17th
Thousands of readers have been writing in to ask what I think of the Sean Avery affair, seeing as it touches on two of my perennial themes—hockey and misogyny.
For those of you who missed it, Avery, a former New York Ranger, was recently *kicked off the Dallas Stars* for complaining that two of his ex-girlfriends were dating NHL players. What he said, more specifically, was: “It’s become a common thing for players in the NHL to fall in love with my sloppy seconds.” He said this in his role as very annoying guy, right before the Stars played the Calgary Flames, whose star defenseman, Dion Phaneuf, is in fact dating Avery’s ex-girlfriend, who is an actress.
Avery is not a beloved player in the NHL. On YouTube, alongside his comments about sloppy seconds, here, you can also screen “Rick DiPietro Slaps Sean Avery,” “Sean Avery Is a Coward,” and “Hordichuck Beats on Sean Avery.” Nor is he very good at hockey. As the great hockey blogger Puckupdate warned Dallas fans earlier this year:
He’s got some speed. He definitely has some grit. But that’s about it. He doesn’t have much of a hockey IQ. You’ll see a lot of bad penalties and silly giveaways. You’ll see a lot of shots on goal right into the midsection of the opposing goalie. You’ll see average defense. You’ll see some goals from right around the front of the net, but that’s really it. Do yourself a favor and lower your expectations now.
Avery wasn’t having a very good stretch with Dallas, and still it’s just downright amazing—I can’t think of any precedent in sports history—that a player can say something offensive to the other team and be expelled from his own team for it.
But what I mostly want to say is this: Avery is famous for being a “pest”—not, as Newsweek put it last month, for being “the baddest badass in the NHL”—but for talking trash to other players, being dirty, and probably, though I can’t say I’ve ever seen him do this, banging his stick on the ice when the other team has the puck and pretending he wants a pass. People shouldn’t do that. I wish coaches would teach kids not to do that. I *hate* that.
And so, to sum up, Avery was touching on a genuinely important emotional conundrum of late modernity—the fact that all of us have former lovers, which is how we like it, and yet we never actually want them to date anyone ever again. We especially don’t want them to date professional hockey players. And yet, watching the video of his comments, I see that rather than expressing genuine sorrow over this state of affairs he was merely “doing his job.” And for that, I, like the Dallas Stars, cannot forgive him.
Those are my comments on the Avery affair.
The video above shows Calgary defenseman Phaneuf wrecking guys. It’s got a good soundtrack. Halfway through they show Phaneuf scoring a goal—he scores 20 goals a year, which is a lot—and you think the video is going to turn into him scoring goals, but instead it goes right back to him wrecking guys. Recommended.
