Interview with Michael McKinley
Michael McKinley recently authored the book entitled Hockey: A People’s History
Michael was kind enough to answer some of my questions for Behind the Jersey and I’m pleased to share his answers with you.
1) Fans and members of the media usually give expansion teams in the warmer states (ie. Florida and California) a hard time. However, we’ve seen the rise of Anaheim and San Jose this season and our last two Cup winners are Tampa Bay and Carolina. Do you believe a team from California or the Sun Belt will win the Stanley Cup this year?
Perish the thought that a team from a region of the continent not blessed with natural ice should have a great hockey team! It’s always surprising to me when a California or Sun Belt hockey team gets grief for simply existing from the so-called purists. California has had pro hockey since the 1920s, there was a league in Florida in the late 1930s (the Tropical Hockey League lasted but a season, and though they had a team in Havana, all games were played in Miami), and pro hockey first hit Texas in 1941.
I think hockey fans in those markets are some of the best, as they really have to work to support their teams amidst all the other regional and national sporting priorities, and so you get passionate fans who love the game, love their teams, and more than rise to the occasion during the playoffs.
Speaking of which, I like Anaheim’s size and toughness, and when healthy, they are indeed one of the elite teams in the NHL. Carolina is out of the playoffs, but Tampa is in and watch out– teams that have to claw their way into the show retain that hunger in the first round, and especially if they’re recent Cup champs. As for the Ducks or San Jose, just making it into the Cup final could be a kind of victory because to get to the Dance, you have to get past Detroit.
2) Can you tell me about some of the history behind the Stanley Cup? Who was Lord Stanley? Why do you think it is the best trophy in all of professional sports?
Frederick Stanley (AKA Lord Stanley of Preston) was the Governor-General of Canada from 1888 to 1893. The Queen or King of England is the official head of state of Canada, and the Governor-General is their proxy, so Stanley was sent to what was then called the “Dominion of Canada†to represent Queen Victoria as head of state.
He was an aristocrat, the younger son of the 14th Earl of Derby, who had also been Prime Minister of England. Stanley had been a Member of Parliament himself, as well as an army officer, but at heart he was a gregarious sportsman who loved the vast potential of the new world—and he loved hockey, when he first clapped eyes on it at the Montreal Winter Carnival of 1889.
Soon, Stanley’s sons Arthur and Algernon were playing the game on a team called the Rideau Rebels, after Rideau Hall, the Governor-General’s official residence in Ottawa. His daughter Isobel played in the first recorded women’s hockey match in Ottawa 1891 (though she—and women –played well before that), and Stanley built himself a rink at Rideau Hall and was known to play as well—even on Sundays, which earned the wrath of pious editorial writers who said he was blaspheming the Sabbath.
Stanley owned shares in the Ottawa rink in which his favourite hockey team played, the Ottawa Hockey Club, and while he would have loved to see them win his “Dominion Challenge Trophyâ€, that was not why he gave the sport this extraordinary gift.
The idea of such a trophy had been mooted in Canadian journals in the early 1890s, and Stanley saw that hockey was indeed Canada’s “national winter sportâ€. Having traveled across Canada, he also saw a young country of huge size and sparse population that was a British dominion next door to much more populous and republican USA. He saw a challenge trophy as a way to express Canadian national identity and to unite a far-flung people through hockey by making it possible, for example, for a team from the Yukon to play a team from Ottawa (as happened in 1905) for what was soon known as the Stanley Cup.
Stanley also saw the widespread play of hockey as a way to keep young men of military service age in shape during the winter, since there were real fears that the US might try to expand its borders.
So the Stanley Cup has a rich history for its being, and a great irony at its core: Lord Stanley never saw a match played for his glorious trophy because he went back to England on the death of his older brother in July 1893 to become the 16th Earl of Derby. The first Stanley Cup was awarded a few months later.
To me, it’s the greatest sports trophy in the world not just because it’s the oldest professional sports trophy in North America, nor because you have to win sixteen games over a gruelling two month schedule to win it, but because what began as a nationalistic enterprise is now truly international—hockey players from all over the world can come together to compete for it and to win it, not as a nation, but as a team made up of different nationalities who for this season, prove it belongs to them.
3) You recently wrote the book Hockey: A People’s History. Why did you decide to write this book and how long did it take you to complete it?
I was invited to write the companion book to the CBC TV series “Hockey: A People’s Historyâ€, as well as the accompanying children’s book, “Ice Time: The Story of Hockey
I was inspired by the scope of the project, and the chance to tell as much of the story of this great sport as we could on both page and screen. I began writing in February 2005, and finished final edits in April 2006. I wasn’t writing the whole time, though, and it was very much a team project, as I benefited enormously from the research done for the TV series.
