An Apology for Sports

For me, writing as a former professional ice hockey player and proud Canadian, when I hear the word “sports,” I immediately think of the Stanley Cup (hockey’s ultimate prize for the champions), frozen ponds surrounded by tall blue mountains and icy mountaintops, hockey players missing their two front teeth, Wayne Gretzky, and two big brutes “dropping their gloves” at centre ice to engage in a wild swirl of fisticuffs as the crowd passionately cries out for blood, much like the crowds of the Ancient Roman Coliseum as they watched the gladiators fight elephants, tigers and lions to their death.

Or perhaps my British friends across the sea might think of the smell of the freshly-cut green grass of the pitch at Wembley Stadium, the eyes of mesmerized tennis fans robotically following the tennis ball back and forth over the net at Wimbledon, or the beautiful and poetic ritual chant of hundreds of thousands of English soccer fans (or “football” as I believe the British strangely call soccer) singing Swing Low, Sweeeet Chariot all together at once.

Or perhaps you might see the very same soccer fans as passionate, wild and deranged drunken hooligans cathartically expressing their inner life frustrations through and into the sporting event for a collective sense of meaning in life. (You wouldn’t be wrong.)

The reality and understanding of sports is unique to each one of us, but please allow me to take a moment to share a little more about myself and my understanding of sports, for I speak from a strange and unique identity as someone with a Master’s degree in the philosophy of sport, and someone who played professional sports: a sort of mixed “athletic/academic” hybrid identity, if you could call it that.

I am a 30-year-old Canadian that grew up playing competitive hockey on the rinks and frozen ponds of Ontario. I have “ice in my veins” as we hockey players would say. My childhood experience is grounded in the reality of cold, snowy, early morning practices, travelling across North America to play the best in the world, and learning how to train, play and fight physically in a world of sport that is truly chaotic. As a kid I was accustomed to playing in front of large crowds full of envious and embittered parents who spend tens of thousands of dollars annually on their kids’ hockey programmes, equipment, training, travel and more for their kid to “make it to the top.” As of today, the average Canadian parent will spend anywhere from 14,000 to 25,000 dollars CDN a year for their son’s hockey season. Growing up as a skilled athlete, it was not uncommon at all to witness dads fighting other dads in the stands during games, parents cursing or fighting the referee, parents giving the head coach of the team bribes to propel the career of their kid forward, or participating in large “brawls,” which are fights in which both teams leave the benches to engage in a massive “tilly” aka “scrap” aka “fight” with each other.

After childhood, I played what is called “Junior A” hockey in Ontario, the highest level of competition reserved for athletes from the age of 16 to 20 where they train and compete as adolescents before reaching the “pro” level and age. I played Junior A hockey from the age of 17 to 19, with early aspirations and offers to play professional hockey in Europe and America.

However, many experiences occurred that led to my conversion to Christianity at the early age of 20, where I quite suddenly and deftly left the world of sport. In an instant, I found myself in a new world that was very, very different from the previous world I lived in: the world of academics. The Lord led me away from the spiritual incubators of sport (my personal name for sport stadiums) to a Christian university called Redeemer in Hamilton, Ontario, where I fell in love with philosophy (a discipline I had never even known before, to be honest).

After graduating from Redeemer with a BA in philosophy and a minor in theology (still a shock to think about to this day), I entered into a Master of Interdisciplinary Humanities programme at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, where, after two years of study, I completed my Master’s degree with a final research paper entitled, The Function of Sport as Ritual in Modernity. The basic position of my argument is that sports function in modernity as spiritual outlets called rituals in the way they did in antiquity, just in a different form. 

But we can talk more about those ideas later, because right now it is story time and I am feeling like Walt Disney.

While studying my MAIH at TWU, I tried out for the university hockey team as a walk-on player after four years of lack of competitive play. I shyly admit I had a lot of success, scoring lots of goals and performing well, which led to two and a half years of professional hockey after I completed my degree from the age of 24 to 27.