Thursday 20 December 2012

Underwhelmed by Two of my Favourite Teams

Here I go a little personal and write about the consequences of expecting my former hockey playing heroes to lead my favourite teams back to glory as either coaches or general managers.  A holiday tale of the ups and downs of rooting for two teams with greatness in the past but that struggle to exceed mediocre in the present.

You can read the digital version here.
 
Accepting A Team’s Present by Not Living in the Past

By Avi Goldberg

We’ve all heard people say that fans don’t come to the games for the coaches or the general managers. The accuracy of this sentiment is highlighted by the painful absence of NHL competition and player storylines during the lockout, yet at times like the trade deadline, the free agency period, and the firing and hiring of a coach, fans give their rapt attention to the GMs. Following hockey through the intrigue of coaching and managing can also be compelling when these positions are held by former players who are adored for their on-ice careers. As we wait and wonder if the players and games will return in time for the holidays, this is a tale of the consequences of investing emotionally in management and coaching with the hope that a team’s success will be delivered by its playing heroes of the past.

Born in Montreal but raised in Edmonton, I have always split my team loyalties between the Habs and the Oilers. After early family training in obsessing over the Canadiens during playoff games, I spent my teenage years with the Oilers dynasty serving as the religion that tied me to my friends and city. Though I idolized the play of Robinson, Naslund, Messier, Fuhr, and Tikkanen, the Oilers and the Habs drew additional loyalty from me by bringing some of my other favourite former players into professional positions. In both team success and my resulting sentiments as a fan, the parallels are uncanny.

As it addresses the curious post-playing professional careers of Bob Gainey and Guy Carbonneau with the Canadiens, my first story is undoubtedly recognizable to Habs fans.

In awe of his five Stanley Cups as a player with Montreal, his experience as captain, and his performance as the top defensive player of his day, I felt an awakening of real optimism when Gainey was hired to be GM in 2003. And though the circumstances surrounding his appointment as head coach were not outlined in the GM’s five-year plan, the fact that Carbonneau was brought in strengthened the legitimacy of team management in my eyes. With two revered former players at the helm, I believed that the dark years of Alain Vigneault, Michel Therrien 1.0, and Andre Savard were starting to fade in the rear-view mirror. 

As almost everything about team affairs was wildly inconsistent under the Gainey-Carbonneau regime, my warm feelings quickly cooled. Aside from the heights achieved during a strong regular season in 2007-2008, dysfunction prevailed. Between intimate old port walks shared by the GM and the team’s enigmatic star player, the coach’s inability to explain his squad’s indifferent play, and endless debates about goaltending and the organization’s inability to develop and look after its young prospects, I felt I was following a soap opera, not the systematic renewal of a once proud hockey power.

The Habs limped into the playoffs during their highly promoted centennial season and were swept by the hated Bruins in four games. My suspicion that the team was organizationally rudderless was practically confirmed when Gainey resigned as GM in 2010, less than one year after showing Carbonneau the door. Notwithstanding the tantalizing run to the conference finals overseen by Jacques Martin and Pierre Gauthier, to me, Gainey’s final organizational hires merely capped off a managerial track record marked by mediocrity and drama.

The Gainey-Carbonneau duo did not live up to the expectations I projected on them based on their collective past.

Possibly less familiar to Canadiens fans, my Oilers story centres on another former playing duo for which I had great admiration, that of Kevin Lowe and Craig MacTavish.

The Oilers first ever draft choice, winner of five Stanley Cups with the team, and steadiest of defenseman, Lowe spent one season as Edmonton’s head coach before being named GM to replace Glen Sather in 2000. Meanwhile, after a year in prison for having committed vehicular homicide, MacTavish joined the Oilers in 1985 and, unexpectedly, helped the team win three championships as a pre-eminent shut down third line centre. After two years coaching with the New York Rangers, MacTavish returned to Edmonton as assistant coach in 1999 and was named head coach upon Lowe’s promotion to GM. With both men experienced as on-ice captains, and with each regarded as a winner, I saw the Lowe-MacTavish team as the perfect leadership scenario for the twenty-first century Oilers.

