Unscripted games trump contrived drama
ANN ARBOR, MICH. — You would think that in the middle of the biggest stadium in North America, a hockey rink would never seem smaller. The hard blue benches in Michigan Stadium ring the field and stretch out in a vast half-bowl toward the sky, and they can fit 110,000 in this modern Colosseum. The sound, on New Year’s Day, will rise and fall in massive waves.
But Michigan Stadium doesn’t feel as big as it is because the seats are jammed together, 16 to 18 inches apiece, ringing the field, close. Even in the 96th row you don’t feel miles away; you feel included. When the Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings meet in the Winter Classic on Wednesday, the Big House will be a sea of red and blue blended together. It will be spectacular, weather permitting. The current forecast is for snow.
And that’s the Winter Classic at its strange and goofy best, when it is not being crammed sideways in baseball stadiums. It’s tricky, sure. TV wants it to look like a snow globe, but they don’t want so much snow that it accumulates and mucks up the play. In 2008, for instance, the snow piled up and the ice cracked in spots, and Buffalo and Pittsburgh spent most of the game trying not to get hurt.
But it was all redeemed by the perfect tableau of Sidney Crosby alone at centre ice under lights and a darkening sky, with fat snowflakes falling around him and boos rolling down from 71,000 fans. He scored to win the shootout, pushing the puck through snow and Ryan Miller, and it was cinematic as all hell.
And that’s why, while you can cart in all the cynicism you can carry, when the players play outside, when the puck hits the ice, there’s something evocative there, being mined for all it is worth. It will be described as magic, but whatever it is, it can be better than the problems the game itself presents. It’s like then-Buffalo coach Lindy Ruff said after that 2008 game: “You know, it may not be the best hockey game because of the situation, because of the weather, because of the snow. But the atmosphere was incredible. It was incredible. And to hell with the cynics.”
The Winter Classic is in its sixth year as an increasingly lucrative institution; it has been accompanied by the HBO documentary show 24/7 for three. This is a made-for-TV production, all of it, beginning to end; it is taking a game that may well be critical in the year-end standings and playing it under unusual conditions.
But the game is only part of it, and it is the part that can hold up best. This year’s edition of 24/7, lovingly shot and elegantly narrated, has become something close to vacant. It has begun to feel more like marketing than ever, rather than the inside look it was at the beginning. It’s a show.
That is the way of sports, of course; paranoia strangles access, more and more. The game footage allowed us to see poor snakebitten David Clarkson argue with Todd Bertuzzi over a water bottle — “What are you, the water bottle police?” said Bertuzzi — and allowed us to experience slices of the game’s speed and beauty and brute danger from ice level.
The locker-room footage was useful in showing how Leafs coach Randy Carlyle lambastes his troops based on effort rather than execution, and gave a small window into Detroit coach Mike Babcock’s thinking. That is, when the cameras weren’t being thrown out.
But it has been largely dull, full of set pieces and some profanity. Detroit has been a wooden puck, and the Leafs are so conditioned to be careful around cameras that the glimpses of reality are rare. Nazem Kadri mistakenly saying that he was a friend rather than an enemy of complacency, for instance. Or Carlyle, after a win, saying, “We can breathe, right?”
Otherwise, there were so many generic interviews, some humanizing of players through their families, two teams with no rivalry between them, and a string of montages set to music of players walking in slow motion — into arenas, through airports, down sidewalks, a pretty and empty thing. The most compelling moment of the entire series might have been in the first episode, when the closing montage featured a shot of Bertuzzi sitting in a bar, tattoos creeping up to his wrist, a Corona in his hand, his face looking worn and old and grimly melancholy, full of thoughts that will never see the light of day.
Bertuzzi has a lawsuit coming next year, finally, a full decade after he jumped on Steve Moore’s back, and that’s what made him drinking alone in a bar something close to a story, untold. One or two seconds, and it told a part of the story, hinted at something deeper, but that will go unexplored without an order from a court.
And that’s what 24/7 has become, after the unvarnished glimpses of Bruce Boudreau trying to grasp his falling Washington Capitals, and of Ilya Bryzgalov swallowing Philadelphia’s tightly bound universe whole. It is hints of stories untold. The teams don’t want to get burned. The players know that honesty can hurt them. The games can’t be controlled, but everything around them can be, unless your coach has trouble with a toaster.
That’s one reason why we’re lucky there is a game at the end of all this. Its problem is the opposite — that it can’t be controlled, that it’s less likely to grow stale, that it remains a real experience, even with fake cotton-candy snow spread out on the ground. And as outdoor games multiply in a dig for more revenues, a game will eventually be a genuine weather disaster; the magic will wear off by the fourth or fifth or sixth outdoor game of the year, which also increases the odds that something will go wrong.
But the cinematic nature of the game, under the sky and under the lights, holds its power. At least, for now.