I had just gotten home from school on a normal Wednesday when I found my dad on the couch, ready for our daily banter about sports, politics and anything else that we felt like arguing about. The T.V. was on, showing a hockey game between Canada and Sweden. My dad isn’t a big hockey fan—we watch maybe two or three Seattle Kraken games a year—so I was surprised to see that he was watching a game without me. Normally I’d pass, but for some reason this time I was intrigued.
I started watching with around 15 minutes left in the third period. Canada led 3-2, and for the first few minutes, I fought the urge to go on my phone. But, only seconds later I jumped off the couch when Joel Eriksson Ek, of Sweden, sent the puck through the goal to tie the game up. After that moment, my eyes were glued to the T.V., and in the final minutes of overtime, Mitch Marner broke away and scored the winning goal for team Canada.
After that game, I spent the rest of the night digging up any information I could on the Four Nations Hockey Tournament. I found out that the NHL was having a similar problem to every major sport—nobody is watching the All-Star game anymore. People are tired of watching million-dollar athletes put out lackluster performances for a meaningless game on national television. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman had a fix—Four Nations Hockey: a round-robin tournament between the four most represented countries in the NHL (excluding Russia). What do NHL players care about the most? The countries from which they descend. Hockey players will fight for their countries like their families’ lives depend on it.
The real question was if players would put in the same fight, for an exhibition tournament. In the weeks leading up to the first game, fans from all over the world weren’t super excited for the tournament, not, anyway, how the NHL would have liked.
The next day, team USA blasted Finland in a 6-1 annihilation, capturing the attention of American sports fans. American sports fans took a pause from their sport and united around this team. Including those who knew little about hockey, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was team USA playing against three other teams fighting for nothing but pride.
The United States has recently been very divided politically and it seems like half the country hates the other half of the country. People that disagree with other people’s political views, now disagree with each other entirely. Sports, though, are unifying. They create a sense of family and camaraderie, something that the United States really needs right now.
However, before the two juggernauts of the tournament, team USA and Canada, faced off, tensions started to flare when the home Canadian crowd booed the playing of the National Anthem. After the game, in an interview with NPR, goaltender Connor Hellebuyck was asked if he used the booing as momentum.
“You have free speech,” Hellebuyck said. “You can do whatever you want. If you’re going to boo the anthem, we sing it for the troops that protected our freedom. That doesn’t really mean anything to me. You can do whatever you want. But I don’t use it at all.”
This moment was bigger than hockey. As Hellebuyck said, we sing the national anthem for our troops and for our country. When Canadians decided to boo the National anthem, it wasn’t an attack on team U.S. hockey, it was an attack on the United States.
I understand why Canadians felt the need to be mad at America. If my country was being threatened by its long-time ally, I wouldn’t be happy either. But, booing the National Anthem at a sporting event may not have been the best way to show their frustration. The players can’t do anything about the U.S. government decisions, and if anything, booing the National Anthem might have made them even more mad. However, they did get their point across on a national stage and if the President of the United States tuned into the news at all, he definitely saw it.
Team USA went on to defeat team Canada 3-1, securing the Americans a spot in the championship of the tournament. The chance to prove that the states were not inferior to Canada in hockey filled the minds of millions of Americans.
After all was said and done, the championship game collected 16.1 million North American viewers, the second most for a hockey game in the past decade. For the sport of hockey, these numbers are incredible to see. It means that there are hockey fans out there, we just have to find them.
As for me, I’ve learned a lot from hockey in my short time as a fan. I’ve learned that sports are so much more than what meets the eye, and what it means to represent your country. If people can drop their differences and rally behind a team in a tournament, I have faith in our country after all.
