When Political Commentators and Journalists Double as Hockey Fans

For this piece, my first published on Habs Eyes on the Prize, I wrote about three public figures who spend their leisure time tweeting about hockey and the Montreal Canadiens in particular. I caught up to Andrew Coyne, Les Perreaux, and Emmett Macfarlane during the 2014 NHL playoffs. Each was paying attention to the exciting run the Habs managed to put together to get to the Eastern Conference Finals. You can view the original piece here. 

 

The Unexpected Habs Fanatics

While the real action is undoubtedly on the ice, we’ve heard quite a bit about Habs fans during these playoffs.

We've read about the religious fervour with which expatriate believers unite around the Montreal Canadiens. We've learned that the superstitions and neuroses that we thought to be unique to our own living rooms are actually universal features of the game-day experiences of fellow members of Habs nation. Finally, we've seen how the traditionally face-to-face act of collectively cheering on the CH is now increasingly practiced in digital space.

Forgive Habs fans if they've been panicking in this third round series against the New York Rangers, but even with tensions running high, it's been a thrill.

Now, there's nothing unusual about fans doing fairly typical fan things. But, as the Habs have gone deeper into this year's playoffs, I've also noticed unexpected partisanship emerging around me. From the Coordinator of my department who's closing e-mails with "Go Habs Go," to the Humanities professor who's talked my ear off about Thomas Vanek, people who normally shy away from the hype have exposed themselves as full-blown boosters.

I have many academic friends who'll keep their hockey passion on the down low out of a sense that sports is not serious compared the real life topics we're supposed to be dealing with in higher education. But, in light of the numerous Habs love reveals I've witnessed in recent weeks, I decided to explore this question in a little more detail.

In the age of Twitter, it's easy to locate people with particular interests, and it's from my own feed that I drew a sample of hockey fans with whom to talk. Similar to the normally closeted Habs devotees at my work, these folks address important social issues in their professional lives. Yet, they've also stood out for their enthusiastic hockey tweeting during the playoffs. I turn to them to explore the phenomenon of the unexpected Habs fanatic.

Readers of Andrew Coyne know that the Postmedia national affairs columnist is deeply engaged in Canadian politics. Those who follow him on Twitter also know that Coyne's not shy about defending the positions he takes against those who come after him. Though he admits he'd rather be chatting with those he knows personally, Coyne explains why he'll go back and forth with his critics on Twitter.

"People don't always get your point," Coyne said. "People tend to believe what they want to believe, but every now and then you run into somebody who you're able to disabuse of whatever preconceptions they had about either me or about the column. [Twitter's] useful sometimes to know how you're being perceived."

Debating Justin Trudeau's policy on whether Liberal MPs can vote their conscience in parliament on abortion is one thing, but trolling the proponents of advanced statistical analysis in hockey on Twitter is something else entirely. Then there's the commentary he provides on the Habs' ups and downs in the playoffs. Why is a prominent political commentator taking time out of his busy schedule to do that? Coyne explains how tweeting his hockey interest is a welcome release from writing about the big issues of the day.

"It allows you to show a different side of yourself," Coyne said. "There are bounds of tastes that apply to newspapers that are a little looser on Twitter. You might throw in a swearword that you wouldn't in a newspaper. It seems to be an understood norm of the place, and that can encourage a breezy informality. And, [hockey] lends itself to that."

Coyne was a Winnipeg Jets fan growing up. As the only Canadian team in the playoffs, Coyne says he's solidly behind the Montreal Canadiens.

Supporting his notion that political writers tend to enjoy sports, Coyne wasn't the only nationally published journalist I was able to find who's been revealing affection for the Habs via Twitter during these playoffs.

In the recent Quebec election, Les Perreaux, a news reporter for the Globe and Mail, was assigned the task of live tweeting the second leaders debate. Leading up to the event, Perreaux provided historical context by supplying 140 character highlights of debates from the 2012 election. That his replay resembled TSN's routine of showing the previous year's Grey Cup on the afternoon of the current year's championship game is no coincidence. Like Andrew Coyne, Perreaux enjoys alternating between news and sports in his public musings on Twitter. Hockey and the Habs make regular appearances.

"Hockey is an area I feel pretty free to say what I think," Perreaux said. "I don't have to have evidence that the Habs stink to say, ‘the Habs stink,' whereas before I can say Philippe Couillard stinks, I better have pretty solid reasoning to say it. Sport is a distraction, a leisure activity, a spectacle, and for someone in my job, it's a fun area to talk about."

Before he began to use Twitter to discuss issues he's reporting on, hockey was the subject Perreaux tweeted about most frequently. And while he thinks that too many people tweeting the exact same things during games can ruin interactions, Perreaux's personal investment in the Habs playoff fortunes and his work duties keep him involved.

"I will continue to observe play and games, and [tweet] things that happen on the ice," Perreaux said. "If the Habs continue on a run, there's going to be stories we have to do outside the actual games, [like] the buzz in the city or Stanley Cup fever. If they get to the final, we'll be doing stories everyday, so I'll be using twitter for that sort of hybrid news-sports."