The Oilers did ice some gritty teams under Lowe and MacTavish. Notably, my heart raced through highly competitive playoff series against the much deeper Dallas Stars and Colorado Avalanche during which leaders like Ryan Smyth, Doug Weight, and Todd Marchant put in heart and soul performances. The pinnacle, however, came in 2005-2006. That’s when Lowe astonished Oilers fans by acquiring Chris Pronger and Mike Pecca prior to the regular season and MacTavish deftly rode the hot goaltending of another late season pick up, Dwayne Roloson, to a trip to the finals that ended honourably in a seventh game loss to Carolina. Although the surprise run stirred up magic and joy I had not felt since the early-1990s, my belief in MacTavish and Lowe’s potential to do it again evaporated the moment Pronger told the world he wanted out of Edmonton. Oilers fans are still waiting for the team to recover.

So, due to my indelible net memories of management conflicts with players, oddly timed trades of valuable players, desperate efforts to lure free agents that ended in failure and league ridicule, and of a battle between a hapless coach and an arch rival’s team mascot, I view the 2006 as an accidental happenstance rather than an outcome of the deliberate workings of a competent regime.

The Lowe-MacTavish duo did not live up to the expectations I projected on them based on their collective past.

From two organizations that share having glory days in the ever distant past, recent levels of mediocrity, and whose coaching-managerial compositions have been eerily similar in their playing pedigrees, I now know better how to be a fan today.

From the underwhelming records of my teams in general, I know that championships of the past are not only hard to repeat but also set the bar of my expectations impossibly high. Both Habs and Oilers are in the middle of organizational transitions but I will forever refrain from expecting the accomplishments of the past to portend success in the future.

From seeing the painful struggles of my dream managements teams, I also know that the hometown players who were superhuman on the ice may not be well-suited to lead from the bench or from the front office. By comparing successful mangers like Kenny Holland, Peter Chiarelli, and Dean Lombardi, and in thinking about accomplished coaches like Claude Julien, Joel Quenneville, and Darryl Sutter, it’s hard to identify the factors that make it work. I have my doubts about the potentials of both current regimes in both Montreal and Edmonton, but I also know now to look beyond local heroes when my teams are seeking new coaching and management personnel.

Finally, from having sufficient time to heal from the coaching-management experiments in which I invested so heavily, I also know not to allow the non-playing parts of my playing heroes’ careers to erase the memories of what they did on the ice. Whether it was a resounding hit, a spirited penalty kill, or a timely and team-inspiring goal, my favourite players performed at the highest possible level when it counted the most. Yes, they gave me little to cheer for when they donned the suits and ties, and they also failed to prepare their clubs to be competitive today, but I have chosen to separate these unfortunate facts from what I saw them do a long time before.

Following favourite teams through the ups and downs of their coaches and managers can be fun. When it comes to a favourite team’s former playing heroes, however, it might be best for everyone to leave the glory in the past.

Lockout Politics


This piece is the first official contribution I made to the digital hockey magazine AllHabs.net as a Featured Contributor.

While many fans lament the ways that economics and power struggles have kept hockey off the ice during the current lockout, in this piece I explore the historical connections between sports, politics, economics, and culture.  After understanding the ways that sports is used by societies to promote, and argue over, its most cherished social values, I suggest that fans use these connections to get involved in trying to bring the game of hockey back and to contribute to the social needs of the societies and communities in which they live.

You can read the digital version here.

The Politics of Sports and the Hockey Lockout

By Avi Goldberg

It’s been a rough couple of years for hockey fans in general and for fans of the Montreal Canadiens in particular.  Between the lockout, intractable negotiations over arena deals, and intense scrutiny over whether the Habs coach and GM must be bilingual, much attention has been focused away from the game of hockey itself.  While resentment of the presence of politics, economics, or culture within what we like to think of a realm of play is understandable, ties between sports and core features of society cannot be unravelled.  We may choose to shy away, but awareness of those ties can give us control when the perceived contamination of sports by societal issues leads us to feel as though we have none.

Because humans have always imagined their sports as representing their most valued social characteristics and aspirations, direct resemblances between politics, economics, culture and sports can be traced far back into history.

Ancient Greece, birthplace of modern democracy, was known for a liberal approach to life and for enlightened politics in which citizens joined together in discussion and decision making over community affairs.  Contours of this participatory philosophy and other societal features were grafted onto sports practices of the Classical Greek era.

Echoing Greek politics, values of fair play and equality in competition were taught to students in physical education classes in the national education system and were also intricately applied to events in the ancient Olympic Games.  Exemplifying additional sports-society links, ancient Greek athletics displayed core social values through their public enactment of rituals that characterized Greek religion.  Greek athletics were not merely about physical fitness.  The organization of sports highlighted revered social priorities.  Participation signalled honouring of the gods as well as efforts to bring divinely granted good fortune to the community.     

