Like everything else, hockey is mostly about doom. Decay and death are inevitable, omnipresent, omnipotent -- and sometimes, hockey men transcend these with speed and power and grace and skill and will. And, sometimes, they embody them, and initiate us into the mysteries of limitation, decline, and lack.
In 2004, the Colorado Avalanche franchise was coming off a couple consecutive disappointments, and was mourning the loss of its iconic goaltender, so it was time to rebuild. Or reload. Or something. Anyway with furrowed brow did the Avs survey the available free agents, and with money did they entice a magnificent pair to the cosy environs of the Front Range: brilliant skaters by the names of Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne, 16 all-star games, 736 goals, a pile of awards between them. ESPN commissioned a documentary series on the team, drawn by the stars' charisma and the prospect of a world-historical kind of season.
Selanne had long been known as one of hockey's fastest skaters, with the hand and brain skills to match his unequalled feet. He came to the Avs with 436 goals in his 901 games, and zero evidence of decline, having played all 82 games each of the previous two seasons, scoring nearly 30 each year. Not quite the point-a-game man he had been in each of his first ten seasons, but he was, after all, 33: no longer a young kid, but still a powerful, productive skater with adorable tousled hair and a firm jaw line.
It was a disaster.
While he did manage to appear in 78 games, his speed and strength on his skates were obviously completely gone. A bad knee reduced him to fourth-line duty, and he proved unable to finish or distribute at a high level, notching a paltry 16 goals and the same number of assists. He'd once been impossibly swift, and the end of his career had, clearly, come equally swiftly.
The next season was taken from us all by powerful men who decided the existing economic order displeased, and so they did decree that in their stately pleasure domes would obtain a "salary" "cap" -- really a "salaries" cap -- such that each team would have the same maximum amount to spend on player payroll.
Thus it was that Selanne mounted a thoroughly hopeless comeback campaign, back with his old team for a mere one million dollars, a far cry from his 5-million-plus season in Colorado. The well-regarded Finn would, no doubt, take a bit of a victory lap, and everyone could enjoy watching him end his career in a familiar uniform. Any actual hockey performance would of course be impossible: the end had come, and all that was left was to face it with some dignity and class.
That was nine full seasons ago. Over those nine seasons -- or, to put it another way, over a second full career, for most players -- Teemu Selanne played another 572 games, and piled up another 232 goals, including two more 40-goal years, and won a championship. He has just retired, as close to a universally beloved figure as the game has known.
Hockey, like everything else, is shadowed by and susceptible to doom. But life often finds a way and rebirth is inextricable from death. Teemu Selanne has a posse.
Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs is proof positive that savage, chiseling, union-busting nightmares sometimes finish first. This viper followed seasons of all-conquering team success by being one of the prime movers behind a lockout that annihilated half an entire season, thereby effortlessly obliterating the line between "hardliner" and "complete dipshit". Fuck him.
(Song Choice by Our Own Bogdan von Pylon)
Bruins' Achievements That Weren't Important Enough for Jeremy Jacobs to Refrain from Nuking a Season, in His Billionaire's Wisdom
2008-2009 Vezina + Jennings Trophies for best goaltender + lowest goals-against average for a season
2008-2009 Jack Adams award for best coach
2008-2009 Norris Trophy for best defenseman
2010-2011 Stanley Cup
2010-2011 Vezina Trophy for best goaltender
2010-2011 Conn Smythe Trophy for best player in the playoffs
2011-2012 Selke Trophy for best defensive forward
Exactly how successful do these masters of the universe have to be before they stop fighting for the rules to be changed ever more in their favor? Exactly how much do you have to win before you stop cheating?
—Collision, who probably shouldn't've told his boss to eat shit
here there is none that can guide me aright in the pathless wood.— ... If I've had to howl 'neath the lashes of fate, trust me to find folks I can lash in my turn— ... The corpses all laugh. But their laughter is forced; ... Enough for the day is the evil thereof,— and further: Discount not thy funeral.—
Not long ago, the NHL team from Colorado—dead last in the league—hosted the one from Calgary, second-to-last. The game itself was uninspired but inspiring, in that it led well-regarded veteran goaltender J-S Giguère to go ham on his squad after the game. All this has been more-than-adequately covered elsewhere, of course. Over to The Classical, however, I came at things from a slightly different angle: Losing Again: A Play in Verse. It hosts probably the piece of art I'm proudest of having had a hand in ever: Bogdan von Pylon's pitch-perfect reworking of Raymond Pettibon's cover for Black Flag's Jealous Again.
