Making the playoffs is about shedding past ghosts — but fanaticism is not always a good thing

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2015 (3831 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The morning after Winnipeg qualified for the NHL playoffs, professional women in the downtown business core were rocking an unorthodox form of Friday casual: jeans, blazer and a Jets T-shirt.

Portage Avenue pedestrians were more resplendent than usual in club ball caps. A Winnipeg Jets flag hung from the pole at city hall.

Winnipeg-geolocated Twitter feeds contained little but excited blurbs about the original Whiteout, the return of the Whiteout and yes, the sale of official True North-era Whiteout merchandise.

This city’s obsession with its professional hockey club, intense even during the ice-devoid doldrums of July, has been ratcheted up past the point of omnipresent background babble to a collective sort of mania.

And the most frightening thing is, the bloody playoffs haven’t even started.

On a surface level, the excitement in this city is easy to explain. Winnipeg hasn’t been an NHL playoff town since 1996, when a sad-sack, lame-duck Jets squad that already had plane tickets booked for Phoenix lasted six games against deeper Detroit in a first-round matchup.

“It’s actually a unique time in Winnipeg’s history and sports culture history. The Jets is an old name and it’s a new team,” said Nicole Neverson, an associate professor of sociology at Toronto’s Ryerson University, who specializes in the sociology of sport.

But there is more here at play. It would be simplistic to just attribute the buzz to some sort of collective yearning to watch playoff hockey up close again.

The original NHL Jets, so beloved in the minds of Winnipeggers of a certain age, only experienced middling playoff success, winning a pair of series against the Flames in the 1980s. The longing in this city after the Jets flew south was for NHL hockey, period, as opposed to playoff hockey.

Rather, what’s happening in Winnipeg right now appears to be a form of group therapy on a municipality-wide scale. This city, which has struggled with unfulfilled expectations for a century, is latching on to the Jets as a means of reinforcing its fragile collective identity.

Sure, some of us just want to watch a few exciting hockey games. But a great deal of us want to be a part of something larger, as manufactured and corporate as that may be.

“There is something about having that collective identity that can be appealing to people. Suddenly, Winnipeg is on a national or international stage,” said Ben Carrington, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, a mid-sized state capital with more than a few similarities to Manitoba’s largest city. “People can feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.”

Carrington, who specializes in the sociology of sport, said Austin’s embrace of the annual Formula One United States Grand Prix is partly due to its status as the only major sporting event in the city, which doesn’t have a major-league professional sports franchise.

The Jets, meanwhile, are the biggest game in town in the second-smallest North American market with a pro sports franchise in one of the four major leagues. Only the NFL Green Bay Packers play in a city smaller than Winnipeg, which has a metropolitan-area population of 793,000.

“The Jets represent that Cinderella team, this underdog team,” said Neverson. “The narrative of the underdog really does resonate with a lot of people. Fans can get behind that. Winnipeg can be one of those marginal teams.”

In 1996, when Winnipeg’s collective confidence was at a nadir, Canadian hockey fans loved to hate Winnipeg. The “Loserpeg” epithet summed up the national disdain for what was then a fading, industrial city.

Two decades later, cultural values have changed practically everywhere. It’s OK to live in a medium-sized city. Winnipeg now finds itself just as likely to be romanticized from afar as it is to be a subject of disdain — in large part, because of its hockey team.

“The Jets have become the Green Bay Packers of the NHL — kind of everyone’s second-favourite team,” said Ed Willes, a Vancouver Province sports columnist who covered the Jets’ final season in Manitoba as a beat reporter for the Winnipeg Sun.

The presence of the Jets in the NHL playoffs fits right in line with the mythology of professional sports, which favours David-versus-Goliath narratives, Willes said.

“People love to cheer for the underdog. That’s it. This is a field where Winnipeg is competing against New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and on relatively equal footing. That just does not happen that often.”

The Jets’ corporate owners clearly understand this. True North Sports & Entertainment, which doesn’t need much help marketing its product, has broken from its traditional practice of distancing itself from Jets 1.0 during the early days of Jets 2.0 playoff mania.

