Palin, playing the off wing
After a bagarre generale on the New York Times’s Slapshot blog this weekend and another throwdown on a Caps blog, old friend-of-BTN Eric McErlain wondered Wednesday at the NHL Fanhouse why it seemed to offend people that Sarah Palin calls herself a “hockey mom”:
To tell the truth, I’m a little flummoxed over the whole thing. After all, baseball fans have gone the better of the last two terms with an unpopular President who loves the game so much he holds tee ball games at the White House lawn, and we don’t hear much carping from them. If anything, learning biographical details like these are pretty common over the course of a campaign, and I’m having trouble figuring out why learning Palin loves hockey is all that different from knowing Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) loves hoops.
It’s not, of course, unless being a hockey fan is supposed to make us different from Sarah Palin.
I think we’re running into a milder version of the sport-as-social-marker phenomenon in American soccer I discussed last year at Pitch Invasion. Friends kid me about “thinking I’m Canadian” based on an affinity I believe many American hockey fans share for a country where our chosen game dominates sports culture, rather than being the butt of jokes. And yes, my interest in Canada first grew out of my discovery of hockey when the Richmond Renegades debuted in the fall of 1990.
The inverse of this is that some Americans are initially attracted to hockey by its exoticism and foreign origin, or even simply its being a minority interest. I think these people are realizing now that part of hockey’s appeal to them was that they subconsciously wanted their sports fanhood to be somehow qualitatively different from others’: it doesn’t take much to be a basketball fan in America, but we have to work at being hockey fans in this coldwarm, cruel land, and that makes us special. Right?
Not so much, if Gov. Palin being a hockey mom is supposed to appeal to blue collar and suburban voters. Isn’t that for football and youth soccer types? And it really hurts if you like hockey in part because you get to associate yourself with those friendly folks up North with socialized medicine and gun control, and now this right-wing evangelical Christian with five kids and an NRA Life Membership is trying to muscle in on your turf and ruin your pseudo-Canadian cred.
If hockey really is apolitical, then it shouldn’t be objectionable at all that Sarah Palin calls herself a hockey mom for political purposes. Which sport she’s cheered from the stands isn’t the point. But the uproar tells me that some hockey fans wanted their fandom to imply a blue-shaded political view, and Gov. Palin has disrupted that just as effectively as she has the rest of this year’s campaign.
4 September 2008 / 3 Comments / Tags: hockey, politics