How successfully does hockey reporting accurately reflect what happens on the ice?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one of the questions Andrew Holman will tackle in his keynote address for this year\u2019s Crossing Borders conference on Saturday, March 7.<\/p>\n
Holman\u2019s lecture, Hockey Talk: Sport, Communications and a History of Getting it Wrong<\/em>, will focus on hockey talk and the ways Canadians and Americans try to describe what happens on the ice. He will trace the way hockey has been reported in newspapers, by telegraph, radio broadcasts, and television and consider how hockey\u2019s storytellers, such as Foster Hewitt and Danny Gallivan, insert their own narratives into the process.<\/p>\n \u201cIn some important ways, hockey talk erases the border,\u201d says Holman, who researches the social and cultural history of Canadian-American relations, borderlands studies and the scholarly history of sport.<\/p>\n \u201cNewspapers, telegraphy, radio and television have joined Canadians and Americans into a single, sometimes monolithic audience.\u00a0At the same time, hockey discourse has been a vehicle for expressing Canadian nationalism and anti-Americansim, and for carving out smaller, more particular constituencies of followers and fans,\u201d he says, pointing to APTN\u2019s Cree and Roger\u2019s Punjabi hockey broadcasts.<\/p>\n \u201cThe discourse is both unifying and inclusive, but sometimes it can be divisive, too.\u201d<\/p>\n Holman is a Professor of History and Director of Canadian Studies at Bridgemwater State University in Massachusetts. He is the author, co-author and editor of five books, including three on the scholarly history of hockey: Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity<\/em>;\u00a0The Same but Different: Hockey in Quebec<\/em> (with Jason Blake); and Hockey: A Global History<\/em> (with Stephen Hardy). He has been interviewed extensively on television, radio, podcasts, documentaries and print media.<\/p>\n A native of St. Catharines, Ont., Holman looks forward to returning home for this conference (and a Sunday-morning pick-up game with his family).<\/p>\n \u201cHockey culture has deep and complex roots here, and St. Catharines plays an important role in the larger history of hockey in Canada,\u201d he says, noting that St. Catharines is featured in several stories in Hockey: A Global History<\/em>, where Holman describes his parents and three brothers as \u201chockey people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHockey was a central part of our upbringing,” he says. “Like many families, it remains today an important way that we visit with one another and communicate.”<\/p>\n Crossing Borders is an annual conference co-organized with Brock\u2019s Centre for Canadian Studies, State University of New York at Buffalo and Niagara University.<\/p>\n