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Overview
Home Ice combines memoir and history to explore how the mysteries of Blackhawks fandom explain big questions like tribal belonging, masculinity, and why you would ever trade Chris Chelios. In recounting the team’s—and his own—wins and losses (and ties), Cunningham covers everything from Keith Magnuson’s bachelor pad to the grim early aughts to Patrick Kane’s Cup-winner. Throughout, he explores how we come to love the things we love. Funny and touching, Home Ice is one Blackhawk fan’s attempt to understand why sports fandom is utterly ridiculous and entirely necessary.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384791 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 179 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SKATE-AROUND
It was a bright morning. It could be nothing else. Tea had not made me less hoarse by the time I sat down with my breakfast of champions. I can't remember the meal. Leftover Chinese, maybe. I relaxed with it. There was no need to rush online for the game wrap-ups and praise. I had stayed up into the wee hours to see the first stories as they posted.
"How do you feel?" my wife asked.
"I'm glad I lived to see it," I said.
Throughout the 2010 playoffs, each Blackhawks win raised the stakes. The chips piling up on the table represented the accrued emotion of decades past. That emotion would fuel a massive letdown if the Hawks lost. But their success also forced me to risk their very position in my life. Adulthood had granted me a certain perspective on Blackhawks hockey. I learned one of the worst lessons a male sports fan can learn: that whatever happens, life goes on. I point out male because I, like millions of other Y chromosomes, rely on sports to provide the sole venue in life where it is acceptable to release emotion. If the Hawks lost, and I gave up on them after forty-some years, how would I fill that void?
Responsibility, worry, and the glacial development of common sense had already caused me to lose touch with the pursuit of rock music, beer, premarital sex, and every other reason to stay alive. But it surprised me to feel hockey slipping away. Hockey and I went back a lot longer than music or beer or even an awareness of sex. Yet there was no denying. No longer did I watch the middle-of-the-night encore broadcasts. Whole games passed without me screaming, though I did grunt a lot. The collars of my jerseys had yellowed because the glorious Indian Heads remained on hangers, unworn and unseen, for years.
Nor did I attend games. Of course, Hawks management had played a part in that by declaring war on its own fan base for the better part of the aughts. But Hawks management had been objectionable since the team's founding.
I wasn't sure what had happened. Once, my relationship with the Hawks had been passionate, if always conducted in an atmosphere of impending disappointment. Now, though, my Hawk fandom felt like a tired relationship, where islands of volcanic emotion occasionally arose from a sea of polite disinterest formed by long habit.
The Blackhawks may have hit rock bottom circa 2004, but they had last contended — I mean, truly had a shot that did not involve an imponderable chain of fluke occurrences — just ten years earlier. A decade is a long time in sports, but it's not a black hole. The team's dissolution, a series of events that included the massive level of self-deception necessary to see a blockhead like Tyler Arnason as a star, clinched but did not spark my drift away from Hawks obsession.
Adulthood played a part, of course. Its demands already made it hard to carve out time for the Hockey News, and you can read that thing in about eight minutes. Now my wife was pregnant. Even as I ate the celebratory breakfast, she sent our then-fetal daughter oatmeal and fruit. How angry would I be when I wasted three hours of my precious free time to watch a tilt with the Predators that ended in a shootout loss?
Philadelphia putting some hurt on the Hawks early on allowed me to ponder a heretical silver lining to a Hawks Stanley Cup loss. If it happened, God forbid, I'd have the excuse I needed to relegate the Blackhawks to the passing interest category. The hours of my life thus regained could go toward refining nanotechnology or attending my daughter's ballet recitals.
Or, I thought, maybe a period of self-imposed exile would allow me to have it both ways. I'd be a boffo father free to attend all the events of a busy twenty-first-century childhood. Then, by the time the Hawks made a run at the 2028 Cup (right on schedule), my daughter would have headed off to freshman orientation at the Sorbonne. I would have all the free time I needed to watch what by then would be a fourteen-round postseason.
