as his voice is heard just where at the decisions are made.

Funnily, stats are something which have a value in the long run just because stats have been made for decades, and breaking records gives a feeling of making history, but in fact things have already changed so many times and in so many ways, that the game is not anymore the same. This takes away the power of Iginla's second comment: "Hopefully there are some other things you can adjust in the game without changing the nets." Well, other changes change the situation with stats as well... Any difference made to the game affects the stats. Wake up.

Colin Campbell, a ex-defenceman, coach and current Senior Vice President and Director of Hockey Operations for the National Hockey League, has taken a look at the problem from a different, a bit of a more aesthetic perspective. He talks in defence of beautiful goals! Quoting Canadian Press again: "(H)e'd like to bring back a goal that doesn't really exist anymore. The blast from the wing, made famous by the likes of Gartner, Guy Lafleur or Mike Bossy. Now it seems impossible to score from there."

Iginla accepts this perspective as well. "When I was growing up, I saw a lot of them, guys going down the wing, yeah, slapshots to the far corner, a wrist shot. (...) Sometimes the goalie would even fall down on those far-corner shots if they're off balance because they were standing up. Now with the butterfly style, you don't see them as much. They were exciting goals to see." Exciting goals to see? Now we are cooking! Sometimes I tend to forget that so many players and coaches are in fact very conscious of the aesthetic nature of the game.

During the christmas period NHL.com blogger Shawn P. Roarke wrote in defence of the old nets. He began by saying that he loves goals, and that goals are about beauty. Roarke, I love that comment! And Roarke made a profound comment on shooting goals. "The beauty, however, rests in the hard work necessary to obtain the result -- be it a well-placed snap shot into a corner, a laser beam of a slap shot through the five-hole or, even, a garbage rebound in front of the net. The effort required to light the red lamp is what makes scoring so special."

Roarke used basketball as an object of comparison to illustrate his point. There are so many points made in basketball (a very aesthetic game, by the way), and according to Roarke the amount of points made "devalues the ARTISTRY of any particular score". That is true. In soccer fans remember goals for years, much better than in ice hockey, because you usually make only from 0 to 2 or maybe 3 goals per game, and as you have sometimes waited 88 minutes to see one, a beautiful shot can really make a huge impact on you.

But hockey is a different game. It has a different deep logic. Deep logic? Well, hockey with 90 goals made per game would not be interesting, but neither would hockey survive the amount of goals made in soccer. This is obvious, but there is some deep logic, which is hard to describe or analyze, and this deep logic makes the game what it is. Following this the game is meaningful, like good sentences of speech or well made pictures are meaningful, though we might sometimes have a hard time explaining why. The black box of the game is hard to decode, but if the game changes too fast, we might lose the contact to it. We often understand the logic of the game only when it is lost, even when the loss has been just a small one, as happened with some NHL games during the last years, when goals where not made and technically skilled players had a hard time performing. Now many viewers are suddenly happy about the new regulations (well, some people are hungry for fighting, which has decreased), because it feels more like what hockey should be about. It is really hard to say what changes can be made to still keep the game appealing and meaningful in this way.

Well, a couple of inches more to the size of the net does probably not yet pose very dramatic challenges, but we should always be careful with what we are doing. At least if many changes are made, please, make them slowly, one by one, so that we'd not lose the game.

Evan Grossman talks about evolution, against Roarke, in the same Head to Head. He points out that changes have always been made. For example the schedule of NHL games has been extented. In 1995-1996 players got two more games to play, and this increased their possibilities to make record stats. Attacking Roarke, Grossman asks: "were the 69 goals Mario Lemieux scored that year any cheaper than the 69 Mike Bossy scored in 1978-79?,", and he has a point against both Roarke and Iginla. "Where was the outcry then about tainted records? Exactly. There was none. Just like there were no riots in the street when the goal lines were moved farther away from the back walls to give Wayne Gretzky more time and room behind the nets, and why nobody is coming out of the woodwork to strike every assist he recorded from back there after the playing surface was altered. What if Gordie Howe got to play on the same rinks that No. 99 did? What would the record book look like then?"

Still, I think, usually this isn't the case, but now when Grossman said it, Lemieux's 69 goals feels a bit cheaper than Bossy's, but just a bit, as I of course realize that the game was a lot different in many other ways as well at the time Bossy played. And with the rules we have now and the way of playing which dominates the league, I think nobody can ever break Teemu Selänne's rookie record of 76 goals. Selänne might like that, but when there is not even a possibility to break it - no one has even made 60 goals per season in a whole decade. There we have the already mentioned Lemieux with his 69 goals shot 1996, and, hey, there is one player more who did it that year, and that one still continues. But did Jagr make his 2 last goals of the 62 of that season in the 2 extra games he had? Funny coincidence, if that year really introduced two more games to play, as the coming years have marked a change in stats by decreasing the amount of goals made. The game must have been developing fast in many different ways during those years.

Grossman even points out that goalies have now masks and a lot of more gear, and, true, the list goes on. I did not even know (before reading Grossman's blog) that penalties used to be un-releasable until two full minutes in the box were up!

Aesthetically speaking there seems to be more reasons to make the goals bigger. Roarke says that the point in making a beautiful goal is that it craves effort, but, hey, it is the same for the goalies. To be a Kipper, Brodeur, or Turco with a lot of shutouts when goals get bigger is even more hot than now, and maybe only one or two top goalies can make it, when we now have a whole bunch of goalies who make a shutout once in a while. And in fact, would one or two goals more per game change in any dramatic way the effort factor, as we'd get back to the level of stats (which Roarke so likes) of the 1980s and 1990s with big names sometimes making 60 goals or more, and as it would anyway take just a couple of minutes away from the game played between the red lights. The rink would definitely not become a non stop red light district! We are talking about quite a small difference, and getting back the amount of scoring done in the old days.

The arguments against bigger nets which are built upon notions on the stats seem to be weaker, as we have seen, so I think the people who have wanted to make the nets bigger have won the argument. (Which does not mean that making the nets bigger would still be a wiser move...)

It seems that the biggest question is still the one I posed a bit earlier. Do we want to let hockey become so different in North America and Europe? Europe might follow North America if the nets are made bigger in size, but if we don't want to end up playing American and European hockey the way rugby, Aussie football, American football, and soccer is now played (players could soon, after a couple of these changes, start to develop so different skills that it would hard to change from European to North American hockey), it would be wise to find solutions together - if nothing else, to seduce Europeans to follow the idea in a way which would make them feel that their hockey insights have some value in America. Sometimes keeping the game together might need some group psychology.

But, on the opposite, if we'd really like to divide the game - I am myself open to it, as I enjoy both the European and the American way of playing and their differences already now - it might at least be good to be conscious of doing that, and I am not sure if this is yet realized on the American continent. If the difference between American and European hockey grows big, there will be no Jagrs, Forsbergs and Kiprusoffs coming from Europe to do a career in the New World, as they would stay in their own sport, Euro Hockey. When we just got a globally interesting league (the former NHL was local, and only approximately the last decade has really been international), I would not like to lose it. NHL makes hockey globally focused in a way no other league in any team sport can do. Baseball is so American and it is played so little outside of the US, and the same applies to American football, that the American leagues in these sports are really of local nature. The world of soccer follows a variety of leagues (Spain, Italy, England, Germany).