(Jiggy's eyes are the fountain of the bitter and searing lye of tears)
Aside from the best art you will see today, the piece trickles from a lot of different sources. One is our own semi-tradition of bets here at CtC: Bogdan von Pylon and I renewed our whimsical wager of Shopping of Photos by him or Crafting of Poems by me in the event of "our" team losing. "My" team lost, naturally, and so I began to guide my pen across page—carving and wheeling like the plodding skates of an Avalanche defenseman getting beaten wide—then other, darker roots of influence manifested and from the thick taproot of menace and despair began to bloom weird leaves. I thought of the faces of the goaltenders who worked that night, and thought of their losses and reversals: It instantly seemed that a few short stanzas were inadequate to the task of capturing the spirit of the thing, the meaning of this late-season trudge through the slough. The obvious solution to this perilous lack was a play in verse.
Probably this seemed very necessary because I have of late been reading Peer Gynt, in the aftermath, for all is aftermath, of an interesting staging thereof I attended with the Lady Noodles not long ago. It was, in the words of the program, "a hybrid Peer Gynt [combining] parts of ... three scores—Grieg, Schnittke, and Holloway—with a semi-staged multimedia production". The staging was somewhat light, playing much for laughs and eliding essentially everything from the third quarter of the book, which contains Peer Gynt's attempts to sell himself as a prophet, some still-disturbing scenes in a madhouse, and a sequence of actually horrifying cruelty on a ship. The book used for that performance did elide these sections, anyway. The rather superb Robin Holloway piece "Ocean Voyage" did seem to evoke/embody much of the tumult and sad human shittiness Ibsen built into those passages, though it was incorporated clumsily into the show, being very long and more than a little flow-breaking.
One of the primary themes of Peer Gynt is the frank evil causing/caused-by the philosophy demanded by the Motor City 5: "let me be who I am". This philosophy is of course ascendant now, and not merely in our politics! It has poisoned our writing, too. Essentially every writer within 10 years of my age sallies forth misunderstanding the lessons of confessional poetry/Lester Bangs/David Foster Wallace/Joan Didion/Herman Melville/whoever strikes you as what Ibsen called "Old fossil Highnesses who make it their pride to keep plebeian blots excluded from their line's escutcheon", and reduces every topic to "a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself". But these writers aren't Alice James, or Ibsen, or even Bangs, and the spring of self is stagnating badly.
It's here, sir, that one is oneself with a vengeance; oneself, and nothing whatever besides. We go, full sail, as our very selves. Each one shuts himself up in the barrel of self, in the self-fermentation he dives to the bottom,—with the self-bung he seals it hermetically, and seasons the staves in the well of self. No one has tears for the other's woes; no one has mind for the other's ideas. We're our very selves, both in thought and tone, ourselves to the spring-board's uttermost verge,—
And, well, fuck that. Since I wish to speak of the rough infinity of things more interesting than myself before I speak of myself, the formal play of a play in verse seemed Just The Thing. Plus the third and fourth influences plaguing, or maybe blessing, my every word; I speak, naturally, of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and of Thomas Pynchon—or at least I speak of the urge so potent in them to STOP
(Let's put on a show!)
everything and break into song. And so what was conceived as a pair of poems turned into a play in verse turned into a rock opera—or at least a musical. Which, again: you can read over at The Classical: Losing Again.
But why goalies in particular, you probably aren't asking. There are several reasons. First, as I learned from Manufacturing Consent—not that one, the other one—the name of the game is to try to build up an analysis of the whole structure of capitalism by looking closely at the shop floor; so why not start my look at the shop floor with a look at the goalies? (Charles Fort is instructive here: all life is connected and "One measures a circle, starting anywhere.") Second, if hockey itself be of interest, then surely goalies are of interest, for as one brilliant observer querulously asked "Is [the goalie] not worth between 50 and 60 percent of his [sic] team?"
Okay, so that brilliant observer was legendary goalie Jacques Plante, who perhaps is not the disinterested historian one would wish most for. Nevertheless, goalies do seem important. Third: their helmets are colorful and interesting and draw the eye.
Perhaps, despite all good faith and honest craft, the project failed. Perhaps the result was still and all more an autobiography than an analysis, revealing only my needy vanity, my own failure(s) and rotten (mis-)appropriations of the work of others as an attempt to reclaim what the world stole from me. Perhaps my foolish project is too much like Peer Gynt's, self-serving always, ignorant and arrogant, doomed to an inherent and meaningless uniqueness that can never be special; nothing more than my identity in prose form, a portrait of no more than a shallow and sickly self.
It's true—my grounding's by no means thorough, and history's wheels within wheels are deceptive;— but pooh; the wilder the starting-point, the result will oft be the more original.—