4) Teams like the Detroit Red Wings and New Jersey Devils have been at the top of the league for the past ten years. Why do you think some teams are able to maintain success for so long while others struggle to make the playoffs year after year?
Teams go through cycles, and one glance at the playoff picture shows many of them are going through the same cycle right now, a cycle which the NHL calls “parityâ€. That said, Detroit and New Jersey have remained at the top of the league for a good stretch of time, and while we don’t have the dynastic ‘80s when the Islanders and the Oilers owned the Cup, we do have teams who are consistently favoured to be in the Final.
This comes from a culture of winning created by smart management– and before the salary cap, lots of high-priced spending. From the highest reaches of management down to the goal net and through the farm systems, both organizations understand what they’re doing—though I have to asterisk that when it comes to New Jersey’s firing of coach Claude Julien on April 2. The Devils were, on his firing, in first place in the Atlantic Division and number two in the conference and had won four of their last five. Must be something in the New Jersey swamp water.
5) Do you have a favorite Stanley Cup story (ie. a unique place a player took it or something interesting that a player did with the Cup, etc.)?
The Stanley Cup has had many adventures (which is why I’d think twice about drinking champagne from it, even if alcohol is a disinfectant), and there are stories galore about its travels. It is also ripe with superstition, and NHL players believe that you do not touch it if you have yet to win it, or else you will spoil forever your chance of so doing. Which is why, when the management of the New York Rangers burned the paid up mortgage to Madison Square Garden in the bowl of the Cup in the 1940 after the Rangers had won it, hockey sages said the Rangers had cursed themselves by committing such profanity to the chalice. And they seemed to be right, for it took 54 years for the Rangers to lose that curse, when, in 1994, they defeated the Vancouver Canucks in one of the most exciting seven-game Stanley Cup finals in history.
6) With the arrival of Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin last season, the NHL has started to market individual athletes in clever commercials such as the hotel one shown during the All-Star Game. Do you believe that the NHL is going in the right direction in terms of marketing? Why or why not?
The best marketing tool the NHL has is the sport itself, and if they take care of that (as they for the most part, have been, after that pathetic lock out), then the fan base will increase.
HD TV will help as well, as a common complaint from some sports fans is that, while they love watching hockey live in the rink, they can’t follow the puck on TV. Oddly enough, a 100 MPH fastball poses no such problem, so HD might enhance the architecture of the game for fans who feel TV doesn’t do it justice.
But in the end, promotion of the next generation of hockey talent such as Crosby and Ovechkin and the dancing Swedish Sedin twins—in the fun, self-mocking “it’s only a game†spirit in which it has been done –certainly helps to get the attention of the casual hockey fan. And what will keep that attention is a sport that allows those talented players to do what they do best, without fear of being carried off on a stretcher because of a dirty hit (see question #9).
7) Who is your favorite hockey player (current or retired)? Why?
I’m a big fan of Trevor Linden, the former captain of the Vancouver Canucks, who has been the face of the franchise more or less since 1988 (save for a three-year exile when he ran afoul of Mike Keenan). Linden is a guy who gives his all on the ice no matter what the circumstances, and is a community-spirited gentleman off it who has done so much work on behalf of children with life-threatening illnesses. And he has done it all with a quiet grace.
There are many NHLers like him, but since I live in Vancouver and have seen the effect he has had on this city, I salute him. Indeed, I just wrote a profile of him for Vancouver Magazine, which furthered my admiration of him, and you can read it (for free!) at http://www.vanmag.com/articles/07apr/Captainvancouver.shtml.
My favourite retired hockey players are the brothers Frank and Lester Patrick. The Patricks were hockey stars in eastern Canada who came west around 1910 to help their father with his lumber business in the forests of British Columbia. When he sold that business for nearly half a million dollars (a fortune at a time when $25,000 would get you a mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver), the brothers convinced him to invest his money in ice hockey on the Pacific Coast—a region not known for its natural ice. But the Patricks had played in St. Nick’s, the great artificial ice rink in New York City, and saw that BC had a population base to support a pro league, and so they built arenas and put teams in Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster (today a Vancouver suburb) and eventually, in Seattle and Portland and, so gave birth to the Pacific Coast Hockey Association.
But they did much more than that: the brothers were great innovators, and from them and their Pacific league we get the invention of the blue line, the penalty shot, line substitutions, numbered jerseys, goalies being allowed to fall down to make saves (they could not, before the Patricks), and a playoff system. Among other things. We owe them much of the modern game.
Which team has surprised you the most this season (good or bad)?