Well, what comes to blogging, if the great divide will come and make hockey two different sports (or four, if women will follow), I would have to start blogging on the aesthetic differences between them, and that, oh boy, that would be rewarding... So just go on and make my day!

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CHRISTMAS BREAK (and even more on the importance of the summer break)

We are again close to Christmas and soon we will, for a couple of days, think about something else than hockey. (Or do we?) The beginning of season 2006-2007 was great, and writing this blog has made me so much more aware of the aesthetic side of the game.

In the beginning I thought beautiful goals and assists would be the most rewarding phenomena in the aesthetics of hockey, but as always, whatever topic you start to study philosophically, new ideas will start to pop up.

Soon I discovered that hockey media from camera work to the literary legends created in sports journalism have a significant impact on our way of experiencing the game, that shutouts played by great goalies give us a peculiar kind of fulfilment, and that what we know about players' careers has a lot of effect on how we experience their way of playing.

A philosopher should always find new perspectives, but now I am surprizing even myself. Suddenly, before the break, as NHL will take a Christmas holiday, I started to think that there is something about the break which rewards attention in this blog.

What was striking this summer was that following the increase of hockey writing in the internet, waiting for the coming season (2006-2007) was easier than ever. Why? The magic continued - thanks to the NHL pages which were actively updated off-season and even more thanks to creative bloggers who kept on writing through the summer and found loads of topics to discuss when nothing really happened. There was hardly a week without at least one inspiring text published on-line.

Some years ago we used to get ready for the next season by just reading a couple of articles on what players did on their summer holidays. The news were never very stimulating. Hockey players played golf, drove sports cars, and spent time with their families in the summer. Nice, but hardly interesting. Having a summer break in hockey meant that one had to find something else to be enthusiastic about for a while.

Besides interesting speculations on what the coming season would be like, there is nowadays so much discussion about drafts, strategical choices made by general managers and coaches, and young players who could make it next winter, that there is no need to forget hockey totally in the summer.

But breaks are important.

Christmas is a period when most of us definitely have a lot to do, but what we do differs from the everyday. Breaks in work and sports are needed for the same reason. To keep up with the psychological intensity needed for doing a good job or enjoying any really rewarding form of entertainment, you have to cool down sometimes. If the world of hockey would be too much alive all of the 365 days of the year, the feeling for the first game of the season would be lost. We need breaks to sustain and to cultivate intensive, dynamic, and positive experiences.

Well, talking about christmas, the NHL will give us only a two day break. Thinking about the approximately one hundred hot tv dinners of hockey offered during the winter a two day break might sound just symbolical, but it isn't. Just check out how your energy level as a hockey loving couch potato has been raised a bit when the 26th of December comes (the break will be held on the 24th and the 25th). If you experience this consciously, you will learn something valuable which can help you to develop your relation to hockey next summer. Take an even longer break than last year: read the reports and blogs when you return from your summer holiday, and give your way of experiencing hockey a kind of a holiday. Taking a rest is as important whether you play professional hockey or just enjoy it as a fan.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON DEVELOPING

Sunday morning the 12th of December 2006 I was reading my favorite web pages on hockey, Kukla's Corner, as I noticed a notion on hockey and pyrotechnics. In an article written by Karen Rosen for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution - southern hockey is so weird for us Northern Europeans, we can't imagine what it would mean if Egypt and Marocco would play hockey against us - published on the 7th of December, she had been enthusiastic about the use of pyrotechnics in making hockey a show event. The text was about Rick Lambright and Andy Ulanowski, and the pyrotechnic effects they have lately used to spice up the Trashers' home arena.

As Rosen tells it, these "brothers-in-law" operated "the high-flying twin bird heads that spew 20-foot flames during introductions, after every Thrashers goal and whenever the NHL's rules allow them to fire up the crowd."

Amazing, I thought. The show has been a motor of the success of American hockey, but enormous pyrotechnics? Well, as the game is now played also in the south I understand that all possible ways of spicing it up have to be used to get more viewers. (Which will still not help international star Marian Hossa to become a local one!)

The cited text says that pyrotechnics is taking Atlanta to the 21st century. I think it could inspire hockey culture in other cities and countries as well. The show is developing, and it has to develop, and besides development in televizing the games (see the earlier post on Developing Camera Technique), hockey, to be a competitive sport and a show of its era, has to keep with going forward, finding new ways to be holistic entertainment, in a manner which keeps it in touch with other spheres of culture.

Of course there are people who vote for 'pure hockey', but this type of sportsmanship has already died out from the NHL at the same time as it is cultivated in international matches from the Olympics to the IHFF World Tournaments, without forgetting most European series. In the end it might be good to have these worlds of hockey separated, because there will always be two different tastes for hockey. There are people who want it to be about showmanship and media culture, and there are people who in the modern olympic spirit are into 'pure sportsmanship' and ascetic aesthetics of sport (which still rule more in e.g. track and field) and the aesthetics offered by plain games, where an ideology of health and economic disinterestedness is performed in low profile (which is partly just an aesthetic facade nowadays, as all important sports are in some ways professionalistic).

That Atlanta is going for the same burner effect as "Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath" is cool news - though the technique used is far from easily adoptable, so it might be that the Trashers will for a long time be the only ones with a pyrotechnical show on this level:

"Before each game, Lambright and Ulanowski take a tank of propane to the catwalk 135 feet above the Philips Arena floor to refuel the accumulator, which pressurizes the gas. They also check and recheck the equipment for gas leaks. For Thrashers games, they use a chain motor to lower the birds from their "nesting" position in the rafters to a place about 80 feet off the floor and about 10 feet above the scoreclock. The birds are 14 feet long and weigh 350 pounds apiece. (...) The blasts are synchronized with the announcer — for example, "Ilya Ko-val-CHUK," the final syllable being the cue for the flame — or with the horn sounding after a goal. (...) The best burst is about two seconds. "We toast the nose if we let the flame on too long," Lambright said."

As the idea seems to function well, other hockey venues might have something to learn from it - though I don't really think most of them will follow. But it raises thoughts: are there any limits for imagination when you want to spice up the game? And thinking about showmanship, one can again ask: how far can we take the show in sports?

While considering this we might want to embrace the history of this odd phenomena. We have to at least give some credit to the pioneer:

"The original Prometheus of Philips Arena was Peter Sorckoff, senior director of game operations for (the team) (...). He introduced the bird heads in the Thrashers' second season. "You can imagine what it was like going to the Atlanta Fire Department and explaining we were going to have this giant head that was going to shoot a fireball the size of a Volkswagen Beetle every time we scored kind of thing," Sorckoff said."

Read the article here
and take a look at this very aestheticized use of pyrotechics and masks on ice as well.

