The Puck Stops Here: an Inquiry Into the Manufacture of Goalie Masks
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Puck Stops Here: An Inquiry into the Manufacture of Goalie Masks by Guilherme Nothen A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Exercise Sciences University of Toronto © Copyright by Guilherme Nothen (2019) The Puck Stops Here: An Inquiry into the Manufacture of Goalie Masks Guilherme Nothen Doctor of Philosophy Department of Exercise Sciences University of Toronto 2019 Abstract The present inquiry seeks to document the changing landscapes of the manufacture of ice hockey equipment in Canada. This was once a burgeoning branch of industrial activity, but has more recently been heavily impacted by outsourcing and offshoring tendencies (especially from the early 1990s onwards). In little less than two decades, imposing manufacturing plants have been systematically shut down, thoroughly reducing Canada´s share in the production of the equipment needed for the practice of what is often deemed its national game. Today, estimates suggest that roughly ninety percent of the hockey gear consumed in Canada is manufactured in the Global South. This research unfolds in the aftermath of this geographical transformation, paying particular attention to the perspective of the small manufacturers of hockey equipment that are still based on Canadian soil. For six months, I carried out participant observations and interviews in a factory where goalie masks are produced. Drawing upon the findings that derive from my experience in this setting, as well as from attending mask shows and similar events, I try to bring into light the daily routine of the factory floor; the progressive steps in the assembly line; the relationships that ii the workers entertain with the game of hockey; and, most fundamentally, the uncertainties faced by small companies attempting to survive at the margins of a market dominated by major corporations. In addition, I discuss the specificities of goalie masks as sporting commodities, seeking to illustrate the residues of artisanship that, in some special cases, pervade the manufacture of these objects to this day – thus resisting the general drive towards standardization that characterizes the sports equipment industry more broadly. To conclude, I engender an exploratory analysis of the different meanings that goalie masks are invested with – including as a projection of a goaltender’s identity. iii Acknowledgments I am very grateful to my family and friends for the patience and unwavering support throughout this rather demanding and time-consuming scholarly journey. To my cohort at the University of Toronto for providing what I have experienced as the most encouraging, supportive, and innovative research environment. And especially to the members of my thesis committee – Peter and Mike – for the valuable advice and counseling over all the years during which this thesis was in the making. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to all of the participants in this research – and especially to those engaged in the production of goalies masks who, so generously, allowed me to become a part of their team. I will always carry with me the lessons that I learned in the factory floor. Above everything else, I would like to thank my mentor and friend Dr. Bruce Kidd. Every time I felt I was beginning to venture into uncharted academic grounds, it was only to subsequently find out – with great delight – that he had already been there before. iv Table of Contents PART I: THE FIELD OF STUDY AND THE METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH.................01 Chapter One: New and ‘old’ materialisms…….…………………….………………..02 1.1 The object of study……………………….…………..………………………11 1.2 The commodity in its general form ………….…………….….……………..14 1.3 The study of material culture.………….……………………….……………22 1.4 The significance of the hockey manufacturing industry in Canada…….........26 1.5 Why goalie masks? The scope, relevance, and objectives of the study….…..31 1.6 An outline of the study…………………………………………….…………38 Chapter Two: Methodology……………………………………………………………40 2.1 Doing research in Canada as an outsider…………………………………….44 2.2 Challenges in entering the factory floor……………………………………..48 2.3 Participant observation…………………………………………………...….50 2.4 Semi-structured and object-based interviews………………………………..60 PART II: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT..........…………………………….............................65 Chapter Three: The world of the small hockey equipment entrepreneur….………66 3.1 The decline of the hockey manufacturing industry in Canada………………78 Chapter Four: The birth of the goalie mask………………………………………….89 4.1 Three major phases in the history of mask making………………………….94 v PART III: FACTORY LIFE………………….………………………………………………..102 Chapter Five: Mas(k)s Production…………………………………………………..103 5.1 An inside look………………………………………………………..