It might not be all that surprising to find Canadian columnists and journalists publicly commenting on the Stanley Cup playoffs as part of their chronicling of current events. But, can the same be expected of folks in the ivory tower? Are my colleagues and their coming out stories an aberration or are many scholars experiencing & expressing a similar latent Habs fever? Twitter supplied me with an answer.

I first learned about Emmett Macfarlane due to the fact that his Habs tweets would frequently appear in my Twitter timeline on game nights during the regular season. Macfarlane, an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, studies the Supreme Court of Canada, and also writes on politics for Maclean's and the Globe and Mail. A regular participant in Twitter discussions with a network of political journalists and academics, Macfarlane won't hesitate to express his adoration for the Habs right in the middle of the high-flying conversation.

"I tweet about [hockey] because it's one of the things I'm passionate about," Macfarlane said. "Most of my tweeting is during a game, particularly big games, like in the playoffs. It's kind of neat to connect to other Habs fans online, or to get into debates with people who like other teams. A lot of the people in my twitter feed are tweeting about the game, and it's a shared experience in that way."

It's refreshing to hear a fellow academic be as unabashedly enthusiastic about a sports team as he is about the politics he studies, but is there no hesitation to mash the Montreal Canadiens with the Canadian Constitution in such a public manner? Macfarlane makes the balance work.

"I'm much more inappropriate when I'm talking about hockey," said Macfarlane. "There are people in academia who are conservative about seeing someone swearing or making stupid jokes about other teams. They regard it as wholly inappropriate, and even something that can damage your professional reputation. I don't personally buy into that. I am a fan of hockey, so I behave as a fan. I will literally tweet ‘YAAAH' when there's a goal, as if this is a remotely an intelligent thing to do. But, it's something that's one of my passions, so I enjoy engaging in that way."

In their public expressions then, all three unexpected Habs fanatics transition between the serious content of their day jobs and the joy that comes from following their sport. But, beyond tweeting the Habs, I also wondered what they thought about hockey's place in Canada more generally. Isn't hockey really just a diversion? Or, is it truly as vital to our nation as the CBC and Prime Minister Harper would have us believe it to be? These observers and storytellers of the national scene are in a perfect position to comment.

Though he certainly sees crossovers between hockey and real life affairs, Les Perreaux mostly views hockey as a distraction with limited societal stakes. Taking a different tack, Macfarlane and Coyne not only respect hockey's value to Canadian society, but they also suggest that its big picture significance is partially responsible for drawing them in.

"I think we're a little bit insecure about what makes Canada distinct," Macfarlane said. "We do so much comparing of ourselves to the United States, so we point to things like universal healthcare or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as things that make Canada special. I would put hockey in that class of things. In some ways it's analogous to what baseball is to Americans, but in other ways it's also reflective of us being a winter nation, a northern country. We do hold it in pride of place in that sort of cultural perspective."

While Macfarlane acknowledges that the Conservative Party has invested a lot in trying to leverage hockey into political gains, he also maintains that the sport is a legitimate and needed marker of Canadian identity.

Andrew Coyne agrees that hockey's expressive of Canadian culture, and he offers an inspiring take with which many of us would no doubt agree.

"Hockey crosses every boundary of identity politics," Coyne said. "All the supposedly immutable differences and vast gulfs that are supposed to separate the different languages, or the different races, or even the different genders, all of those get blown apart, and people just find a certain unity just playing a game for fun. That's a wonderful and sacred thing and, at its best, the game really does bring people together."

Coyne recognizes hockey's role as a great social unifier. Yet, true to his reputation as a bit of a contrarian, Coyne offers an additional view of the sport's importance in forcing Canadians to re-evaluate taken for granted views of their own historical and cultural sensibilities.

"It is not the peaceable kingdom caring sharing type of sport, it's just not in its nature," Coyne said. "When you see the game of hockey, you see a more accurate picture of what this country has been than a lot of the nationalist mythmakers would allow. It is violent, individualistic, spontaneous, freewheeling. We've colonized large sections of America with it, so the whole argument of cultural imperialism gets turned on its head. That's probably part of what appeals to me about it, [and] there's a part of me that finds that ruggedness of our forebears something to learn from."

It's clear that even unexpected Habs fanatics enjoy publicly supporting their team, and that they recognize varying degrees of hockey's social value, but one final serious matter requires attention. 

Can the Montreal Canadiens actually win this year's Stanley Cup?

"The stats people would say that Montreal is the odd man out amongst the last four teams in the sense that they were the least effective at controlling the puck all season long," Coyne said. "But, the fact that they've come this far shows that maybe statistics don't explain everything, and that intangible things like emotions and teams playing above themselves can also kick in."

Coyne's foray into the language and logic of fancy stats is impressive, but his prediction is basically a hedge. He's not alone in stopping just short of a clear declaration.

