I want to begin by thanking whoever dropped a dollar bill outside the Pollo Tropical on Okeechobee Boulevard a few days before Christmas. Cash seems so rare these days, you almost wonder what the story must have been. Invisible busker? Low-stakes drug deal gone bad? Wallet failure? I'll never know. How sad that I was not willing to spend $5 to buy and review a book for the board, but $4? That's in my budget. I should set up a Patreon, "Curious Hair is creating large posts on small message boards," see if anyone jokingly pays me pennies to professionally post, and then call the five bucks a business expense. Julie DiCaro would do the same.

I should note before I go much further that I seem to have a very specific form of brain damage that prevents me from fully absorbing an e-book the same way I would a tangible book. It's not even that I'm such a heavy annotator that I can't read meaningfully without pencilling notes in the margins, which I could type equally well if I wanted to, there's just something different and decidedly less important about reading a book on a screen than there is on paper, and likewise on the writing side, in my mind. I could have, of course, bought the book in dead-tree, but again, buying it at all was predicated on literal found money; I don't want it that badly. So if I miss something or make too superficial an observation somewhere, that's just my inability to read an e-book. And this dogshit Kindle app ain't helpin'. It took me forever to toggle the sliders to where the page resembled decent typesetting, by which I mean 30 to 45 seconds.

Anyway, we begin as always with a cryptic title. A little research shows that Madison Street Station was an old alternative name for what's now Ogilvie, though I've only ever heard it called that or North Western Station. It's also the name of a local band, not bad, probably got play on Local Anesthetic (RIP) once. But I'm guessing the "station" in question is the Chicago Stadium and/or the United Center, or that he was stationed outside the UC selling programs.

I hit page 4 and there's already a mistake that a proofreader should have caught, and that's to say nothing of what I pointed out in that old post about previewing the book, which is that there are far more parentheticals than there should be. Sometimes there's a place for them, but when sentence after sentence is set off in parentheses, I get annoyed: was this important enough for you to write and me to read, or wasn't it? Even David Foster Wallace knew not to do the footnote gimmick every time.

Away from hockey, there's a lot of loss and grief running through this, enough to make me feel kind of bad about going so hard on other aspects of the book. It's never explored in depth, more just nibbled at the edges, but there's a lot of that nibbling at the notion of a permanently deferred adulthood, which I think is eminently relatable for a lot of people in my generation. I was joking the other day about radio stations using the tagline “the best of the '80s, '90s, and today!,” and how that means it's been today for 19 years. And I think for a lot of thirtysomethings, the years have added up and the technology has gotten better, we've gotten jobs and maybe gone someplace else, but still failed to make some fundamental jump or break that it really feels like we ought to have made by now. Maybe part of that is universal trauma of 9/11, Iraq, and the crisis, none of which we've ever gotten adequate closure for. Maybe it's personal trauma, and there's a lot of personal trauma here. Losing one's whole family by age 35 has to be really tough on someone, I don't wish it on anyone, and I can see how it can leave someone unmoored and looking for a sense of belonging, wherever it may come from. Also relatively unexplored is Sam's trademark transformation from an edgy humorist to a woke scold. That seems like a big thing to gloss over if you've been reading Second City Hockey and watched them push their commenters away and recede into a fortress of themselves and Weird Left Twitter. He mentions being accused of racism and ableism for The Committed Indian and acquiescing to them, followed by a cocksure declaration that the Blackhawks will change their logo one day and there's nothing we can do about it, but he never plumbs the development of his newfound wokeness like I expected him to.

My aim is not to fisk the book to death: I don't want to write that, you don't want to read that. But I do have to start with a collection of the weird class associations of hockey and the Blackhawks, since that seems to loom large in his blogging and in this book.


This sort of classism has always bewildered me. All the data has repeatedly shown that of the four major leagues, the NHL does best with the educated and internet-savvy. Why is it always portrayed as the domain of the untouchable caste as it is here? I'll allow that the game has changed since the days of Steve Larmer and Murray Bannerman, but it hasn't changed that much that the people who like it today would have been horrified by it thirty years ago. I doubt every regular in the second balcony of Hawks games was irredeemable human detritus, but even if they were, do we live in a better world because they've been priced out of attendance? Are the games more fun without them? What about the upper-deck denizens of Wrigley and Comiskey? Do higher ticket revenues make the team on the ice better if it's the same situation for every team? Do rich people make tidier drunks? I would think they're just more likely to be inoculated against the consequences of their bad decisions. I never made it to the Stadium, but I did, as you guys know, live around some working-class white people. I went to school with them and went to their houses and watched my neighbor sell low-grade weed to them. None of them cared one bit about the NHL.

