Sens fan Katie Kerrick was assaulted at Friday’s game. Prior to this she met Ottawa player Bobby Ryan.
Photo from Kerrick’s Facebook page.

Sports culture—jock culture—is part of our national masculinity. And in the case of Canada, national manliness is all about white middle class men playing hockey, chugging beer, and getting maple leaf tattoos, as pointed out by William Bridle and Martyn Clark in “If Canada is a ‘Team’, Do We All Get Playing Time? Considering Sport, Sporting Masculinity, and Canadian National Identity.” Our Canadian heroes are players like Sidney Crosby: white, assumed to be heterosexual, and rich. Hockey players are known for their hard work and making it to the top.

Undoubtedly a lot of work is put into becoming and remaining a NHL player. But, it’s not exactly like the majority of hockey players started from the bottom and hard work alone got them where they are today. In the last 10–15 years, minor league hockey costs have dramatically increased, “It’s a development that threatens the sport’s blue-collar roots, including the idea that the next Gordie Howe or Wayne Gretzky will come from backgrounds as modest as theirs were,” James Mirtle reports in a 2013 article for the Globe and Mail. “Players of modest means in this generation must beat out peers who are often better trained and have spent many more hours on the ice, thanks to wealthy parents.” Wealthy, in the majority, is connected to whiteness and men. The NHL insists “Hockey is for everyone,” boasting its history of black players. Still, there’s no question the majority of players are white—white Europeans, actually (but somehow this is a Canadian sport).

At the professional men’s level, hockey is an aggressive (thus manly) sport, and it can easily become a place where both players and fans release their aggression. In the case of fans, frustration from socio-economic stress, bruised egos and socially-taught entitlement, can all add fuel to the fire. Michael Kimmel writes about how the growing divide between the haves and have-nots has added to white male anger in his book Angry White Men: “It requires that we both look into the hearts of regular guys, as well as those who feel marginalized, and that we examine the social and historical circumstances that brought them to this precipice.” I wonder whether this sort of this behaviour will be seen in the stands of National Women’s Hockey League games? Or is automatically part of a less “manly” culture—the kind that won’t attract the type of men who attack two young women?

When Kerrick and her sister were hit with towels, shoved, called “whores”, and had beer poured on them, it wasn’t because Montreal fans are inherently evil. It has nothing to do with the city or the specific team. It isn’t even a result of the sport itself. It is a result of the culture we created and continue to perpetuate. This culture allows this group of men to think their entitlement and assertion of manliness is acceptable behaviour. And when attendants dismissed the women’s abuse and did nothing, when security was nowhere to be seen, these men were proven right. Our anger at the city of Montreal would serve everyone better directed at the mentality that “boys will be boys” and this is how Canadian boys are expected to act.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Toronto's Rogers Centre (formerly Skydome), built with public funds and later sold off to private business for a pittance. A major league sports team is often assumed to be more economically stimulating than actual results attest. Creative Commons photo by Mike Babcock.

The National Hockey League playoffs open this week and the abundance of emotion-laden storylines are sure to captivate a significant portion of the the Canadian sporting public’s hearts. But while three Canadian squads—the Vancouver Canucks, the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators—vie for Lord Stanley’s coveted Cup, there’s another, less exciting, story unfolding that probably should captivate our minds, even those of the non sports-adoring variety.

Tomorrow, the city council of Glendale, Arizona will vote to approve the arena-lease agreements for the two bids put forward to purchase the suburban community’s NHL hockey club, the Phoenix Coyotes. But, as the Globe and Mail reported this weekend, even if the leading bid, submitted by Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reisdorf, is approved the lease agreement may not survive. In an interesting twist of fate, a lawyer for the Goldwater Institute recently announced that the conservative watchdog group won’t hesitate to take the city of Glendale to court if it appears the agreements are in violation of Arizona laws against public subsidies for private corporations.

The concern for Goldwater is a piece of the Reisdorf “memorandum of understanding” that calls for local taxpayers and businesses to foot up to $165-million of the purchase price and annual operating losses. While this sort of stipulation isn’t unusual in the standard agreements between sports franchises and host cities, it is unusual that a powerful watchdog is calling both parties out.

For too long, the public has dogmatically accepted the connection politicians and team owners like to tout between sports franchises and local economic development. Massive public subsidies are regularly given to billion-dollar sports operations under the guise that they will bring an influx of new economic activity to the local community. This year alone, Winnipeg, Quebec City and Hamilton have all, at one point or another, flirted with the idea of bringing a professional hockey team home. And each has made claims about the economic benefit a pro franchise would bring. However, the problem is that justification is demonstrably false. There is, in fact, no economic rationale for publicly funded sports teams and stadiums.

According to Andrew Zimbalist, a prominent sports economist at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, all independent scholarly research on the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums has come to the same conclusion: there isn’t any. As he told Stephen J. Dubner on the New York Times Freakonomics blog, contrary to the rhetoric often aired by local politicians and sports teams owners, “one should not anticipate that a team or a facility by itself will either increase employment or raise per capita income in a metropolitan area.”

The economics behind this are complicated, but, generally, three principles hold. First, sports stadiums rarely create new capital: consumer spending on sport is almost always a redistribution of existing dollars in the local economy. People don’t spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise; they simply spend some their entertainment budget on local teams instead of something else. Second, much of the income generated by the team ends up leaking out of the local economy. Millionaire owners and players have their savings tied-up in world money markets and often live and spend their money outside of the host city. Third, and perhaps most importantly, host governments typically contributes close to two-thirds of the financing for the facility’s construction, usually takes on obligations for additional expenditures and routinely guarantee a significant amount of revenue. In other words, it’s the taxpayers that bear most of the risk—not the multimillion-dollar franchises that make a city home.

That’s not to say there aren’t perfectly good reasons for cities to host big-time sports teams or build world-class sports stadiums. It’s just that the supposed “positive economic impact” of a sports franchise shouldn’t factor into local governments’ decisions. Cities spend millions of dollars on cultural activities that they don’t anticipate to yield additional revenue. Sports teams can have a powerful cultural impact on a community and are integral part of most cities’ social fabric. If local residents value sport they are obviously welcome to allocate public dollars toward it. In fact, I, for one, hope they do. But sports teams and stadiums should be sold as a source of civic pride—not as a source of economic development.