Hockey and Philosophy

Normand Baillargeon, Christian Boissinot, Scott Irving, Normand Baillargeon, Christian Boissinot

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780776622903
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Does hockey provide a better understanding of the differences between Canadian and Québécois nationalisms? Is there a fundamental relationship between the hockey arena and the political arena? What have we lost as a society in abolishing the tie game? Are salaries in the NHL really that outrageous? Is hockey more art than sport? Should hockey players be banned from using performance-enhancing drugs at all costs? Do goalies suffer from angst? Does our national sport have its own mythology and metaphysics? Do hockey brawls reflect our true human nature more than we would care to admit? And what would it be like if the great philosophers were to face off on the ice?

A team of philosophy and hockey buffs go deep with these fascinating questions and many others in this examination of a worshipped sport elevated to something akin to a cult. Accessibly written and peppered with humour, the essays in this book will charm specialists, sports fans, and everyone in between. Whether you're a fan of Richard, Gretzky, Crosby, Plato, Kant, or Kierkegaard, you're invited to be a spectator at this very special meeting of minds!

3rd period

Ethical and aesthetic issues

Eulogy for the Tie Game

Daniel M. Weinstock

There are no more tie games in the NHL. Not since 2005. The last tie game in regulation time dates back even further, to the 1982–1983 season. Within a few years, the tie game will have been relegated to the dustbin of our national sport’s history. I’ve searched far and wide but have found no one who has mourned its disappearance. It’s as though every last fan of the game implicitly agrees with the late US Naval Academy football coach Eddie Erdelatz, who, upon seeing that his team had tied with Duke University, famously expressed his frustration by saying “a tie is like kissing your sister.”

Despite the general lack of enthusiasm for tie games among the fans, and also despite the huge popularity of this crime against nature we call the “shootout,” I will defend the position that the loss of the tie game represents a major loss for hockey. I will do so in three stages. First, I will develop a normative framework that will allow us to evaluate the many rule changes made every year to NHL hockey. I will defend a position that sits between nostalgic purism, which condemns any change to the rules as an affront to the original purity of hockey as practiced since its beginnings, and revolutionary enthusiasm, which automatically praises any and all changes as inherently good. The position I will defend is called moderate progressivism. To put it briefly, I think that hockey, like all sports, has room for improvement, but that rule changes are improvements only if they bring the practice of the sport closer to its spirit.

Second, building on the normative framework I mentioned above, I will demonstrate how the mechanism used since 2005 to declare a winner after 65 minutes of play violates the spirit of hockey. This conclusion will be insufficient as a positive defence of the tie game; it will simply allow us to reject one specific method of tiebreaking. This section will leave open the possibility that other methods of declaring a winner may be preferable to keeping the tie. Finally, in the third section I will develop a positive argument in favour of the tie game. This requires me to outline what I see as the educational function of hockey. For better or for worse, hockey plays a part in the moral development of our young people (and their elders too). I will argue that the sport fulfils this function better with the inclusion of the tie game than without it.

I

Every year, NHL officials make changes to the rules of hockey. At the risk of oversimplifying, we can distinguish among three categories of rule changes.

1) Essential changes: Changes to observable practices in the game that, while they comply with the rules, push the game further away from its spirit or essence.

2) Protective changes: Changes intended to protect players from injuries that could imperil their careers.

3) Populist changes: Changes intended to increase the appeal of hockey in a market where it is bound to compete with other sports in attracting spectators and sponsors.

Hockey fans will instantly recognize these three categories and will not have much difficulty using them to classify many of the rule changes made in recent years. Having said this, I don’t think the boundaries of these categories are perfectly clear in all cases. Grey areas definitely exist, and any attempt to define these categories neatly in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is destined to fail. I will attempt to provide a preliminary description of each category using clear examples. Next I’ll show how they can sometimes come into conflict with one another (in other words, how a change that is justified for one end can come at the expense of a different end). Finally, I’ll propose a method for establishing priorities among the three categories when such conflicts arise.

Recent hockey history provides us with a good example of an essential change. During a playoff game between the New Jersey Devils and the New York Rangers, the forward Sean Avery of the Rangers turned his back on the play during a 5-on-3 power play for his team and began waving his arms and stick in the air to break the concentration of the Devils’ star goalie, Martin Brodeur. The Rangers scored, and Avery received no penalty. Apparently there was no rule in place to stop him from doing this, although everyone agreed that he acted in a manner that went against an “unwritten rule” of hockey. The following day, the NHL responded by creating what is now called the “Avery rule,” which dictated that this type of behaviour would thenceforth be considered unsportsmanlike conduct.

Why does this count as an essential change? Because anybody who watches a lot of hockey, either as a participant or as a spectator, can see right away that “you don’t do that.” It’s part of the implicit ethics governing players’ behaviour on the ice: there are some things you can do with your stick and other things you can’t. Most of the time these rules don’t need to be codified, as they form part of the ethos of the sport.

Let’s formalize this a bit by turning to one of the classic distinctions from the history of philosophy. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel made a key distinction between what in individual and group morality are termed Sittlichkeit and Moralität. (Philosophers are fond of saying that these terms are “untranslatable” because doing so increases their social capital. But they are perfectly translatable. The first term refers to a community’s customs, traditions, and mores, which are most often implicit and unwritten; the second refers to the explicitly formulated ethical rules.)

