Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities, and Cultural
Politics. By Richard Gruneau and David Whitson
(Toronoto, Ontario: Garamond
Press, 1993. Pp. 312)
Throughout
the course, commodities have mostly been talked of and debated as a physical
object—an item that is physically held, tasted, eaten, injected, and overall
manipulated. The commodity is
deployed to meet the demands of the individual, the group, a manufacturer, a
government entity, or even the national community. Moreover, the course has discussed that a commodity can
exemplify a form of identity—one that defines a national sense of awareness, association,
and ownership. Yet, the monograph Hockey Night in Canada does not tell a
narrative of a physical commodity.
It instead presents a case that a sport, in this case ice hockey from
the late 1800s to the early 1990s, can become a commodity, especially one that
can affect a nation’s overall sense of identity and ownership. The argument of who holds identity with
the commodity in this the monograph is what I wish to explore.
As
with other commodities, hockey is sold, traded, and is transported to other
regions, both transnationally and even internationally to various regions—yet, the
authors, both of whom are academic professors in Canada (Gruneau in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and Richardson in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta respectfully), are primarily concerned with the transnational aspects of hockey
between Canada and the United States.
This is all done with hopes of commodifying a team and sport that will
produce both a prosperous market for the region and ingrain within the local
populace a sense that hockey can indeed become a valuable part of their
culture, as well as economy. Ice
hockey, through professional leagues, particularly the National Hockey League
post-World War II, is when ice hockey began an immense push to commodify itself
in metropolitan regions beyond Canadian borders. The sport, through its entrepreneurs, shareholders,
and team owners, utilized mass media consumerism to transport it across
national borders. The monograph
argues:
Cable
and satellite technologies pay-per-view, and global information and
promotion
systems together create a potential for audiences of unprecedented
size,
wealth, and distribution. They
also typically involve large initial
investments: in production technologies, promotion,
and superstars; and these
in
turn require multinational advertisers attracted by the prospect of large and
affluent
audiences.[1]
Mass consumerist
technology, including cable and satellite, would transport ice hockey onto the
television screens of viewers that would pay any sum of money to watch the
sport. Moreover, mass media would
allow the attraction of various advertisers to further solidify the message of
hockey to a transnational audience.
They further required advertisers to assist with the cost of
broadcasting the sport into the homes as well as assist in paying the cable
companies in broadcasting both the sport and their own products and
services. Additionally, mass media
assisted in producing a hockey fan-base within cities. Gruneau and Whitson write, “Indeed,
media cheerleading for professional teams has typically represented hometown
fans as “us,” a common identity that presumably includes everyone in the
city—business people and wage earners, property developers and low-income
residents, men and women, as well as the imported athletes who are paid to
represent “us” and the entrepreneurs who pay them.”[2] The media provided an outlet that would
create an atmosphere within a metropolitan area that would create excitement,
unity, and overall promotion of a sport that a city and its inhabitants could
all relate to, a team and sport that would represent them in other regions,
playing against other teams that represented their home base.
As
hockey reaches out to attract new audiences, especially in the United States, the
monograph points out that commodifying of the sport through mass consumerism
has led the sport to be pulled out of its original and more prime markets. The monograph argues that the NHL’s
refusal to not place the St. Louis Blues into a Saskatoon because it did not
have that large of a television market during the 1980s. The monograph states even with Bill
Hunter’s offer of roughly $14.5 million for the team and countless pledges for
season’s tickets for the game to be brought to Saskatoon, “…in the eyes of U.S.
NHL governors, even if Saskatoon could sell out all the seats in its arena, and
even if the management was wealthy and the franchise stable, such a move stood
to hurt the league in its quest for national stature in the United States and
access to a U.S. national audience.”[3] Simply, the market was not there in the
Canadian region to insert a team—the United States was the better option. This demonstrates that commodifying the
game within a U.S. market was more profitable to the overall producers of the
sport, in this case the league, teams owners, and by extension even those
within the entertainment and leisure-based activities. This lends the perspective that ice hockey is becoming a more Americanized commodity, further giving national identity and ownership to the U.S. and away from other markets and regions, namely Canada.
As
much as ice hockey attempts to become a staple within a U.S. household and
market, Gruneau and Richardson point out that it disrupts the integrity of the
game. They argue that children saw
trading cards as “investments” and that people look at hockey as more of a
“market than as a “community”—adding that, “The boards around many rinks are
covered with sponsors’ logos, and Hockey
Night in Canada has quietly been transformed into Molson Hockey Night in Canada. In the big-money game of the 1990s, custody of hockey’s
traditions seems to have been awarded to modern marketing.”[4] Ice hockey is no longer a sport that
promotes ideals of wit, and especially throughout the monograph, one that promotes
paternalism and masculinity, but is instead rather heavily market-driven. Hockey allows for the promotion of other
commodities, such as alcohol within its rinks to influence consumers of their
products—its sense of a commodity is left on the ‘back burner’ as other
commodities are promoted, further eschewing hockey’s vitality as a sport and
even commercialized product. The
consequences of commercialization and commodification have taken away the more
classical aspects of the sport, affecting a national identity and even ownership.
