One More Epicycle

So my sister and a friend wound up having dinner with Wayne Gretzky, because his meeting with the chair of the Canadian Olympic Committee had been cancelled.

She was headhunted last year and is currently handling special events and special guests for a Calgary hotel at which several hockey teams stay when they’re visiting, including the Coyotes.

So now she has a great story and some signed Sidney Crosby memorabilia, whereas my old #99 lunchbox has long since been lost to the winds of time. (Yes, I know what team Crosby plays for, and no, I don’t understand how that worked either.)

Many years ago I went off to do the university-grad school-professional academic, whereas my sister had enough of studying after her time in high school and went off to the work world.  Few days go by when I don’t wonder about the wisdom of that decision; she meets much cooler people.

(No offense to my colleagues intended..)

The Leafs losing? Bad.

Losing the first game of the regular season? Also bad.

At home? Not good at all.

When they were leading in the third? Dispiriting.

In overtime? In principle better than in regulation, but actually worse.

To the Senators? Terrible.

Having my morning sports news describe it as “Heatley’s ice hockey [emphasis mine] goal lift Senators over Maple Leafs”? Worst of all.

Ice hockey. Good grief.

s/ice\ hockey/hockey/g

So my Mom’s an Ottawa Senators fan, and has been teasing my father and I something fierce. Give her credit: she became a Sens fan when they were first re-established, back when they were terrible. She’s recently been annoyed by my reluctance to cheer for the Sens, even though they’re the only Canadian team left in the finals.

Since I grew up in Alberta during the Dynasty, you’d think either the Oilers or the Flames would be more natural, but Dad grew up in southern Ontario, so that was that. I was doomed to be a Leafs fan from the very beginning, even though I usually scorn anything having to do with Toronto.

I rooted for Calgary when they made the finals a few years ago; and likewise with the Oilers. I’d even have supported the Canucks.

But I can’t root for the Sens. The rivalry’s too strong, and the taste of knocking them out of the playoffs time after time after time after time was too sweet, and the taste of not being in the playoffs to do it again too bitter.

It’s nowhere near the visceral hatred I have for the Habs and all their unholy works, but it’s still respectable. I tried to get this across to Mom but because she’s a good-hearted person, she can’t understand why love for one team means you may have to hate others enough to rule out supporting them, whatever the circumstances.

Cosh said it well, regarding the Oilers and the Flames:

While We’re On the Subject: there’s a lot of local sentiment in Edmonton that Oilers fans should be pulling for the Flames, our homegrown Jarome, and “Alberta hockey” in the playoffs. I’m afraid I can’t entirely sign on to this new concept of nationalistic decorum. Pulling for the other Canadian teams just because they’re Canadian is just a recipe for adding more sorrow to one’s hockey year: since only one team can hoist the Cup, it only makes sense to cheer against the teams you’re bred to hate. (Is there a way both Detroit and Calgary can lose?)

Do Edmontonians really think they’d feel more than a brief moment of pleasure, or anything remotely like the joy of an Oilers championship, if Calgary actually won the Stanley Cup? You people (I’m looking at you, John Short, with all due respect) are deluding yourselves. That moment of cheap, borrowed, bandwagoneering pleasure–perfectly hypocritical, and no doubt revolting to Calgarians–would be paid for in years of cultivated insufferability anyway. We missed the playoffs, so we’ve earned the right to continue cheering unconditionally against Calgary, as we did four weeks ago when they occupied a space in the playoff bracket we might have taken. (They’re still occupying it!) Fandom is about plunging into a stochastic attachment that coalesces into love over the decades; those who say we should discard our negative allegiances for some imagined concept of good form should go back to their macramé.

My father agrees with respect to the Habs, but has been more ambivalent about Ottawa.. maybe this is because he has much more pre-Senators hockey history to draw upon.  Of course, he’s also been softening over the last few years.  (I’ve mentioned before that the mellowing out of such a naturally irritable man worries me.)

Long story short: I’m hoping that goaltending will decide the series.  Anaheim in six.

Or, as I told my beloved and saintly mother when she reminded me that the Finals were upon us and waited for a response:

Go Ducks go!

Today a story linked to by Cosh (he of the keen insight and regrettable permalink situation) triggered all the rant circuits in my brain.

