By Avi Goldberg, Featured Contributor, All Habs Hockey Magazine
MONTREAL, QC. — As we roll to the trade deadline of this shortened hockey season, it’s hard to believe that only months ago many of us were cursing the NHL and the players for depriving us of our game. We can easily recall the anger we felt during the lockout, but we may blush as we admit just how easily we let it evaporate when the action returned. Following-up on the effects of the lockout on the fans, I have gone to two known lovers of hockey and to one expert in human behaviour. At the risk of opening old wounds, I use their views to help make sense of how fan bitterness appears to have been forgotten so soon after the lockout came to an end.
Everything is peachy now, but last December and January sports headlines in Canada screamed that the lockout was pushing fans away from hockey. Fifty-eight percent of one survey’s respondents reported not to care whether the lockout would be settled. Almost half of those participating in another survey indicated that they were less likely to attend a game when the work stoppage would end. And, in a poignant cris de coeur published days before the season began, a Canadian rock star and National Post columnist painstakingly argued that if fans were pissed off at hockey, it was with good reason. A shared conclusion was unavoidable: this time, there would be no easy fix to the damage that the lockout did to the fans.
If you were disgruntled during the lockout, you didn’t need media reports to confirm your feelings. The anger likely grew out a couple of main sources.
The first cause was the sense that the lockout was a fight between millionaire players and billionaire owners, and that neither side cared about its consequences for ordinary fans. This view was held by Roy MacGregor, member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, and Globe and Mail writer who published a haunting piece discussing a research study that found a steep decline in levels of passion expressed by Canadians toward their national game.
MacGregor describes himself as “loving hockey too much” but he also believes that a wedge has developed between the NHL, its players, and the fans.
“In this last lockout, I came to the disturbing realization that both sides live in bubbles,” MacGregor said. “The owners believe they’re entitled to make millions off the fans’ love of the game and the players now have reached the point where they accept that they are also millionaires. There was very little understanding of the third partner, and the fans were completely slapped in the face and ignored.”
After greed, a second source of anger grew out of a particularly Canadian critique of the NHL under Gary Bettman.
Montreal based actor Bruce Dinsmore wasn’t bothered by the posturing surrounding NHL-NHLPA negotiations, but he did hold a “Canadian point of view” of the lockout as representing a tipping point that unleashed frustration he felt for some time.
“For me, the NHL was no longer in the business of hockey, they were in the expansion business,” Dinsmore said. “[I had] an anti-Bettman sentiment based on, ‘dude, stop taking the game to non-hockey markets, especially when you’ve got Winnipeg and Quebec and possibly Halifax and Hamilton!’ Canadian hockey fans were mad and it was predicated on the fact that there’s these teams in these markets that just don’t belong. I was totally in love with the [NHL] product but totally against the business side.”
MacGregor and Dinsmore provide dramatic illustrations of media pronouncements on fan disaffection. But, once the games returned, Canadian hockey fans didn’t hesitate to fill their local arenas. How was heavy damage to the NHL brand actually averted?
According to Matt Loveland, a sociologist at Lemoyne College in Syracuse who specializes in the study of religion and in survey research, prognostications of lingering fan anger made on the basis of the research done during the lockout may have been exaggerated.
“Surveys capture a moment in time, and demand that [respondents] quickly present a coherent self,” Loveland says. “Like any conversation you might have, answers depend more on the immediate emotional context than on an unpredictable future. If somebody is ‘angry’ in the moment, then they are going to give the ‘angry’ response to every question. It’s reasonable to expect those attitudes might change over time, especially if situations change.”
Aside from specific sub-groups, Loveland is not surprised if the type of fans that would have expressed anger in an anonymous survey came back when the lockout ended. Loveland’s view is partially based on the precedent of returning fans after the 2004-’05 lockout. It is also significantly influenced by dynamics that tend to characterize connections between fans and their teams.
“Sports fans have an emotional attachment to their sport and team,” Loveland said. “Some invest a lot in that relationship, and it is a relationship. Some fans think of their attention to the team as an obligation. They watch on TV and pay money to attend games, even when the team isn’t playing so well. They get an emotional buzz out of being part of the relationship. It’s love!”
A love thesis not only explains the resumption of the connection at the present time, Loveland suggests, but also the depth of the hostility that was expressed not so very long ago.
Roy MacGregor’s assessment of fan anger reflects this notion. He even hints at infidelity as leading fans to say they wouldn’t come back.
“I certainly believed there would be repercussions and backlash,” MacGregor said. “You can’t jilt your lover twice, and that’s really what the NHL and players were doing. This was the second time around, and I think any lover has the common sense to bugger off and tell you to ‘go fuck yourself’ at some point.”
Bruce Dinsmore also describes anger that can be seen as the byproduct of a fan-hockey love relationship. The relationship was so strained late last year that his buddies went totally silent, refusing to vent their anger during dressing room banter prior to their weekly games. Dinsmore described his pals’ unplugging as expressive of a “very typically male way” of avoiding feelings.
Refusing to remain silent himself, Dinsmore channelled his anger into organizing a Canadian-wide boycott of the first NHL games at the end of the lockout. The boycott tactic provides yet another illustration of the love thesis. Dinsmore envisioned it as a way to gain the attention of the partner he held responsible for the dysfunction that plagued the Canadian fan-hockey relationship.
“I said to my buddies after hockey one Saturday evening, ‘what if Joe Blow hockey fans could raise money to convince paying hockey fans not to go to the first game,’” Dinsmore described. “That was the nut of it and I fell in love with that idea of emptying the buildings, just to snap that little mole’s head around, ‘Mr. Bettman!’”
With few tools available for fans to punish the NHL and the players, Matt Loveland sees the expression of anger and apathy during the lockout as reflective of what anyone might do to a partner when a relationship is violated. “The silent treatment often begets the silent treatment,” he said.
Assuming the love thesis fits, questions remain. Have fans truly forgiven the NHL and the players? Are they committed to staying in the relationship for the long haul?
Despite early evidence to the affirmative, Roy McGregor remains unconvinced.
“You have to factor in a number of things,” MacGregor said when commenting on fans filling the buildings thus far. “I would factor in January. It was dark, it was cold. The evenings were long and there was nothing to do. If season’s tickets go wonderfully well for every team in the summer, then I will certainly be willing to say, ‘well, they came back.’ I haven’t [yet] seen any proof that they are going to come back with the same kind of passion and commitment and love for someone that has jilted them twice.”
Bruce Dinsmore always planned to come back to hockey after the lockout, but he says he’s not contributing to the relationship in the same way as before.
“For me, now that [the NHL] is back, it’s way less important than my Friday outdoor game with buds,” Dinsmore said. “[The NHL] is not as important as the freeing aspects of the outdoor game, where we have some measure of control, where we’re organizing it, where we have a blast, where we skate our butts off, where we’re superstars, and then we go to the bar.”
For sociologist Matt Loveland, all of this confirms his sense that, without looking at different aspects of love, research studies focusing on abstract feelings or on brand loyalty alone couldn’t provide a complete picture on whether fan disenchantment with hockey would lead to a breakup.
“It’s easy to say you’ll not go to games when there are no games to go to, but it’s hard to stay angry with someone you really love,” Loveland said. “[The lockout] did end, so I’d expect the relationship to move to a new state. Maybe not it’s original state, but probably not a state of anger, either.”
The relationship is reconstituted. At least for now.
(Feature photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes)
Follow me on Twitter @AviGoldberg