"STRAIGHT" PLAYER CAREERS - AND ON CELEBRATING DEFENSEMEN

A colleague of mine who has written extensively on aesthetics, environment, media, and (most radically) mobility, commented one of my earlier posts by mail, the one on Player Careers as Narratives. (Thanks Ossi!) In this post I celebrated changing, developing, and dramatic player careers as aesthetically more rewarding than careers which do not make big differences through the years. Ossi's critique was that there is an aesthetics of reliable playing, something about narratively speaking dull careers which is enjoyable. It is just something different we experience when someone always plays in the same way and well.

This made me think. In my eagerness to find ways of writing about the aesthetics of hockey, I had forgot the everyday. There is an everyday of hockey, which is enjoyable together with its not-that-stunning games, good craftsmanship, and periods of regular season bulk in where your favorite team is not really fighting its way up nor really risking its future. This everyday is aesthetically based a lot on the secure work done by defensemen, and good but not great forwards. It is this endless stream of hockey at its not best which make the highlights seem special.

Without even thinking about this grey ground from which special events make a difference, I just had to get back to basics. In most situations you want your team to win, whether that happens for the love of team or (more and more the case as players get easily drafted and do not represent 10 years the same team) some of your favorite players in it. Karl Samuelson wrote a while ago an excellent article on defensive defensemen on the nhl.com, but thinking about NHL what strikes me personally is the way for example three times (1998, 1999, 2003) Selke winner Jere Lehtinen plays. Having Lehtinen on the team when Finland plays in the Olympics or the World Cup (last times Finland won silver in both losing only to Canada in the 2004 World Cup and to Sweden in the 2006 Olympics) gives you a feeling of trust. An aesthetics of trust? Maybe, but also an aesthetics of pure craftsmanship which gets an extra flavor from its reliability. In the Finnish Elite series SM-liiga Jere Karalahti of the HIFK is this kind of a defenseman - though he is famous for having been a bit unreliable in another way: sometimes he just does not appear on the ice at all... But when he does, he does his work - which is a pretty strange combination, which has anyway, in fact, just made his fan club bigger. Sports need big personalities, as I have said...

Mats Sundin was named already in the earlier post on Player Careers as Narratives, and he is an excellent example of craftsmanship which is always good. Players like Sakic, Niedermayer, Pronger, Chara, and Lidström exemplify in differing ways this aesthetic. Sundin and Sakic are of course masters of the puck in their endless, victorious hunt for points, but defensemen are really the heart of the aesthetics of trust. Watching them play is usually far from drama, and closer to the enjoyment one gets when the house stays clean or the car has been reliable for a long time. Nhl.com shows, by the way, nowadays highlights which focus on forwards and goalies. How could we develop the way the work of defensemen could be appreciated? There is not always a possibility to show highlights of defense playing, as it looks more work than fun. Should we start presenting media files like "the last 10 minutes of Alexei Zhitnik / Marek Malik / Christoph Schubert / Ken Klee on the ice"? Why not. These are all players with a stunning +/- ratings but no points made. I'd like the idea. Getting depth to the reliability of a player and understanding better the craftsmanship of hockey through these media player profiles could become one new way to develop consciousness of the finest sides of the game, and to celebrate excellence in hockey where it is at its hardest to present.

THE COMPLEX CONSTRUCTION OF SOME HOCKEY EXPERIENCES

I have already earlier in this blog mentioned how experiences of NHL hockey in Europe often gets constructed through fragments, but as this type of experience seems to become more dominant - in nearly all sports and in all parts of the world, as contemporary internet with its audio visual possibilities is becoming as important as tv in conveying what is happening - I shall pay more attention to it.

In cultural philosophy and cultural theory it is taken for granted that we construct our experiences actively, and that we work out holistic experiences from small fragmented parts, but the idea might be new for many hockey fans.

The game is different when seen live - we all know that. But how many of us have thought about the development of the hockey game experience, which has gone hand in hand with the development of media? There was a time when radio dominated representations of hockey together with printed media. You heard the game through sometimes amazing sports commentators, and then you read about it - from a paper where articles where professionally edited and short, following the needs and conventions of newspaper journalism. Though radio never died, and though it even got a new start following the acoustic development of internet (I listen to a lot of NHL games through the radio links presented on the NHL webpages), there should not be disagreement about the fact that tv took over the major responsibility for broadcasting the games in the 1970s.

Where we are at now, the range of media is enormous even when we just think about life in the 1990s. Radio is not history when you can't make it home early enough and have to follow the game in the car, and tv will probably never become history, but internet has taken a big role in distributing radio broadcasts and live image together with a broad variety of journalism (in electric form) and writing done especially for web pages (e.g. blogs).

Hockey journalism in its traditional form has not died, but blogging and other types of writing for NHL pages, blogger, webpages of tv channels, and so on, have changed the scene. Texts on hockey used to be shorter. Now some authors put up several posts a day, and they have space to discuss even marginal issues. They can also publish long stories which do not have any news value. The web has in this way relaxed discussion on hockey, as sports journalism has been tied to a restricted space in newspapers, journals, and magazines, where the role of writing has always been governed by what is expected from journalism, not from hockey enthusiasm. Also newspapers have great blogs on hockey, because the internet gives an opportunity to write more and to use an endless amount of perspectives and styles of writing - without forgetting how you can link e.g. a video to your text!

Together with this development of hockey journalism, where the web has made hockey writing multi-faced multi media, bigger in size, and less tied to conventions of old media and its limited space, our experiences, partly together with reading these texts written by our favorite authors (thank you, especially, to my favorite bloggers Paul Kukla (and the whole community on Kukla's Corner), Risto Pakarinen and Tuomas Nyholm, and of course the superb hockey pages of nhl.com), get built up with the help of many sources.

The game, say just an ordinary one from yesterday (when finishing this, yesterday is 7.12.2006), Colorado Avalanches - San Jose Sharks (5-2, by the way, wasn't just the ordinary because of some really pleasant-to-see work made by Sakic against the Californians led by Thornton) might be first heard in the radio or seen on tv. Personally I missed both opportunities last night (Nearly morning for us Europeans). In the morning when I woke up I watched the highlights, and later read a couple of stories about it. Some of these stories were professionally edited news, some others were emotional or deeply analytic writings produced by some blogging individuals (some of them working as journalists as well). After this, some of the information of the game hit the newspapers and in the future it will hit hockey / sports journals, though at that time this will be just one game of many, maybe mentioned in an article on Sharks, Avalanches, Sakic, or Thornton. Though the sources are many, and we are talking about quite a period of time, there is only one experience of the game which I possess. It gets built like a puzzle, but does not feel like a puzzle: my Colorado - San Jose game is a holistic experience, which is anchored to certain feelings and some knowledge I had prior to this. About the latter: knowing in advance Sakic and Thornton, something else about both teams as well, is a resource which affected the way I organized the visual / acoustic and textual information I got about the game. Soon this game will just become a couple of hardly noticeable traces in my experiential resource on hockey, which helps me to make sense of even shorter descriptions and highlights of the future. The single game experience will just become a part of my way of making sense of hockey - as the game is not a classic which I have a reason to remember.