It’s well known that Hegel was one of philosophy’s great plunderers of ideas: specifically, he lifted the idea of Sittlichkeit from Montesquieu, who had formulated the idea of the spirit of the laws six decades earlier. Therefore, in homage to Montesquieu (who never got the chance to apply his ideas to hockey, a sport that wasn’t played in Bordeaux in the eighteenth century), I will refer to the implicit customs, traditions, and mores of the sport as the spirit of hockey.

Sean Avery’s action undermined the spirit of hockey. Because the incident went unpunished and his team scored as a result, there was a risk of setting a precedent that would be liable to further erode the spirit of hockey unless an explicit rule (a piece of Moralität) was established.

Let’s agree that a rule change fits into the category of essential changes if it seeks to protect hockey from practices and behaviours that could undermine its spirit.

Protective changes and populist changes are much more straightforward. The purpose of a protective change is simply to protect players against injuries, which, because the game is so fast and contact is allowed, could prematurely end a player’s career. The clearest cases have to do with the equipment players are required to wear. But other changes and proposed changes are intended to protect players too. For example, if the NHL were to adopt the automatic icing rule (i.e., not requiring that a player from the defending team get in front of a player from the attacking team), this would be to avoid the kinds of injuries caused by the epic races allowed under the current rules, with the attendant risks of terrible falls and vicious slams against the boards.

A populist rule is intended to make the game more exciting. While everybody knows hockey is objectively the best game you can name, it’s not always the most popular game you can name, especially in the United States, where it vies with other sports for the fans’ and sponsors’ money. Many rules are adopted with the sole function of making hockey more “saleable.” Some are specifically intended to increase the number of goals scored during games. I will argue that the shootout rule constitutes one example of this logic. Examples of rule changes made mostly or exclusively for populism’s sake include restrictions on goalie leg pad sizes and the rule prohibiting goalies from touching the puck anywhere behind the goal line outside of a very restrictive trapezoidal area.

I mentioned above that these categories don’t have clear boundaries. For every case that fits into a given category, there will be others that fall into a grey area of debatability. Is the elimination of the red line used to determine offsides an essential or a populist change? The much-hated “trap” strategy helped propel the soporific New Jersey Devils to victory in 1995, and this rule change was meant to thwart this strategy. Does trapping undermine the spirit of hockey, or merely the spectacle thereof? The issue is debatable. Personally, I feel that there is overlap between essential and populist changes, given that spectacle is a part of hockey’s essence.

If my proposed categories for classifying rule changes in NHL hockey have fuzzy boundaries, it’s because the ends that motivate them (the spirit of hockey, player safety, the popularity of the sport) sometimes come into conflict. For example, the speed of the game and the allowance of intentional contact both contribute greatly to the spectacle of hockey, but these are also factors at play in most serious injuries. Both should be constrained in various ways for the sake of player safety, even if this means the spectacle isn’t as rousing as it could be.

Similarly, populism can also clash with the spirit of hockey. I will argue in the following section that the shootout constitutes a prime example of this. But other conflicts can also arise.

We can imagine various ways in which these competing ends could be prioritized (or opt not to prioritize them). For example, an end might receive priority if it somehow served as one of the organizing principles of the different categories of rule changes. We could also be opposed to any change, regardless of its end. Conversely, we could see any and all changes as desirable, so long as they are justified in terms of one of these principles.

There are doubtless some nostalgic purists out there for whom the changes made to hockey since March 3, 1875 (the date on which the first hockey game was played according to codified rules—all seven of them!) have been a steady path of degeneration and decline. These people commit what one might term original sophism. This sophism consists of thinking that the essence or spirit of a phenomenon is fully and completely revealed in its first manifestation and that any departure from this historical origin therefore constitutes a loss. There is no shortage of cases exposing this as a sophistry. For example, democracy was still in its infancy when it first appeared in Greece about 2,500 years ago. It was a long way from achieving the ideals that lay dormant within it: notably, women and slaves were deliberately excluded from the political community. Many centuries would pass before democratic practices began to approximate the ideas embedded within the concept of democracy. Perhaps what is true of democracy is also true of hockey: loyalty to its historical origins is not the best way to be loyal to the spirit of the practice in question.

It would seem that nostalgic purism isn’t a viable attitude to adopt with respect to rule change processes. But if that is the case, then revolutionary enthusiasm cannot be the alternative either, as it fails to establish any priority among the three ends we’ve identified. Endorsing all ends at once can lead to contradictions. For example, if we choose safety as the priority, we may favour the protection of players by adopting the automatic icing rule. If on the other hand we prioritize populism, we may, in the name of spectacle, choose to defend the rule prohibiting goalies from leaving their zones and going after the puck in the corners, which puts skaters in the position of having to do faster defensive withdrawals and poses the very dangers that the automatic icing rule seeks to prevent (i.e., falls and violent boarding).

Only moderate progressivism, in which priority is assigned to one of the three motivations behind rule changes, can be justified. Why should moderate progressivism be required to prioritize essential changes as opposed to protective or populist ones? Because this is the only ordering that preserves the sport’s conditions of identity. Allow me to explain.

Suppose we gave progressive...