by Adam Gopnik
But if ice-skating begins as a solitary and poetic enterprise, by the middle of the century it transforms into something that is essentially social and overtly sexual. That wonderful engraving of Goethe on skates holds intimations of that transformation — though Goethe is in his own world, he is surrounded by girls who are desperate for him to pay attention to them, and they are ready to throw snowballs at him to make that happen. And when you begin to have urban and metropolitan skating in the middle of the century, that’s what happens: skating becomes a form of sex, or at least of the social foreplay we call flirtation.
Technological advances helped make skating social and sexual. With the introduction of the one-piece skate — where the boot and blade are sewn together — in the 1860s, skating became less laborious than it had ever been: more people skated. But it was also a social change, and tracing it back, once again we find ourselves in Switzerland. As with winter landscapes, so with winter sports: the Alps were the hinge point. For the first part of the century, the British travelling class went to Switzerland mostly in the spring, when that basic rhythm of warm interior and sublime exterior was balanced between the auberge where you spent the night and the Alps where you spent the day. Winter sports — skiing and outdoor skating and one-man “luge” sledding and bobsledding — remained quaint occupations for the locals in the off-season.
It was not until the winter of 1850 that a quartet of Englishmen were persuaded by their host that a winter holiday in Switzerland could be as fine as the usual spring Alpine holiday, that you didn’t have to go to Switzerland just for those distant snow-capp’d mountains; you could go in December or January and have a sporting experience too, skiing and sledding and luging and skating. They stayed for the winter and invented a new form of fashionable fun. (Though this story has the perfect hollow ring of counterfeit history, it does seem to be true. Fashions have to start somewhere.)
Two things derive from this story. One is that winter sports took on, despite the grey grizzle that passes for winter in Britain, a British character. As late as the 1920s the young Ernest Hemingway in Switzerland still saw luging and skiing as primarily English activities. The growth of winter sport in the nineteenth century involved first absorbing — and then decisively rejecting — a British military model of what winter sports ought to be.
And, where the imagery and aura of skating in the early Romantic period were meditative and inner, by mid-century the imagery of skating, as it became “socialized” and took to cities, was rapidly becoming almost openly erotic and sexual. In the middle of the nineteenth century ice-skating is everywhere, far more than it is today; in every major European and North American city, people skate and someone makes pictures of them skating. Winslow Homer, the greatest of American artists, as early as the 1860s, on furlough from the Civil War, devotes himself to skating scenes in the newly created Central Park. Jules Chéret, the greatest of French poster-makers — and, through his creative dialogue with Georges Seurat, a contributor to Post-Impressionist style — cannot make enough posters for the Palais de Glace in Paris.
There’s this incredible wealth of metropolitan urban skating activity from the middle of the nineteenth century, much more of it than we would now think. People skate in Central Park today, but you only have to look at the images to see on how much smaller a scale we skate now than our great-great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers did. There is no Palais de Glace, no ice palace left in Paris at all, and when the city fathers installed a little skating rink a few years ago outside the Hôtel de Ville, it was a five days’ wonder. (Even a flat-footed Canadian in hockey sweater and skates making ice-splashing hockey stops was a sight.)
The reasons for the rise and subsequent fall of skating, I think, are extremely simple. It doesn’t have much to do with the idea of the sublime; it doesn’t even have very much to do with the idea of sports. It’s all about sex. Ice-skating was one of the few things urban people could do in public as an acceptable form of flirtation and sexual display. When Central Park was built by Olmsted and Vaux in 1861 there were two separate areas for skating — one in front of what’s now the Dairy and a ladies’ pond over on the west side, not too far from where the Dakota is now. The ladies’ pond was meant for ladies — it was in operation for about ten years and then was closed and later drained because not enough people wanted to skate there. The idea of there being a separate female pond was so against the purpose of skating that it was left virtually unused. The Great Rink, on the other hand, became a place where, hard as it is to believe, as many as thirty thousand people were said to come on a Saturday afternoon to skate or to watch.
And you only need to look at Homer’s skating images from that time, his great woodcuts published regularly in Harper’s Weekly, to see how much they are about fashion, how much they are about flirtation, how entirely they are about sex. Two women turn on skates, catching that Wordsworthian wind — only now they compare each other’s fashionable hats and turn away in disdain. Men show off; women pretend to be impressed — the eternal circle of the selective lek. There’s a wonderful Homer woodcut of a single girl on skates turning her head to look back over her shoulder in perfect come-hither seduction, made respectable by her neat little muff. That’s a recurrent theme of ice-skating imagery in the nineteenth century: the girl looking back over her shoulder with a come-hither half-smile. It’s the exact opposite, if you think of it, of Goethe’s lofty stare in the early part of the century. Goethe was saying, I’m above it all; she’s saying, Come join me down here.
