It makes no sense to point fingers but the spirit that is (was) the game of hockey is declining rapidly. Everything starts at the top of course so that's a good place to start looking, but I can't blame NHL president Bettman and his pals for doing what only comes naturally. Their mandate had nothing to do with hockey. They would have done the same thing to tiddly winks if the opportunity was there.
This decline has been accelerating in recent years, what with all the brawling and stick swinging and sucker punching and concussions and broadcasting policies...and on and on. The proverbial nail in the coffin could be the transfer of all things hockey from the CBC to Rogers. And who better to philosophize on this than the man who intellectually will smother all the talking heads on NHL broadcasts, Toronto Star columnist Rick Salutin. Here's some of what Rick has to say in today's edition of The Star...
"Rogers’ corporate ego (is) massive but deeply shallow. It expresses itself only in numbers, in quantity. So we get hockey on all their sports channels, plus CBC, CITY, CTV even FX. FX? WTF. Rogers says they’re the new guardians of the game but really they don’t know how to be anything but multipliers of it. At some point, we’ve had too much, we’ll turn away or retch.
And there’s this: You can’t really guard something immaterial. But all Rogers really owns and provides is images of hockey, on multiple platforms. Fewer and fewer Canadians play it. The equipment’s too costly, the concussions worrisome, parents prefer soccer. Attendance is declining. You have to be an idiot to pay the ticket prices (mea culpa). And even the images get re-imaged: the GoPros on the refs’ helmets, the SkyCam. It’s like the tourists who get off the bus already shielded from actual sights by their cameras. I don’t know where this ends but it’s nowhere good, and nowhere real.
It’s almost mystical. There’s a notion in Kabbalah (the original version, not Madonna’s) of the celestial body of the primal Adam. Not the guy in the Bible but his prototype, writ large in the stars, like a constellation, so he’s kind of electric. He’s not quite God but since Adam was created in God’s image, he’s godlike and this celestial Adam stands between God and the actual universe, filling it with light derived from his own electric qualities. Surely you can see why I associate this with Rogers. It hovers somewhere in the regions above, full of light and electric synapses, raining hockey down on us. Not hockey as concrete human reality but as an electronically mediated set of images in the service of shareholder profits. They want to devour it whole (minus a few shreds) turning hockey itself into Rogers by metabolizing it into their corporate celestial body.
This is hubris and it’s blasphemous. No one can be hockey but they’re trying. Aux armes, citoyens."