Of course something might be added to the single game experience as well pretty much later, and something might of course be taken away. I might get some fresh information for example about one of Sakic's goals, which was scrutinized thoroughly (Sakic was between the goalie and the goal, nearly in the goal, working hectically with his stick) during the game. Specialists might say later that the goal should not have been accepted. Later on a friend of mine who could have been there could add something to the story. This would keep the singular game a longer time in my active memory, and the experience would get restructured in some sense. In my mind the experience of the game would still be one and holistic, and it would anyway, soon just become a part of the big background knowledge and understanding of hockey I possess.

The game experience would have benefited from a possibility to see the game on tv or at least hearing it on radio, but a holistic experience gets as well completed with the help of only fragments - and the same applies to our overall understanding of hockey.

Our active way of constructing experiences gets illuminated through this example. The way of building the experience described is actually the way many sports experiences are nowadays built. Collecting the info from a variety of different sources and putting it together in our head - that's going to be more and more important for the audience of the future. (Hey, anyway, when can I see games on the net (media player)? I will never get cable here, but I'd like to pay for a possibility to see Sakic play!)

I wonder what kind of experience a group of Americans had about a game of baseball they followed on text tv a couple of years ago when they spent a night in a Finnish hotel where I happened to be at the same time? This was just before the advent of the laptops and a bit before the internet got filled with good audio visual material. I heard these sports enthusiasts talking at the breakfast table about the strange experience of having seen minutes, names, and points appear on the screen after long breaks of seeing just the same information! Must have been a long night...

What is important to learn and remember is that we are actively constructing experiences and the experiences we build are always somewhat holistic, and feel complete. What we conceive of as hockey - yes, you too - is mostly based upon a broad army of fragments of media coverage which we organize actively by ourself.

THE CATHARSIS OF A SHUTOUT

Catharsis is an old Greek medical term refering to purification. Aristotle used it to describe and explain the effects of drama. After the tension developed with the dramatic plot catharsis was gained when, in the end of the story and its performance, pieces started to come together, and when the crisis was solved.

While watching hockey one gets purifying experiences as well. Seeing your favorite team rise from e.g. a painful 0-3 situation slowly to 3-3 is enjoyable, but not purifiying. Winning feels fine, and maybe the end of a positive game is somewhat purifying as a feeling when one is on the side of the winning team, but there is nothing as purifying as a shutout. Goalies, when representing our favorite team can give us the most purifying experience of hockey.

The tension, close to the end when a shotout seems possible and even probable, becomes incredible. Though it would be clear that your team is winning, seeing Turco catch one more shot 19 seconds before the end, Lehtonen getting his pad on the way of the puck as only 9 seconds are left, or gazing nervously at Brodeur when he comes out of the goal to succesfully block an attack two seconds before it all is over - that sure is a special kind of thriller of excellence... The intensity at stake is so different from 'Are we going to win or lose?', or 'Do we have to go for the shootout?'.

And when the game is over, and your goalie has saved your team from all the attacks, there is a feeling of odd relief. You don't make many shutouts during one season. 2005-2006 Kiprusoff made it to 10 (Legacy and Huet 7), Brodeur kept the zero 11 times during the season of 2003-2004 (Belfour 10, Turco and Nabokov 9), and it was as well Brodeur who topped the race during the season 2002-2003 with 9 shutouts.

Shutouts make legends. Goalies who win games with shutouts have anyway a high saving percentage, but as every shutout leaves a trace of a feeling of perfection to your relation to the goalkeeper who did it, men who make it gain an extra aura, which cannot be gained with high saving percentage only.

So you wanna-be legendary goalies out there: give us a purifying experience with a shutout. You can lose many games. Look at Lehtonen. He is a star, though his saving percentage is far from the highest on the market and he has lost some games in a fashion which is far from legendary - but he wins a lot with shutouts, which has already earned him gloria.


End remark:

Brodeur is pretty high on the all-time shutout list of the NHL (he is 5th, with 83, as Terry Sawchuk, who has the record, made the amazing amount of 103 of them during his career, and Ed Belfour, if we concentrate on the still playing goalies, ranks 9th with 75. Dominik Hasek has 71 shutouts and he ranks 12th. After 6 shutouts Hasek will rank already 8th, and after 2 more Brodeur will be all-time 3rd, so there is a lot to wait for - hopefully already during this season. Kipper, the 2005-2006 Vezina Trophy winner has still a long way to go with his 20 shutouts, though if he continues making approximately 10 of them every year (he nearly tops the early season list right now with 3) he could reach the top 30 in two and the top 20 in three years.

DEVELOPING CAMERA TECHNIQUE

I am watching the highlights from the Dallas Stars vs. the Colorado Avalanches game, played on the 20th of November 2006. Suddenly I get shocked. The camera follows players from time to time like in a movie. It gives new angles. I notice that it moves on the side of the rink on the glass wall.

I had taken part as an audience in the official birth of this new delopment. I found Paul Kukla mentioning it in his blog on the 21st of November:
"The rail camera made its debut last night during the Colorado-Dallas game on Versus. After two periods or so, I was used to seeing the camera move along the rail which was placed on top of the glass, and believe it has some merit. One suggestion, paint or cover the camera in white, it will blend in with the ice and won't be as obtrusive as it was last night."

There was a feeling of movement and drama, which, I am sure too, will add something to the media experience of hockey. We need better media, and what I started to think was: who created this? If somebody makes something well, he / she should get credit for it. You know who made the goal, who directed Kill Bill, and if you're into architecture you know who built your favorite buildings. Should sports media coverage be like car design: no names, no personalities? I doubt it. Probably there has been a big team behind this development, but at least the name of the team, or some of its key designer names would do good for the sport. For the sport? Am I not talking about its media coverage? Well, the sport lives quite much through the media, and when that gets good, you don't always even have to be interested in the sport itself to enjoy it. I am not interested in basketball, but NBA programs are not hot just because of the fantastic players: the highlight cavalcades are also high level media entertainment, good work.

To feed people's interest in helping hockey media to develop, we need to show them that we appreciate creativity. That is done by giving them a name.

Talking about that game, especially when Brendan Morrow gets fast up to Colorado's goal gets beautifully filmed from the back - like a heroic attack in a Western movie. (Made it 2-0, by the way, in the first period.)

Some checkings as well look like they'd be straight out of some reality tv, as the camera passes the situation from a helicopter angle. 'Bad boys, bad boys...' Is this an effect of reality tv? And if the possibilities to shoot from different angles and use more creativity in filming a hockey match develops, will the next Tarantino dream about directing ice hockey matches and not fiction films? How beautiful and stimulative is the game going to get on tv, and how much can it afford to develop - and how fast? The traditional way to do it is still good, and sports coverage does not survive if it gets too radical. You don't want to have too many shocks when you follow sport. But yes, some creativity is definitely needed. Thank you, whoever you were, who provided us this.

Another top visual event was when Jokinen, Modano and Lindros rose up to the center ice and towards the Colorado goal in the 3rd period (an attack fulfilled by Lindros' goal), and the camera made it look glorious right from the side, following the players. It was like watching a hockey version of Easy Rider - or a fictional film on hockey. Hey, wait a moment... it is fiction affecting sports media here. The idea comes from action films, where cameras are constantly driven in fast speed to make everything look more effective. Will we get some special effects as well? Please no, do not add sound effects to punches, and don't create explosions on the goals when points are made. It is enough with the atmosphere of old media when the lamp gets lit.

