Ottawa Senators take to the ice in front of a near empty Scotiabank Arena before NHL hockey action against the Toronto Maple Leafs, in Toronto on Jan. 1.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Many of us haven’t been flying much lately, but I guess we’re all assuming that fist-fighting is just part of the deal now, right?
At some point, one of your fellow travellers is going to lose the plot and hit someone. Hopefully not one of the flight attendants. You’re going to need all of them in tip-top condition if the violent insurrection becomes a general mêlée halfway over the Atlantic. If the Daily Mail is anything to go by, all major airlines ought to start including boxing tape and a roll of quarters with the uniform.
People are angry. They get even angrier when they’re stuck in a metal tube for several hours. This is basic math.
Maybe that’s why nobody’s all that surprised or even that bothered that the Russian world junior hockey team was tossed off its flight out of Calgary the other day. The players wouldn’t wear their masks correctly. According to one report, some of them were trying to cadge smokes in the back of the plane. The Russians’ unruliness may or may not have unfairly got the Czech team (which wears similarly coloured outfits) tossed as well. The scamps.
What’s to happen to them now? Nothing. The Canadian authorities seem happy to be rid of them. The International Ice Hockey Federation has promised an investigation (which I assume will go like this: ‘Was anyone hurt? No? Then I’m going to bed for three months. Call me when this is either over or we’ve gone broke. Whichever happens first.”)
Sports has reached the stage of COVID-19 that could either be called widespread anarchy or perfect libertarianism. Take your pick.
The rules aren’t gone, but nobody has any faith in them any more. The rules change from day to day. Which means there are no rules. There are only official-sounding excuses to do whatever it is you’d like to do. Once again, sports leads the way in this latest phase of the pandemic.
A few players got the bug? No problem, we’ll play with fewer guys. Too few guys? No problem, we’ll delay the games a few days. Too many delays? No problem, we’ll amend the collective agreement so that we can hire some new guys. The new guys got the bug? No problem, the old guys are nearly back.
You got NBA teams out there shaking hands and exchanging friendly greetings before the tip with their own teammates. These guys look as though they’re meeting for the first time on the floor. That isn’t pro sport. It’s the plot line for the last act of a Disney picture.
Need to cancel a game? No problem, we’ll move that back a few weeks. Need to cancel a whole bunch of NHL games? No problem, we’ll flake on the Olympics. Need to ban all fans from the arena? No problem, we’ll just play in your building.
When the rules stop functioning, the orderly flow of information stops as well. You can’t tell anyone what’s going on until you’ve figured out how to massage that info so that you can’t be blamed. What used to be called crisis communications is more like a communications crisis these days.
When the plug was pulled on the world juniors, all anyone knew was that a few people on Team USA had tested positive. It wasn’t until well afterward that the IIHF announced that the outbreak was widespread.
They’d booked all these kids into hotels stuffed with other travellers. The whole bunch of them mingled together in the halls and elevators. And that didn’t work as well as a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory? What a shocker.
If you’re 28 years old and you make twenty-five grand a day whether you go to work or not, this sort of thing isn’t going to bother you. As Omicron roils three major leagues, you haven’t heard much complaining. And these guys love to complain.
Athletes are quiet on this issue because if one option is chaos, the other option is unemployment. So they got coronavirus? So what? Every day, some pro or another reminds us they all stopped fearing this thing a long time ago. All it is to them now is an administrative annoyance. As long as the money tap is still turned on, what do they care when or where or in front of whom they play?
But if you’re 17 and you’ve just come halfway around the world to play for free in a hockey tournament that makes a lot of money for people who are not you, you might be a bit more put out that it’s all gone sideways.
Which is how the Russians end up making a show of themselves on a flight out of Alberta. This is a collective middle finger given to authority (any sort) in the gladiator pit of our current moment – the long-haul commercial flight.
The question is who’s getting their cues from whom? Is sports encouraging the public to say one thing and do whatever the hell they want, or the other way around?
I suspect it started out one way and has now settled into a feedback loop. We’re all doing this to each other. The responsible authorities – whether that’s the NHL or local public-health officials – have stopped pretending anyone listens to them any more. If they bother yelling, they know they’re doing it into the void.
The only order anyone’s interested in any more is a slow trudge forward. Governments don’t take their cues from experts any more. They take them from society at large, from lived life as opposed to computer modelling.
When the leagues pushed on through Omicron, it emboldened political authorities to do the same.
A great many of us don’t get the option to hole up at home. It’s hard not to notice that the people most in favour of shutdown are always the ones who can most easily afford it.
If the grocery-store clerks, garbage men and nurses have to get out there and do their jobs in order to survive, it’s good to see that just a few people on the far-more-fortunate end of the socioeconomic spectrum were doing the same thing.
That’s one good example sports continues to set. Everything else they’re doing is an example of how far you can get in this life if you say one thing and then do whatever you like.