Whereas participation, fairness, and religious practice were fundamental virtues of society and sport in ancient Greece, the organization of ancient Roman sports was directly reflective of the core economic and militaristic dimensions of that great civilization.

The Emperors of Ancient Rome routinely used the wealth they accrued from imperial and economic success to please their citizens with the public provision of material opulence and national holidays of leisure.  The culture of conquest and economic extravagance was replicated in Roman sports festivals that featured gladiatorial fighting by paid performers before audiences that were permitted to gamble on outcomes.  Thus, in an advanced commercial and militarily robust society, sports took the form of orchestrated entertainment publicly celebrating the spectacle of violence in amphitheatres throughout the Roman Empire.

In one final example of the constructed connections between core elements of society and sports, hockey in Canada provides a familiar illustration.

As a game originally played outdoors on ice, and that historically showcased tough physical play, hockey not only models the reality of a cold physical environment but also the strength required by Canadian communities to thrive within their geographic contexts.  Parallel to the requisite physicality, hockey players off the ice are also valued for their humility, politeness, and generosity.  When they find these character traits in the everyday comportment of their favourite players, Canadians locate in hockey a particular approach to social conduct and political affairs that many argue distinguishes their culture from that of their neighbours to the south.

This brief history shows that modern sports activities are not merely by-products of society, against which a human group’s politics, economics, and culture collide from time to time.  Rather, society and sports are deeply intertwined, with the latter often deliberately built as a stage on which core features of the former are publicly expressed.

But, if it is really a society’s prized social philosophies and values that are showcased in sports, why should conflicts arise over these features at all?
 
As current tensions in the US remind us, societal values reflect the aspirations of many of its members at the same time as they can exclude the preferences of some.  Serious disagreement over political, economic, or cultural policy can result in social unrest, but this is part of an unavoidable continuous process in which citizens of free societies move between stability and change as they work through defining and institutionalizing their social priorities.  Due precisely to its role in expressing society’s values, there is no escaping the fact that sports is involved in social dynamics that are almost as likely to stir up debate and contestation as they are to promote collective agreement.    

So, just as a political doctrine or an economic policy will not represent the aspirations of all members of a diverse society, the deliberate presentation of some of these features in sports will necessarily promote the interests of some citizens more than others.  This was clearly the case in Greek athletics as women, non-aristocratic males, and slaves were excluded from participation in Olympic competition just as they were from the deliberations of the vaunted first democracy.  And, while fighting and hitting are widely appreciated as reflective of a Canadian style of play, there is also an increasingly restive segment of fans and media pundits willing to speak out against their presence in the game.  

The promotion of a society’s core values contributes to making sports an emotionally compelling experience for its fans.  As fans in Montreal know well, when those values lack full citizen endorsement, the potential for acrimony is always there.   

In the context of the ongoing hockey lockout, what does a consideration of the nation-building functions of sports offer to counter the intense frustration that hockey fans currently feel towards the NHL and the NHLPA?

With knowledge of the relationship between sports and society, the first suggestion is to accept that there is no mystery to the hockey lockout, or to the tactics taken by both sides, and to view it as tied to historic battles over the terms and possibilities of our society’s economic system.  Shaped by and expressive of fault lines that characterize capitalism, the NHL is advocating owner or manager control over the conditions of work while the NHLPA is defending a more cooperative model of economic affairs.  Fans and pundits appear surprised by owner and player greed, but limited restriction on material acquisition is endorsed by the private enterprise economy and by the culture in which it operates.  Despite claims to the contrary, the lockout is a stage on which owners and players are performing societal deliberations, and intense disagreements, over core societal economic principles.

Recognizing the economic values being showcased in the lockout leads to a second suggestion that fans work toward developing specific positions on what is required to resolve it.  It is common to hear that both sides are to blame, but this is a non-position that sidesteps the possibility of forming an informed judgment.  Beyond displeasure resulting from missing the games, or from a lost salary if one’s income depends on the NHL, frustration is also created by confusion over which side’s policy ambitions are most unjust.  Once they see the lockout as similar to management-labour battles waged in their own professional fields, fans can more easily identify the policies advocated by the two sides that require immediate reform in order for the business of hockey to resume and return to being healthy once again.        