PLAYER CAREERS AS NARRATIVES

Some ice hockey players always play in the same way, without any significant development. There are no ups and downs. There is no drama.

To be reliable as a player, that's more a dream of a coach than the average ice hockey fan. Fans and spectators are hungry for dramatic events and changes - and shutout games from the goalies as well as hat tricks from the forwards.

Joe Sakic is a legend. Sakic's game reading ability and technique are even more than you can expect from an ice hockey player. He has shot and assisted some very beautiful goals. But following the fact that he gives laconic comments, that he is considered to be a bit of a dull personality, and that even his playing, though it is reliable and he might be considered to be a risk taker once in a while, is somewhat always what we are waiting for, he is less a legend on ice than he could be. (Canadians of course love him.)

Last night Olli Jokinen made a hat trick, facing Montreal Canadians with his team Florida Panthers. Jokinen may not be the most creative player in the NHL, nor has he a seductive personality - though he has some bully charisma - but his personal history, development as an ice hockey player makes him sympathetic. He will never challenge Sakic as a player, nor will he become a legend (if not in Finland, but I doubt even that), but it is rewarding to think about his story. The story of Jokinen gives his deeds a profound taste. "I really like how that kid has developed", a phraze a commentator gave on October the 26th on Jokinen when he played against the Devils, says it all. You can like someones development, as you can like the development of the plot of a detective story. Jokinen, who was selected by the Los Angeles Kings in the first round of the 1997 NHL Entry Draft as the 3rd overall pick, gained just problems when he tried to make it to the top in North American hockey. He was considered to be arrogant in Finland. He was young and promising, but he became too early a self proclaimed star. In the NHL it took years for him to find a new way of playing hockey. He needed a new style, and he needed to find a new role on the top of the ice hockey world, where he just couldn't play too big. Being now on top - and he got there slowly if you think that he was a 3rd round overall pick (Jokinen is now 27 years old) - looks more profound following the fact that we know this story, and many people remember his long way to the top to fulfil his prophecy.

We view players partly as protagonists of the stories of their clubs, their native countries' ice hockey, but as well through their personal histories.

That's why it raised feelings when Teemu Selänne won the Bill Masterton memorial trophy 2006. He made a comeback, and that's drama. To be precise, that's from the end of a drama, when things come together. A happy end? Not yet, but close to it, as Selänne can't play many seasons anymore. He is now 36 years old. The long period of problems followed up by the comeback gives an extra aura to his game. He had to build up his success nearly from ground zero. Selänne's second coming gave us some of the same emotional spice which made Aerosmith's and Tom Jones' comebacks so tasty in music, and the same feeling of recognizing something of an old favorite, which now has gained a more mature form, which we gained from John Travolta's Tarantino directed comeback in Pulp Fiction. In Selänne's case the story gets a nice ethical dimension: his working ethics have year after year gained a broader horizon, as he is less and less just a goal shooter, and more an overall player and a spirit booster for his team.

Mats Sundin is great on ice, but his story is dull: he is always good and reliable - like Sakic is, and no big dramatic stories give depth to their work. Okay, Sundin is more interesting, and powerful as a personality, but his story does not just touch us. (What story?) Gretzky? Well that's a really dull story, though Gretzky's magnificent playing might forever top the hall of fame of the aesthetics of ice hockey...

Peter Forsberg's story is more interesting, as it is an every year rally against injuries. You can sometimes just feel his fragility when you see him making his delicate passes.

Darren Eliot pointed out in his blog in the NHL blog central that young supergoalies (Rangers' Lundqvist, Trashers' Lehtonen) should take nothing for granted. Top goalies of the NHL have experienced ups and downs. Eliot does not use the word, but maturity craves crisis and overcoming them. Ed Belfour, Dominic Hasek, Olaf Kolzig and Miikka Kiprusoff are examples of winning through a saga-like development. Eliot is talking about facts. Goalies get practically better through this process. But it also creates an aura of depth to these players. There would just be something wrong in a too young goalie with no crisis yet experienced.

The same kind of stories of personal histories give depth as well to captains of the clubs. They, of course, have to be reliable as well, but the already legendary aura which starts to glow around Philadelphia's Peter Forsberg (sad that his game is this year not that fine) gives more weight to his role as a captain. Montreal's Saku Koivu's cancer, fighting it and winning it... that created empathy, and a heroic aura around him.

Getting back to young and unexperienced players, think about Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin. He just started off his NHL career in a way which cannot but end up in a mythical story... I am now not even talking about his record breaking start as a goal maker. I am pointing to the way he fled the post-Soviet (but oh, still so Soviet as you have to flee from there) Russia to get on his dream ice in the NHL. The youngest Staal has already some aura around himself, which comes partly from the fact that he is a part of a hockey dynasty. The dynasty would not matter much more than a curiosity if he would not play well, but through his achievements his last name starts to glow...


The playoffs of NHL get written every year by ice hockey historians in a mythical fashion. A team, which nobody did believe would take the trophy, faces near-to-impossible enemies (like a knight faces dragons) and wins because of sudden contributions of players nobody even knew by name in the beginning of the season. There is no other way to tell the Stanley Cup story. But telling it with new names, new teams, and sometimes with some additional information which spices up the story, makes it every year enjoyable to read.

In Europe, the years when the Olympics or the World Championships have been won, have in the respective countries of the winning teams a bunch of mythical stories around them - containing the same kind of development from problems to heroic victory as the Stanley Cup has. For a challenger the story just gets better if there are first problems and then a surprizing victory. It just tastes better to get gold or bronze (oh those silver medals, they get their taste just after some time has passed), if the beginning is marked by mistakes, like a loss to Belarussia, and the end highlighted by winning one of the greats. Canada would be the most enjoyable team to beat for most countries, but of course there are classics like Czech Republic vs. Slovakia and Sweden vs. Finland.


Stories are important, because they give depth - not just to sports, but as well to politics, friendship, and love. Life is about stories and they are important for our experiences.


Jarome Arthur-Leigh Adekunle Tig Junior Elvis Iginla was born to a white Canadian mother and a Nigerian father. Great to take that heritage into hockey, which still has too much of a ethnic caucasian reputation. That, together with great playing, is going to make Jarome Iginla's personal hockey history an all time classic.

There are as well stories of Europeans who came to the NHL and faced prejudices. Börje Salming is one of them, and he has told now somewhat strange stories on what it meant to come from the outside during the 1970s and 1980s... As European born players are now a commonplace on ice, the stories of the pioneers interest both them and the (especially European) NHL public.

The story of women's ice hockey will get big as well. As the sport's 'feminine version' becomes normal, and as nobody in the future will ask whether women should or should not play ice hockey (let's face it, this is going to happen: it happened with nearly all other sports already), the pioneers of the sport will be remembered. And they will have amazing stories to tell... not just about building up the game and its culture, but about negative people they met. We don't even know these names yet, though they will be history soon.

