I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell

Author:Kent Russell [Russell, Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35231-4
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2015-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Hockey is, essentially, entropic. Its central drama revolves around men attempting to create, maintain, and subvert order where there is none. To begin with, the foundation of the game is skating, on ice, something that comes naturally to zero humans. On top of this balancing act, hockey asks that you: control a rubber disc; pass that rubber disc to your teammate as he, too, skates on ice; retrieve the rubber disc by jarring it loose from another man, also ice skating; all while moving at Olympic-sprinter speeds (via knives attached to your feet) throughout a circumscribed field of play where contact is not only encouraged but guaranteed, as the only things scarcer than respites are exits. Also, everybody’s got bludgeons.

We’re talking here about a frontier pastime, first played by sanguinary ruffians on the ice of the northern waste. Referees, when present, chose what to call and, like lawmen in the sticks, were pained to do even that. A hook might be a hook in the first period but not necessarily in the third. In overtime, or the playoffs—forget about it.

You get viciously bodied down; the game continues. Your temper flares as infractions pile up; still, the game continues. Something begins to seep into the play, something bad and communicable. Your frustration leads you to start taking advantage of hockey’s unique amnesty vis-à-vis the legal system. You slash the backs of knees with your stick, cross-check vertebrae, butt-end ribs. You, and everyone around you, commit assault.

All involved believe in the personality of the law. A foul is as much an offense against the victim as it is a violation of the rules. The cry in hockey is, “Let ’em play,” which rings about the same as “Boys will be boys” and actually means “An eye for an eye.”

Reprisal has always been at least one-half of the game. (One Canadian poet called it a “mix of ballet and murder.”) It’s the unforgiving element hockey’s fugitive grace floats on: original violence tolerated, then accepted, then in time turned into custom, into spectacle, into tactic, and finally into theory.

Thusly does the game continue until, at last, your baser nature has flooded and colored your soul. You’re ready to crack open an opponent’s coconut—slavering to, like a castaway—when two men decide it’s time to fucking go. They drop gloves. The game stops. They throw hands for retribution, or intimidation, deterrence, protection, or momentum—really, what they fight for is catharsis. The way things were going, someone might’ve gotten hurt. They do single combat, and then the game can start up afresh, purged for now like a drained wound.

That’s why there’s fistfights in hockey.

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