"My ability to predict hockey is much worse than my ability to predict what the Supreme Court will do, and I'm often wrong about what the Supreme Court will do," Macfarlane said. "I was nervous going in to [the Rangers] series, but I'm starting to feel that something special's going to happen this year. The Rangers are a good team, but I think the Canadiens match up well against them."

And, despite being closest to the ground in Montreal, Les Perreaux goes no farther than the others.

"I honestly don't know what's going to happen," Perreaux said. "Hockey's a weird sport. The stats guys are getting a bigger and bigger presence in how hockey's analyzed, but hockey has to be the most unpredictable sport. Anything can happen. To me, that's the crazy thing about hockey."

So, despite all their collective knowledge and opinions regarding the most important happenings in the country, the unexpected Habs fanatics' predictions about their team are surprisingly non-committal. Thus, even taking the highly serious nature of their professional engagements into account, maybe Coyne, Perreaux, and Macfarlane are not so different from fans like you and me.

"After the win over Boston, I suddenly [became] very excited," Macfarlane said. "But, as a Habs fan, being excited just makes you nervous. Are you getting your hopes up only to be crushed? It very much is a completely irrational approach to assessing these things as a fan I think."

Whether our Habs fanaticism is expected or not, it's the irrationality of it all that helps makes the ride so worth it for all of us.

Sociology, Twitter, & Fan/Media Engagement With Hockey

In this All Habs piece, I do a little sociology lite in an analysis of how fans and media pundits use twitter to chime in and debate NHL coaches. In response to announcements regarding prominent coaches who were given new hockey jobs during or at the end of this past season, I gathered a sample of fan and media comments on Twitter and developed four narratives that express the types of story lines told about hockey coaches. Digital media affects sports and fandom in complex and uneven ways, and this piece shows how hockey fans and media writers use Twitter to bring themselves to have symbolic control and involvement with NHL affairs and developments.  

Coach Opera

By Avi Goldberg

For fans of the Montreal Canadiens, one of the most compelling stories of last offseason was the repatriation of Michel Therrien as head coach. Though this development gave an academic colleague and me a surprise opportunity to employ a little humour in a fancy stats lite analysis of Therrien’s potential in his second go around with the club, many of us fans routinely enjoy observing the movement of coaches from one NHL gig to another. And, despite its abbreviated and intensified pace, or maybe because of it, this past season provided a handful of interesting developments to be written into the script of hockey’s ongoing coach opera.

To make some sense of it all, I’ve looked at this past season’s major coaching transactions in conjunction with a half-scientifically gathered sample of comments from the Twitterverse, and I’ve come up with four storylines that fans and hockey media pundits use to talk about NHL coaches. A comparative look at popular coaching storylines reveals a lot about the relationship between the perceived needs of NHL teams and the drama produced and consumed by those who follow the plotlines of their favourite team serials.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

Digesting That NHL Lockout Thing

In this piece, I present my thoughts on a few major dynamics I paid attention to during the suddenly resolved NHL lockout. On the very day I am posting this, hockey fans in Montreal and Canada are anxiously waiting for training camps to open and for the abbreviated 48 game race to the Canada Day Stanley Cup Finals to begin.  

 

113 Days of What, Exactly? The ‘Catelli’ Lockout

By Avi Goldberg

I know that we’re all sick and tired of the lockout. And, though it won’t be long before hockey fans in Canada get back into the routine of the games, many of us are also somewhat troubled by what we and local businesses and their workers have had to endure over the last 113 days. As we wait for the sides to ratify the new CBA, and for a feverishly short training camp to prepare for a feverishly short season, I’ve reflected and come up with five issues that summarize what I think went down. I will explore some of these issues again in the future but let’s hope that most of them can now be permanently put to rest.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

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.

Popular Sociology On The Air!

Twitter, NBC, & London 2012

Sadly, I hold the belief that sociology and the social sciences more generally are not held in high regard in the wider society.  Thanks, however, to my childhood friend, Duke Gent, who always said things like "the world needs people who study things in detail and share the products of their labour," I want to try to show people that sociological insights can be used to help think about our everyday lives in new, provocative, and helpful ways.  I was most fortunate to have the chance to do this on Monday, July 30 when I was invited by Dave Kaufman to join him and Jay Farrar on their kickass TSN990 radio show, The Kaufman Show.

In the segment, we spoke about the temporary suspension of Guy Adams' Twitter account.  The LA based correspondent for The Independent had his Twitter account shut down after he encouraged his followers to complain to NBC about the quality of their coverage of the London Olympics.  Twitter cited Adams' publication of an NBC executive's e-mail address as a violation of the social media site's User Policy in its decision to shut down his account.

Dave, Jay, and I discussed the significance of these events and I suggested that they reflected tensions between two differing logics of communication and community in the new media world.

Thanks so much to Dave and Jay for having me on the show.  Listen to the entire episode (and tune in each Monday night) or zoom ahead to my segment (starts around 1:45).  You can find the link here.