ABSTRACT
Athletes and sports teams are ready symbols of groups, cultures and jurisdictions; in demographically diverse states, national teams evoke national unity. But what happens when a country’s best athletes are forced to work in another country and are barred from playing on national teams in international competitions, so that they cannot contribute to the narratives of national community? While one can cheer them from afar through the mass media, the fact that they perform their dramatic feats elsewhere – they are ‘owned’ by foreign capitalists – legitimates powerlessness and colonial status. That was my concern in the 1960s and 1970s when I took up the case of Canadian hockey. Then as now, the highest form of the game was controlled by the National Hockey League (NHL), a corporation located in and primarily interested in the American market.
I have always loved hockey. In fact, until my father turned me towards the Olympic Games, I always wanted to be a professional hockey player. But as a teenager growing up in the 1950s, and then as an athlete meeting players and owners at sports banquets in the 1960s, it was hard to turn a blind eye to the abuses in the game – the exploitation of players, the wanton encouragement of fighting in flagrant violation of the rules, the deliberate policy to deny players education, and the head-in-the-sand approach to sport science, all during a time when the fortunes of Canadian teams in international competitions were sharply falling and the NHL refused to allow its players to help. So when I had an opportunity to work as a researcher for the Hockey Study Committee of the National Council of Fitness and Amateur Sport, I jumped at it. And when the recommendations of that Committee were swept under the carpet, I made an effort to bring them out into public attention.
The 1960s were a time of heady nationalisms in English-speaking Canada, Quebec, and the First Nations, in the political economy, in education, in the arts and sciences. I strongly identified with the various Canadian expressions of nationalism. The ambition was not to control others – the aggressive form of nationalism that has been so costly throughout modern history – but to assert our own voices and to forge a more equitable and humane Canadian society on the basis of our own needs and desires. I became active in the ‘Waffle Movement’, a caucus within the New Democratic Party that believed that without strong, democratic state institutions we could not shape our own future, took part in the public debates about the future of Canadian society, and sought to connect sport to those debates. This paper is one of the first of those efforts. It was published in a collection entitled Close the 49th Parallel, etc: The Americanization of Canada after a painting of that name by Greg Curnoe, a painter and friend who sought to do the same for the visual arts.
