Rogers Place area before the first game of the World Junior Hockey Championships in Edmonton on Aug. 9.TODD KOROL/The Globe and Mail
It’s hard to say how many empty seats take a big-time sports event from “disappointing” to “pathetic.” But let’s agree that the world juniors currently going on in Edmonton has hit that low bar.
On some afternoons, it has looked like the only people sitting in Rogers Place are cleaners waiting for their shifts to start. When the home team played in the round robin, the place looked just full enough to be sad.
Everywhere else, the world juniors has been blurred out of the national conversation. The scores are reported like soy futures. Even the on-air banter is calibrated not to sound too much like an endorsement.
In other countries, public scandals are an opportunity for a healthy screaming match. But in Canada, they are treated like that time Uncle Joe may have killed a guy in a bar fight. Keep it in the family. The less said, the better.
You’d think ignoring a problem would be difficult when the problem is being nationally televised. But give Canadians credit – we are world-class deniers of embarrassing problems.
All this willful indifference may have convinced Hockey Canada’s executives that they’re in the clear. That was their transparent goal – to run and hide. Not forever, but until the worst of the heat was off.
The closest shelter from the hounds in Ottawa and the media was this tournament. It may have seemed to them an act of outrageous fortune that last December’s iteration was delayed by COVID, giving the gang a temporary summertime hideout. Maybe a few of them thought this was a sign.
If so, it’s the only sign in sight. Along with the fans, the ads are also absent. Here’s a shocker – few companies want their product name included in the same thought as “alleged sex crime.”
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So nobody’s talking about it, nobody’s going to it, nobody’s making bank off it and nobody cares what happens. Well, some people still care, but they have to keep quiet about it lest they offend the other hockey parishioners.
As spectator events go, this tournament is trending in the same neighbourhood as public executions and warehouse fires.
Many will see this is as a blip. They’ll think usual programming resumes after all 400 official investigations have been concluded, a few people torched and all the malfeasants named and shamed. And maybe so. Where there’s a buck to be made, there’s always an excuse.
But it might be more useful to think of this another way, as a thought experiment. What if what we are watching (or not watching) isn’t the temporary humbling of the world juniors? What if it’s the Ghost of Hockey Future? What if this is what the national sport could look like in a few years if people keep telling themselves the game is too big to fail?
Try working it backward. How would you kill a much loved, ubiquitous cultural practice?
First things first – turn the sacred to the profane. Take something fun and easy and turn it into a big, complicated business.
People love the things corporations make, but they hate corporations. This is why Gary Bettman is booed every single time he appears at a rink anywhere. People love NHL hockey, but they hate the NHL. It doesn’t make sense, but these are the little lies we tell ourselves to get by.
Once you’ve made it into a business, monetize the living daylights out of it. Ram it down people’s throats. Get so out of hand with the branding that when you run out of adults to hawk, you start turning high-schoolers into salesmen.
It’s often said, but not said enough – the hype around a tournament like the world juniors is unique to Canada. No other country gets this worked up about a bunch of amateur teenagers competing internationally. That includes every other country participating in the world juniors.
This fixation with constantly asking ourselves “Whither Canadian hockey?” then using kids as bellwethers to divine the answer, is a bizarre compulsion.
But lots of countries have what we’d think of as strange practices. This is ours. And it was sustainable as long as no one thought too hard about it.
An alleged sex assault and the way in which it was steered away from public attention is a reason to think very hard about it.
Why did people have such a visceral reaction to this story, when others just like it pop up in every news cycle? Because this was a family matter. We’re all implicated by hockey.
Until recently, we thought that was a good thing. Even if you’ve never played the game, or watch it that much, you don’t have to be a hockey obsessive to be part of hockey. You just have to be Canadian. That’s why “Our Game” is such a potent tag line.
But that cuts both ways. When hockey takes a wrong turn, the implication becomes an accusation. Is this your fault, too? You were there for the good times. Why didn’t you see the bad ones coming?
In its characteristically avoidant way, this is what Canada is wrestling with now. Is this all of our faults? And if so, what do we do about it? How angry should we be?
The mistake would be thinking that just because you can’t see that anger, it means the good times will resume. This sort of stuff doesn’t just disappear behind a gold medal. Without a deep cleaning, it festers. In Canada, because we’re all so reticent, you won’t see it happening until the corrosion causes a collapse.
Then one day you hold another tournament that no one cares about. And another. And another. And all of a sudden, what was a flag-waving ratings juggernaut is a wrung-out marketing dishrag.
If I were in a position to make decisions about Hockey Canada’s future, I wouldn’t waste a ton of time worrying about it. That organization is already doomed.
Based on what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, I’d be more worried about hockey’s future, full stop.