So I guess what bothers me the most is the attempt to embrace this unsavory element while still keeping them at arm's length when expedient. It's easy to talk about finding your place in the world at the punk-rock outsider-chic Stadium when you like hockey, punk rock, and being an outsider, and can thus conveniently project your personal sensibilities onto everything you like, but when drunk guys break beer bottles over each other's heads because the Hawks lost to the Oilers, then it becomes a curious anthropological study. His portrayal of hockey fans, or at least Hawks fans, as bloodthirsty racist white trash is this weird, very performative othering, saying "I'm not like you, you normal people, I'm like them, but wait, hold up, not too much like them," as if trying to carve out a liminal space just for himself. Who'd even want such a lonely status? When Sam finally does show remorse for a lifetime of stereotyping hockey fans, it's in the form of a funny anecdote about using Russ Courtnall's name in a phony citation for an 8th grade research paper: he feels bad that he assumed his teacher wouldn't catch it because the teacher was a woman. Assuming women can't be hockey fans is wrong. Assuming other people who aren't blue-collar alcoholics can't be hockey fans is still okay. Later on, Sam goes to a Bulls game at the then-new UC, which he calls an "airport hangar" in what I assume is a mixed metaphor of "airport terminal" and "aircraft hangar." From the 300 level, he imagines a sweater-club conversation thus:


But to me, he's giving away the game here: the pity and disdain he imagines monied Bulls fans to have is the pity and disdain he himself actually has. Given everything he's said to this point about Hawks fans being these odd sewer creatures who can't be integrated into society because they'd blow their life savings on back-alley cockfights, why would I ever believe he'd be anywhere but downstairs with the mai-tai-sippers if he could afford the seats? And for his allegation that the one-way "rivalry" of Hawks fans toward Bulls fans is mere racism, how is it that his conception of Bulls fans is simply and consistently one of plummy North Shorers who only want to applaud politely while sipping cocktails? Where do black and Hispanic people exist in his mind palace of Bulls fandom? Are they the hardwood-floor equivalent of "the people you never see at the grocery store"?

And despite Sam's proclamation that he wanted nothing to do with sweater-club Bulls fans as a kid, so much of his writing today is about how the NHL needs to be more like the NBA, Hawks fans need to be more like Bulls fans, NBA Twitter is so great, et cetera, et cetera, because for all his posturing as a dangerous outsider, he knows his real brethren are dorks from Buffalo Grove who write blog posts called "From a Young G's Perspective: How a New Generation of Point Guards Is Changing the Way We Think About Basketball, Fashion, and What It Means To Be Alive." It's like how Dan Bernstein wanted to be cool and different as a kid, so he declared himself a White Sox fan in Cubs country, but in adulthood he couldn't resist the pull of the Cubs' newfound business-school professionalism. I guess you can't hold a pose forever, and on that note, I have to move on from the class struggle for a little while so that I can finish this.

Once you filter out the snide jabs at people whose parents couldn't afford to send them to Francis Parker, there are some very good accounts of individual late '80s/early '90s Hawks games, and those are fun to read. Some online scolds like to rag on the NHL's 1979-1993 golden age as being less than golden because there were too many fights, as few as five teams would miss the playoffs, and the goalies couldn't stop beach balls, but I think there's a lot to be said for that era's clearer stratification of skating talent and the familiarity-bred contempt of the old rivalries. Some, like the Battle of Quebec, even had a political valence, where unionists and anglophones supported the Habs while the ascendant separatists sided with the exclusively francophone organization of the Nordiques. And while fourth-line players have never been more talented than they are today, are we sure that's for the best? When everyone is pretty good, it's harder to be really good. 100-point seasons, once a reliable benchmark for the elite, are now relative rarities. And I don't think the downside was ever clearer than last year's Final, where the first-year Golden Knights went 13 wins deep on a roster of Just A Guys who ran a high-speed dump-and-chase with all the finesse of a chainsaw but made it work because the mismatches were never wide enough to exploit -- that is, until they ran into Ovechkin and Backstrom, who draw gaping mismatches off almost everyone. Sam dithers on whether the NHL has gotten better as a result of diminishing fighting and diluting/ending classic rivalries (of the Red Wings, Maple Leafs, North Stars, and Blues, the Blues are all we have left): it's better for the players, but worse for us, but in a sense also better for us, but the league could have marketed that intense hatred if they wanted to, but they didn't and couldn't, so it's gone now, but most of those players sucked anyway. I wonder if, by the end of the book, we get a conclusion as to whether Old NHL or New NHL was better, but any statement as definitive as that seems unlikely when I hit sentences like this:



SOMEBODY EDIT THIS. JESUS!

