On Frozen Blog

Have you ever wanted to convey all the passion in your hockey heart for the game you cherish to a buddy who just doesn’t get it, and felt meager to the task? Well Andrew Podnieks’ A Canadian Saturday Night: Hockey and the Culture of a Country is both poignant expression of his very hockey heart as well as a marvelously considered reckoning of his country’s congenital love affair with hockey. It is also a beautifully illustrated keepsake for your coffee table. It’s not meant so much to be read cover to cover as coveted and intermittently perused, which in a sense makes it a fantastic light read for summer, when we miss our game so.

While offered from the uniquely Canadian vantage, Podnieks’ prose lovesong actually achieves more than its aim of capturing and illustrating Canada’s puck passion: it fairly invites the reader to testify that Canada’s passion has actually been broadly exported and replicated across oceans and borders. Still, Podnieks is proud of the hold hockey has in his homeland. “You cannot live in Canada without being touched somehow by hockey,” he writes. “And, yes, that is a good thing.”

The work is a set of 65 single-page snapshots from the hockey heart, accompanied by photographs that are alternately historically significant, clever and amusing, and artistically apropos. They have a flair about them, too; how better to convey the odd but enduring allure of ‘Slapshot’ than with a tight shot of Todd McFarlane’s fabled action figures?

Podnieks’ subject(s) matter is meant to convey the fullest range of hockey’s hold on his country, down to the tradition of NHL fans fashioning their own Stanley Cups out of aluminum foil and brandishing them at playoff arenas each spring. In his preface Podnieks powerfully foreshadows his reverence for, and acute insights into, hockey’s storied culture:

“Hockey is not just sport and it’s more than a passion; it is an ingrained part of who we are, how we live our lives and go about our business. Grown men play the game until they are too old and their bones too brittle to endure the rigours of skating . . .

“There is an artistry to the game, both a ferocity and a beauty that make hockey appealing. It’s creative but played at breakneck speed . . . It’s very much a thespian game that develops character and plot . . . It is a game that includes the mentally strong and the emotionally weak, the sportsman and the cheap-shot artist, the hero and the villian, the brave man and the coward.

“Hockey players walk among us — they are like us. They are not overly tall like basketball players; they are not beefed up like football players or juiced up like baseball players. They are essentially average size and weight. What separates them from us is that they are in meticulous physical condition and have incredible speed and strength — and they have an indefatigable will to win that the average person simply does not possess.”

Podnieks knows better than to take his subjects too seriously. Within his rumination of the role beer has played in the live and broadcast consumption of hockey, he writes, “hey, is it just coincidence, or is a beer bottle shaped just like the Stanley Cup but without the bowl on top? Or is it the Cup that’s shaped like a silver beer bottle?”

A sampling of his other subject treatments:

• House-League Jacket: “A young player cherishes it like it’s his birth certificate, and with it he is accepted into the country called Hockey . . . The jacket authenticates a child’s on-ice endeavors . . . You wear it to tournaments, to special occasions. You never wear your hockey jacket while playing road hockey or doing yardwork . . . It’s essentially a boy’s tuxedo . . . You wear it to school to identify yourself as a hockey player, and in Canada that identity gives you instant credibility.”
• Grapes: “Cherry got in his hottest water yet when he said the majority of visor-wearing players in the league were French Canadian, a comment that upset many. No one mentioned that, statistically, he was absolutely correct . . . Regardless of controversy, Cherry understands the hockey code, the game played underneath or outside of the rulebook . . . Cherry is something most Canadians are not. He is in your face, unafraid to speak his mind, and seeks the approval of no one . . . he loves the game as he loves life.”
• Sharp Skates: “A quality skate sharpener is like a barber, tailor, or mechanic — find a good one and you keep him for life.”
• “CAR!”: “who in this country has not heard the peal of kids’ voices screaming, “Car!” as a car approaches and slows? The ball carrier puts his foot on the ball to stop play officially and maintain possession. The goalies pick up the nets like they’re gates at a border crossing and move to the side of the road to let the car pass. They then move their nets back to the middle of the road, and the game continues. You do this until it gets dark, or until the guy whose ball it is says he has to go home for dinner, or until you’re simply too tired. The next day, you play some more.”

“This book is an attempt to define the collective history of the sport,” Podnieks writes. He’s collected hockey history all right. I hope he finds more of it.