With a defined perspective, a final suggestion is for fans to join the deliberations by taking action.  This can mean writing letters to the NHL, the NHLPA, or to specific teams to challenge the details of their stances.  It can take the form of organizing online communities to pressure corporations that do business with the league or the players.  It can also mean developing innovative projects, such as mobilizing to punish the NHL and the players when they return or appropriating popular symbols of hockey to get people involved in social priorities more important than arbitration rights, HRR, and ‘make whole.’  The fans’ power lies in their pocketbook and in their passion, interest, and time.  By communicating clear preferences on the issues, by withdrawing support unless priorities are changed, or by channelling their frustration into either pressure tactics or needed public involvement, fans can use their power during the lockout to get things done.

Because fans are both valuable members of their communities and citizens, seeing hockey as a battleground for a society’s political, economic, or cultural direction need not instil fear.  Just as sports will always be used to express official societal agendas, fans have the power and the right to get involved in the process.  Involvement will not only help to ensure that the games are organized and played as the fans would like, but it would also mean that their communities and their societies are being built according to the visions that are closest to their hearts.           

Monday 15 October 2012

Hockey Enforcer + Twitter = More Than Just A Rant

In this piece, published on the All Habs online hockey magazine, I go beyond most mainstream sports media and blog accounts in unpacking the Krys Barch Twitter outburst against the NHL owners.

While most media coverage either questioned the significance of Barch's comments or challenged the player's judgment for suggesting that fans feel sorry for him during the hockey lockout, I explore how Barch's position of marginality in the NHL may allow for additional interpretations of the meaning of his words.  In addition to providing insights into the status of solidarity among the players, I suggest that the Barch Tweets give insight into the particular anxieties of the NHL fighter as well as supply an opportunity to assess the role of new media in fan involvement and mobilization vis-a-vis the ongoing NHL lockout.

You can read the online version here.  

Krys Barch, Messages From The Margins

By Avi Goldberg

There has been a fair amount of debate surrounding the Krys Barch Twitter rant from last Saturday night and whether there was any big picture significance to the thoughts of a marginal NHL player.  Judging from the media coverage of the incident, in which the analysis has mostly alternated between slim and scathing, skepticism reigns.  Taking Barch’s marginal status a little more seriously, however, provides an opening for deeper interpretation.  Since people on the margins of social contexts have vantage points of their surroundings that are not as available to everyone else, I would say that the Barch comments do contain some important observations that are worthy of further discussion.

The most obvious significance of Barch’s Twitter talk pertains to the NHL labour negotiation. 

Collective negotiations between two sides in a dispute require that both parties demonstrate solidarity to the public and to each other.  The recent Jimmy Devellano diatribe against the players not only showed the challenge of keeping members of a group in line but also that the owners appear to be steadfastly united in their resolve to resist the players’ claims.

While the fine levied against Devellano provides evidence that Gary Bettman wields a heavy hand in keeping the owners quiet, Donald Fehr’s efforts to forge a new culture of unity among the players has also been noted.  We know that many of the owners have the means to wait things out, but in going rogue, Barch alerts us to the potential that exists for more economically marginal groups of players to speak out against the defined interests of the NHLPA should the cost of lost income become too hard for them to bear.

Beyond lockout politics, a second insight arises from asking what the Barch comments might reveal about the particular anxieties of players like him in today’s NHL.

In referring to the pain his body has endured, his consumption of alcohol, his concern for his ability to provide for his growing family, and in his insinuation that the owners are taking away his ability to do the job he loves, Barch’s pleas put health, safety, and existential threats to hockey’s enforcers on uncomfortable public display.  Not withstanding the influence of alcohol, what would lead him to want to do that?

To establish his credibility, Barch made explicit linkages between the work experiences of hockey fighters and those of other blue collar workers.  While this comparison aims to draw empathy by highlighting the especially wide gaps in privilege that separate the fourth line hockey players from the owners, it may also have been delivered as way to publicly rationalize the on and off-ice stresses and coping strategies that distinguish hockey enforcers from their more widely serviceable teammates and union brethren.

Interpreting Barch’s remarks as expressing a pre-emptive effort to normalize his hockey job does not require logic to be stretched too far.  With acceptance of the fighter’s role as valuable in today’s NHL not nearly as secure as it used to be, in addition to losing their income, enforcers are hovering in a perceived position of weakness. 