By marketing Whiteout merchandise, True North is deftly exploiting the disjunction between the loss of pride this city experienced in the mid-1990s and the quasi-nationalistic fervour that today’s Jets fans frequently exhibit.

As a Winnipeg blogger once noted, the eruption of “Go Jets Go” chants at events unrelated to hockey represents the expression of a sort of regional nationalism.

True North doesn’t call it that. “It’s the brand,” president and CEO Jim Ludlow said on Thursday, hours before the Calgary Flames’ defeat of the L.A. Kings clinched a playoff berth for the Jets.

“This is an opportunity for the city to have its brand recognition — Winnipeg, and the Winnipeg Jets — around North America,” Ludlow said.

“This is a dynamic place to live and a dynamic place to work. It’s fragile in places, but if we can push that aside, all these kind of opportunities create a much better place for everybody,” he said. “There are folks in every city talking about the Winnipeg Jets. That’s a good thing.”

There is a slight exaggeration. In Ottawa, they’re talking about the Senators. In Calgary, the Flames.

As well, True North Sports & Entertainment is not the sole driver of the city’s “fragile” renaissance, notwithstanding considerable Chipman family investments into downtown Winnipeg. They include the MTS Centre, the Centrepoint development across Portage Avenue and the proposed True North Square.

On the other side of the relationship, the City of Winnipeg and Province of Manitoba facilitate $13 million worth of annual funding for True North, in the form of tax breaks and gaming revenue. All three levels of government contributed to the construction of the MTS Centre.

Most fans appear to have no issue with this whatsoever. Only in Winnipeg is a corporate owner so popular, fans chant the name during the national anthem.

Carrington, who’s from the U.K., suggested North American fans are more comfortable with corporate owners.

He also suggested, given the decline in popularity of organized religion, professional sport is in some ways filling a void — a need to worship, or maybe even prostrate ourselves before something greater.

“Stadiums are like cathedrals, and we elevate certain players to godlike status,” Carrington said, adding this is problematic when the worship is linked to commercial interests.

Given their adulation of their favourite team, fans may not want to even consider the taxpayer commitment.

“Where is that point where a fan no longer desires to think about that relationship they have with sport and totally go gaga over the team itself?” asked Neverson. “Many of the ways sports culture is presented to us kind of has the blinders on us.”

Another case in point: Winnipeg’s Whiteout. In the 1980s, Edmonton Oilers goalie Grant Fuhr joked it looked like a Klu Klux Klan gathering.

He was kidding, but there is something creepy about an entire arena full of people dressed the same way. Think Munich in 1936, for example.

“For those of us from Europe, when I attend North American sports events, there’s an uneasiness when I see tens of thousand of people chanting in unison, often in highly orchestrated ways,” Carrington said.

“And this notion everyone has to wear the same colours as well? It does involve, at least symbolically, the memories of the stadiums in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, when fascist leaders were aware of the power of sport.”

Carrington notes democratic regimes can use sport to reinforce ideas much the same way authoritarian ones did in Italy and Germany. He’s right: Consider the practice of honouring military personnel at Jets and Bomber games.

Both clubs, of course, have other military ties through their logos and merchandise. After all, what is team sport if not a modern, less-deadly proxy for the ancient practice of facing a neighbouring city state on a battlefield?

In less abstract terms, playoff runs can result in dark consequences. The Stanley Cup riots in Montreal and Vancouver offer stark examples of what can happen when fan expectations fail to match results — and that frustration becomes an excuse to release pent-up anger related to broader social dynamics.

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Of course, Winnipeg Jets fans aren’t looking to win it all this year. Many are simply happy their team is in the tournament.

In spite of everything you can read into what’s happening in this city, the playoff buzz simply offers a chance to escape our mundane, daily routines without actually going anywhere.

“Hockey is one of those sports that sometimes shows us images about who we think we are and who we aspire to be,” Neverson said. “There’s a lot of fantasy, a lot of drama, that we sometimes connect to our sports teams. That explains the excitement.”

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca