In late September, several weeks after signing a long-term deal that gave him the third-highest average annual salary in the National Hockey League, P. K. Subban went shopping for a house. Subban, a twenty-five-year-old defenseman for the Montreal Canadiens, grew up in a diverse Toronto neighborhood called Rexdale. For the first several years of his pro career, he rented apartments, either in the tourist district of Old Montreal or in a hotel downtown, while maintaining a condo back in Toronto, to which he returned each summer for training. Now his mother, Maria, a bank officer, was encouraging him to establish roots in his adoptive city. “It’s too expensive to rent,” she said. Subban’s new contract was for eight years and seventy-two million dollars. He rode shotgun in a gray Honda sedan while his friend Marwan Ismail, a real-estate agent, drove up the hill into Westmount, a former bastion of old Anglo money. “We’re nine minutes away,” Ismail said, alluding to the Bell Centre, where the Canadiens play. “It’s—how you’d call?—a conservative area. They have their own rules, they have their own guidelines, they don’t like people coming in and saying, ‘Yeah, we want to do this. I don’t care about the architecture.’ No, no. They preserve things—out of respect for all the other units.” Subban seemed pleased. “Everything is old, but it’s beautiful,” he said.
Subban is one of the world’s most thrilling athletes, someone who, like Roger Federer, or Kevin Durant, or Yasiel Puig, awes less because of the results he achieves than because of the way he achieves them—kinetic charisma, approaching genius. But a hockey preservationist he is not. Within the context of his sport’s culture, he is more like a gaudy mansion, with a waterslide out back and a cigarette boat parked in the driveway leaking gas. He “craves attention,” as Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie turned author and liberal politician, put it last spring, during a playoff run in which Subban performed brilliantly and was reaffirmed as perhaps the “most polarizing” player in the game, to quote Canada’s National Post. (Earlier in the season, Sports Illustrated had identified him as hockey’s “most hated” player.) He has a reputation for running his mouth—chirping, in rinkspeak—and not long ago he gave an interview on a popular French-language TV show in which he boasted of using pregame café as ammunition for weaponized flatulence on the ice. He peacocks after scoring goals and brings a debatably excessive exuberance to the serious business of bodychecking. He seems to regard the national anthem as an opportunity for limbering up, if not boiling his blood. Sometimes people—even well-meaning people, not intending it as a criticism, exactly—say that he reminds them of a basketball player.
A fair amount of this must be attributed to his appearance. Subban’s parents were born in the Caribbean, and it would be difficult not to notice No. 76 even if he were a middling skater with a case of lockjaw. There are thirty teams in the N.H.L., and eighteen black players. Yet only Subban, among them, is regularly booed by opposing fans when he touches the puck—a shaming honor reserved for a handful of villains in any given hockey season. He is not the sport’s first black star. Grant Fuhr, who is biracial and was raised by adoptive white parents in Alberta, played goalie for the Edmonton Oilers dynasty in the nineteen-eighties. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003. Jarome Iginla, whose father was born in Nigeria, is now playing in his eighteenth N.H.L. season, and has scored five hundred and sixty-four goals, the second-most among active players. A rugged forward, Iginla has the straight-ahead determination of a slot-hockey player, and is typically praised for his classy strain of truculence. Unlike Subban, he has never affected the pose of an archer while on the ice (shooting the lights out), nor given himself a nickname like the Subbanator.
“Look at the stonework on that house!” Subban said, pointing out a stately Victorian, as the Honda proceeded deeper into Westmount, where most of the homes are tightly packed, on small lots, taking advantage of the hillside views. “This is probably the wealthiest neighborhood in Montreal,” he went on. “In Toronto, there’s Post Road, or the Bridle Path, where Prince used to live. You’re talking completely flat land, two acres, and ‘Fresh Prince of Bel Air.’ That’s the type of neighborhood you’re looking at in Toronto.” Subban could now afford to live among Molsons and Bronfmans—Montreal Brahmins—and so he would. But, mindful of his middle-class upbringing, he was starting small—“Things change, you never know, maybe you get a girlfriend,” he said—and he’d budgeted about a sixth of his annual salary for his search.
Subban and Ismail parked on a downward slope, outside a two-story brick house that had been built in 1925, and were met by a sales agent named Marie Sicotte. Subban wore dark jeans and a slim-fitting cardigan, which emphasized his stocky build. He is listed at six feet, which seems generous, and two hundred and fourteen pounds, which sounds about right. He has a broad face, and was sprouting a neck beard, a complement to a slightly nerdy demeanor. It’s not hard to imagine how Subban’s chirping might agitate a toothless Saskatchewanian bruiser. His voice remains boyish: nasal and scratchy. There is no trace of menace in it.
“It’s not very big, but it’s got it all,” Sicotte said, leading them inside. “It’s a traditional house.” There were three working fireplaces, and a private garden, with a barbecue connected directly to the gas line. There was even a garage—not a given in Westmount—although Ismail wondered aloud, skeptically, whether it was large enough to accommodate Subban’s truck.
On the second floor, Subban walked into a wood-panelled study, with a Murphy bed and a large flat-screen TV mounted on the opposite wall, and asked, “Is this, like, a man cave, or what?”
“You can make that lighter, paint it, make it more funky,” Sicotte said, referring to the panelling.
“No, I like the wood,” he said, bringing his hand to his chin.
“The gentleman’s room,” Ismail suggested.
Down in the basement, which had been renovated to include a wet bar and a guest bedroom, Sicotte did her best to distract Subban from the low-hanging pipes and gestured with each hand, in succession, at a couple of luxuries: “Here you have your walk-in closet, and then here’s another, you have your cedar closet.”
“Oh, cedar,” Subban said, turning to Ismail, with a wink. “You know why that’s important? For your furs.”
Sicotte flashed a look of amused surprise. “Do you have a lot of fur coats?”
“I got a couple,” Subban said. “I got some fur.”
Subban has spoken in interviews of his conscious emulation of Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jordan, a list that is notable for its absence of hockey players. He is a good friend of Novak Djokovic, the tennis star, and mentioned to me that they have talked idly about planning a joint vacation trip. Last summer, he visited Monte Carlo, and ran into Magic Johnson, who tweeted a photo of the two of them posing together in front of yachts. When Subban returned to Canada, he appeared onstage at an Alzheimer’s benefit with the actor Seth Rogen, a British Columbian who was hoping to fulfill a lifelong dream of drinking from the Stanley Cup. Subban supplied the pitchers of beer, and even slurped up Rogen’s remains—using a straw, so as not to anger the hockey gods, who are presumed to smite those players who dare to touch the Cup before winning it. This was borderline sacrilege even so, and a columnist for The Hockey News was moved to write a blog post arguing, contra the chuckleheads on Twitter, that this was “a complete nontroversy.” The trophy was a replica.
Subban professes not to know what “polarizing” means. “I’m still looking for somebody to explain it to me,” he said during our first meeting, at the N.H.L.’s corporate headquarters, in New York, where he was getting his picture taken for a video game. (“Who is that, Denzel Washington?” he said, admiring his own image on an iPad, and revealing an unblemished dental set.) Partly, this reflects his reticence on the subject of race—a refusal to grant unacknowledged prejudice any power. “Reticence” is not otherwise a word that comes to mind when considering Subban, and this, in turn, helps explain the polarity of opinion. Hockey, like the country of its birth, has long valued understatement—sometimes comic understatement—and shunned salesmanship. The general lack of celebrity taint is, to some traditionalists, one of the sport’s great appeals, and so when Subban suggests, as he did not long ago, that the N.H.L. expand farther into the Sun Belt by adding a team in Houston—“because that’s where Beyoncé’s from”—fans (like me) laugh and cringe a little at the same time.
To “grow the game,” as hockey executives like to put it, is, inevitably, to make it more American, more mainstream, where the line between sport and celebrity is ever blurring. And one needn’t be a moose hugger to fear what this might mean for the winter game. In the United States, where hockey can still seem like a cult obsession, fans grow up memorizing the names of Canadian towns they’ll never visit (Kamloops, Flin Flon, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat: music to a rink rat’s ears), in the vain hope that it might better acquaint them with the soul of something pure, unsullied by Kardashians and halftime shows.
The conformist power of Canadian hockey culture is such that even New Englanders and Swedes, after a few years of inhaling North American Zamboni fumes, will come to adopt a Manitoban prairie lilt, and speak in run-on sentences of cautious optimism. I submit as evidence a slew of interviews, available on YouTube and elsewhere, of the journeyman center Jeff Halpern, with his pronunciation of “aboat” (not aboot!), and his clipped “Ah, you know”s, and his recitations of hockey bromides. You can’t tell, can you, that he was raised in Potomac, Maryland, and finished at St. Paul’s and Princeton? The allure was so great for Bobby Holik, a snarling sweetheart of a forward with a scar zigzagging from the top of one ear across his scalp, that, while growing up in the Czech mining town of Jihlava, he resolved to abstain from drinking alcohol until he could sip from the Cup—which he did, after winning with the New Jersey Devils, in 1995. He was twenty-four. The Cup is the star. Here, then, is the idealized face of hockey: not any particular player but whichever anonymous bearded hulk happens to be lofting the thirty-five pounds of polished silver and nickel over his head with a delirious, gap-toothed smile, tears running into crusted blood. No straw for him.
At one point, at league headquarters, Subban’s phone buzzed with an incoming text message. “Sidney,” he said, shaking his head. “Probably telling me to take it easy on him.” He added, “I told him I’m taking him out to dinner when he comes to Montreal—before I slap him!”
That would be Sidney Crosby, a Nova Scotian prodigy who at age fifteen was anointed by Wayne Gretzky as the heir to hockey’s throne. Crosby—formerly Sid the Kid—is now twenty-seven, and the captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins. He is brilliant but largely unloved, in spite of his having led Team Canada to two consecutive Olympic gold medals. On the ice, he comes off as a bit of a whiner, someone who seems perpetually disappointed in the lesser efforts of his comrades and opponents. Off the ice, he is unfailingly polite, if repressed. It’s as though all the early accolades had left him so afraid of dishonoring his cultural inheritance that he doesn’t quite know how to honor it.
Crosby and Subban “fraternize a little bit,” Subban said. They also share a tailor, Marc Patrick Chevalier, who told me that Crosby is “so shy that he only wants dark suits—blue, black, gray,” adding, “Most players are like that.” Most players, but not Subban. “He likes to try colors,” Chevalier said. Trilbies and other accessories, too. “He’s in a league of his own.”
“See, the way hockey is, you’re supposed to carry yourself a certain way, and behave a certain way,” Maria Subban told me. “It’s kind of like the military, and partly like being the Queen.”
She continued, “P.K. is a fun person, and he smiles, and all the guys, they hate it when he smiles on the ice, because hockey players are not supposed to smile on the ice. This is a fun game. You can have fun and still win. And this is the difference between him and Sidney Crosby. Sidney Crosby is a serious guy. He has to put on his hockey face. He has to carry that around with him all the time. But P.K. doesn’t carry anything. ‘This is me. This is the way I am. Put me on the ice!’ ”
Like many Canadian boys, P.K. (short for Pernell Karl) started skating not long after he could walk. His mother was a skeptic (“He’s going to break his little legs!”), but his father, Karl, evinced an immigrant’s determination to see his firstborn son conquer the national pastime. Both parents arrived in Canada as eleven-year-olds, in 1970, he from Jamaica and she from Montserrat. Maria’s mother had died, and so she went to live with her eldest sister, in Toronto. Karl’s family settled in Sudbury, Ontario, where his father, a diesel mechanic, had landed a job in the nickel-mining industry.
Karl lived in Sudbury’s Flour Mill district, a Francophone neighborhood, where people rooted for the Montreal Canadiens. In the nineteen-seventies, the Canadiens would prove to be one of the sport’s all-time great teams, with Ken Dryden between the pipes, Guy Lafleur streaking up the wing, and Serge Savard, a.k.a. the Senator, providing stylish D. The newcomer was enchanted, and got his first pair of skates from the Salvation Army. But soon he learned that his experience was too little, too late, and that organized leagues were too costly. He grew to be six feet three, and was better, anyway, at basketball, which he played at the varsity level in college.
“If you want to be an N.H.L. hockey player, you better be really good on your skates, so one of the things I realized was he needed to put a lot of time in at a young age,” Karl told me, referring to P.K., who was born third, after two girls, Nastassia and Natasha. (Hockey was deemed too rough, so they played basketball.) “And one of the best times is before they start going to school for a full day.” Karl bought secondhand equipment, and he and P.K. visited as many outdoor rinks as possible, where ice time was free. When P.K. was four, and attending junior kindergarten in the afternoon, Karl set a goal of skating with his son every day throughout the winter. This presented a logistical challenge. Karl worked as a teacher and, for extra money, served as the vice-principal at a night school. So Maria would put P.K. to bed, wearing his snow pants, and Karl would get home at nine or ten o’clock, wake the boy up, and take him to Nathan Phillips Square, a flooded plaza in front of Toronto’s city hall. They played shinny, under the lights, past midnight, sometimes until 2 A.M. Dad got up for work, while P.K. slept in.
At age five, precocious P.K. began attracting doubters: the parents of boys on opposing youth teams, who requested to see the kid’s birth certificate. He was big, and capable of wristing the puck high and hard at a time when most children are still using their sticks like shovels. The next year, he let rip a shot that cracked the helmet of a goalie—who immediately turned in his pads, quitting the position altogether. “Comments were made at one time, I think, when he was eight,” Maria recalled. “ ‘He should go play football.’ Because P.K. was always a chunky kid. But he could skate. And they couldn’t figure out how he’s so heavy and he skates so well and so fast. We used to laugh.”
By then, convinced that the commitment was real, Karl had begun what became an annual tradition of building a makeshift rink in the back yard, like Walter Gretzky. He and Maria also had two more boys now to make use of it: Malcolm and Jordan, who are four and six years younger than P.K., respectively. There was a hole in the tarp that Karl used, and, with every thaw, water would rush toward the house of a neighbor, a man who spoke little English and had little use for hockey. This prompted occasional angry knocks on the door.
A friend of Karl’s had once remarked that you could never have enough good defense. “I always kept that in mind,” Karl said. “I thought, If every team is looking for a good defenseman, then my boys will have a place in hockey.” He insisted that all three boys play defense, even when their coaches wanted them up front, and when their personalities and puck-handling skills, in some cases, inclined them to linger in the offensive zone. For Christmas, he gave them copies of “Bobby Orr: My Game,” the story of a defenseman who transformed the sport’s imaginative possibilities with his skill at both ends of the ice.
In 2005, a few days before his sixteenth birthday, P.K. was drafted by the Belleville Bulls, of the Ontario Hockey League, one of Canada’s “major junior” conferences. It was a bittersweet occasion, not only because it meant that he’d be leaving home, to “billet” with a local Belleville family, but also because he hadn’t been selected until the sixth round—an afterthought. He was no longer big for his age. In fact, the rap on him now was that he was too small, and maybe too flashy, for a defenseman. His sisters cried. For the Bulls, he chose to wear No. 6, as a reminder of the slight. He became the most offensively prolific defenseman in Belleville history, and achieved redemption two years later, when he was drafted, this time in the second round, by his dad’s beloved Canadiens.
Jordan, the youngest, who is now nineteen and billeting with the same Belleville family, is within range of surpassing P.K.’s junior scoring marks. Jordan is smaller (five feet nine, a buck seventy-five) and faster than P.K., and was drafted last year by the Vancouver Canucks. “Jordan’s going to be the best of all of us,” P.K. said recently.
Malcolm, the middle brother, and the tallest (six feet two), was a Belleville Bull as well. He now plays for the Providence Bruins, in the American Hockey League—as a goalie. As reserved as his older brother is flamboyant, Malcolm never liked playing defense, and finally, at the age of thirteen, persuaded his parents to get him a proper set of goaltending equipment. “We tried to get him to forget about it,” Maria said. “It’s very expensive.” Five years later, he was a first-round draft pick in the N.H.L.
The eldest Subban boy made his N.H.L. début in 2010, and it wasn’t long before his attitude elicited the indignation of Don Cherry, hockey’s chief culture warrior. Cherry, a former coach of the Boston Bruins, has for the past thirty-odd years been a fixture on the CBC’s Saturday institution “Hockey Night in Canada.” He lectures weekly on the virtues of toughness and self-sacrifice, and on perceived threats to the sport’s dignity from modernity in its many guises. The jingoism and self-seriousness are leavened by his getup, an endlessly rotating series of outlandish suits, and by occasional appearances from Blue, Cherry’s bull-terrier sidekick. Ten years ago, the CBC aired a series called “The Greatest Canadian,” soliciting viewer input in ranking the most distinguished individuals in the nation’s history. Cherry, or Grapes, as he is fondly called, came in seventh, ahead of Wayne Gretzky, who was tenth. (First place went to Tommy Douglas, the politician who introduced universal health care.)
“It’s good to be cocky when you come in the league,” Cherry said after an October, 2010, game between the Canadiens and the Penguins, in which the rookie could be seen pestering Sidney Crosby. “Really, it’s good to be cocky—I like it. But you gotta show a little respect. Tonight, we’ve got him, he’s giving Crosby heck, pushing Crosby, telling Crosby what to do. And what did I say to you in the first period? ‘Somebody’s going to get this guy.’ ” The producers cued up a video of a Penguin clipping Subban in the face with a high stick. Ron MacLean, Cherry’s long-suffering straight man, intoned, “Surely to God, you’re not recommending the guy take a stick to him.” Cherry replied, “I just predicted he’s going to get hurt. And, if he has a big mouth like that, he’s going to get hurt worse.”
A month later, Mike Richards, a center for the Philadelphia Flyers, made a similarly ominous prediction that sounded more like a threat. “It’s just frustrating to see a young guy like that come in here, and so much as think that he’s better than a lot of people,” Richards said. “You have to earn respect in this league. . . . Hopefully, someone on their team addresses it, because I’m not saying I’m going to do it, but something might happen to him if he continues to be that cocky.”
Subban’s family believes that others have mistaken their beloved P.K.’s boisterous personality for something more sinister. “He is confident,” Maria says. “My son is a different kettle of fish.” He is also an inveterate camera hog, dating to the earliest birthday parties and home videos. I can vouch for his chirping outside the rink, too, turning up the radio at stoplights and drawing wayward looks from other drivers as he shimmies in his seat.
But Cherry and Richards, in airing their grievances, were appealing to hockey’s honor code, the moral self-policing, through controlled violence and ritualized fighting, that has arguably relegated the sport to the American margins. So entrenched is the code that teams have traditionally delegated a salaried roster spot to a brutish figure—an “enforcer”—rather than leave justice to the referees. Subban’s crime, in essence, was dereliction of rookie status, and the complaints of Cherry and Richards seemed to be validated by reports of intra-squad skirmishes between Subban and some veteran teammates.
Subban’s strengths were easily evident to an untrained eye, and this made him especially appealing from a growth-oriented perspective, in a sport that is often too fast and chaotic to attract novice viewers. He had a hundred-mile-an-hour slap shot (a “howitzer,” according to Cherry), and he delivered explosive checks, too, owing to his peculiar habit of backing into players, ass first, rather than springing forward with the upper body. This was a contemporary twist on an old-fashioned technique: not a hip check, now considered a fading art, but a “bum” check, in Cherry’s formulation. (“When you hit with your shoulder, that’s a lot of force on an extremity,” Subban told Sports Illustrated recently, offering a kind of medical rationalization. “Your butt and back are two of the strongest parts of your body.”) And then there was his skating, a result of all that early practice at Nathan Phillips Square. His strides were conspicuous—more staccato than legato—but he darted laterally with finesse, and could accelerate out of a sharp turn with his head up, ready to make a play.
His weaknesses were subtle: a tendency to wind up out of position, to make poor choices about when to press forward, to annoy his coaches and teammates. And Cherry, the former coach, seemed almost to be offering a corrective to the dazzling exploits, on behalf of hockey insiders, lest any interested new viewers get the mistaken impression that hockey is such an easy game. As Subban’s career continued, Cherry called him out for “silly stuff,” like taunting opponents and celebrating goals, and also for “diving,” or falling dishonestly, to draw a penalty. The problem, as some observers noted, was that Cherry, in his ongoing attempts to valorize hockey’s humble grinders and muckers, had long made a habit of scapegoating talented outsiders. First it was Swedes (too soft), then Russians (too fickle), and now Subban (too cocky).
