Le Book Review
This may go through one more iteration as I do a quick re-read, but here it is.
If newspaper articles are tomorrow’s fish wrappers, then sports books are next year’s bargain bin staples. They fall into two broad categories: ghostwritten autobiographies and journalistic accounts of some finite time span. Sometimes these journalistic accounts are poorly cobbled together from a series of articles. Sometimes they attempt the epico-mythic, as with David Halberstam’s tomes on, say, the 1949 pennant race. But either way they fail to convince us that what they’re writing about is more than ephemera. The few books that can truly be considered literature among the sports genre usually combine the finite story with some larger and more meaningful frame of analysis. The two that spring to mind are Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer and Joan Didion’s On Boxing. Lorna Jackson’s Cold-Cocked: On Hockey shares elements of both, the elegiac relationship with father and the sharp and shocking meditations on violence and masculinity, from the point of view of one both drawn and repulsed.
One senses immediately that Cold-Cocked is an important book. A stream-of-consciousness exploration of two seasons of Vancouver Canucks hockey, it ranges over the landscape of the Canadian West Coast, women and aging, familial connection and estrangement. Almost every page contains some fresh insight, the most important of these being the uneasy relationship between fans who did not grow up wanting to be hockey players and the hockey mythos itself. Where is the place for an appreciation that is not about emulation? Where is the place, for instance, of the frankly sexual, and beyond that of emotions even more complex and submerged? Perhaps Jackson’s daughter Lilly, she writes, wears her favorite hockey player’s jersey in order to lend him her strength. These are waters that are not often disturbed in the commercial business of sports. Jackson’s frustration and fascination with the enforced masculinity of the hockey world (for American fans, combine the cultural history of baseball with the popularity and violence of football) are evidence in the many discussions about the inadequacy of the metaphor of the warrior and the media-driven frenzy of the revenge narrative. Jackson rarely lets a conventional statement stand without interrogation, and that interrogation is incisive and full of both anger and pathos.
Although the book’s flaws never overwhelm the enterprise, and it’s refreshing to see a sports book come at the material in a totally new way, the work could have done with at least one more major edit. Although Didion and Kahn differ from each other stylistically, with Kahn’s dreamlike proxlity and Didion spare, formal prose, both benefit from a tight structure. Cold-Cocked is arranged somewhat chronologically but generally as a flow. That arrangement can be overwhelming, and the language at times a bit precious. One of the finest chapters, “A Day With Todd Bertuzzi” is only two pages long and consists of a few people of various ages and walks of life describing how they might spend a day with the player, and the relationships they evoke indicate exactly what sports journalism is missing in its simplistic formulations. In moments like these the book comes closest to being a work of art. Other chapters sometimes drag on without a clear structure, making this a book that is difficult to read straight through, although in the end impossible to put down.
The other flaw is encapsulated in the title itself, surely chosen intentionally for its meld of the frigid and the turgid. I found it accurate but vulgar, encapsulating the ways in which the book might potentially alienate a certain kind of female sports fan. Jackson proves it’s vital to begin speaking to the experience of men and especially women who love hockey, but not because they grew up on some Eastern river dreaming of playing in Maple Leaf Gardens. But she does not discuss the growing number of women who do aspire to hockey, their relationship with male players and with the new generation of elite female players. To use rock parlance, since Jackson was a musician in her past career, she’s written a book about groupies while not really acknowledging the existence or impact of Sleater-Kinney. This is a lacuna that can be alienating for an otherwise receptive audience, who want to break out of the same stereotypical molds as Jackson, but perhaps in a different direction.
Whether it is because she comes out of the creative writing tradition or because she so effortlessly combines the world of the everyday self and the world of the sport, the emotional upheavals created and nurtured by the interconnection, Jackson invites an introspection in her readers that is extremely rare in sports writing. I can think of no higher praise than that the book made me think seriously about my own relationship to sports as a fan. Although sections will perhaps be difficult for those with no hockey background, Cold-Cocked’s insights about gender will interest any thoughtful reader, and it is a fascinating contribution to the new literature of women and sports.
