Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
My line mate and usual center shared with our team this interesting article from the Globe and Mail. If you don’t play hockey, this might provide some insight into why those who do love it so much. If you do play hockey, this will simply remind you of some of the not-so-obvious reasons why you love it so much. In any case, it’s an interesting read:
Stepping onto the ice and playing hockey requires timing, a bit of strength, some lung power and an overall physical exertion that both exhilarates and exhausts, even when it looks like the Keystone Cops routine I regularly turn it into.
It’s a highly athletic game, and only those who are or who aspire to be athletic can understand the high you get from playing hockey.
Having said that, some of the secondary aspects of the game are nearly as enjoyable, particularly if you’re involved in any brand of hockey attached to either a rink or a community league hall (like my Wednesday-night gang).
For instance, if you enjoy salty and inventive ungrammatical language, a medley of disagreeable smells, undeserved verbal abuse, zinger one-upmanship and generally infantilized behaviour, I suspect you would enjoy one key aspect of what I’m referring to: the locker room.
Our locker room is a place where men are men and women are usually too smart to venture (though I feel compelled to add we’ve had a woman or two join us on occasion, and it can be quite literally a breath of fresh air to have a female presence in the room).
There’s something utterly unique about the hockey locker room. I’m not sure why. I’ve played other team sports and none of the locker rooms were like this one.
For now, I will forgo getting into the various psychoanalytic “theories of the womb” having to do with the warm cocoon of the locker room, where everyone’s dripping wet and everything carries a vaguely fecund odour.
But there is no doubt the hockey locker room is different than those of other sports. It carries an air of exhaustion baseball doesn’t force on you, an intimacy football loses through sheer roster numbers. The soccer locker room (if you’re lucky enough to have one) may be closest, with similar player numbers and roughly equivalent levels of fatigue.
Still, soccer doesn’t feature the great joys of getting to the rink hours in advance to don the equipment in the same ritualized, almost obsessive way that hockey players have, decade after decade. Soccer players also usually wash their socks.
But more than the equipment rituals, I think the locker room retains a mystique and even an unspoken attraction for men because of its simple intimacy. It provides an easy way to manufacture conditions for intimacy under which men can operate without ever having to pretend or, God forbid, admit that they care about anyone.
Friendships are formed, personalities are revealed, bonds are cemented. It’s a safe haven for men in a way that sitting in a Starbucks with a couple of pals sipping a chai latte and sharing a low-fat cranberry muffin probably never will be. As shocking as this may be to the distaff side, men are evolving but have not yet fully grasped the frankly rather bizarre bonding methods women typically favour (such as the premeditated use of not just questions, but answers).
The locker room, therefore, offers a frictionless way for men to bond while also participating in the one thing that truly defines us as men: abusing one another verbally. Women, of course, can also dish it out when they have to, and I have no doubt women’s locker rooms feature their own brand of bonding and ritual.
My daughters love hockey and they can cut someone (okay, me) down to size with a couple of words and a half-lidded glance. But my sense – or hope – is that women are above it all. Men, on the other hand, are plainly at their most manlike (notice I didn’t say manly) when they are able to freely harass, torment, provoke and insult one another.
Take one of the friends I play with every Wednesday. We’ll call him JR. He’s one of the best players on the ice and is well liked by all, but it isn’t until you hit the locker room that his true gifts are revealed. It’s in our little hockey hall that he shines, doling out the abuse he feels is warranted on a weekly basis.
If someone whacks him on the shins, he will suffer in the locker room. If someone cherry picks, he’ll hear about it. If someone quits early because it’s too cold, the poor sap will absorb a few slurs at the earliest possible moment. Even in writing this, I am exposing myself to the worst JR has to offer. For what, you may ask. For writing about hockey instead of getting out there and playing the bleeping game, even though I play it like a bleeping bleepy.
Yet it’s moments such as these that bring dreamy smiles to the faces of hockey veterans. Locker-room ribbing is part of how men communicate the world over – a male Esperanto if you will – and though I make no claims about its psychological worth, I think it’s a big part of why hockey veterans and former pros miss the game so much. Sure, they wish they were still flying up and down the rink, but it’s all the other stuff they miss nearly as much.
Bobby Orr once said hanging out with the guys was something he missed after hanging up the blades, and one of the reasons Wayne Gretzky came back to coach the hapless Phoenix Coyotes was that he missed the locker room.
Even Pat Quinn, the 65-year-old coach fresh off the thrilling World Junior success, was quoted as saying he came back to the game because he “liked being around the rink and liked being around the players.” You could parse that many different ways, but to me it’s simple: He liked being in the locker room. I don’t blame him.
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