To glide is to escape the normal bonds of the body, but it also makes us body-conscious. Skating, like ballet, is a virtuous stylization of sexual poses that subliminally restates them. Skating rinks in the nineteenth century served the purpose that health clubs and gyms serve now — they’re places where, with impeccable motives, you can go and engage in wild flirtation and open body display. A sexual display is always acceptable when it’s billed as hygienic and salubrious. Erotic acts and invitations are innocent when they’re called exercise. (Even today, still photos of pairs skaters tend to be far more daringly and explicitly erotic than almost anything else that would be considered family entertainment.)
It’s almost a rule: when overt sexuality is repressed, it finds a theatrical, public, stylized form for its expression. Suppression puts the enactment of desire on blades, whether it’s the sexuality of young women in the nineteenth century or the sexuality of homosexual men in the twentieth. Toller Cranston, skating in a way that seemed flamboyant and even “effeminate,” forced his desire on our attention without crying out its name: surreptitiously presented, it then became sanctioned by its beauty. It is no accident, as historians say, that so many of the great skaters of the mid-twentieth century were gay. As long as homosexuality was disapproved of, oppressed, or persecuted, homosexual flirtation got expressed in ice skating — just a part of the understood code of what skating was in the twentieth century. When the erotic impulse is suppressed, it puts itself on skates and offers as art what it is denied as affection. Once public show was allowed, however, and men could hold hands on the Mall, skating became just another sport. And once actual sex between unmarried people became socially acceptable, sometime in the 1920s, the energy fell away from ice-skating and the skating rink got moved to the periphery of the park — in every sense. Skating became again a thing the kids did.
This double move — away from sex and ever closer to it — is inevitable, as Freud would have said. We dam up the libido in wools and furs and steel and then release it in lengthened legs and heightened movement. This double action of the ice, which Pushkin recognized in his erotic poetry of winter, is a crucial part of our winter legacy. Winter cools us down, and then its energy heats us up.
The intertwining of sex and skating has a third component: sport as an alternative to sex. Skating by the middle of the nineteenth century was being divided into two schools: the English style and the international style. The
English style, long lost to us, was based on the forms of military drill and was an expression of military values and military discipline. The apotheosis of the English style was what was called “combination skating,” which was an attempt to imitate on skates pure drill, the kind of thing we see in palace courtyards and parade grounds. It was stiff-legged, correct, and correctly attired; its goal was perfection of the figure traced on the ice and its practitioners went through the austere cadences of their routines with unsmiling dignity — a sort of militarized version of the Romantic reverie. As someone wrote at the time, the English skaters, even in romantic Switzerland, skated “for all the world, as though they were changing the guard at Buckingham Palace.” Photographs of that sort of skating have an unintended Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks look to them now: the tension between English stiffness and English will to action becomes a source of English eccentricity.
Then a man named Jackson Haines changed everything. A young American trained as a dancer, in the middle of the nineteenth century Haines took up skating, and he went to Europe to demonstrate a newly musicalized version of it. He invented the stunts and skills we associate with figure skating now: jumps, spins, arabesques, and pirouettes. He was never, curiously, much welcomed in America, in part because there weren’t sufficient arenas for him to play in, and he was certainly never welcomed in England. But he became a sensation in Europe, particularly in Vienna and Germany, for this new style that we now call figure skating. Although “perfect control of the body and limbs is what is aimed at” in the English school, he thought that skating, as he wrote once, “should become an art rather than a science.” The English school persisted alongside the new school that Haines had founded — but it went in a very separate direction; in 1892, when a guide to skating was published in London, it was divided neatly into two parts, one about British style and the other devoted to Haines’s international school.
By the end of the century the urge towards team sports and spectator sport becomes very, very powerful. People begin to pay to watch other people compete. And that’s true all throughout the West: it’s true about the invention of organized soccer in Britain, the spread of rugby in France, and the growth of baseball from cricket and rounders to Big Sport in the United States. Now we take this so much for granted — sports ‘r’ us — that it is difficult for us to see how peculiar, how unusual, this new thing was. As the great Caribbean thinker C. L. R. James reminds us in his seminal study of cricket and national feeling, Beyond a Boundary, for almost fifteen hundred years, since ancient times, sport as a national or civic adhesive had largely vanished. Then, very suddenly, in the last part of the nineteenth century it returns: “Golf was known to be ancient [but] the first annual tournament of the Open Championship was held only in 1860. The Football Association was founded only in 1863. It was in 1866 that the first athletic championship was held in England . . . in the United States the first all-professional baseball team was organized in 1869.” And on and on: team sport is an entirely and thoroughly modern phenomenon.
Many social forces had to come together to make the transformation of team sports happen. In one way it was a sign of increased “solidarity” among working people and of the birth of that other new thing, the weekend. People who labour together on Friday play together on Sunday. Department stores sponsored team sports, factories sponsored team sports, newspapers sponsored team sports. In other ways it was a mirror of the new mass militarism. Even the move against professionalism and spectator sports — the cult of Olympic amateurism sponsored by Baron Coubertin — involved an appeal not to pleasure but to morality. There was a whole rhetoric of purification and renewal attached to team sports, specifically anti-sexual. The Winter Olympics, which began in its current form in the 1920s but was foreshadowed by “Nordic games” at the turn of the twentieth century, with its cult of amateurism, with its insistent national regimentation, also involved a cult of implicit militarism. Organized team sport was a way of escaping this dangerous flirtation with freelancing that you could find in the middle of the century. You lost yourself not in your inner self but in a common cause.