A final insight relates to the role of new media in the current version of the lockout.

Is digital media allowing fans to exert leverage on the hockey negotiators in the same manner as protesters are believed to have used online networking to gain new opportunities to shape domestic politics during the Arab Spring?  Or, can the potentials for rapid and wide dissemination of player sentiment on the internet be harnessed to push the league into compromises that it otherwise would not have felt pressure to make?  Does Barch’s Twitter commentary, and its immediate repercussions, yield any tentative answers? 

Getting ordinary people to leave their routines to act in support of a cause requires more than just anger.  Without leadership, strategy, incentives, peer pressure, prominent allies, and meaningful bonds between would be foot soldiers, the translation of anger into effective action usually does not occur.  Had the tweets been written by Sidney Crosby or Claude Giroux, and had they been accompanied by a call for fans to take coordinated action against the NHL, perhaps a new media mobilization potential could have been initiated.  Because they were authored by a relatively marginal hockey figure, with limited public prestige and influence, they have had little traction.  They can be classified as nothing more than one digital narrative of complaint among many others.      

Digital media are currently providing opportunities for fans to communicate with each other about their frustrations and to independently express their individual opinions about the lockout.  Conditions can change, but despite recent claims to the contrary, the deepening of this digital interaction is currently containing the anger to the blogosphere and the twitterverse rather than channelling it in opposition to its perceived source.

Krys Barch was understandably taken to task for tweeting that fans should empathize with athletes who risk losing the potential to continue to earn millions of dollars a year, but our inability to relate to his claims of economic vulnerability is not the only message here.  Seeing him as a player whose specific hockey job may be on the line, and who publicly vented his fears through a communications medium whose independent power to wield influence can easily be exaggerated, Barch’s tweets may signal the anxiety he feels about his ability to control his own life as much as they reveal his anger over the owners’ refusal to agree to the players’ terms for concluding a new CBA.

The Culture of Hockey Fandom

In this piece, published on the All Habs web magazine, I take exception to the notion that the fans of hockey would be foolish or pathetic if they were to return to support the NHL at the end of the current lockout.  While hockey, and sports in general, can be rightly criticized for its various excesses, it also provides numerous avenues of meaningful social, intellectual, and leisure activity for its fans.

Influenced by sociological theory addressing the role of culture in bringing members of society together, I defend the fans against charges that there is something obscene about the dependence they have developed on their sports and on their participation within hockey fandom communities.

You can find the web version of the piece here.  

Cheering For the Fans

By Avi Goldberg

In the early days of the NHL lockout, much attention has been directed towards hockey fans.  Talking points have ranged from accusations that Gary Bettman takes the fans for fools to suggestions that the lockout is an opportunity for them to wean themselves off their obsessive involvement with a sports business whose economics are too unseemly to deserve their time and money.  A shared theme is that hockey fans are irrational, both for loving their sport so much and for returning so quickly when it is temporarily taken away from them.  Accompanying these views is the insinuation that fans should stay away when the lockout ends.  There are compelling reasons why this outcome will not, and arguably should not, happen.

Sport in general, and hockey in Canada in particular, must be viewed as part of a society’s way of life, or culture.  While culture exists to guide members of a group, we give the elements of culture multiple meanings in addition to their intended functions.  Just as religious practice can mean more than worshipping a higher power and mobile phones provide experiences that surpass the convenience afforded by carrying a tool to makes calls, fan involvement with hockey creates significant routines that transcend tracking wins and losses of favourite teams.

Above all, hockey is a social experience in which fans join with friends, family, and sometimes with strangers in bars or via the internet, to participate in the action.  There is no doubt that the plays, points, and outcomes matter, but there is much more to it than that.

Given the comfort that comes from being with others, joking and laughing with them during the games, and from sharing food or drink at the same time, it can be credibly argued that fans willingly pay the price of admission just to be able to experience group connection that all humans need.  Hockey, as experienced through its multiple platforms of activity, is a significant source and locus of everyday social belonging for its fans.

Second, many fans are routinely involved in hockey because it enables them to exercise their minds in creative ways.  When fans debate the greatness of the players, argue over issues like fighting or blindside hits, or when they dissect the strategies of coaches or GMs, they engage in cognitive stimulation that has positive social effects.