But ... the Blackhawks had won. In 2010, before the era of ape conquest, they had won.
"Were they drinking champagne from the Cup?" my wife asked, probably not intending an uppercase C in cup.
"The French-Canadians, maybe," I said. "Hockey players seem to mostly like beer."
Like most Hawks fans that day, I was experiencing a kind of happiness immune to cynicism. But I knew that my joy, while genuine, was a small thing compared to the bender I would have embarked upon had the Hawks won in, say, 1995. Yes, I had changed. Yada yada.
But why did I care about a hockey team, this hockey team, in the first place? And why was I so sad I had navigated the change in my feelings toward it?
• It is traditional in a sports book to claim that the team under examination inspires a unique form of suffering. Admittedly, handing Chris Chelios to Detroit caused me to break out in a rash that lasted for twelve years. But followers of most National Hockey League teams, of most sports teams, can provide a timeline hash-marked with lamentations, disappointment, and dermatological problems. While the Hawks have provided their fans with many painful moments, the most that can be said by way of superlatives is that the franchise shares a legacy of breathtaking stupidity and venality with — well, okay, just an elite few.
Let's try again. True, the Hawks' team executives spent 1997 to 2005 running around in circles while the Benny Hill theme music played in the background. Spare a thought, though, for the sufferings of a contemporary Oilers fan, one too young to remember the 1980s. Sure, the Hawks dealt away Phil Esposito for no discernible reason. They ran off Bobby Hull in a hail of insults and traded Jeremy Roenick at his peak due to some weird sense of violated omerta. But they didn't sell off the greatest player of all time (at age twenty-seven), or see their sleazy owner almost destroy the team, or fall into a whirlpool of mediocrity (albeit after winning a title without Gretzky) that lasted thirty years, or watch the league's financial structure change in ways that made it impossible for them to compete.
Whatever the pains, Patrick Kane's epic goal and all that led up to it saved my fading ardor for our heroes and for NHL hockey in general. Damn the dulling effects of adulthood. I suddenly had motivation to learn about the salary cap, to revive my terrible Pat Foley impression, to put the jerseys in the wash.
Again the question: why had a Hawks championship meant so much to me? To all of us? God knows I played no part in the triumphant march, had shed no blood or cash. Sometimes I felt as if I had a bleeding ulcer, but a real one had burned a hole in Joel Quenneville's stomach. As time passed I wondered more and more about where this love of hockey, and in particular the connection with the Blackhawks, had come from.
• I never played ice hockey. Though I'm reasonably athletic, preschoolers can outskate me. The pack animals in donkey hockey charity games can outskate me.
Nor did I live in any sort of hockey hotbed as a kid. In fact, for long periods of my life I followed the game through print or the highlights tacked on to the end of sportscasts on very slow news nights.
This separation from the game wasn't my fault. My parents refused to move to Toronto. Furthermore, when I was a kid, Evel Knievel got more airtime than the NHL. Even after the Miracle on Ice allegedly introduced hockey to a mass audience, American cable channels preferred Australian rules football to the NHL. The situation changed a little when the USA Network and then ESPN adopted the league for a time. But the Blackhawks, languishing in their post-1973 doldrums, seldom if ever attracted the attention of the embryonic cable titans.
As for the inheritance theory — sports loyalties passed from fathers to sons and daughters — it is true my dad introduced me to the Blackhawks. A native Kentuckian, he moved to Chicagoland in his teens and followed Chicago sports with the avidity of any late convert, if also with the fatalism of a native.
The thing is, Dad was not a big hockey fan. Sure, he checked in if the Hawks were on, once the NHL returned to TV. He wished them well. He kept up with what was going on enough to hold a conversation. As is the case with most of Chicago, though, the Bears were his main team. Thus, according to inheritance theory, I should spend Sundays — and some Thursdays, Saturdays, and Mondays — racked out in a metaphorical recliner drinking a metaphorical six of Bud Light with the rest of Real America. Yet I haven't watched pro football on a regular basis in years.
