Red and his colleagues know everything about the Rangers. They know where the players live. They show up at practice sessions to roar encouragement and abuse. They study the yearbooks and the charts. They can remember—and will tell you, with very little urging—every mistake every player made in every game over the last four seasons.
– Jeff Greenfield, “Hockey Fan-Antics, or . . . Why the Rangers Will Never Finish on Top or Win the Cup!” in The Greatest Hockey Stories Ever Told, page 106.
This quote comes from one of the best articles I have ever read about the NHL. (You can read it in its entirety on Google Books, pages 103 – 112.) It’s winsome, witty, and bitingly ironic. And, for better or for worse, it captures the attitude of most hockey fans and journalists.
What this quote shows best, in my opinion, is the attitude that some fans and many journalists show bring to the game. Win, and we’ll love you to death and sing your praises all night long. But make any mistake or lose a game, and we’ll turn on you, call you names, complain about your play on local radio shows, and generally make your life hell.
But do we love hockey? You betcha.
It feels like many hockey fans and journalists don’t really love hockey any more. They have an affection for it, they like the way winning makes them feel, but they have no tolerance for subpar play. Every hockey city in North America (and some of the pretenders) confidently believes that its team needs to be #1. Worse, most of the people in these cities are bandwagoners: when the going’s good, they cheer the team on. But when things are tough, they’re the ones throwing tomatoes and rotten eggs from the sidelines.
Of course, every team needs to aim for that #1 spot. Every team needs to value winning. But I don’t believe that its the right of fans and journalists to demand that their team always be the best. If they really loved their teams, they wouldn’t devolve into cynical naysaying so quickly. They have every right to criticize, but if all that’s you ever do when the team is down, can you really say that you love hockey? Aren’t you just getting off on victories?
Hockey fans (not to mention players) should know that being a good loser is more important than winning. For example, if there’s one thing that stands out about Trevor Linden (the recently retired ex-captain of the Vancouver Canucks), it’s that he knew how to lose. As they raised his number to the rafters this past December, all I could think about was how he’d never won a cup. But that didn’t bring him down in my estimation, nor did it make him a failure, because the way he played in the 1994 playoffs and the way he lost was an invaluable lesson for me and thousands of other youngsters who had their hearts broken by Mark Messier and the New York Rangers.
Winning is wonderful, but it’s not everything, and it’s certainly not a human right. It’s time we hockey fans remembered that.
Tags: hockey fans, Jeff Greenfield, New York Rangers, Stanley Cup, Trevor Linden, Vancouver Canucks
5 January 2009 at 1:36 pm
What would you say about a team (*cough* Chicago Cubs *cough*) whose entire appeal is its losing record?
5 January 2009 at 3:55 pm
If you only love a team because they’re losers, then something’s probably wrong with you.
Knowing how to lose/fail is absolutely necessary in life; being a loser (or, one who aspires to nothing more than failure) would be a mistake.