Outside the Olympic sphere, I am a man who reads four newspapers a day religiously. While in Utah, I skimmed a few sports pages and spent most of my time reading bio sheets on Slovenian bobsledders, Lithuanian ice dancers and Belarussian hockey players. As a result I am now a reservoir of Olympic minutiae, desperately in need of a purge.
It is a pathos that is shared only by my reporting brethren at the Games. How does it manifest itself? Well, as I braved lines that stretched for hundreds of yards outside the airport terminal this week to make my escape from Salt Lake, I actually engaged my esteemed colleague Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan in a little nostalgia over Nordic skiing. Trust me, that’s the last conversation anyone in this country will have about Nordic skiing until the 2006 Games in Turin.
So the experience of returning home is more than a little Rip Van Winklish. I am strangely out of step with and bewildered by the world. I hear “axis of evil” and I still think of the Russian judge, the Ukrainian judge and the French judge Madame Marie Reine Le Gougne. I am more than a bit obsessed with the latter, if only because she is apparently a dissembler to rival our last president. Every day she has a different fable, more than Aesop himself, to explain her pro-Russian vote in the pairs competition. It was me. It was the French. It was the Russians. And, finally, it was the Canadians. (When I imagine this scene cinematically, I come up with something between Linda Blair’s spinning head in “The Exorcist” and Faye Dunaway’s desperate “Chinatown” confessional finale.)
I kind of buy into Le Gougne’s last one: the evil Canadian empire. We who live in New England are well aware of the threat that Canada represents, but have trouble getting the rest of the country to take us seriously. Efforts to move some troops off the North Korean border and up into vulnerable Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine communities have proved futile. But back to Madame Le Gougne. Among the extraordinary pressures brought to bear on this poor lady in Salt Lake City was the Canadians inviting her to a birthday party for a Polish judge—and then making her stay a whole 20 minutes. You may once again scoff, but anyone who has ever been to a Polish party knows 20 minutes can seem a lifetime.
Listen to Madame long enough and the world turns topsy-turvy. Hers becomes not a scandal, but an act of conscience worthy of “Profiles in Courage.” Though, by her own account, she was petrified. Still, she somehow found the stones to support the Russian pair in the face of daunting pressure from up north. How do you buck the Canadians when they are a superpower in the International Skating Union? Indeed they are so powerful and unduly influential in the skating establishment that, until Salt Lake and the revision in favor of the Canadian pair of Sale and Pelletier, no Canadian had won an Olympic figure-skating gold medal for 42 years. Over the same period, the Russians (or, previously, the Soviets) have won 22 Olympic golds. Now please explain it to me again. Who has all the influence on judges?
Sale and Pelletier were not the only Canadian skaters who’ve had a lasting effect on me. I came home after that fabulous Olympic hockey tournament with something of a hockey jones. The current Olympic format was designed as an NHL showcase and, to a certain extent, it worked beyond anything the league could have anticipated or even dreamed of. The hockey was compelling, even mesmerizing (as, by the way, it was in Nagano, except there the Americans stunk and were a turnoff for the home audience). I thrilled to the Belarus upset of Sweden, the classic Russian 1-0 win over defending champ Czech Republic and the U.S. grit. And at the gold-medal game, I was left breathless by the skill set of the Canadian team. (There should be songs written about Joe Sakic.)
But the problem with this showcase is that as soon as you try to replicate the fan experience in the NHL game, you’re bound to be disappointed. Less than 24 hours after getting home, I was feeding my hockey habit with the Islanders-Bruins game. (It must have been strange for the Islanders to realize that its stars like Alexei Yashin and Michael Peca are no longer the most famous skaters on Long Island, upstaged by a 16-year-old girl from Great Neck.)
As NHL games go, this contest was pretty entertaining. The Islanders salvaged a 3-3 tie with less than two seconds remaining. Yet it was somehow unsatisfying, sloppy and choppy. It bore no more resemblance to the fluid and thrilling Olympic game than to a curling contest. And believe me, I now know curling. The comparison is not entirely fair, since Olympic hockey contains an elite subset of stars with the added fillip of nationalism. But far more important is that every single international hockey rule that differs with those governing the NHL is an improvement and makes for a superior game.
The bigger ice surface and the two-line pass both serve the same purpose, to open up the game and increase opportunities for the skilled players. It favors real hockey talent over thuggery and helps neutralize the various blue-line trap defenses that have stultified offense in the NHL. The 15-second face-off rule, requiring play to resume quickly after a stoppage, is aimed at the dawdling and mind-game substitutions that, in the NHL, make every face-off a mini-drama absent any real drama. And the automatic icing rule is a no-brainer, eliminating the requirement that the nonoffending side waste time and energy pursuing a puck to no productive end.
Moreover, the time for an NHL ban on fighting, as in the Olympics, is surely upon us. Hockey is the only sport where fighters aren’t automatically booted from the game, a sop to adolescents or the adolescent-minded. It keeps real hockey highlights from making the sports shows and causes the game to be lumped with theatrical farces like the WWF far more often than is healthy. Is the NHL game really bolstered by players like Dennis Bonvie? In the Islanders-Bruins game, I witnessed the Bruins winger-enforcer score his first career goal, indeed his very first point, though he had already managed to accumulate 242 penalty minutes in 64 career games. (For the record, that’s only 34 less penalty minutes than Hall-of-Famer Jean Ratelle notched in his 21 seasons in the NHL.)
I understand that there are economic constraints against some of these rules. It’s costly to widen rinks at the expense of seats. And those face-off delays provide time to run commercials. But if the NHL ever wants to be more than a poor stepchild in American pro sports, now is the time for some courage. (Let the French judge be your inspiration.) Give the game the makeover it so desperately needs. Take away the thuggery, boost the artistry. Your showcase was a hit. Now give us the show.