Studying my impending parenthood and what it might turn into down the road, I thought it important to understand the source of my obsessions, in order to better support those of my daughter. As a parent I hoped to avoid the unnecessary friction I had with my folks. God knows, there will be enough necessary friction over the car, the chastity belt, etc. It's easy for distance to develop between loved ones. I wanted to avoid handing down past mistakes to the next generation.
Many of my passions manifested at an early age. Except for a love of music, all seem to have sprung up without any connection to the interests of loved ones, influential peers, or mentors. All of my obsessions baffled my parents, even frustrated them. Dad wondered about why I'd learn to type when I could replace a distributor cap. And so on.
In calmer moments I dismissed my own concern as just another of the irrational worries that afflict new parents. The question of how the Blackhawks entered my life continued to knock around my brain and led to other questions. It took time to access the memories that led me to the inadequate answers. Thanks to the Cup win, I could for once put aside angst and see the pleasures offered by the Hawks, pleasures unique to them in some cases, and general to hockey in others. This newfound if short-lived clarity didn't explain how I'd come to love the team. But it clued me in to how someone could, and that was a start.
CHAPTER 2
THE MAGAZINES
I read four books in third grade. Though memory is unreliable, I am confident of the figure because anything that unimpressive is probably true.
The first was Stuart Little, a kids' book about a mouse. The second was Chariots of the Gods — only the classics for me — and the third an astronomy book by Patrick Moore, one of those fantastically crusty British crackpots who wore a monocle and after decades of bachelorhood declared women had ruined the world. What can I say? Some little boys dig on dinosaurs. For me it was outer space. Learning about the Messier catalog, which numbers certain objects like galaxies and nebulae, prepared me for French-Canadian hockey names.
I stand behind my last choice: Stan Mikita's I Play to Win. As the rest of the reading list shows, I had until that time never read a chapter book by a sane person.
No offense to Stan, but I doubt I made it through the entire book. That was just my attention span then.
A life story about matters off and on the ice, I Play to Win remains worth reading even now, though Mikita's recent Forever a Blackhawk covers and elaborates on some of the same material. I Play to Win came out in 1969, when Mikita — with two Hart Trophies and four Ross Trophies on his resume — was one of the stars in the NHL. Once a penalty-prone pest nicknamed Le Petit Diable, Mikita had reformed to become a Lady Byng winner by the time he turned to writing.
There's no false modesty in the book. Mikita's proud of his accomplishments, and rightly so. What's endearing is that he puts his story out there in an unaffected way. He can write that he thought he deserved a number-two center spot on an All-Star team over Jean Béliveau, but it doesn't sound petty; it doesn't even sound as if he thought twice about it.
His reflections on his selection as Most Valuable Player:
This is the Oscar of hockey. It means that people consider you the best player in the league out of more than two hundred — whether you are or not — and there can't be higher praise.
I learned all of that rereading I Play toWin as an adult, though. I recalled only two parts from my third-grade study.
First, the magazines. Mikita shows up for his first youth-league practice in second-hand skates and with magazines tied around his legs for pads. I never forgot that detail. I once used it in one of my many half-finished novels. For years I thought the magazines illustrated Stan's childhood poverty. As it turns out, he didn't grow up poor. Joe Mikita (the uncle who brought Stan to Canada from Czechoslovakia, and who Stan called Dad) built houses, and the family did okay. Either Stan didn't ask for pads, or Joe Mikita wisely waited to see if the kid was serious about hockey before making the investment.
Then there's the story of how Stan came to Canada. I found it harrowing, as a nine-year-old, that a kid around my age left behind his family to move thousands of miles away, to a country where he didn't know the language, where he had to change his name and trade a familiar farm life he liked for St. Catherines, Ontario.