……..104 5.2 The manufacturing process……………………………………………..…..110 5.3 Assembling the masks………………………………………………………116 5.4 Goalie masks dissected: The ‘Made in Canada’ claim……………………..120 5.5 Goalie masks dissected: Latent signifiers…………………………………..124 5.6 Ice hockey on the factory floor…………………………………...………...129 5.7 Politics on the factory floor…………………………………………………131 Chapter Six: Custom-made masks………………………………….………………..133 6.1 Casting the mold……………………………………………………………137 6.2 The sculpting process……………………………………………………….139 6.3 Replicas……………………………………………………………………..143 PART IV: THE WAY OF THE GOALIE MASKS…………...........…………….……………147 Chapter Seven: Goalie masks as a projection of a goaltender’s personality…..…..148 7.1 Goaltenders…................................................................................................148 7.2 The artworks……………………..…………………………………………152 7.3 Alter-egos…………………………………………..……………………….156 Conclusion: The commodities of sport............……………………………….………159 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………168 vi List of Appendices Appendix A: An overview of the scholarship on ice hockey in Canada…….………...………180 . Appendix B: University of Toronto ethics approval letter………………..……….……..……183 Appendix C: University of Toronto ethics amendment approval letter………………..…...…185 Appendix D: Interview Guide (Current Workers and Small Business Owners)…………....…186 vii PART I: THE FIELD OF STUDY AND THE METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH 1 Chapter One: New and ‘old’ materialisms Over the course of the last three decades, the critical study of sport and physical culture has been thoroughly reconfigured by what one could perhaps refer to as a growing sensitivity towards the ‘material world’. On the one hand, this tendency found expression through a renewed interest on the human body and how it intersects with wider social and political forces. According to several authors working in kinesiology and physical education departments, this shift in orientation first appeared, around the mid-1980s, as a further development of the so-called ‘return to the body’ concurrently taking place within the social sciences more broadly (Duncan, 2007; Andrews, 2008). Over time, the preoccupation with ‘body politics’ came to define much of the scholarship associated with the sociology of sport. Such a gradual transformation in the scope of the discipline could be verified not only with regards to the problems under investigation; in effect, the whole discourse of the field came to be progressively galvanized by the introduction of a terminology geared towards the representation of physicality (Andrews & Silk, 2011). Still, to account for the elusiveness of the embodied experience – which, by its very nature, resists so conspicuously to be captured in words – remains to this day a key challenge for scholars carrying out research on the entanglements between the body, sport, and physical culture. By the early-mid 1990s, on the other hand, an analogous move towards materiality started to take shape: Namely, a burgeoning concern with the production of sports spaces (Van Ingen, 2003). The driving force behind this line of inquiry has been the interest on the built environment – in other words, how its organization and administration largely privilege certain hegemonic sporting practices, thus marginalizing other forms of physicality. Notable in this sense has been the scholarship dealing with the distribution of (public) sports facilities throughout various major cities (e.g., Silk, 2004; Misener & Mason, 2008; Horne, 2011), as well as the numerous pieces focusing on specific sports venues, such as stadiums (e.g., Kidd, 1990), gymnasiums (e.g., Vertinsky & McKay, 2004), and arenas (Hanningan, 2006; Dennis, 2009). There has been, too, a smaller avenue of research which has concentrated not so much on the built environment per se, 2 but on how sports spaces have been revered1 (as quasi-sacred sites), imagined, and, most importantly, “experienced” (e.g., Vertinsky & Bale, 2004). Particularly relevant for the argument being developed here is the latter one, that is, the scholarship on ‘lived’ sports spaces. This appears to be so because it brings together the two materialistic tendencies that I just briefly mentioned: Specifically, the concern with ‘bodies’ and the concern with ‘spaces’. Indeed, it has become customary, in the field of kinesiology and physical education as well as in the social sciences more broadly, to speak about “bodies-in-space” (e.g., Friedman & Van Ingen, 2011). In the guise of introduction, it should suffice to say that the realm of objects – or, to put it differently, of material culture – has (paradoxically) remained somewhat alien to these ‘materialistic’ tendencies. It is true that objects have been often conceived