Speaking of the Blue Line, midway through the 1997-98 season, it stopped publishing due to perceived lack of interest. This caught me by surprise, because '98 is what I think of as only the first year of the true dark age that ran from the Belfour trade to Wirtz's death. I would have thought they would have stuck it out a little longer than that. With the Hawks closing in on two missed playoffs in a row and four years without a series win, it makes me wonder when Sam's reinvented Blue Line will wind down for good. The book kind of stops publishing during the dark age, too, as real life intervenes and we fast-forward from the Chelios trade to the Fleury nightclub incident with just a few garbled frames of "Pulford sure was a drunk piece of shit" and little else. I don't need a complete oral history of that time Tony Amonte and Jocelyn Thibault dragged a crappy team to 5th place and a first-round loss to St. Louis, but that was the series that ended my own personal Blackhawks lacuna that began when my family moved north, away from any playground/lunch-table interest in hockey, and I lost my NHL '95 cartridge in the move.

All three lockouts are within the timespan of the book, so I want to get to all of them, because you can't tell the story of being a fan without them. Some notes on the '94 lockout, Lockout I, whatever you want to call it, beginning with the Rangers' Cup win:


But of course he wouldn't get booed in 1994, because any hockey fan knows that the ritual Booing Of The Bettman didn't begin until 1995, when not only had Bettman been the face of ownership during a lockout so acrimonious that Chris Chelios went in front of a camera to suggest that someone might assassinate the commissioner, he also had to present the Stanley Cup to the Devils, on Meadowlands ice, just as he had been threatening that the Devils were sure to move to Nashville that summer without a commitment to a new taxpayer-funded arena. That's how booing him started: there were 20,000 Devils fans on the entire planet and they were all there looking at the guy who seemed to want their team gone. Now we all do it just to do it because it's the thing we do, and every year Bettman leans so far into the gimmick that he practically does a somersault. Talk about the league losing its charm.



This to me sounds like a strange sort of learned helplessness: the union was equally at fault for the owners' lockout because they could have...had endorsement deals? Couldn't they have had that without a luxury-tax system that would suppress salaries without widening revenue sharing? Why shouldn't the union have felt threatened by the league going out and hiring David Stern's notoriously merciless lieutenant to get them the salary cap they'd always wanted? Seeing as the lockout only ended when Ed Snider, Mike Ilitch, and MLSE locked young Gary Bettman in a closet while they got a deal done to save the season -- a deal that was favorable to the conditions of the Philadelphia, Detroit, and Toronto markets, but not many others -- I believe it's perfectly fair to put the vast majority of the blame on Bettman. By all accounts, particularly Jonathon Gatehouse's must-read The Instigator, Bettman went into negotiations with the delicate touch of a sledgehammer and was not exactly prepared for the, how you say, "gentlemanly pace" of the old NHL and its smoky, wood-paneled offices. Perhaps under leadership that understood the game's moment and approached negotiations with an eye toward consensus-building and measured long-term growth rather than big and ruthless short-term victories, labor and ownership could have reached an equitable compromise, but that was never going to happen with a bean-counting pitbull like Bettman in charge. Of his three lockouts, the first one is the forgotten one -- it's the oldest and it didn't kill a full season, but it had a huge negative effect on the league, not the least of which being the second lockout that did kill a full season. Starting the '94-'95 season wasn't too rough for the author because he had time to get more into Pearl Jam and Soundgarden while the Hawks were shut down. It could have been worse. He could have been a Quebec, Winnipeg, or Hartford fan. The worst-of-both-worlds CBA helped kill three teams in three years, and two out of three are never coming back.

