Hockey's response to its newfound celebrity: Thanks, but no thanks! - By Bruce Reed - Slate Magazine
Lipstick on a Puck
Hockey's response to its newfound celebrity: Thanks, but no thanks!
By Bruce Reed
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008, at 1:31 PM ET
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008
Ice Time: When Joe Lieberman became the first Jewish vice-presidential nominee, Clyde Haberman of the New York Times summed up the American Jewish reaction as one of initial pride, followed immediately by the question, "Is it good for the Jews?" When Mitt Romney launched his presidential bid, he ran into similar worries from many fellow members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, who wondered if it would be good for the Mormons.
So perhaps it's only natural that since Sarah Palin emerged as the most famous hockey mom in history, the reaction around the rink has been, is it good for hockey?
Other sports have made their peace with politics. For a century, major league baseball has asked presidents to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day. Both parties have elected retired football players to Congress, the Super Bowl is a major political event, and George W. Bush risked his life to watch an NFL playoff game. Barack Obama played basketball with troops; he and McCain both hyped their NCAA tournament picks.
Yet aside from Team USA's gold-medal upset in the 1980 Olympics, the worlds of American politics and hockey have tried their best not to collide. A few politicians may tout the sport in hockey-mad states like Alaska, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, and John Kerry nearly brought his skates all the way to the White House. But in general, the two arenas have kept their distance, each viewing the other as too rough, cold, and foreign.
Now comes Sarah Palin, who threatens to turn hockey into the biggest celebrity spectator sport in the world. Suddenly, "hip check" and Zamboni have entered the political lexicon. Last week, the New York Times examined the "hockey way of life," suggesting that in Alaska, the game is at best a way to keep young people off the streets and at worst the reason Bristol Palin got pregnant. This week, hockey moms went viral with a Swift Boat parody, "Hockey Moms for Truth."
As a fading hockey player and below-average hockey dad, I have one reaction to the overnight surge of media attention to our once obscure game: Thanks, but no thanks! If we wanted to become a political football, we would have signed up for a different sport.
At first, the rush of Palin publicity seemed like a boon for the game. Before she introduced herself as "just your average hockey mom," "average" wasn't the first word most often associated with hockey parents. In popular culture, the more common adjectives were "violent" and "homicidal." USA Hockey, the governing body for the sport, frets enough about the stereotype to run chill-out ads like these.
What's more, ice hockey suffers from the same problem as the Republican Party: not much of a female fan base. The scoreboard company Jumbotron makes the astonishing claim that only 22% of NHL fans are women. By comparison, women make up nearly twice as big a share (43%) of Major League Baseball fans, 41% of NBA fans, 40% of NASCAR fans, and 37% of NFL fans. (Hope is on the way: Ice hockey is one of the fastest growing women's sports.)
But after a few weeks under the media spotlight, the hockey world is starting to remember why we preferred our rinks dimly lit in the first place. Stu Hackel, a hockey blogger for the New York Times, wrote a long post recently on how much he resents the game being dragged into politics and used as a pawn. Several readers agreed -- and chided him for dragging politics into a hockey blog.
Over at OnFrozenBlog, pucksandbooks tried to look on the bright side: "If you love hockey, how can you not like how hockey is being celebrated (associated with perseverance and toughness) in the rhetoric of 2008's political debates?" For readers, however, pride was tempered by grave concern about what the association with politics might do to hockey's reputation.
In my experience, we hockey parents are already a little grumpy from ice times that are too late or too early. For many, the sudden attention just brings up the sore subject of how little respect the sport gets in the U.S. "You know hockey is never going to be better than the fourth major sport," one OnFrozenBlog reader lamented, recalling how ESPN's SportsCenter used to make fans suffer through golf highlights before getting around to the NHL.
Then again, at least we don't live in Canada, where politicians are always trying to put lipstick on a puck. The current leader, Stephen Harper, is a self-styled "hockey-dad-turned-Prime-Minister." A Canadian hockey pol gets to have it both ways – screaming at the refs now and then shows you're a regular bloke, while sitting behind your kid on the bench softens your image.
Yet even in Canada, the hockey schtick doesn't play well in all quarters. With national elections a month away, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran two articles last week after an "exclusive interview" with Harper. One piece discussed the Prime Minister's views on NHL expansion, noting that he has written an unpublished history of hockey. The other article took a different tack: "During a campaign stop at a winery in St-Eustache, Que., Mr. Harper, who many have called a Philistine, also spoke at length about his life-long passion for music and the piano." With great panache, Harper recounted writing poetry, suffering as a pianist from "nervous" hands, and overcoming one of the most unusual childhood hard-luck stories in political history: "For the first half year I was in lessons, we didn't have a piano and I would actually practice for my lessons on a cardboard keyboard."
If politicians start saying the difference between a hockey dad and a pit bull is a cardboard keyboard, hockey parents might decide we liked our old reputation better. ... 1:38 P.M. (link)
An Article Hockey Getting Dragged Into Politics 