The Edmonton Oilers. Ryan Smyth was the heart and soul of the Oilers, and when they traded him over what was essentially a salary pissing contest, the Oilers’ brain trust unravelled the team. Yes, pundits say the Oilers were weak on from the blue line in, and that the loss of Chris Pronger hurt them, but they still had that intangible connection to all those Stanley Cup banners hanging from the beams of the their barn—and a chance to take a run at another –when the trade deadline arrived.
They’ve won just one game since Smyth was sent to Long Island, and a proud franchise that was in the Finals last year, and whom I saw give the high flying Vancouver Canucks serious trouble a couple of weeks ago, was shot in the foot by its own management. And they can’t say this was a rebuilding move: the Oilers have been rebuilding since Gretzky left, and unless they pull a rabbit or two out of the hat this summer, they have sent their players and their fans a terrible message.
9) The debate over fighting and its place in the NHL has been discussed a lot this season. What role do you think fighting should have in the game and why? How has the role of fighting changed over the years from the days of the Broad Street Bullies to the present?
The role of fighting has “evolved†from an actual strategy to win games by intimidating opponents through systematic violence, as used by the Broad Street Bullies, to what those who support it call a kind of safety valve, one, allegedly, that makes those who attack or deliberately injure their opponents accountable in a way that the penalty box, or a fines and game suspension system does not.
You can see right there the flaw in the argument. If accountability is the issue, then it must first come from the players. Calgary’s Jarome Iginla recently made some interesting remarks in the National Post newspaper (Wednesday 21 March 2007) about cheap shot hits that lead to fighting when he responded to the idea that hockey is such a speedy sport that dirty hits are often accidents of that speed:
It’s not that fast. Guys know what they’re doing on 90-plus per cent of the hits…Some guys, if you’re leaned over, your head’s sticking out there, a lot of guys will pass that hit up. There are some guys though, who will take that [hit].
So, if players were forced to be accountable for their actions in a way other than fighting—either by being taught from the get go as kids that fighting belongs in boxing and some of these extreme sports, but not in hockey– and then, of being appropriately penalized for any kind of attempt to injure, the sport would not need this specious argument that it is violence that keeps violence from happening.
And if the moral argument doesn’t work, then show them the money. If I knew that starting a fight or engaging in one would cost me a five game suspension, and a five game loss of salary, with my team fined a prohibitive amount of money, I’d more than think twice about doing it. Same if I knew that smashing someone head first into the boards, or in the face with a stick, or with my knee on theirs, would earn me a term in the press box and cost me big bucks, I wouldn’t do it. And if the automatic suspension escalated each time a player transgressed, fighting would “evolve†out of hockey pretty damn quick. This is not a utopian ideal, either. You just need the “political will†among NHL owners to enact it, and I’m afraid that it will take the death of a player before they do.
On a personal note, I play in a rec league that bans fighting (and swearing and slap shots) and our games are no less intense or fun (and not as swift as the NHL, to be sure!). Yes, hockey is a fast game, and yes, it does hurt when you collide with someone whom you think has hit you in a dirty fashion, but that’s where the referees come in, as well as all those guys in Toronto who watch every NHL game played every night, live, on video monitors, looking for crimes. Goalies didn’t wear masks, once upon a time, and players didn’t wear helmets because it was “unmanlyâ€. Those days are gone, thank goodness, and prove the point that the only thing constant about this sport is that change, eventually, will happen. Let’s hope out of wisdom, and not necessity.
10) NHL players have resisted certain safety measures in the past like helmets and visors. Do you foresee the NHL requiring its players to wear visors? Why do you think the players have such a prejudice against the wearing of visors?
Again, visors are perceived by some as unmanly, and yet, if you’re a young player you wear the full cage. The problem is that you “graduate†from the cage to a visor as you move up the ranks, and then, once you play pro, to a helmet alone. Thus the visor is seen as rule inflicted upon you until you achieve professional freedom (or play in a beer league).
The official version is that players who have tried and rejected the visor say that they can’t see as well as they can without a visor, but again, if you grow up with a cage, and then a visor, and then must keep the visor when you play pro, that relativity argument will disappear. Junior hockey seems to be no less skilled and exciting because players wear visors. Also, goalies wear face protection, and who needs to see the puck and the play more than a goalie? I don’t hear them campaigning to remove their cages and face masks. Yet guys wearing just helmets drop down to block slapshots where the guys whose job it is to stop those slapshots wear full face masks. It’s crazy.
BTJ would like to thank Michael for taking the time out to answer these questions!
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April 10th, 2007 at 9:27 am
[…] Christy over at Behind the Jersey has an interview with Michael McKinley, author of Hockey: A People’s History. If you are interested in checking out the book it is available at Amazon.com. […]