I leveled up as a fan on November 14, 2014, shortly after 7pm, watching a hockey game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Toronto Maple Leafs. I was sitting at the bar at a beer hall near my office. I don’t remember who I had planned to meet or why they weren’t there. I do remember that Evgeni Malkin didn’t score a goal.
Before that day, I would have described myself as a fan of lots of things. Georgette Heyer, Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Oliver Sacks, Harry Potter, Shakespeare, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Alexander McQueen. Artists and shows, books and looks, old and new. And I was, and am, a fan of all those things.
Hockey, too, I would have included in the list. I watched my hometown team with my dad growing up, like most Canadians. I cheered and pumped my fist and complained about the refs. As an adult, I knew who the major stars were, watched the Olympics if they were on while I was awake, and started paying attention to concussion research in Sidney Crosby’s lost season.
But the feeling that came over me for the first time on that particular night — like the world had a new dimension consisting entirely of the Pittsburgh Penguins. That feeling. That was new.
I ordered a second beer, something I would rarely do when sitting alone. I nursed it as slowly as I could so that no one would bring me the bill before I could finish watching that game.
I said to myself: hey, myself. It seems like you’re … really into this.
YES, I AM, myself replied.
Okay then!
Evgeni Malkin bullied his way through the neutral zone in his characteristic looping charge, his long body hunched against a couple of defenders. He turned over the puck, hooked someone, and was sent to the box, where he sat puffing out his cheeks in embarrassed frustration.
I knew what he could do. I’d been following the Penguins for a while in a half-conscious way. But that was the first time I realized I was captivated.
You probably know exactly what I’m talking about. That feeling. You might even be laughing at the fact that I came to it so late. How did I live so long as a writer in a fannish culture with fannish friends without falling that hard for anything?
My answer is partly that I am a writer — have always been a writer — and my enjoyment of books and TV always coexisted with learning narrative structure, which kept me at a bit of a distance.
Why didn’t I embrace hockey earlier, then, since it wasn’t as close to my work? Why did I let it sit on the outskirts of my attention as only a family-weekend activity?
The answer, for me, lies in a cultural divide: way back in high school, I saw the chasm between the nerds and jocks, and I clung to the cultural markers that placed me on one side and not the other.
I imagine many of us face those choices. We need cohorts, tribes, circles, and when we find them, we’re delighted to be welcomed in. In turn, our communities bring out in us a common set of traits, and we let other things wither. But it’s uncomfortable to starve out parts of yourself and your culture, and eventually I didn’t want to do that any more.
At Wiscon one year, I took a deep breath and wore one of my Penguins t-shirts. It was a particularly intense year for me as my debut novel was launching and I needed my good luck charm. Also: the Penguins were in the playoffs, and maybe they needed my good luck charm.
I got high-fives and hockey talk from so many other people! Some folks had already bridged that chasm — or maybe had never chosen a side in the first place. I wasn’t sitting at the wrong cafeteria table at all.
Since then, I’ve been a lot less shy about sharing what brings me joy. This sounds silly when I type it out — I mean, it’s joy. It should be the most shareable emotion.
Some people don’t share my joy, and while I no longer worry about the ones who are just downers, some of them feel that way for entirely understandable reasons. Hockey is sometimes violent — and sometimes racist. It gives cover to some really toxic men. Those things have led me to write a lot of upset tweets and letters to teams. They’ve led some of my friends to take their fandom elsewhere. For me, my joy is still there at the heart, and I want to make things better.
The fans I’ve met since I started opening up about hockey are legion. They’re easy to find, just by wearing a cap or a t-shirt, and the vast majority of them are friendly, kind, and willing to have long conversations with strangers about how to fix the Penguins’ power play. They’ve saved me from a lot of lonely business trips. They’ve welcomed me into a community that is every bit as diverse, smart, socially engaged, and vocal as the other fandoms I know.
And they’re part of so many of the other fandoms I know. There is no chasm. There’s a growing knowledge that we’re all capable of loving so many different things. And we should. We should love and love again, and share our love with the world.
And if hockey doesn’t sound like your thing, let me tell you what’s happening in Toronto with basketball…
Claire Humphrey’s novel, Spells of Blood and King, was published by St Martin’s and won the 2017 Sunburst Award. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines, most recently Strange Horizons, Liminal and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as well as anthologies including the Lambda Award-nominated Beyond Binary, the Kickstarter sensation Long Hidden, and Aurora Award nominee The Sum of Us.
