At the best of times the Vancouver CBC Early Edition guy and former sportscaster is an insufferable sports fanatic. Together with the CBC national sports reporter, they prattle on endlessly year-round about organized sports events. That’s one thing. The other is the overt annual morality play they represent of forced ubiquitous jumping on the bandwagon when the Vancouver Canucks vie for the fortieth (or umpteenth/whatever!) time for the Stanley Cup. Not to embrace Go Canucks go!is in the moment the ultimate social heresy, pure Vancouver lèse majesté, sheer “unthinkability”: such offenders deserving relegation to the hinterlands, hard labour without parole, or worse. At minimum, it is ostracism of utter astonishment that onemay not actually be a Canucks fan! Like being Alabaman or Georgian and not a Ku Klux Klan...
Inordinate air time on CBC Early Edition is devoted to hockey come playoffs, with a local sportscaster added to the team this year, who in shadowing the Canucksjet toggling between games, reports ad nauseum on every imaginable piece of trivia. Switching stations is out of the frying pan into the fire. One resignedly misses while driving inadvertently a lot of weather and news…
Not to be a “homer” if the Canucks are in the playoffs evokes gaping incredulity: as if one has cut off the nose to spite the faceoff. Not to be a hockey fan in Canada where such is ubiquitous zany zeitgeist zealotry is as un-Canadian as the letter Zee.
Now I began playing hockey at the age of four, and have loved the game ever since. I have loved playing in fact a range of sports, still do, though have excelled at few, except briefly in Grades 12 and 13 in Track and Field. But I have not been a sports fan let alone a “homer” of any team for decades.
I reflected on why more so in context of hockey this year, since playoff season this time goes on and on and on: I’m not a sports fan for pretty much the same reason I’m not a member of the Mob or Klan.
Perhaps the concussion suffered by Nathan Horton is best illustration. It was indeed a subdued sportscast triumvirate on the Early Edition the morning after, who sheepishly tried to put the best face on the blatant violence just beneath the surface of Canada’s blood sport: a violence all-too pervasive in player and fan, witness crowd roar at every fight, widespread vandalism after a home team loss, and worse in recent years in soccer. What is kept hidden in hockey, organized sports generally, and all human culture, argues anthropologist René Girard and many others, is an underlying scapegoat mechanism that trades in foundational violence. Not all the anti-bullying programs at school one can initiate will prevent societal violence until its routinely modelled and legitimated organized expression in sports (and police and military) is given all-time game suspension. Such in fact would mean reinventing culture.
Put differently: being a “homer” for sports and country is, drilled down, violent scapegoating red in tooth and claw.
I am not saying remotely that sports per se is bad and all athletes violent. Terry Fox who ran across Canada and Rick Hansen who wheelchaired around the globe showed athleticism at its best, as myriad matches for fun, charity and sportsmanship and wonderful athletic leadership given to fundraising and social betterment, etc., etc. attest all the time! (Though the Olympics did originate in Greek War Games…) And I am not pointing out something original. Stubborn fact is: The corollary of compassion and altruism in organized sports is violent scapegoatinghidden just beneath the surface, as most everywhere else in human culture.
Not only then is experiencing obsessive sports fanaticism insufferable during the playoffs for non-sports fans like me, it is profoundly more menacing than the “innocent fun” the above trendy trivial triumvirate and millions of fan(atic)s would have us believe. Kierkegaard was right: until culture is reinvented, “The crowd is untruth.”
It seems a little short sighted to blame the actions of the rioting crowd in Vancouver on hockey.
Firstly, if you cram 100,000 + people into a three block area for any reason, say to watch two elderly women race at baking a two tier cake, you have created a context and situation for trouble. Too many humans in close proximity leads to rapidly spreading stupidity without fail. It is well documented, that's why we all know the saying 'mob mentality'.
Secondly, there were young people walking through the crowd as early as the first period of the game spreading the 'word': "Riot win or lose". These are not hockey fans nor does it have anything to do with sport. There were a section of people present with the intent of rioting. Hockey or bake off would not have mattered to them. Indeed, the smashing of windows and looting began by the middle of the second period of the game.
Thirdly, there are now reports of individuals who came from out of area with a plan to incite a riot downtown and came equipped with backpacks filled with little gerry-cans of gasoline etc.. They saw an opportunity to foment violence and crime and they took it. Again, they wouldn't have cared about the event, hockey or bake off, what they saw was a crowd ripe for manipulating. The fact that the crowd is so dumb as to get sucked into it is a testament to human nature I suppose, though personally I can't comprehend such blind stupidity.
Fourthly, the level of absolute outrage from the overall public, both local and nationally, against the riot and rioters has been expressed by hockey fans...die-hard hockey fans, such as myself. We have expressed in numerous locations in the wonderful world of online communities our total disgust for what occurred especially because we, more than non-fans apparently, realized that what was transpiring had nothing to do with the game we loved and enjoyed all season.
In the end the only blame that can be laid at the feet of the sports event in all of this is that it occurred at a time and place. Blaming sports, which does far more good and has a positive effect on society as a whole just doesn't make sense, particularly in a situation where the violence and stupidity was the result of other factors, and not the sport itself.
Regardless, Vancouver's reputation as an easy place to cause a riot is well known and now cemented. The next time anyone wants to gather to watch something, say the icing of the finished cakes in the bake off, families will be looking over their shoulders for masked morons setting fire to smart cars and waving at the 'smart'phone wielding morons who think it's all funny while videoing everything.
ehj
Posted by: Eric H Janzen | June 18, 2011 at 03:38 PM
This is easy for me to agree with...unless I apply it to the NFL...but you're still right.
BZ
Posted by: Brian Zahnd | June 16, 2011 at 09:47 AM
here is one wee thought...
every CROWD is untruth, including the church crowd.
it is the individual that can, and usually does reflect God's beautiful artistry and workmanship.
i am learning to appreciate that in sport now too,
there is the opportunity to see God manifest in the midst of sport, the same as anywhere else.
Posted by: jan | June 14, 2011 at 06:34 PM