By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Jan 2, 2012) US Soccer Players -- Later today, the National Hockey League will put on their annual version of what hockey would be like if it returned to an era that never really existed for professionals. The game played outdoors... with the addition of a full and modern Major League Baseball stadium. Hey, mixing metaphors is part of the point. There's a line at substituting frozen elk livers for rubber pucks, but that broadly invoked nostalgia should be expected early and often.
What we're left with is an oddly North American exercise, almost similar to what happens when the pros take the ice for the Olympic hockey tournament. Like the Winter Classic, we hear from people inside and outside of the sport making a quick and unflattering comparison to the usual NHL product. Olympic hockey is better because of the wider ice surface and the ability of skill players to avoid the physical game. The Winter Classic is better because it speaks to all that is good about hockey as a sport.
Both don't stand up to a lot of scrutiny, and both have grown stale through repetition. As someone who has the box set of the '72 Summit Series between the Canadians and the Soviets, what might be in play here is the limits of sports as allegory.
For those of you otherwise occupied in 1972 (I wasn't alive, so work with me here), the Canadians and Soviets played an eight-game series to determine the best hockey team in the world. This was no understatement, especially considering the Soviet Red Army team wasn't sending players to the North American pro leagues (there were two at the time). Having the Canadian professionals play the Soviets was a very big deal. It's still considered some of the best hockey ever played, and almost 40 years later it's still somewhat shocking that it even happened.
Like any good sporting idea, they tried it again. How many of us have any memory of the Canada Cup or the World Cup of Hockey? With the Summit Series, the idea became an ideal the first time around. The repetition starting all of two years later never came close.
For all of those holding up the Winter Classic as its own ideal, it too set a standard in year one that has yet to be matched. More to the point, it did that with an alumni game. That was another example of uniqueness, the last time the 80's Oilers dynasty took to the ice in seriousness.
If you like sports, seeing Gretzky, Messier, and company take their first strides onto that ice in a Canadian football stadium was something else. That was the whole point. When that Heritage Classic became the annual Winter Classic, something was already lost. The NHL might try to play up the Classic as a regular season game under admittedly unique circumstances, but it's a special event removed from business as usual.
How does this apply to soccer? Let me tell you another story.
Back in the late 90's, I was a sucker for a visiting European team. I paid to see the likes of Legia Warsaw and Derby County play the Chicago Fire, and it was as important to me as a fan than any July game against the bulk of the potential MLS opponents. I had little time for the old hands downplaying exhibition games. In retrospect, more often than not they were right.
Maybe for me it was evidence that the American version of the sport was authentic. Play it down all you want, but a European team losing to an MLS team especially in the late 90's was a story. Maybe it was simply the uniqueness of the situation, attempting to collect my own version of Panini stickers by actually seeing these clubs in person. Whatever it was, the repetition problem quickly set in.
Fortunately, the European visits were rare in the early 2000's. The games simply weren't happening. When they did return it was European teams playing each other in stadiums MLS teams couldn't hope to fill. And just like before, the same teams showing up summer after summer began to impact the event. Make that events, with American soccer putting as much spectacle on the calendar as possible.
It's the problem so many soccer writers and fans point to when we're treated to the summer super and not so super club touring teams. It's a familiarity that shouldn't exist. These rare moments should be just that, standing out years later rather than just another game on the calendar. Instead, it becomes regularly scheduled programming.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
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