Fans may not always get to express their passions at the workplace or even at home, but when they do it over hockey, they contribute their unique perspectives to the discussions that are ongoing within their communities.  Telling and sharing of stories help communities to imagine their togetherness.  Fans connect with hockey because it allows them to weave their own ideas into the narratives that circulate and shape the identities of their social groups.

Finally, while some dismiss the leisure experienced by hockey fans as something that distracts them from activities that are of true importance in life, the legitimacy of fan emotion should not be denied.  Creating everyday fun through hockey fandom is but one of many ways that networks of individuals carve out spaces of autonomy for themselves within the confines of modern society.  Far from being a crass distraction from the pursuit of an authentic quality of life, the pleasure of everyday fan experience is both intrinsically valuable as well as a meaningful by-product of choices that society members make to author the terms of their own social realities.

Because it is an outdated notion to only see the pleasures of the so-called higher forms of culture as being uplifting to members of society, it is unfair to reject the emotional roller coaster ride of fan life as a mere waste of time. 

With hockey providing so much richness to the everyday lives of its fans, is there any logical reason to think that the current lockout could, or should, encourage fans to stay away once it is finally resolved?  

One recent interpretation suggests that the lockout represents a clash over ideologies in which the owners are fighting to apply the economic philosophies they promote in the wider society to the NHL.  From this reading, it could be argued that should fans be drawn into an ideological battle, the potential exists for a mass exodus from the game in response to the imposition of an economic system in hockey that violates their own values.

Of course, for this to actually occur, hockey fans would have to be as engaged in the affairs of economic philosophy as the owners are.  Given, however, the sense that fans and pundits are united in their disdain and indifference towards the intricacies of the positions advanced by both sides in the dispute, the implications of the fight over competing ideologies appear not to be grabbing fan attention this time around.

Fan mobilization away from the NHL, to either advocate for or against the implementation of particular economic principles in hockey and/or society, is a highly remote possibility.

With ideological matters far from their hearts and minds, hockey fans are anxious for the players, the teams, the games, and the meaningful cultures of their fandom to return once the lockout does come to an end.  Given the legitimate ways that engaging with hockey gives meaning to their lives, there is nothing irrational or foolish about it.

Saturday 22 September 2012

Dissecting the Yunel Escobar Shakedown Press Conference


The Following post is contributed by my colleague and friend, Randy Schnoor.  Randy is a sociologist who specializes in issues in the study of sexuality.  He is also a huge baseball fan and, like many of us, was glued to his set during the press conference that followed Blue Jays shortstop Yunel Escobar being caught having placed an anti-gay expression on his eyeblack during a game last week.

Responding to what he views as a communication event in which the meanings of communication were highly unstable and incomplete, Randy gives his interpretation of what was said and needed to be said about Escobar's actions and intentions, the Blue Jays organization and manager, and current efforts to address and remove homophobia in sports.

You can contact Randy directly with your comments or feedback:  randal.schnoor@primus.ca 

Homophobia in Baseball: the meaning of words with “no meaning”

By Randal F. Schnoor

The press conference with Yunel Escobar regarding the homophobic slur on his eye-black was fascinating. There seemed to be a gap between the questions and answers. Escobar was not able to articulate what he meant by his actions. His words had no meaning. The reporters did not seem to understand how this is.  Let me try to fill in the gaps.

Latin American society is at a different stage of acceptance/abhorrence of such homophobic slurs. It is a clash of cultures. Escobar said the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong historical period. As a result, he was forced to endure a fierce scolding in public by his GM and others.

Why did Escobar not seem to understand what the fuss is about? It is because homophobia is part of the underlying structure of much of Latin American society. Especially among males. From Escobar’s perspective  it would be roughly equivalent to saying “you are a spaz” or “you are a bum”. A light rip against others. That is how lightly the word “maricon” (faggot or pussy) is taken in some parts of latin American society. It is like teenagers saying today that movie was so “gay”. In other words it was a crappy, cheesy movie. The word is accepted by some as a legitimate descriptor.

Escobar got caught in the cross-hairs of time and place.

This is not to argue that Escobar should be excused. Quite the contrary. Homophobia in sports is a real issue. Words matter. They do have a meaning. They reflect underlying inequities and power relations. They shame others into staying in the closet. Escobar deserves what he got.

