I grew up in Ottawa, and in spite of the fact that I’ve played hockey, follow hockey and know a reasonable amount about hockey, I don’t really consider myself a hockey fan. This is the sort of thing that’s very culturally revealing I think, because by the standard of somebody that lived in, say, Alabama, my devotion to the sport would be seen as practically religious, but in Ottawa, well there were tons of people who knew WAY more about, and had WAY more invested, in hockey than I ever did, and so I’ve always imagined myself as just somebody with a normal, passing interest in the game.
At any rate, supporting the theory that I actually am a hockey fan is that on Tuesday night, I decided that the third game of a second round playoff series was somehow important. I was excited about the Habs-Pens match-up and wanted to share that excitement with a bunch of similarly connected strangers, and so I went down to a local pub (The Roy) on Queen East to watch the final period of a tense game.
I live in Toronto now, and Toronto is different than Ottawa in many ways. For instance, at the pub I went to, which was full of about 50 people, there was not a single person watching the game.
Not one.
In Ottawa, you probably wouldn’t have been able to even get service, as the staff–who probably had money riding on the outcome–would have been focused like laser beams on the game. In Ottawa, people care about hockey. In Toronto, people care about the Maple Leafs, and as soon as they vanish from the landscape, so does hockey.
It’s a big city, culturally revealing kind of thing, I think.
Growing up in Ottawa I always felt that it was an in-between place. Neither big nor small, whatever authority or relevance the city had (government) was externally imposed upon it, and as such, it never really seemed to have an authentic, organic sense of itself. To be young in Ottawa was to feel inhibited and self-conscious, to feel like you were living in a city designed for stable adults, who having already measured themselves against the conventions of the world, were now happy to settle into a “good quality of life.” It seemed hopelessly boring to me as a 16 year-old, and as such I was always looking outward for self-identification.
Really, this is just what it means to be young, but Ottawa was without a major sports team at the time, and so we all identified with teams from other cities.
I was like the Montreal Canadiens.
I was like the Georgetown fucking Hoyas.
I was like the San Francisco 49er’s.
It sounds like a cliché, but without the intense blanket coverage of the hometown team, or the easy access to cable packages that broadcast every single game of a team, you had to take what you could get and spread your interest around. You had to find versions of yourself in all sorts of different places, and in all sorts of different styles.
In a larger city it sometimes feels like less of the external world bleeds in. There can be a kind of myopia, the feeling that everything you need is right there and you need never look elsewhere. Sometimes with fewer options we become connected by broader things—we would all watch a hockey game in a bar—but with more options, we break-off into our chosen niches, and in an ironic way our lives can become smaller, rather than larger.