“Man’s Game”: Media, Masculinity, and Early Canadian Hockey

Abstract

The ideal Canadian hockey player, and by proxy, the ideal Canadian man, is conceptualized as a male who must be willing to at least tolerate, and often participate in, violent acts if he is to be considered authentically Canadian. To buttress these arguments, history is often used to reinforce the tradition of violence in hockey, implying that hockey’s violent past has established a masculine criterion that boys and men of today ought to attempt to meet, lest they be considered weaker than their sporting ancestors. These views have dominated mainstream discussions of hockey by members of the media, popular authors, and even politicians. An uncritical examination of these statements would suggest that hockey’s violent past excuses the violence seen in present day as simply a continuation of a long-standing sporting tradition of violent behavior, or even that the violence in present-day sport has subsided. However, the historical basis for the association between media, masculinity, violence, and Canadian hockey is not self-evident and requires rigorous historical examination. This chapter will critically analyze the way that violence was described in newsprint during the early twentieth century in Canada. To accomplish this goal, this chapter will evaluate linguistic themes used when describing violent incidents in early descriptions of hockey games in the early twentieth century. Since the first organized game was played in 1875, Canadian hockey, in its many forms, has been a space where forms of masculinity have been learned, performed, and codified. Researching hockey’s culture of violence alters perceptions of Canada’s most popular game and, consequently, lays bare the relationship between a country, its people, and its violent obsession.