On Lockout II:

This is spurious logic to me. I've heard of people rooting for their teams to tank for draft picks, but rooting for the entire sport to fail in service of its future success? That's where I hop off the train, and I'm someone who's just as frustrated and exhausted by this league's incompetence as anyone. But for all the issues the NHL had in 2004, I have a hard time believing that shutting down for an entire year was a net benefit. Yes, the owners were able to reduce the players' share of revenue to 57% and later 50% in Lockout III, but it came at the cost of an embarrassingly poor television deal that promised no guaranteed rights fees from NBC and cable coverage on what was then the Outdoor Life Network. It's enough years and enough Crosby/Ovechkin/Kane highlights ago to forget about it now, but that lockout was absolutely devastating, and calling the whole affair a necessary teaching moment for a stupid child is too flippant a dismissal even for me.

And then there's Lockout III, which had the same dynamic of owners wanting to claw back money from their employees and shutting down their whole business to get it. The dynamic that's different here is that the author's employment has since become contingent on the league's operation. It's easy to take the Bernsteinist view that ownership and management are right and the players should know what's good for them, or the nihilist view that the whole league is such a gong show that it deserves to go out of business, when you're just watching from afar. When you're in the terrible position of losing work because you're Party C in an A-B conflict, suddenly it's not fun, games, and impressing people who did afternoon drive at 670. So in the analysis of Lockout III, we have the only correct one, that the owners are greedy bastards and that the real casualties of any sports lockout are the support staff who rely on the events, don't make millions, but have no seat at the bargaining table. It's interesting that this perspective wasn't retroactively applied to the prior two lockouts, maybe saying that this is how I felt then, but now I understand better. Maybe we just had to figure it out for ourselves as readers.

To bring it home, here's the main event, The Truth About Patrick Kane, which more or less seems to be that he knows another girl Kane allegedly raped.


Well, all right.

So in the final analysis, would I recommend the book to a fellow Hawks fan? Maybe if the fan is employed as a copy editor and can do a little work on it. There's a lot of good storytelling here, but the device of telling the larger story in the form of thirtyish years' worth of game recaps is obviously one that doesn't lend itself to a cohesive, flowing narrative. Again, I didn't read the paper book and just messed around with point size and spacing till I got something I liked, but there was a definite rhythm of page, page, two-thirds of a page of white space. It felt a little like reading one of those books by Dennis Miller or Bill Maher that are really compilations of their shows' monologues, which are written for live delivery and lose a lot of life in transcription. That's not quite the case here, but reading something with such a stunted rhythm leaves me with the same pseudo-cheated feeling, as if it's been papier-mâchéd together from old blog posts and repurposed into a book, even if it wasn't. I guess the question then is how to do the game-wrap conceit, arguably his signature form of writing, when applicable, but write more longform the rest of the time.

Is it a bad book? No, and I enjoyed it much more once the story caught up to 2006-2007, the season I rejoined the Hawks. From there, I could remember games I watched, and remember the good old days when reading Second City Hockey was an absolute must and internet hockey culture had yet to intersect with internet outrage culture. I think my favorite chapter was Game 7 of the 2013 second-round series with Detroit, which gets the long look it deserves: I still maintain that Seabrook eliminating the Red Wings from the playoffs, the conference, and long-term contention was as powerful a moment of pure exploding joy as the Blackhawks ever gave us, right up there with the first two Cup wins and maybe even ahead of the third. I just wish the book had gotten a little more fine-turning, that its street team didn't build it up as the greatest book ever written on the topic of hockey, and that the culture war didn't seep into talking about hockey on the internet the way it did. What I do expect to be the greatest book ever written on the topic of hockey is The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL, a chronicle of all the stranger-than-fiction shit this awful league has done over the years. If I tell you guys about it, I won't take so many words to do it.

Ultimately, I think this is my Charlotte's Web Magnum Opus of being low-key irritated by ol' Sam Fels. This came out to almost seven pages of a single-spaced Word document. I've said enough and you've read enough. I feel bad for his losses and I feel bad that his relationship with his readership has changed the way it has. But then it's not hockey if it doesn't leave you annoyed and depressed.

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i'll save this for tomorrow morning.

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@audioidkid

No way i am reading all that. Will wait for the condensed version

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

I wish I had known about this before I went to take a shit.

Can I get the Reader's Digest version?

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Sure. Memories good. Snobbery bad! Why no support union?

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Did Fels write it? If so, keep it.

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Curiousini

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I went down to quite a few games between 84 and the mid 90s. The second balcony at the Stadium was awesome! It was something like a 265, urine scented step, hike to the 2nd balcony. We'd pack military jackets with bottles of beer. I remember having quite a few empties under our seats one time, a couple got knocked over and rolled dow five or six rows under the seats...clank, clank, clank. Joints were frequently passed down rows. It was a blast.

