Christmas time. A time for eggnog, and any other kinds of nog that may be available. A time for holiday cheer. A time to gather around, be it around a Christmas tree or a Chanukah Menorah, together with loved ones. A time to exchange gifts, to stuff our faces, and a time to gather in the loving glow emitted by our televisions and watch Canadian teenagers annihilate overmatched teenagers from another country.
As with every year the holiday season also means it’s time for Canada to re-assert its dominance on the Junior Hockey scene through the tournament known as the World Junior Hockey Championship. Each year, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen year olds leave their families for the right (if they are from Canada) to win a gold medal, or (if they aren’t from Canada) a chance to be embarrassed on national Canadian television. What could be more in line with the spirit of love, peace, and goodwill to all, than body checking a Kazhaki (Kazakh?) teenager into a piece of plexi-glass?
Each year the hype for the tournament is more intense, more elaborate, and more non-sensical than the year before. TSN covers the tournament with the baited breath usually reserved for the crowning of a new Pope or American Idol. The question I have, after being subjected to this overwhelming hype, is why? Why should we be treating this tournament with the reverence that it has been recently receiving? Why should I sit at home and be excited at the thought of Canadians winning a tournament that only Canadians care about? When only Canadians pour resources into it?
Look, I was once a big supporter of the tournament. I sat with thousands of my fellow Manitobans and screamed until I was red in the face, cheering for Canada to bring the title home. I made the road trip down to Grand Forks, North Dakota to turn the tournament into a gigantic home game for the Canadian side. I cringed at Marc Andre Fleury’s gaffe in the gold medal game, and celebrated like mad when John Slaney scored in Saskatoon in 1991 to bring the title home. Recently however, as the tournament has reached record levels of hype thanks to the over-bearing nature of Canada’s ESPN-lite, TSN, it has begun to turn me off and make me disinterested. Yesterday, Canada beat Kazakhstan fifteen to nothing. This victory is supposed to make me proud?
As with most everything in sport, the influence of television has brought it more squarely into the spotlight, and conversely attracted attention to it, that it probably did not need or deserve. There are now two types of World Junior Championships. The ones that take place in Canada (every second year as dictated by the rules) are over-bearing, over wrought, over-hyped coronations of Canada as champions and rulers of teenage hockey. The ones in Europe are smaller, played in front of small crowds, in small towns, and more accurately reflect the humble roots of the tournament. I for one prefer those tournaments. They are more pure and better reflect the humble roots of the World Junior Hockey Tournament. A tournament that, when Canada won their inaugural title in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1982, didn’t even have a recording of “Oh Canada” to play when the gold medals were awarded. Having seen the visual of that group of delirious Canadian teenagers, with arms intertwined, belting out Oh Canada A Capella, when there was no recording to do it for them, I realize that I would rather see that version of impromptu patriotism, than I would see the sight of 15000 sycophants at the Scotia Bank Centre in Ottawa muttering along with Lyndon Slewidge, in some fraudulent, choreographed, version of that scene from Saint Paul. It’s time for the World Juniors to return to its humble roots.
For Illegal Curve, I am Drew Mindell
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