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.