When Blue Jays Manager John Farrell was asked whether there is homophobia in the baseball locker-room. He quickly denied it. This is not a helpful response. It is inaccurate. There is an underlying sexism in male sports locker-rooms which favours tough heterosexual males. Males desperately want to pass the hyper-masculine test. Their success with women help validate their manliness. If one does not fulfill this ideal then one must be the opposite: a fag or a pussy. This is the ultimate insult. These values are so much part of the culture of the male locker room that it is possible that Farrell does not “see” it. We don’t notice the air that we breathe.

Things are improving in sports. The “you can play” campaign is a great first step. Much more is needed. We will reach the next stage when an active major league ball player finally becomes comfortable enough to be openly gay. I predict this will come in the next five years.

Let’s see.

Professor Randal F. Schnoor, Ph.D.
Sociologist specializing in the study of sexuality
York University
Toronto

Wednesday 5 September 2012

My Memories of Jeff Cormier

Jeff Cormier was a sociologist and a very close friend.  We met while the two of us were grad students in sociology at McGill.  In our time together there, we shared many serious and many more not-so-serious professional and friendship experiences.  While he was efficient and productive as a scholar, and was on his way to having a successful academic career, Jeff had a range of esoteric interests and befriended people from all walks of life.  His unique combination of intelligence, curiosity, generosity, and humour drew many folks to become friends with Jeff.  

On September 7, 2007, Jeff Cormier passed away.  To commemorate five years since Jeff's death, I have decided to post the eulogy I wrote and delivered at a memorial service that was held at McGill.  In the eulogy, I did my best to honour Jeff's memory by telling typical stories of my friendship with him.  My hope is that those who knew Jeff, and maybe a few who never did, will read this and be reminded of the kind of warm, wacky, and compelling human being he was. 

‘Cormier’

Since many of us simply called him ‘Cormier,’ that is how I will refer to Jeff today.

I was a PhD student here at McGill with Cormier.  He and I were interested in many of the same topics in sociology.  We were never in a class together because Cormier started his studies a few years before I did, but this did not prevent the two of us from becoming friends.  In the next few minutes, I am going to tell you a few memories of my friendship with Cormier during the McGill years.  I already know that most of you, who were also friends with Cormier, will recognize aspects of your friendship with him in the stories that I recount.

One of the funniest things about my friendship with Cormier is that, if I reflect back on the first couple of encounters I had with him, I never really thought that it would have been possible.

The first time I met Cormier, I got a very bad impression.  I stumbled into the TA room early in my first semester in the program, I think 822A in the Leacock Building, and saw this guy holding court with what I assumed to be a group of other graduate students whom I had not yet met.  Maybe they were even undergrads.  There was a brief introduction, but I really did not like Cormier.  Why did I not like Cormier?  I didn’t like Cormier because he was this big guy with really long hair who seemed to be very charismatic and animated in his conversation with the others.  Durkheim, an early sociologist, suggested that the bond between like and like cannot be as strong as that between unlikes, and since I also had long hair at the time and since I was also known to be somewhat charismatic with my peers, when I saw this guy looking like that and making the others laugh, I just didn’t like it.  Who would want to be friends with a charismatic guy with long hair?

Cormier was a very good hockey player, and I think my second encounter with him came after a weekly game at the McConnel Arena that the sociology and geography graduate students used to play back then.  I did not really know the guy that much and, after the game, I found myself standing around with him in the lobby of the arena as we waited for the others to emerge from the dressing room.  We had a short conversation then and, if memory serves, one of the topics that came up was teaching.  I told Cormier that I was pursuing a PhD because I wanted to teach one day.  Cormier, so much taller than I am, looked down at me, shaking his head, and said something like, “Avi, you think that as a teacher you have something interesting and enlightening to bring to your students.  Your students will want to get good grades.  The two things are not compatible.”  “Who was this guy and why did he say these terrible things?” I asked myself.  That Cormier was so smooth on the ice, but who would want to be friends with a guy who dispenses such disheartening advice?

We didn’t start out as friends.

Strangely, though, as the years of grad school progressed, things really changed for me and Cormier.  The more encounters I had with him, the more I found Cormier’s advice to make some sense or to be kind of funny.  There was a certain charming irony in the fact that he was into political sociology and loved Trudeau, Gellner, and Charles Taylor, but that I found him to be so apolitical.  I experienced hilarity in the way that he would come into my apartment, head straight to my book shelves, and be genuinely tickled to examine some of my new selections, and I was intrigued by the fact that he was a roadie for a local band.  There were engaging conversations at meals—a few at his apartment with Julie and many at Amelio’s or at the Vietnamese place at Les Cours Mont Royal—and there was banter, uproarious but always witty banter, in the locker room at the weekly hockey game.  We loved to make up nicknames for the profs.  Steve Rytina was ‘Stevie Awry,’ Roger Krohn, ‘the Artful Roger,’ and John Hall, well, John was simply John.  Cormier admired John Hall as much as a grad student can admire his or her favourite professor.

