The Grail

The Redwings won the Stanley Cup Wednesday night. This is the original cup, bought for $50 in 1892, with rings added for additional names. It's been punted into a canal, carried up mountains, left on the side of the road after changing a flat, visited home towns in Russia and been taken into the shower with Steve Yzerman and his wife. Babies have been christened in it. People are reluctant to touch it unless they've actually won it.

This is still an Arthurian game, played for a grail by helmeted knights, each with his own personality. Maybe the freeform nature of the game, unlike the ritual of baseball or the military infrastructure of football, allows more individual character to show through. There are good guys and bad guys, goons that play classical piano, ballet dancers of impossible grace and a shot like a bullet, character guys, actors who take a dive and check for blood, even professional "agitators" like Pat Verbeek, the "Little Ball of Hate", or Sean Avery, who used to be our guy in Detroit but has come into his own bringing life to New York hockey. I'm happy for him, actually; Avery was one of many great players in Detroit, but in the dismal swamp of New York hockey, he stands out more.

Like all proper Arthurian stories, hockey has noblity too. Great souls combined with great skills that never give up, gentle in victory, unyielding in defeat, the kind of guys that make a shot as they're falling down without a thought about catching themselves. These are natural aristocrats, like Yzerman and Gretsky and "The Little Professor", Igor Larionov, that even goons and clowns respect.

Pavel Datsyuk is one of these, my favorite of the young players who have replaced the generation of Steve Yzerman and the Russians, is here embraced by Scotty Bowman, the retired coach of the Redwings and still their scout. Datsyuk has also won the Lady Byng trophy for "the best type of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct combined with a high standard of playing ability'' two years in a row, and is in the running for the prize again this year.

Old Time Hockey, Eh?

Great fun on a New Year's day: the Pittsburgh Penguins (in their original uniforms) and the Buffalo Sabers playing outdoor hockey with 73,000 people watching and big fluffy flakes falling all around, dewing up the player's faces in something called the Winter Classic in Buffalo, New York. They sang "Oh Canada", they've got an Irish tenor, the Penguins scored 21 seconds into the first period, and the players are laughing and exuberant in the snow.

THANK GOD, HOCKEY

"Know thyself", says Thales, or Pythagorus, or some one of five Greek philosophers. In our end is our beginning, and as the Red Wings finish whomping the Calgary Flames in their first game of the Stanley Cup playoffs, it occurs to me that my interest in hockey, and indifference to football or the NBA, might have something to do with certain traits I admire that I see acted out in the most intense hockey games.

It is a very Arthurian sport. They play for a grail, there are gallant knights (and some villains) in armor, and the Stanley Cup, grail-like, is the hardest trophy to win in professional sports. There are four rounds in the playoffs, 5 games in each round, before you get to the Cup. Lots of sports reward strength and flash and speed and instinct, but this one rewards endurance. Guys play hurt more than any other sport, badly hurt. Picture a determined squirrel chewing through an oak board while predators are trying to eat him and scare him away from his goal, but he keeps going back and gnawing, gnawing. "Anyone can win a fight--when the odds are easy! It's when the going's tough when there seems to be no chance! That's when it counts!" (see Stan Lee/ Peter Parker, The Amazing Spider Man #33; Frank Miller/ Bruce Wayne, "Batman: Year One"; et alii)

Come to think of it, didn't Isak Dinesen, whose photograph talked me out of suicide one night twenty-five years ago, say that her motto was "je endure"?

Me, I'm not especially tough or strong in physical contests, but I'm good at enduring, a stubborn trait sometimes enough to compensate for my weaknesses. (Lest anyone feel a need to get Hemingway macho on my ass, I should probably mention my creatively vicious streak as well. One improvisation involves a squirrel. And nuts.)

I enjoy the skill in baseball and am awestruck by the human beauty of the Olympics, but hockey's combination of nobility (Stevie Yzerman) and brutality (the goons like to pick on the Europeans and the finesse guys, thinking them less likely to fight back-- then Chris Chelios, coming to the defense knocks the bully on his ass with a comically contemptuous expression of dismissal), mischief (Kris Draper our drama coach, checking his chin and pretending to look for blood whenever an opposing player brushes past him) physical grace and near surgical skill (have you ever seen a Russian skater like Datsuk or Federov weave through a line of defenders?)-- this touches me deeply.

STEVE YZERMAN AND SOME OF THE REASONS I LOVE HOCKEY

They retired Steve Yzerman’s number last night at Joe Louis Arena.

There is a reason hockey rinks play “O Fortuna” from Orf’s Carmina Burana in the third period of a critical hockey game. Hockey is an Arthurian game, with helmeted knights, suffering heroes and villainous enforcers, desperate contests of skill and grit between personalities as varied as Arthur’s knights. They even compete for a Grail: the same $50 trophy cup they’ve been fighting for since 1893 (new bands are added at the base to accommodate more names), a cup that is conceded to be the most difficult prize in professional sports.

... And Yzerman was our Arthur, the model of the fair and gentle knight whose prowess, generosity, courtesy, justice, honor, humility and honesty were the model for the men around him. He was made the youngest NHL captain in history at 21, and carried it with a solemn gentlemanliness that quietly won over even the most cynical players on opposing teams. He seemed to carry his virtue without priggishness and his skill as matter-of-factly as a master of kung-fu in a wuxia film. He made 692 goals... and 1,063 assists. Most of his farewell speech was taken up with praising others and disdaining honors for himself. He played 22 years for the same team (old-fashioned loyalty to a town that needed all the loyalty it could get) and a team that had been called “the Dead Things” made the playoffs 20 times out of those 22 years. The scars on his face (and the replacement crowns on his teeth) made him not disfigured but nobler somehow; one would rather be so scarred than wear an uneventful face,

I have no action shots here. It was fun to watch him play—the adjective heard most often was “what a pretty goal”—and my favorites were the goals he made while falling down, with one, two, three more tries at the puck before he finally spilled, indifferent to his own peril and the mayhem around him. But I most enjoyed watching Yzerman watch the game. He had a wolf’s pale stare, a picture of concentration that never seemed to waver. Even on the bench, talking to his teammates, he was watching the ice. They say the trait that marks genius isn’t necessarily IQ, but the ability to concentrate, to focus on a task without wavering more than ordinary people.

The ceremony showed the kind of affection that Mark Twain called for when he hoped to live in such a way that “even the undertaker is sorry we’re dead.” The five other players whose numbers are also retired were there in person or in spirit, two of them represented by a grandson and a son. There were many pleasures for the cognoscenti: Terrible Ted Lindsey was there, 81 years old and he could STILL kick your ass. One of my favorites, Joey Kocur was there— grinning like Jimmy Cagney and sitting next to Bob Probert behind the penalty box. The Little Professor, Larionov was there; you could hear the sighs from all the female English majors in the crowd. The most human moment came from Vladimir Konstantinov, whose body and brain were broken in a cruel, freakish accident, walked onto the ice with braces and canes instead of being pushed in a wheelchair, his teammates escorting him as if the honor was theirs. Or maybe it was the emotion on Scotty Bowman and Mike Illich's faces; you could see them thinking about the passage of time.

So much of our time on earth is spent having to struggle with the wounds made by cruel or thoughtless men, it is well and proper that we spend at least one night of the new year thinking about the traits we revere and honor and hope to achieve, sometimes.