The furor over Toronto Blue Jays star Jose Bautista’s celebratory bat flip in a post-season baseball game Wednesday night sounded familiar to NHL fans for good reason. For decades, they’ve heard hockey players explain the solemn duty of athletes to “act like they’ve been there before… and police themselves into repressing any and all emotions whose public display would out them as actual human beings.
And I get where those players are coming from. Really, I do. I’ve spoken with plenty of NHLers who make a compelling argument that nobody likes being on the wrong end of a colourful/memorable celebration, and who don’t want their profession bedazzled and bloated by showboaters and braggarts. These types of people – including Rangers pitcher Sam Dyson, who surrendered the home run to Bautista; former Jays ace Roy Halladay, who Thursday told TSN Radio Bautista’s reaction was “a little over the top for me,… and former Capitals coach Adam Oates, who in 2013 went off on Sharks rookie Tomas Hertl for “not respecting the league… by scoring a creatively spectacular goal – aren’t just scowlmongers intent on making everyone miserable. Their point is valid on many levels.
But here’s the big problem with that line of thinking: it only resonates within the tiny community of the players themselves. In the real world – the one populated by fans who are funding the dreams of their idols – the concept of playing poker-faced and bloodless is utterly alien. If you’re not a pro athlete and you’re paying significant sums of money and/or investing time watching pro athletes, you want little more than to connect with them on a very basic level: the playing of a game, and its attendant joys and miseries. You want to see eyes glassing over with tears, happy or sad. You want to see anger and elation, not indifference and world-weariness. You want to know the game matters as much to them as it does to you.
However, you can't live vicariously through an athlete determined not to give you any indication they're alive.
More importantly, you can’t attract kids to an athletic endeavour whose best players don’t appear to be enjoying themselves. When a sport like hockey already has challenges (concussions, for instance, or the high cost of ice time and equipment) persuading parents to sign up their children and devote hour upon hour and dollar after dollar to pursuing their on-ice dreams, it needn't further hamstring itself by insisting its top talents behave like robots. But if that continues and kids decide to take their time and money to a sport that doesn't frown on smiling, who could blame them?
Some will read this column and mistakenly interpret it as a call to turn hockey and sports in general into a theatre of absurdly over-the-top celebrations and zeppelin-sized self-inflating egos. It is nothing of the sort. Instead, it’s a plea to gatekeepers to remember for whom the game is played – the paying customers – and to acknowledge fans aren’t in the stands simply to see who wins and loses. Ultimately, the modern sports-consuming experience is about the ride and the effect it has on those who best play it.
Indeed, given all Blue Jays fans know about Bautista over the years – his late-blooming stardom, the passion that’s never far from his surface – it would’ve been shocking had Bautista not shown any emotion after he drove that ball over the left-field wall at Rogers Centre Wednesday. It wasn't just a normal home run. It wasn't just another game. And because we knew who he was and the road he'd taken to get to that bat-flipping moment, our enjoyment of his triumph was heightened to hugely emotionally-satisfying levels.
Again, I understand where the Dysons and Oateses of the world are coming from on this. It’s natural athletes will bristle at the thought of providing their opposition with motivational material by celebrating a little too cockily. But by conditioning players to surrender any trace of personality and ordering them to at all times keep their heart rate at the level of a sociopath taking a lie detector test, the sports world robs itself of its emotional essence.
“Act like you’ve been there before… sure sounds nice, and even admirable, as a slogan for a group of players. But fans don’t want to see that. They want to behold the impact of a game on the central nervous system, to revel in the achievements of those who can rise above massive amounts of pressure to deliver in the clutch and deliver a beautiful sense of wonder and happiness that isn't easily manufactured in our complex day-to-day lives.
Act like they've been there before? To hell with that. We want to see athletes act like they may never be there again.