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Happy birthday, Fred
Mar. 2nd, 2010 02:23 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -1. High today: 2.
What I will always remember from these, the most awesome Olumpics in the history of humanity, is the presentations of the broccoflowers.
That and Sidney Crosby messing up the flag. It is a remarkably unremarked-upon fact that Sidney Crosby is, like Wayne Gretzky before him, a remarkable dork.
The whole Olympic hockey thing is so odd--so hard to gauge just how much anyone actually cares. Obviously a lot of the players care a lot, but just as obviously, for the NHLers, the Olympics is not the big show. No little boy imagines himself scoring the winning goal in the Olympics (at least, outside the couple of weeks when all that exists is the Olympics), although plenty of little girls probably do. As for being a "fan"--if you're a Thinking Sports Fan, you can never completely escape the creeping feeling that there's no good reason for you to be attached to your team. But as a fan of a club team, you are at least involved in a narrative. You can try to work up a Team Canada narrative, but it's too discontinuous.
All the delirious Canadian jingoism reminds me of the line of Kojeve's that he wanted to reconstitute the Roman Empire as a soccer team (or something like that). It has gotten concerning listening to people go on about what these, the most awesome Olumpics in the history of humanity, mean for the awesomeness of Canada, but then I think, well, maybe it'll just confine itself to sports. I know I'm not the only one eagerly awaiting the first post-Olympic poll. (Now here's an excellent example for Searle's point about tautologies not necessarily being meaningless: either Michael Ignatieff supports the Canadian hockey team or Michael Ignatieff supports the Russian hockey team. Gotta hand it to Jack Layton and Olivia Chow for getting themselves front-and-centre in the "Toronto bar crowd" shots. ETA: or, um, maybe not.)
What the Olympics show up to me more than anything else, because of the range of sports and the obvious differences in how competitive they are, is the fact that the more you dominate your sport, the less meaningful it is to dominate your sport (which is the generalization to be made from the threat to kick women's hockey out of the Olympics: when two teams are laughably better than anyone else, it doesn't say anything good about those teams; it only says something bad about the state of the sport). This goes beyond sports (but it always goes beyond sports): for the competition to be meaningful, you need competitors worthy of yourself, but a competitor truly worth of yourself is one with whom you're equally matched, and if you're equally matched, who will win is a matter of chance, and so it would be silly to take pride in winning. (If it's silly to take pride in winning, is it silly to be happy about winning?) The more competitive a sport is, the more likely the outcome of a given contest will be decided by accident. (Seriously, to give skiers just one chance to go down the hill, and skaters just one chance to land a jump--what could show more clearly that the point is to determine a winner and not to demonstrate who's best? What in the world is it like to be one of these athletes competing regularly and this one race happens to be the one for the Olympic medals--this one race that's not really any different from the one you were in last month or the one you'll be in next month except that the conditions are worse because they can't postpone it or cancel it? (Shades of a rainy October night in Philadelphia....) What could be more absurd? But that's life. One little slip and you've lost all the marbles and it doesn't matter if you wouldn't do it the next hundred times in a row; those marbles are gone. That's life.)
I think it's because I'm a baseball fan that I'm so bugged by the "It's Our Game" business with hockey. You used to get this, you still get it a bit, that Canadian cities have no business having teams playing America's Game. But here's the thing about hockey being Canada's Game: hockey is Canada's game because nobody cares about it as much as Canadians do. If Americans cared about hockey as much as Canadians do, Americans would be better at hockey than Canadians are--about ten times better, you'd reckon. If hockey is that great a game, you should want everyone to care about it. If everyone doesn't care about it that much, you should probably consider the possibility that it isn't worth caring about that much.
Oh yeah, one more thing: they should have skills competitions for medals in hockey. One medal for twenty players in a two-week tournament? A single skier can get four medals for going down the hill for, what, a total of half an hour maybe? C'mon! Hardest shot! Target shooting! Goalie goals! Medals for all!