And so you even begin to get a kind of rebound Romanticism — a rebound Romanticism in which people begin to go back to the idea of winter sport not as an arena for social engagement but as a place to test your morale, to test your endurance, to test, in short, your courage. One sees this, for instance, after the First World War in Ernest Hemingway’s dispatches on winter sports for the Toronto Star. All the rhetoric that Hemingway soon after imbues the bullfight first shows up in his writing on luge and sledding. That cult of the lonely individual, the courageous individual, taking up sports in winter takes an ugly turn in the 1930s, when it becomes essential to the ideology of Nazism. One of the images that occurs in Nazi propaganda posters is that of the solitary skier or solitary skater, the Nordic man who, braving the elements, is able to find himself as a singular figure outside the corrupting influences of the cosmopolis, the corrupting influence of the Jewish city.
But for the most part team sports involved finding a complex balance between solidarity, bringing people together in a common culture, and rivalry, dividing people through a common cult of competition. Above all it was moved by that curious and fragile but utterly real thing we call identity. We play and watch sports above all to connect — with our friends, our neighbours, our city, and even our country. In a modern time, when those things are uncertain, up for definition — Who are our neighbours? What’s the nature of our city? What is our country all about? — a game is the easiest way to say what our identity is, who we really are. Team sports are always a form of mock warfare, but with both terms having equal weight. Sports are a form of warfare, clan against clan and city against city and nation against nation. But we play them because, well, they’re play. They’re also a parody of warfare. They mock the passions they exemplify. Their intensities and energies stop just short of murder, just this safe side of rage. The whistle blows and we shake hands and plan to play again tomorrow. Where politics highlight social difference and try to end it, sports dramatize social difference and then perpetuate it — the Habs need the Leafs in order to persist as the Habs. Stylizing tribal passions, team sports help us transcend them, or at least treat them as a game, as in every sense a sport. And that leads us at last, and blessedly, to ice hockey.
Ice hockey in some ways is just one more of those team sports that emerges in the 1860s and ’70s, in the orbit of the British Empire. The first recorded games are played in the 1870s, typical of the British imperial cult of sports that spreads cricket to Trinidad and soccer to South Africa. Field hockey, one might think, but iced over. No more moving or positive story of imperialism exists than the spread of sport: most hallucinatory with cricket, where the white trousers and gentlemen’s manners now decorate a sport enlivened by Caribbean energy and Indian passions; most universal with soccer; most amateur with rugby.
Ice hockey is also a peculiar hybrid, many sports brought together into one. One thing seems certain: far from being a simple rural sport, a kind of pastoral child of winter and ponds, it is above all a city sport, and it’s made in the strange crucible of the growing Canadian cities. Through city pressures and city privileges, the game we know gets made, and in particular it gets forged from the melting pot of Irish, English, and French attitudes in my hometown of Montreal.
Now, I’m well aware that other towns claim hockey for their own, including Kingston and Halifax. So I assure you that it is pure coincidence, forced on me by fact, that I claim the birth of hockey for Montreal, and also claim the particular stable of that birth to be my own alma mater, McGill University — and, more narrowly, also call the labour bed of the birth of hockey the six-square-block area between Sherbrooke and St. Catherine streets and Stanley and Drummond, where I happened to grow up. What can I say? It happens to be so, and there is nothing to be done about it. (Seriously, the most persuasive account of this moment points to its home there,
and we owe it to the Laval University historian, Michel Vigneault, who has shown in detail how it happened. Obviously hockey grew up in many niches and in many parts of the country, but if modern hockey was born in any one place, it was in Montreal, and the game still bears many marks of the forceps.)
The earliest records we have of a game of ice hockey come from the 1870s and ’80s around McGill, but it seems quite possible that the winter game was brought there from Nova Scotia. (There is a whole other argument that it began in Kingston, but people from Kingston who wanted to have the Hockey Hall of Fame there seem to have invented that one.) Certainly it was a young Nova Scotia–raised engineer, John George Alwyn Creighton, working in Montreal as the Grand Trunk Railroad was being built, who first consolidated the rules of hockey at McGill in 1873.
The strange thing about ice hockey is that, while it looks as if it belongs to the larger family of games that share its name, it doesn’t. It looks like lawn hockey; it must be like field hockey; it has something in common with polo — it’s one of those games you play by knocking a ball around with a stick until it goes into a goal. It even seems to belong to the same family of sports as association football, what we call soccer.
But Creighton was not a field-hockey player, nor was he a soccer player (soccer was a workingmen’s sport in any case). He was a rugby player, and hockey for him was a way of extending the rugby season into the winter months. The scene of his invention was the old Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, the first large purpose-built rink in Canada, between Drummond and Stanley, where on a cold March day Creighton is said to have been heard hollering out rugby rules to the players of the new sport. (Lord Stanley saw his first ice hockey game at the Victoria Rink.)
