ral symbol. It is universal not because every Canadian has played the game... But even those who haven't played hockey... nonetheless relate to the game. They know what it is, connect it to some context, and have some feelings about it. The point is not whether hockey is the world's best, fastest or most barbaric game; nor whether we are the best in the world at playing it. The point is...it is ours (Salutin 293).
Ours. We Canadians have a serious identity problem when it comes to assessing what is ours. Is ours an Anglo-oriented, high-culture, non-violent culture? Or is it a violence-prone, lumpen proletariat amalgam of immigrants - led by a Francophone minority that threatens secession at every political turn? Hockey, like Canadian identity, reflects this cultural schizophrenia like a mirror ready at hand.
Hockey, from its very inception, shared with the ordinary Canadian an ambiguous relationship to the concept of "our" identity. There is no questioning the fact that it grew out of popular winter games. Whether one assigns the ancestry to shimmy or curling is beside the point: hockey, like American baseball, evolved during the 1800s into the sophisticated game it is today as part and parcel of the same evolution that saw Canada change from a wilderness, trading-post colony into an agricultural-industrial nation. As part of that process, the development of urban centers found a working-class population congregating in large numbers, a population expressing the simultaneous need for low-cost recreation and entertainment.
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