A FAN’S NOTES: Beautiful Losers

My home town’s minor league hockey team went through several transformations when I was growing up. First they were called the Dusters, a name that evoked dirt roads, not slick ice. The team’s logo back then—a cartoon caveman holding a hockey stick—appealed to me as a kid, and I was therefore disappointed when the team ditched their identity and became the Binghamton Whalers. I liked the cool graphic of their new logo, though—they turned the blubbery green “W” from the NHL’s Hartford Whalers on its side, so it became a “B” shape with a whale tail on the left-hand edge of the letter

When I was in high school, the Binghamton Whalers hired a new coach, and the coach’s son wound up in my French class. (He was Canadian, so French class was not a problem for him.) Supposedly the kid was a tremendous hockey player; he certainly looked the part, broad-shouldered and lean, with a leonine gaze—he always seemed to be waiting for a rewarding opportunity to sprint after something weaker and slower. But I wound up feeling sorry for him. He never really fit in or befriended anyone. I’m sure the girls were curious, but the only romantic inclination the young hockey prodigy ever expressed was a desire to eat a meal off our 50-year-old French teacher’s bosom. I imagine that, at home, his father told him that our little town was just a stop on the way to something bigger and better—a more lucrative coaching job, a sweet hockey scholarship, years of glory as a bruising winger. Whatever. My old classmate might be in the NHL now for all I know, or his career may be over; maybe he never made it.

After I graduated from high school, the hockey team changed its name again, to the Binghamton Rangers (official team motto: “We’re In a Winning Mood!”). I went to a Rangers game once when I was home from college and recognized the overweight guy steering the Zamboni, that boxy vehicle that re-polishes the ice between periods until there’s a bright liquid sheen over the scarred surface of the rink. The driver had been a merciless bully in seventh grade, someone I’d genuinely feared. I thought, Good, you bastard, you got what you deserved. Driving the Zamboni at hockey games, having that as your job, that’s like a Jean-Paul Sartre play.

Later the Rangers became the Icemen (motto unknown, but note that, despite the fact that I’m writing a literary sports blog, I am resisting any Eugene O’Neill references). These days the hockey team is called the Binghamton Senators, and their mascot is truly evil-looking, some sadistic Roman centurion on skates. How far we’ve come from the gentle, seemingly stoned caveman tooling around with his anachronistic hockey stick.

Ultimately I think the identity flux that my hometown hockey team has suffered says a lot about the place itself. The area of upstate New York where I’m from has been depressed for years; all that hockey-team re-branding is a natural response, an urge to improve or escape, to make it new when it’s really just the same old place. One bright spot in Binghamton has been the university, one of the top SUNY campuses in the state, but even that has an odd history of tangled marketing: first it was Harper College, then SUNY Binghamton, and now we’re all supposed to call it Binghamton University (or B.U., if you prefer). When I was a kid, the university was a Division III school with no accomplished sports teams to speak of; they’ve now moved up to Division I. The basketball team name used to be the Colonials; since then, they’ve been renamed the Bearcats. If, like me, you’ve been absorbed by the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament lately, you may have seen Binghamton matched up against mighty Duke in the first round. The Bearcats (seriously? the Bearcats?) got rocked 86-62, but my hometown paper (this is the newspaper my dad used to read at the kitchen table) turned the bottom line into a story of plucky heroism. The front page featured a huge color photo of a Binghamton player fighting for the ball, accidentally smacking a Duke player upside the head. Take that!

But Binghamton won’t be this year’s Cinderella story, dancing its way deep into March Madness. Too bad: my hometown could have used a boost. In general, the underdog story—and the great thing about college basketball this time of year is that it inevitably generates great underdog stories—is partly about a renewal of hope in a place that has been pinched by hopelessness. That’s why the heroes in sports movies always seem to come from down-and-out towns. And that’s why I didn’t love John McPhee’s recent New Yorker piece about lacrosse. Although McPhee, that elder statesman of American non-fiction, does a wonderful job breathing life into his research (he even reveals that Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous grandnephew played lacrosse for Princeton in 1888), he sort of dismisses one of the great underdog stories in American sports. He notes that the Iroquois, who invented lacrosse, still field competitive teams in international tournaments despite being “populationally outnumbered.” Then he goes on for pages about the Princeton University lacrosse team. Passing over the Iroquois story to cheer on Princeton! No sensitivity to the allure of the underdog.

One reason I’m fascinated by the changing of the Binghamton hockey team names: it’s a flat-out refusal on the part of my hometown to admit they’re the underdog. Dusters? Hell, no—we’re the Senators! We’re the Bearcats! But there’s dignity in the underdog that comes from acknowledging all that you’re up against. And you, Binghamton, are up against it. Anyway, what the hell is a bearcat?

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