Hockey has always seemed to me a bar fight on skates with a lot of French and Russian names. The games themselves nasty, brutish, and long. Surely hockey was invented by a dental surgeon longing for more patients. That this fierce and seemingly merciless game should have not only rules but a code of etiquette was, to put it charitably, counter-intuitive. I was as surprised as Logan was when he learned from Butch Cassidy that there were rules in a knife fight. That peaceful Canadians should clutch this violent game to their hearts is a real mystery, eh? Curling I can understand, but hockey…
Without F.H. Buckley’s instruction I’d not thought to look for remnants of gentlemanly conduct in hockey.
A friend from Boston who works out at my gym, and who has played, coached, and refereed hockey, told me that the hockey rule book is more than 300 pages long. I was pole-axed to learn that hockey had any restrictions at all beyond a prohibition against players bringing small caliber handguns onto the ice with them.
My confusion on this point goes back decades. Visiting with a close and long-time New England friend in the seventies, I found myself with him at his dad’s house in Northern Vermont on the occasion of the biggest sporting event of the year in those parts. That would not be the Super Bowl or the World Series but the University of Vermont/University of New Hampshire hockey game. Pete and his dad were cheering and whooping or groaning as the action on the ice dictated, just as my dad and I would have been watching a World Series game. I sat mystified. At the first period break I said to my friend: “Pete, I don’t understand hockey. Take checking. That just looks like knocking the crap out of somebody.” Pete smiled and said, “You understand hockey.”
But of course I didn’t, and still don’t. So thanks to Brother Buckley for explaining the choreography behind the seeming chaos and malevolence on the ice. Seeming, that is, to this son of the South who came up where there was no hockey until recently. Yes, Virginia, Florida was culturally Southern in the 1950s when I was a pup and learning about sports, which, back then, meant baseball and boxing. But ever-increasing waves of leftugees from northern blue states (not just blue from the cold) brought this fast, demanding, and violent game with them, along with a raft of exotic accents.
Hockey is popular hereabouts now. In Tampa, my littoral and once again home after various postings elsewhere, I see more Lightning gear than Rays gear on the locals. Back in the day, a prediction that hockey would be more popular than baseball in Tampa would have seemed as fantastical and would have invited the same ridicule as a prediction that Joe Biden would one day be President of the United States.
Amalie Arena in Tampa, where the Lightning play, seats 19K and just about every seat is occupied for home games. Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, where the Rays play, holds almost two and a half times that and is often so empty the voice of the PA announcer creates an echo. Anyone wishing to shake hands with the Maytag repairman can just buy a ticket to a weeknight game at the Trop.
Rays attendance so far this year has been a bit better, thanks to a turbo-start and a lead in the AL East, the toughest division in baseball. But at an average of a bit more than 17K, the Rays are still 25th of MLB’s 30 teams in attendance. In 2021 the Rays won 100 games and yet another division title, but drew only 9,500 per home game. Meanwhile the Lightning were and are a tough ticket.
But the Rays’ troubles, and those of baseball in general, are subjects for another day. Today’s agenda is hockey, which Buckley has helped me understand a little better, perhaps even motivating me to tune into the Stanley Cup games, which I had not intended to do.
It’s a truth considerably less than universally acknowledged these days that masculinity, in Buckley’s words, demands both physical prowess and gentlemanly conduct. Masculinity gets a very bad press nowadays in smart circles. In fact, my sources in Washington tell me the Biden Administration is working to place testosterone on the Federal List of Toxic Substances. The word gentleman has about dropped out of the language. Don’t think so? Ask a young waitress to “Please direct me to the gents’” and see the puzzlement on her face.
Physical prowess it takes in great measure to excel at hockey, not to mention stamina, courage, and the willingness to both take it and dish it out in near combat conditions. But without Buckley’s instruction I’d not thought to look for remnants of gentlemanly conduct in hockey. Areas of restraint, things not done. In the gentlemanly code, one of the things not done is the big and strong picking on the smaller and weaker. When fighting, we learn, hockey players stay in their own weight class. And because he’s too padded to fight, the goalie is off limits for fighting. The highly skilled franchise players are off limits as well, as they mean too much to the game. When code is broken, that’s when the enforcers take over, making the game less not more violent. And these encounters are more ritualized and proceed according to more rules than either Logan or I would have imagined.
TAS readers who missed The Gentlemanly Side should give it a look. It’s not only an instructive look at the positive aspects of hockey that may not be apparent to many observers, but it’s also an articulate brief for the continuing need for gentlemanly behavior in any society that wishes to call itself civilized.