What I will always remember from these, the most awesome Olumpics in the history of humanity, is the presentations of the broccoflowers.
That and Sidney Crosby messing up the flag. It is a remarkably unremarked-upon fact that Sidney Crosby is, like Wayne Gretzky before him, a remarkable dork.
The whole Olympic hockey thing is so odd--so hard to gauge just how much anyone actually cares. Obviously a lot of the players care a lot, but just as obviously, for the NHLers, the Olympics is not the big show. No little boy imagines himself scoring the winning goal in the Olympics (at least, outside the couple of weeks when all that exists is the Olympics), although plenty of little girls probably do. As for being a "fan"--if you're a Thinking Sports Fan, you can never completely escape the creeping feeling that there's no good reason for you to be attached to your team. But as a fan of a club team, you are at least involved in a narrative. You can try to work up a Team Canada narrative, but it's too discontinuous.
All the delirious Canadian jingoism reminds me of the line of Kojeve's that he wanted to reconstitute the Roman Empire as a soccer team (or something like that). It has gotten concerning listening to people go on about what these, the most awesome Olumpics in the history of humanity, mean for the awesomeness of Canada, but then I think, well, maybe it'll just confine itself to sports. I know I'm not the only one eagerly awaiting the first post-Olympic poll. (Now here's an excellent example for Searle's point about tautologies not necessarily being meaningless: either Michael Ignatieff supports the Canadian hockey team or Michael Ignatieff supports the Russian hockey team. Gotta hand it to Jack Layton and Olivia Chow for getting themselves front-and-centre in the "Toronto bar crowd" shots. ETA: or, um, maybe not.)
What the Olympics show up to me more than anything else, because of the range of sports and the obvious differences in how competitive they are, is the fact that the more you dominate your sport, the less meaningful it is to dominate your sport (which is the generalization to be made from the threat to kick women's hockey out of the Olympics: when two teams are laughably better than anyone else, it doesn't say anything good about those teams; it only says something bad about the state of the sport). This goes beyond sports (but it always goes beyond sports): for the competition to be meaningful, you need competitors worthy of yourself, but a competitor truly worth of yourself is one with whom you're equally matched, and if you're equally matched, who will win is a matter of chance, and so it would be silly to take pride in winning. (If it's silly to take pride in winning, is it silly to be happy about winning?) The more competitive a sport is, the more likely the outcome of a given contest will be decided by accident. (Seriously, to give skiers just one chance to go down the hill, and skaters just one chance to land a jump--what could show more clearly that the point is to determine a winner and not to demonstrate who's best? What in the world is it like to be one of these athletes competing regularly and this one race happens to be the one for the Olympic medals--this one race that's not really any different from the one you were in last month or the one you'll be in next month except that the conditions are worse because they can't postpone it or cancel it? (Shades of a rainy October night in Philadelphia....) What could be more absurd? But that's life. One little slip and you've lost all the marbles and it doesn't matter if you wouldn't do it the next hundred times in a row; those marbles are gone. That's life.)
I think it's because I'm a baseball fan that I'm so bugged by the "It's Our Game" business with hockey. You used to get this, you still get it a bit, that Canadian cities have no business having teams playing America's Game. But here's the thing about hockey being Canada's Game: hockey is Canada's game because nobody cares about it as much as Canadians do. If Americans cared about hockey as much as Canadians do, Americans would be better at hockey than Canadians are--about ten times better, you'd reckon. If hockey is that great a game, you should want everyone to care about it. If everyone doesn't care about it that much, you should probably consider the possibility that it isn't worth caring about that much.
Oh yeah, one more thing: they should have skills competitions for medals in hockey. One medal for twenty players in a two-week tournament? A single skier can get four medals for going down the hill for, what, a total of half an hour maybe? C'mon! Hardest shot! Target shooting! Goalie goals! Medals for all!