Apparently Glendale Arena, where the Phoenix Coyotes play, is now going to be called “J-o-b-i- n-g .com Arena”. [name mangled to avoid googling; no hits for you!]

This is a terrible, terrible name. It damages the soul of anyone who speaks it.

So here’s my modest proposal: we consume the flesh of those who proposed and agreed to this idea, as a warning to others and a means of purging the evil from our midst. Or if that’s too Swiftian, here’s something even more modest: we, and by we I mean everyone not involved with the organization, refuse to go along with the name changes presented to us.

Language is one of the perfect examples of the power of tradition, the spontaneous unplanned order that conservatives love. (Well, Burkean conservatives; French conservatives such as those at l’Académie française are a different breed.) And names are one of the deepest and earliest parts of language; they have a near-mystical power. You change your name only when you change in some profound and irrevocable way, as in the cases of Abram to Abraham, Cephas to Peter, and Saul to Paul; at baptism; and at marriage.

If an arena is really supposed to become part of the community, to put down deep roots in the town, then it needs to have a name which will endure. Christening should mean something, and should be permanent.. and like all things which are permanent should strive for excellence. That Name, which I will not repeat, is not excellent.

In fact it’s the opposite of excellent.

David Drake has a fantasy series I enjoy, Lord of the Isles and its sequels. He explains that “[..] I’ve based the magic [in the series] on that of the Mediterranean Basin in Classical times. The voces mysticae (which I’ve called words of power) are taken from real spell tablets. Their purpose was to call the attention of demiurges (entities between men and Gods) to the wishes of the person casting the spell. I do not personally believe in Classical magic or any magic, but neither do I choose to pronounce the voces mysticae aloud: I’ve been wrong before.”

In that same spirit, I can’t bring myself to utter the revised name of the former Glendale Arena. Some things aren’t worth the risk.

So let’s stop playing along and putting our eternal fates in jeopardy. We can’t prevent the names from being changed on paper, but there’s no reason for anyone else to pay attention to this silliness.

For me it’s always going to be the Olympic Saddledome. I was there for the ‘88 Olympics; pretty sure I saw Czechoslovakia play Norway. I definitely remember the loud rolling booms of “Norrrr-waaaay” from most of the crowd and a tiny group of us from my junior high shouting the name of the opposing team (“Czech! Czech!”, I guess) in reply. I had to google to find out that it’s currently called the Pengrowth Saddledome. I can’t even remember the name of the arena in Ottawa (it used to be the Corel Centre, I think.)

Likewise the Skydome (now “Rogers Centre”). And yes, if the name had originally been Rogers Centre, as bland as that is, and the name had settled into the community, then I’d support sticking with that as well.. I’d also have supported the slow rise of Skydome as a nickname for the place, because the development of alternate names is traditional too.

We don’t have to say “the TechCorp Palace”, or the “1-800-QUICK-FLOWERS-4-YOU Racquetball Complex”, or whatever.. and I’m not sure where the sense that we were obliged to came from. Sportscasters in particular work for the news company, not the sports team. They can call the building whatever they like.

(Of course, this’ll cause problems when the same group owns both, as in some famous Canadian cities, but if the rest of us made them the target of incessant mockery I’m sure eventually they’d stop.)

It’s true that if we limit the benefit of sponsorship deals by refusing to use the newspeak names for the places, basic economics tells you there won’t be as many sponsorships. Buying the naming rights won’t be very appealing if no one uses the names, although maybe if we change the conventions, then for some companies having their names hang on the banners and the wall will suffice. (“The Skydome, brought to you by Rogers”.) I suspect that if they have to, they’ll come up with something new: twenty-minute long advertisements played during intermissions? Who knows what lurks in the mind of marketers?

Regardless, professional sports leagues — and they’re not the only offenders, merely the worst — are renting out my services as an unwilling advertiser by expecting me to promote the company of their choice any time I refer to the arena which too many of my tax dollars went to build. My memory simply isn’t up to the task.

Enough. The Saddledome it is.

[Title of this post reminded me of the classic TMBG cover of Istanbul (not Constantinople).]

This morning Cosh mentioned something which is, if true, destined to become a standard in hockey trivia battles for years to come. It led to a few moments of should-I-have-known-that? introspection on my part. (I decided no.)

This year, one player is the first in NHL history to use a certain two-digit number, which was itself the only unused number left. Can you name the number?