So much great stories to wait for. Though academic history is important, as all facts get well checked out by ambicious historians making a career in an academic game where reliable publications in high standard journals are a bit like goals in hockey, popular history with its expression of emotions, literary descriptions, and passionate speculations is something hockey can't still afford to lose. It is one essential, enjoyable part of our aesthetic (here literary / poetical) relation to hockey, spicing it up, giving it depth, keeping up the emotional strength of sport as entertainment.,

HOCKEY, AESTHETICS AND VIOLENCE

"Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Over and over again I am watching Muhammad Ali's moves in the ring. Ali vs. Foreman, Ali vs. Norton - there was magic in the air, which owed at least some of its power to Ali's dance (less to his celebrated 'poetry').

When Tyson hit the scene he gave us more kicks by being closer to Alien or Predator than most of his fellow boxers. There was less aesthetics to that, if one does not count in the way Tyson was convincingly ugly.

Some of Ali's moves were to surprize the opponent, but some of it was plain performance. Sport on a top level is always a holistic show from press conferences to post-battle reactions and talks.

Though there are beautiful martial arts performances by sports legends like Benny the Jet Urquidez (kick boxing) and film stars like Jackie Chan (see Urquidez and Chan, by the way, together in the perfect martial arts movie Dragons Forever), violence in sport is not, as we know, restricted to only sports where it is in the focus.

Many martial arts have been aesthetisized (wushu, taido, kata performances in many forms), and in our society and culture we accept violence in sport when there are clear boundaries for it (boxing ring) or when there is a long history of accepting it (at least checking in hockey, though any body checking is a penalty in womens' hockey, which makes it quite a new sport).

I don't have any clear answer to the question if hockey fights should be allowed and what we should think about them. But it would be interesting to read a good historical overview of hockey fights, which would concentrate also in the role fights have had in hockey as the spectator's sport and in its culture. All sports and arts have their own culture. We accept that visual artists drink and in arts circles it is usual that people accept the drug use of other artists. When you are big in painting, you can as well be the most impossible personality on earth, and even get some more aura of convincing artistry around yourself. Why not a couple of punches in a sport once in a while, especially when it is a historical tradition, and because mostly it is the same people fighting against each other - it is not typical that big bullies smash around weak and tiny (do they exist?) newcomers.

As sports are always closely connected to the values we cultivate in the society as a whole, the question cannot be solved just inside hockey. Sports have some relative autonomy, like arts and religion have, but in the end something has gone wrong with communicating with the society as a whole, when the reputation of a sport gets really bad, and something should be done to it. Ice hockey has not succeeded in communicating its tradition to the broader audience when hockey fights are discussed as a problem at the same time as boxing and wrestling are not seen as problems! Ice hockey can develop, or it can communicate and illuminate its essence and finesse in a better way to the outsiders.

Those who say hockey is a violent sport in a non-violent society, are fooling themself. In hardboiled modern life, where we fight to get jobs, then fight to get them better done than our competitors, where we face psychological bullying at working places, drive like madmen in a traffic culture which has killed millions (how many players have died because of hockey?), and in a world where there are always so many cases of economical, psychological and even physical acts of violence done by majorities and state institutions against poor people, women and ethnic margins, it is hypocracy to talk about ice hockey as something especially violent, as the margin of violence in hockey is still pretty restricted and accepted by all people taking part in the sport.

After breaking some of the ground of the rethorics against 'violent hockey', there is still a lot to be solved. Though hitting and checking are part of so many sports, people react to ice hockey. I discussed a couple of weeks ago sports with an American friend, and when I said that I like ice hockey, I got a strange reply: "I am against its violence." Most Europeans would not consider ice hockey to be that violent, but the style of playing is so different in the ice hockey played in Olympics, World Championships, and European leagues, that seeing some NHL games (many Europeans have never seen a whole NHL game) might even shock European friends of hockey.

In Finland hockey violence has been "discussed" a lot during the last weeks. Two players, Pasi Nielikäinen (HIFK) and Ryan VandenBussche (Jokerit) took in october 2006 a boxing match in the American style in the rink.

Though Jokerit and HIFK are both Helsinki teams, and as local rivals they have a tradition of playing games with rough contact and high atmosphere, this match became the story number one in Finnish sports for weeks. The act of violence was reported to the police, who according to Finnish laws had to start investigating the case. Finnish ice hockey association backed out and charged both teams. Positive feedback was probably gained from outsiders, but the role of boxing in hockey did not get illuminated in any way.

In George Roy Hill's Slap Shot (1977) where Paul Newman plays the player coach Reggie Dunlop of the Charlestown Cheifs, hockey violence is portrayed, exaggerated and ironisized.
Still the movie tells something about real hockey. You wouldn't ironisize violence in soccer or basketball in the same way, though the physical contact of these sports is ruthless on a professional level. There would just be no idea to do that. Though it is fictional, the film brings to mind real hockey, and in a way comments it. The championship match which the Charlestown Cheifs make it to by using more violence than other teams - in this they get help from three new players, the Hansons - does not anymore include anything else than fighting.

A Euroopean hockey fan does not always get the point of the film. He interprets a lot of the plot as being a part of the fictional exaggeration of the film - sometimes when there is realistic depiction in it! And hey, nearly all the players celebrated in HockeyTilts.com are born in North America...

Still, even in Europe one should ask what is a part of the game, and what is not. Is there a distinctively European tradition of hockey and if there is, what are the features which make it differ from North American hockey? Is it always worse - like pizza outside of Italy is - or does it sometimes have something to teach to the reast of the world?

Earlier in this blog I have said, that hockey got more aesthetic following the new rules adapted lately. Less tolerance has really helped many technical players back to the top.

Still, we should not forget that also fighting in hockey has its own aesthetics. We don't admire good punches that much, as the fighters are not really developed enough to please the eye with their technique - without forgetting how skates and clothes / pads make it harder to move in any way which could be admired by the audience. I also said, that sport on a top level is always a holistic show from press conferences to post-battle reactions and talks. NHL has more show manners than European hockey leagues, from music and light shows to mascots. See also the following film with mascots, fans and cheerleaders. Fighting is a show. Not just for the audience, but sometimes to the other team. Don't bully our players! It is a war dance. If fighters would really want to hurt each other, they'd use sticks and kick with their skates. This does not mean that they would not box seriously out there, but there are clear, deep cultural boundaries for how to do it.

What the aesthetics of doing a good show is, that's a harder question, but I would count hockey fights in to this section of the sport more than anything else. They don't contribute much to the real game, if not through penalties - which of course are a big part of the essence of ice hockey. Too much fighting makes you a loser, because nobody can afford too much penalties.

One thing about showmanship is for sure: when things work out, and the audience is satisfied, making changes can affect the sport badly. Here Europe can of course show example for North America. Hockey can survive, and get an audience, even though it would not include a lot of violence. Once again something to think about when NHL is gaining more and more attention on this side of the globe, and less on its home plane.