At first Stan considered it an adventure. After all, the trip began with a train ride. Then in Prague, about to leave for France and the ship to cross the Atlantic, he realized his parents would remain behind and broke down. I understood that emotion. I found it moving when I reread the book a few months ago. That he continued to think for years about going back is heartbreaking, though obviously things worked out.
In St. Catherines he learned hockey terms as some of his first English words. Kids also taunted him by calling him a DP, or displaced person. Children can be monsters, obviously, but picking on someone because you think (wrongly, yet) that he's a war refugee? The guy doesn't have enough problems coming from a country that split the 1940s between the Third Reich and the Red Army? What's wrong with being a DP, anyway? Why would non-DPs be so down on it? Did Canadian parents tut-tut about how escapees from a communist takeover would lower property values?
No doubt some kids threw down the name just to rile up Stan, in the way kids have of hurting others for no reason other than joy. Yet Mikita dealt with it as an adult, too. DP was a favorite insult of Mikita's nemesis, the Montreal Canadiens star Henri Richard:
Richard and I always have had a touchy relationship. We've even had a fight or two or more. I treasure one of those with him, because it's one of the few I've ever won. ... What usually touched off our scraps was a stick or elbow in the right place. Henri would call me "DP" and I'd snap back with "Frog" or "Pea Soup"— because he's French Canadian.
Pea soup! If that's considered a slur, I apologize for laughing. Let's repurpose it to tease kids possessed by the Devil.
We both wound up in the penalty box one game after a fight. Then I guess Henri glared at me and I looked at him and I kind of snickered. He said, "Say, what you laugh at? You a DP. You come to dees country. You even don' speak so pretty good da Engleesh." That heavy, broken accent sounded as funny as hell under the circumstances.
Based on my reading habits of the time, I suspect I put down I Play to Win when I realized Stan wasn't going to get abducted by aliens. I don't remember reading about Mikita's early career, but I'm guessing I made it that far, because I was always on the lookout for a moneymaking deal — those wax worms with the colored syrup inside didn't buy themselves. Possibly, I picked up the book in the first place to cadge insider knowledge on becoming a pro hockey player and making a ton of money. The impulse, while built on the myth that 1970s hockey players got rich, did speak to an actual truth. My family needed the money.
By the time he reached juniors, it seemed to me that Mikita had it all. First, he went through a teen greaser phase. Fonzie on skates. Awesome. Even better, he made $60 a week, plus $15 under the table. Big money, clearly, and this was before he beat Hawks GM Tommy Ivan out of an extra five grand on his signing bonus. Mikita even quit school to turn pro. It was like a dream.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Home Ice"
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Copyright © 2017 the University of Iowa Press.
Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 1. Skate-Around 2. The Magazines 3. The Munro Doctrine 4. Competing Faiths 5. Birth of the Uncool 6. The Limping Superman 7. Red Haired Like Me 8. Strangers Hmong Us 9. Red Menaces 10. The Masculine Mystique 11. West Side Story 12. Mount Orval 13. It’s a Shame about Dave 14. Springtime in Alberta 15. Fables of a Reconstruction 16. Between Blue Lines and Borges 17. Jagr in the Heart 18. Coda 19. Love and Winnipeg 20. All Locked Out 21. Big in Japan 22. Onward and Downward 23. Except It Actually Hurts 24. Letting Go, Taking On 26. Trying 26. High Anxiety 27. Pure Platinum 28. On Injured Reserve 29. They’ll Never Get Past Detroit 30. The Yellow Brick Road 31. Final-ly 32. Before the Parade 33. Pacific Division 34. Lady Byng SourcesWhat People are Saying About This
“This is the book that Blackhawks fans have been waiting for, and I mean really, REALLY waiting for. It was difficult, even as a Blues fan, not to be a little happy for Blackhawks fans these last few years. This book is an excellent argument as to why.”