Sam could not have been very old when he went to the Old Barn. I'm thinking parts of his memories are stories related to him by older people.

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Thank you Mr. Hair.

Love your suit, Senator.

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CSFMB: Home of the small minded

Why would you feel bad for the guy? He sounds like a total asshole with his special, gnostic knowledge about Kane and his too-cool-for-the-trash-and-their-social-betters attitude. Is anyone real enough for him? Sounds like he sees himself as a martyr. What an asshole.

It sounds like he grew up on the SW Side in the 80s, where hockey fans (at least in my parish and the one next door) were a weird coalition of outsiders and people with the money to play. The kids who didn't go to Catholic school were rabid hockey (and metal) fans, and Fels would have considered them trashy. Hockey seemed to be the counter-cultural thing to do, but they were devoted fans (when it was hard to be a devoted fan), and the Hawks were pretty good. But he seems to think they were all violent rednecks.

Fels seems to be, in the excerpts quoted here, not only revolted by them (fights in the stands of the Stadium? Oh no, not that!) but also afraid of them. This is the kind of guy King of the Hill used to rip on.

It was such a run down shithole. The ice surface was smaller if I recall. My drinks got knocked over because it was very dark up there with little room for people to get by.

And yet, I loved the Eddie chants. I loved how loud that small building was. Every short handed puck clear was cheered. I swear there were only 18,000 or so Hawks fans, and they were all in that building. And Dino...oh how they hated him.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Yeah, Chicago, Boston, and Buffalo all had shorter ice, really tightened the game up. It made tight-checking dump-and-chase teams of the Bruins and Sabres in particular, but then the Nordiques bucked the Adams Division trend by playing wide-open Eurohockey.

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I haven’t been to near as many hockey stadiums as baseball ones, but I don’t care for the UC. For as big as it is, the bathrooms are still a train wreck at intermissions especially in the 300 level. Site lines are ok, but the place has no character. I’d prefer a more intimate facility, meaning smaller.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Being a hockey fan and a punk fan means that no one will ever be real enough. But a lot of his posturing as being too good for everyone feels like coping mechanisms from someone who doesn't think he's good enough for anyone. I've been guilty of that myself. The fixation on hockey fans being white trash, however, feels like pure Bernstein pandering/Score auditioning. I wonder how the league would be sustainable if all its Michigan and Ontario fans were white trash.

Pretty sure he's a north sider, btw.

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I never stereotyped hockey fans as white trash. People whose kids play hockey are decidedly upper middle class due to expense.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I'm terribly impressed with the new arena in Quebec City. 18,000 seats, not too big and not too small, and steep, so steep that they need railings in every row once you get to the nosebleeds. It's the anti-Rosemont.



All it needs is a team.

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Steep is a huge mistake. See upper level Guaranteed Rate Field. That looks nice though.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

It's not a mistake in hockey. It's much tighter quarters than a baseball field; you'd rather be high and close than low and far. Upriver, the Canadiens insisted upon an unusually steep rake to their new building and I think the Canadiens know what they're doing.

EDIT: they know what they're doing in game presentation, not roster construction

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Hmm well Montreal is on the bucket list for a hockey game, so I’ll be sure to check that out.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

If you haven't seen it already, look up the memorial pregame ceremony for Jean Beliveau. The moment of silence, real silence, and 22,000 people singing the anthem together in its original French are the kind of powerful, almost supernatural moments McDonough can only dream of creating.

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I had a cool trip planned to see the Hawks play in Calgary and Edmonton with a few minor league games sprinkled in up there. I got the minor league thing in my head after watching Goon. But my brother didn’t have his passport, and the other guy backed out.

I haven’t initiated the hockey road trips like with baseball. I may do that someday.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

if I had unlimited funds, I'd love to go road-tripping around the Q, hit those tiny little barns in places whose names just echo around my hockey head, like Saguenay, Rouyn-Noranda, and Bathurst.

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Our goal (no pun intended) was to see a few Hawks games on the road, and then some shitty minor league hockey. Specific to the minor league games, we were going to find out where everyone goes after the game, you know the players and few hundred fans, and just get blasted with the goons.

In any case, it’s still on the bucket list. Gambling in Macau is next up, and then all bets are off.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

We approximate that the 1st row of the 2nd balcony was about 50' closer to the ice...easily. You were right on top of the ice.

Speaking of Dino...his wife was a Dyke.

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