The best ice hockey film of all times? No, it is not Slap Shot, but one of the most anarchistic and violent Goofies: Hockey Homicide (1945). 7 minutes, but all action. Talk about hockey violence - and its relation to real war!

ABOUT THE MEANING OF ONE GOAL

It is hard to say what the incredible goal scored by Pittsburg Penguins' Evgeni Malkin against the New Jersey Devils and Martin Brodeur on the 24th of October meant for (NHL) hockey.

One goal? After a couple of dry years, when ice hockey had suffered from the fact that no really astonishing new players (except for goalies, maybe - thanks Kipper, you saved the game at least for us Finns) had entered the spotlights, Malkin suddenly gave everybody a feeling of living in a time when ice hockey history was once again written.

You can see this in both NHL.com and outsider blogs on hockey. No words have been enough to describe the goal, and here I hope that more scholars who are experienced in describing in an illuminating manner visual events would take up the challenge offered by sports.

Currently displayed in the 10 best goals of the first month of the season at the NHL website, Malkin's skates through half of the rink, makes his way past the defense, and then turns around and puts the puck in with the backside of the stick at the same time as he is already starting to lose his balance. Impossible to stop in time. But what an elegance! It is as close to ballet as ice hockey can (and should?) be.

Sometimes a whole goal makes you believe in hockey, in a way which gives you fuel for months to come. This is not about winning, sportsmanship, or stats - but about craftmanship, artistry, and aesthetics. And here hockey does not differ a lot from the practices we have labeled as art. Don't you think that the difference between sports, arts and science are that big!

Though hockey is about winning and losing, and this gives meaning to the individual events in the games played, from time to time sports fans need goals, assists and saves which are unbelievable. "Un capolavoro fantastico" - 'a fantastic masterpiece' - an Italian soccer commentator once shouted when Alessandro del Piero made one of his most memorized goals for Juventus. That's attitude, and Italian soccer commentators have a lot to teach for us.

I read a lot of novels. Most novels are nice, but nothing special. I wouldn't read them if a book at least sometimes wouldn't kick my ass, shake my world, or make me think differently. Sometimes I go and take a look on what galleries in my home city offer to me. Although Helsinki is not global center for art, it is a capital, a trendy city, and one filled with over-educated people, who have time and interest to express themselves artistically - so once in a while someone manages to astonish me. I am not saying often, but sometimes, maybe 2 or 3 times a year - but that makes the difference. As I've learned it, and I am into visual art, I go out once in a while, hoping that something might happen. The same applies of course to films. Because of previous experiences - at least one hot experience is needed - we return to films directed by Quentin Tarantino or films where Paul Newman has a big role (guess what film I am thinking about here).

In the same way, after seeing a fantastic goal, you return to the sport easier than you otherwise would.

At least a part of the audience watching hockey wouldn't even keep an eye on what's happening if events like this wouldn't occur. Hardcore fans, maybe those who have themselves played hockey as kids, or who are totally obsessed with the sport, would watch hockey even if no Datsyuks or Afinogenovs would anymore be born. They'd watch it to the bitter end, without virtuosos. But the big audience needs its virtuosos and masterpieces.

And the core audience of hockey, which wouldn't leave the sport whatever happened to it, need the big audience to survive. This is just like it is in arts. The elitist arts people, though they prefer to snobb around in their own circles, need the broad public to enter some art shows, to buy tickets, to buy art, and to make the whole thing bigger in quantity. Some arts people want to live in a purist bubble (read: galleries and museums). Some ice hockey people too? Sometimes when I read blogs or articles on hockey I react to this: many people are against the development of hockey, and the fact that new type of fans are coming in to the sport. Hey, wake up! We need big audiences, and that is a fact - whether this would happen through forms of development which some (narrow minded) people wouldn't accept. Big audience means survival, money and staying meaningful in the competitive world of sport.

Of course it gets more diverse too. Women play hockey now - and that's great, because no human practice can survive today without offering some form of it to women. There are women in the army too, and we have to give some males a possibility to work as florists and hair dressers. Following their rush into hockey women will as well start watching men's ice hockey games too, and this will help also the traditional sport to survive. As you can see in this blog, some people who are usually more into philosophy and arts are as well more and more into hockey - and this will bring some new sides to the sport and the way we think about it. Old hockey needs broader horizons to survive. No cultural conventions and traditions survive without developing and reacting to the development of society.

The core is anyway out there, and nothing will change it. No sport will be hot without bigger-than-life experiences.

Don't you forget this, people in the heart of hockey. The public demands master pieces! And the art of hockey cannot survive without them!

AESTHETICS OF STATS

Kidding? Aesthetics of stats?

Aesthetics of a good slapshot? Technique, timing, the right amount of force and foremost succeeding in making a goal are all in their own way affecting the beauty of a great slapshot. Fast skating with a good contact to the puck with the stick, approaching the goaltender with a rush - God that can be beautiful, a situation we might remember for a long time, sometimes forever. And it is not hard to convince someone that there is some beauty in a fast, surprising, and witty assist, reinforced with good timing and excellence of technique.

These are reasons why there is magic on the ice when players like Mats Sundin, Peter Forsberg, Jaromir Jagr, Maxim Afinogenov and Marian Hossa, or, not to forget the history of ice hockey, foremost Wayne Gretzky and the whole squad of the Red Machine of the Soviets during their peak years of ice hockey enter or entered the ring. Even good spirit can have aesthetic extentions. Saku Koivu does not make the most goals nor the most beautiful ones - but he gets admiration as a player with a good spirit, which affects the way we see his playing, at the same time as this spirit can be seen in his performance. You recognize good morals and spirit when you see it, whether the player would intentionally or not perform them. And there is an aesthetics of reliability which merges with appreciation of craftmanship which is at stake when we watch Joe Sakic play - maybe even more when good goalies are at stake, without forgetting that there is a certain style of acting as a goalie which can be pretty personal sometimes. And as we know, goalies are as well special personalities, both for real, and in hockey mythology - which in its turn affects growing goalies. They know they have more space to perform as individuals than defensemen do...

A perfect hockey playing machine (a team of perfect ice hockey robots) wouldn't satisfy us. We need stars, personal ways of playing and performing, and loads of good spirit and intentions - though excellence, in the end, is a must as well.

But stats? Isn't this something in a way boring, though important for sports?

As this is a blog on the artistic / aesthetic sides of hockey, stats are a challenge.

Why do people read stats? Of course statistics tell us important aspects of the game. Though there are players in a variety of different roles on ice, stats indicate something about the level of performance. It is a part of the job of a forward to shoot goals. The saving percent of goalies should be high.

Information is still not the only reason why we read stats. There is something special about reaching milestones and mythical numbers. That's right, there is something mythical in reaching not just records, but the amount of 50 goals or 100 points. In what way mythical? Your personality and ability as a player grows from what you really are to mythical, not necessary fictional, but a bit like magical qualities. You gather an aura around you. Whether a young player would already be close to the top or at the top, or whether someone would be the name of the season - like Malkin at least at this early phase of 2006-2007 - when a legend skates on the ice, he differs from others like an antique couch differs from a bunch of great, new designer couches.

