Hockey Culture

What is it that makes hockey so profoundly Canadian? As writer and hockey fan Roy MacGregor explores in the November 2003 issue of Canadian Living, the values respected in hockey — teamwork, resourcefulness, tenacity, humility and triumph — are the principles Canadians try to uphold on the world stage, and as individuals.

All across the country, on frozen backyard ponds, community rinks and in state-of-the-art arenas, Canadians are playing our national sport: hockey. The game is invariably tied to our collective sense what it means to be Canadian and is perhaps our most identifiable icon. After all, the maple leaf, a familiar Canadian emblem, adorns some hockey jerseys, and two major chains selling our favourite food, donuts, were started by hockey greats Tim Horton and Eddie Shack.

Hockey has even become a recurring subject in our literature. The theme is so significant that Michael P.J. Kennedy, instructor at the University of Saskatchewan, has created a course entitled “Reading Culture: Hockey in Canadian Literature.” Kennedy has also published Words on Ice: A Collection of Hockey Prose (Key Porter Books, 2003), an anthology of stories that capture many different perspectives on the game.

Read on for excerpts from some of those stories, and significant pieces of hockey history.

“I would sometimes imagine one great outdoor hockey game, stretching from just inside the Rockies to the shores of the Atlantic, detouring only around the too temperate climate of a few of the bigger cities. Or, perhaps, a hundred thousand simultaneous games, all overlapping as our own used to overlap at Dickson Park, kept separate only by the carved initials, inlaid in snow, on our pucks.”
- Peter Gzowski, The Game of Our Lives

“Hockey is our winter ballet and in many ways our only national drama.”
- Morley Callaghan, The Game That Makes a Nation

The Drama Unfolds
All hockey season long, fans gather around televisions at home or in pubsin pubs to watch “the national drama” unfold. And it only intensifies when the playoffs begin.

Special games, such as the Winter Olympics or the 1972 Summit Series, are even more cause for excitement. In 2002, more than 6 million Canadians tuned in to see the women's hockey team win the gold medal at the Winter Olympics; 10 million tuned in to see the men's team do the same three days later.

The eight grueling games of the 1972 series against the Soviet Union were tantamount to a national identity crisis. No one expected the quick, hard-playing Soviet team to match the skill of Team Canada's NHL professionals.

Many Canadians took the day off work on Sept. 28, 1972 to watch the final game broadcast from Moscow. With mere seconds remaining, Paul Henderson scored the series-winning goal to win the game, 6-5, and all of Canada rejoiced. Describing the game play of Team Canada, Soviet coach Anatoli Tarasov said they “battled with the ferocity and intensity of a cornered animal."