At
the heart of the monograph, after all the affects of consumerism, commercialization,
and even commodification of ice hockey, are concerned with who most closely identifies with and shows ownership with the sport. At its heart, they want to know if the
sport still embodies a sense of ‘Candianness’ and sense of Canadian nostalgia
with the sport. They note, “Hockey
has a capacity to induce the recollection of familiar experiences and to a
seemingly less complicated image of Canadian society. In a time of uncertainty, and in a Canada increasingly characterized
by difference, this comfortable familiarity and ability to convey an older
sense of Canadian identity have an engaged and enduring appeal. They help sustain our ability to
imagine a national community.”[5]
It is through this stance that Gruneau and Whitson most boldly point out that
through collective memory or ‘nostalgia,’ especially through the past that
Canadians can embolden a sense of ‘Canadiannness’ toward ice hockey and claim a
sense of national identity and ownership toward ice hockey as a commodity.
In
comparison with other texts related to national identity and the commodity,
such monographs as The True History of
Chocolate (2013) emphasizes chocolate as a commodity. Yet, in the concluding chapters, the
text points out that the commodity makes a full circle, going back and
benefiting its original producers and consumers. The Kekchi Maya in the mid-1990s through the product “Maya
Gold” chocolate bar was able to utilize Kekchi grown cacao to bring into the
world-chocolate market but at the same time through outside commercial forces
was able to benefit even more from its profits via the Green&Black Company
founded by Jo Fairly.[6] This point urges that through the
various players that interact and utilize chocolate, the commodity ultimately
shows that it assists with giving the Kekchi a sense of identity, though not
quite national, and ownership to the product. Jungle Laboratories (2009)
argues that the babasco fruit that is utilized in production of hormones as
well as women’s birth control and shows that through all the players involved
with the production and movement of barbasco between Mexican compesinos
(peasants), the government, and transnational pharmaceuticals companies, which
entity holds the most identity? To
its author, Gabriela Laveaga, the identity of the product is ultimately in the
hands of Mexico as they still control the area most suitable for its
production. In terms of national
identity, the Mexican pharmaceutical company Proquivemex during the Echiverria government of the
1970s showed that Mexican compesinos were vital in the production of the crop
so Mexico could continue to be ‘number one’ in the hormone industry—Laveaga
shows this through her use of primary source pamphlets the company distributes.[7] The barbasco is thus viewed as a
product that most nationally identifies through all its various pushes and
pulls, especially from outside actors, that it identifies and shows ownership with Mexico and to an
extent its lower classes.
Banana Cultures (2005) exhibits the
argument that the banana growing regions of Honduras was fought between
multiple actors for who would identify and own bananas. Through the efforts of the poquiteros
within the La Paz (dealing with issues of land control) and the local elite-municipal
officials during the 1930s in the fight for bananas against the United Fruit
Company led to an expression of “Honduran nationalism.”[8] The efforts of the native persons to go
against outside forces to include United Fruit was an expression to show that
the commodity held a unique place for persons in Honduras to exhibit
nationalism and show the fruit as part of the national conscience and part of
its identity. The edited text by
Arjun Appadurai The Social Life of Things
(1986, eleventh printing 2013) takes into consideration the study of commodities
themselves. Appadurai’s essay, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value" particularly mentions that through Braudel’s The Wheels of Commerce, wants to examine the, “…nature, structure,
and dynamics of in the world of commerce after 1500CE.”[9] By analyzing such dynamics associated
with a commodity can assist in better understanding what entity, be it person
or the nation as a whole or even a combination of both, most identifies and takes ownership of a
given commodity.
In
sum, the monograph presents the position that ice hockey both embodies itself
as an entity that is commodified transnationally via market and consumerist
forces and one where its national identity and even ownership is to an extent
challenged but ultimately assessed to Canada. In conjunction with the monograph, I further suggest reading Richard Gruneau and David Whitson’s
edited piece, Artificial Ice: Hockey, Culture, and Commerce
(2006).
[1]
Richard Gruneau and David Whitson, Hockey
Night in Canada: Sport,
Identities, and Cultural Politics (Toronto, ON: Garamond Press, 1993), 229.
[2]
Gruneau and Whitson, 238.
[3]
Gruneau and Whitson, 230.
[4]
Gruneau and Whitson, 280.
[5]
Gruneau and Whitson, 7.
[6]
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The
True History of Chocolate, 3rd Edition (New York, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2013), 262-3. Further, citations and quotes of this
source can be further pulled/found from blog post by Brendon Jucks titled
“Chocolate Back in Its Homeland:
Agency and Identity” on the blog posts CommoditiesHIST 2014
(blogger.com), dated 17 September 2014.
[7]
Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Jungle
Laboratories: Mexican Peasants,
National Projects, and the Making of the Pill (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2009), 145. The
pamphlet is under Figure 22. Further, citations and quotes of this source can
be further pulled/found from blog post by Brendon Jucks titled, “National
Identity, Awareness, and Ownership of Barbasco,” on the blog posts for
CommoditiesHIST 2014 (blogger.com), dated 29 October 2014.
[8]
John Soluri, Banana Cultures:
Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the
United States (Austin, Texas:
University of Texas Press, 2005), 101. Further, citation and quotes of
this source can be further pulled/found from blog post by Brendon Jucks titled,
“Geography and Commodity: Banana
Cultures,” on the blog posts for CommoditiesHIST 2014 (blogger.com), dated 15
October 2014.
[9]
Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction:
Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, edited by Arjun Appadurai
(Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy
Press, 1986), 35-6. Further,
citation and quotes of this source can be further pulled/found from blog post
by Brendon Jucks titled “Does Commodity Itself Hold Overall Authority and
Agency?” on the blog posts for CommoditiesHIST 2014 (blogger.com), dated 03
September 2014.
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