Even numbers serve symbolically, and aesthetically. As a couch potato seeing someone reach great scores has something of the aesthetic fulfilment about it which resembles the satisfaction of getting a math problem done, a room cleaned up, or some other task accomplished. It gives satisfaction to see other people do that as well, if doing that does not harm us in any way. When someone sells a million CDs, the satisfaction is still not as good as when you partly see, partly hear about it, and in the end at least see in the stats that someone reaches a milestone of 500 goals (congratulations Sundin - now waiting for Selänne) in the NHL, and the reason is that the stats in hockey are made by hard work, constant, night-after-night fighting for winning. You work hard when you make the CD, but selling it has to do with a larger quantity of people in the business. We admire a good CD or a film, but numbers make a positive difference when you have to perform every single one of them. If there would be stats for who can perform 100 excellent gigs in rock'n roll during one year, that would be a musical equivalent for hockey stats.

In this way stats both have something aesthetic about them on their own, and at the same time help us to recall and bring up memories and experiences - and to give them a permanent form in numbers. You have seen a beautiful goal by Jaromir Jagr, and when you see that he has reached 50 goals during the season (again), that tells as well about the permanence of this excellence, and something inside you makes you imagine that whole, a series of goals in a restricted period (season). That creates the strange enjoyable feeling which can be felt when looking at good stats. Besides bringing to mind singular events, stats "visualize" a chain of hot performances in our minds - at the same time as they give history a form.

Statistics as a phenomenon is something very American. In the US there are stats for everything. But their appeal is starting to rise also in Europe. No wonder why. Even if Americans mostly defend stats because of their information qualities, stats are as well an aesthetic phenomenon.

INTERNET, GOOGLE, YOUTUBE AND COMPUTER GAMES

NHL goes global and the essence of hockey is in change.

First the NHL webpages evolved to be a media library where you could escape the everyday by reading articles and blogs, listening to matches through the radio and get lost in stats, Hall of Fame pages and video clips.

Hockey fights, beautiful goals and some of the most spectacular saves soon made their way to google video and then youtube. Now you can see whole matches in google video, still when they are pretty fresh.

This is not all, though, partly on the base of this, important changes have accured.

The development which has changed NHL during its last two decades, the invasion of European born players, is now followed by a paradigmatic development realized through new media. Though NHL has always been the big league in the world of hockey, local leagues in countries like Sweden, Finland and Russia still include teams which are on a higher level than AHL teams, and of which some could even challenge NHL teams - which makes them good entertainment, at least if there is no real NHL alternative around. As NHL has been, and usually still is, quite hard to reach through European tv stations (and distributed by rare cabels - mostly in the middle of the night!), it has never challenged any European hockey leagues when it comes to experiencing, enjoying hockey. It has just provided facts. In the morning you have read in the local newspaper how a player from your country has made a goal (sigh).

Now NHL players come from all over the world, and you can follow what's going on there, so there is a growing European audience, which lives its hockey experience through NHL more than the local leagues. And now the new media has made this a more pleasant experience. A puzzle of reading, watching results and stats, seeing film coverage from the games (if you watch 8 three or four minutes selections in the morning about games played in the NHL lst night, you really gain some overall picture) makes the European audience all the time more strongly involved in the NHL.

Another change, which is still partly just potential, follows from the first one. Like Woody Allen films, which often did not get the audience they economically needed in the US, but were produced partly because they would sell in Europe, NHL now has the potential to really turn global, to rely on foreign money, and to forget the problem of being so over shadowed by baseball, basketball and american football in the States.

This is a revolutionary horizon, and time will show if this potential gets used as it could. NHL could get millions of active viewers and maybe even millions of new active fans in the so called Old Continent (let's still not forget that an interest for hockey is growing in Asia and even in countries like Australia). What new media productions and developments are needed to fulfil this possibility, which could help hockey survive in the US and give more intense and global hockey experiences for us living outiside of North America? (There are naturally no problems with hockey in Canada...)


Aesthetically, and talking about media experience, a lot of other things are of course at stake too. One of them is the way NHL hockey gets illuminated by the ice hockey computer games produced. By playing a team which resembles pretty well the real one, and playing against other teams you learn soon more about the world of hockey. You can see Mats Sundin and Joe Thornton shooting great goals on tv, but trying to defend your own goal against them is different. God how you start to hate them... (Better turn to start playing the Toronto Maple Leafs or the San Jose Sharks instead.) Even more important: as forwards and goaltenders often get a bigger role in the media, once you have to get your forward behind both Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger, which in the EA PC game are as good as in real life, your understanding of the importance of defense grows. Sometimes, after a long evening of playing virtual NHL you start to just play game after game without really paying notice to what team you face. Already yawning, you suddenly don't make it to the goal very easily, and you wake up. Hey, this is Detroit and that's Niklas Lidström... You get the dynamics of it from a new angle, without forgetting the fact that soon every younger person interested in hockey will have at least a bit more (though partly of course not always realistic) understanding and at least interest in coaching. Understanding hockey, interestingly, gets broader and deeper through games, as the games of today are good simulations of real life.

Games and other new media have in the last decade made their way quite to the core of our hockey experience, and what comes to younger generations, the effects can be even bigger than we can imagine. The aesthetization of hockey has become simulation which affects our real viewing. One of the funniest things in hockey games is that you see it all as you'd see it on tv, which makes the game in a sense an extention of our tv experience, not of playing hockey! When you look at real games after playing EA Sports' NHL07, you feel an urge to engage in the events. "Hey, I'd use Selänne in another (read: better) way" (than the coach, maybe even Selänne himself!). The way you trade players in some games gives also a profound socio-economical dimension to hockey. You buy a player who is from your own country, and not because he would create good chemistry or get a certain role (nationalism is a part of the European way of enjoying NHL), or you use money stupidly on a couple of favorite players and then most of the men on ice are suddenly b-quality, which does not make your team a winner.

I don't get hungry for playing real hockey by playing computer games, but how much computer hockey affects hockey juniors, that's something else.

As some people say hockey gets less beautiful year after year - of course recent new rules have changed this to the better and there are promising names around like Evgeni Malkin - the helping hand might in the end come from the media, which in the beginning served the real game, but now changes it. Young players will grow up seeing more and more mediated hockey, where the eye is pleased by beautiful (though of course also effective) moves, highlights which include not just points but as well heroic saves by goaltenders and engaging, partly also strategic computer gaming. At its best this might stimulate more technical practice, heighten the strategic consciousness of hockey already on junior level and bring the whole sport to a new height - both in sportmanship and craftmanship. You can take a 100 looks at Malkin's best goal or Kiprusoff's hottest save of the year, and as you play these characters in highly simulative computer games, you learn about their roles in teams - and you want to be one day on one of those NHL webpage highlights, or a character in a computer game, and make a move which is so impressive and beautiful that it will be named in some hockey blog.

The growing sense of media and sports will also make some people hungry to specialize on directing and filming sport programs. Already now many people outside of sports enjoy watching for example NBA specials and the way in which the show (lights, music) is created in many sports event.

Is there already a Hitchcock of ice hockey growing somewhere out there?