Cormier and I had become friends after all. 

Cormier worked hard while he was at McGill.  He worked hard with Axel.  He worked hard to complete his degree under the guidance of Suzanne.  He always seemed to be working.  He often had an article he wanted to share.  He always had something intellectual cooking with Philippe.  He was serious about sociology.  He seemed to know where he wanted to go with this academic thing.  I noticed how hard he worked and, in seeing this and reflecting on myself, I thought that I would never make it because I don’t, I can’t, work as hard as this guy does.  One day Cormier said, “Avrum” (by this time he would sweetly call me by my full first name) “I treat it like a 9 to 5 job.  I work all day and when I leave the library I leave the work behind.  The next day at 9 I start over again.”  Thinking that I was so clever, I responded to Cormier, “Cormier, I will never succeed at this, I will never be able to work hard enough, I don’t have the Protestant work ethic like you do!”  Cormier looked at me and laughed like crazy.  He laughed that laugh where you think you must be the funniest person alive.  I thought he laughed because he knew it was true, he had the Protestant work ethic.  After he laughed, Cormier looked me deep in the eyes and said, “Avrum, I’m Catholic.”  I never knew if he laughed then because I thought he was Protestant or because he thought the joke was truly funny.

I am going to wrap up my storytelling now by sharing two quick, but my most favourite, memories of Cormier from those days.

The second last memory occurred when Cormier, Jimmy Kennedy (another grad student), and I were hanging out in a different TA room, it was near Suzanne’s office but I don’t actually remember the room number.  Jimmy and I had been talking recently about Cormier and we both mentioned that we could not get over this guy’s laugh.  He was out of control when he laughed.  Everyone knows it.  Everyone!  Jimmy and I were so into Cormier’s laugh, that when we sat chatting in that TA room, without really planning to do it, Jimmy and I found ourselves laughing intentionally just to draw Cormier into laughing too.  It started and it went on and on and on.  Jimmy and I just kept laughing and Cormier laughed even louder.  We were like school children.  I was sure we were disturbing Suzanne.  We put it on so we could derive enjoyment from hearing him laugh and Cormier was totally unaware of what we were up to.  That just made the whole thing funnier.  Cormier, hearing this story now, would probably say that Jimmy and I were taking the piss to him.  We were.  We did it out of affection.

My final memory is of when, even though Cormier was a political sociologist who seemed to me to be apolitical, I saw him unexpectedly one day at a very political event.  It was not long after I came back from my fieldwork in Israel and I was still all fired up.  There was a major downtown rally in support of Israel and there was a small counter-rally organized by those who wanted to stick up for the Palestinians.  I went to check this out because this was what I was studying.  I was most surprised, part way through the action, to hear my name being called, and to look beyond a fence separating the two sides to see Cormier.  “Why was he here?,” I asked myself.  That question quickly became irrelevant.  What is really important here is that, after I made my way to him and after we exchanged a few thoughts on what we were in the midst of, Cormier told me something that was so great.  No one ever knew what Cormier was doing, what projects he was involved with, even though he did a lot.  I could not have predicted what he was about to say, but he told me, right in the middle of Israel versus Palestine in downtown Montreal, that he got a tenure-track job at King’s University College at Western.  The racket of the demo faded to me.  He looked so proud.  He looked so pleased.  I was so happy for him.  I was so happy that he looked so clearly happy with what he had accomplished.  The demonstration was just the same old same old.  Cormier’s news made it a really wonderful day.

I told you at the beginning that I would present to you my memories about Cormier, the guy with whom I originally never expected to be friends.  As with many memories, I cannot be certain that I got the timelines, or even all the details, 100% right.  What I am certain of is that the final two memories I shared with you—about Cormier’s beautiful propensity to laugh and about the quiet pride and pure joy he expressed when he told me he landed the job—revealed the qualities that Cormier displayed in abundance.  Those are the qualities that enticed me, and so many others, to spend time with him.  Those are the qualities that will always come to mind when I think about my dear departed friend.