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.