Like European soccer, hockey has had its share of banana-throwing incidents, but in the case of Subban—or of Josh Ho-Sang, the New York Islanders’ first-round draft pick last summer—it can be tricky to tease out the racial coding and stereotyping from the coaching. Ho-Sang’s father is a Jamaican tennis pro, and his mother is a Chilean Jew. His great-grandfather was born in Hong Kong. He has acquired a reputation as a problem case, and, despite his widely acknowledged talents, was left off Hockey Canada’s roster for the upcoming World Junior Championships. “When I start dangling, my G.M. calls me a Harlem Globetrotter,” Ho-Sang told the Toronto Sun, a few months ago, referring to a deft style of stickhandling, in which the puck is presented tantalizingly close to a defender, only to be cradled away in an instant. “Why am I a Harlem Globetrotter? Analogies get related to basketball all the time with me. I don’t play basketball. I’ve never played basketball. I’m a hockey player.”
Subban can dangle, too, but claims not to mind the analogies. “If someone wants to call me a Harlem Globetrotter, well, great, go ahead,” he told me. “I was very good at basketball. I was a really good point guard. I was the best passer.” He believes, in fact, that passing, and not shooting, is his greatest asset on the ice. He has a knack for scoring memorable goals, perhaps a dozen or so per year, but his seventy assists over the past two seasons rank second among all defensemen in the league.
Yet it was a projectile from Subban’s howitzer that lingers in my mind as one of the enduring images of last spring’s playoffs. This was during Game Five of the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the Canadiens and their hated rivals the Bruins, in which Cherry had accused Subban of “poking the bear”—provoking Cherry’s former team with a low and possibly dangerous hit on the enforcer Shawn Thornton. After the first game, in which Subban scored two goals, including the overtime winner, a disturbing number of Boston fans had used the N-word on social media. (One tweet read, “Tied something for SUBBAN,” and was accompanied by an image of a noose.) And here, four games later, was Subban, occupying the point on the power play, so impatient for the puck that he began bouncing up and down on his skates, like a child without a care. (“He says, ‘Mom, when I’m playing, from my head to my toes, I don’t feel anything,’ ” Maria told me.) He even got airborne, just as a teammate was finally getting around to setting him up with a pass. Slow it down now, and watch carefully: Subban’s skate blades reëstablish contact with the ice a second before he one-times a laser beam into the upper right corner.
Hockey’s postseason series are easily fashioned into morality plays. Bruins fans had begun the conference semifinal by selling “Canadien Dive Team” shirts, with Subban’s No. 76 on the back, to project their belief in the superficiality of Subban’s theatrics: a little too much embellishment from a guy who leads with his bum. Shawn Thornton’s answer to Subban’s jump shot was a weaselly squirt of the water bottle from the bench, aimed at No. 76 as he skated past. Thornton was fined a couple of thousand dollars—for lameness, I like to think.
Enforcers like Thornton, according to the northern mythology, are the rock salt of the frozen earth: otherwise gentle giants who mete out punishment with their shoulders and fists so that those blessed with more skill may play on peacefully. The selfless nature of their job (which also requires absorbing punches from their counterparts) lends them a stoical aura, and they are often said to be the kindest and, in a way, the most thoughtful players. Scoring goals is all instinct and timing; enforcing is a philosophy. But the romance is waning in these days of greater worry over brain injury. A series of untimely deaths by accomplished N.H.L. enforcers has reminded even those who thrill to a good scrap that the toll of it all may be too great, and has suggested a kind of enabling on the part of teams and doctors, who have tended to look the other way when the self-medicating, through alcohol and prescription painkillers, gets out of hand. Have we been mistaking a drug-induced trance for quiet contemplation all along?
As if concussions weren’t problem enough, here come the nerds, too, arriving late to the rink after their victory laps around the baseball diamond and, more recently, the hardwood court. And what their stats show, or seem to show, is that an aesthete’s preference for smooth skating and passing over bumping and grinding may actually represent sound strategy. The alternative, better known as “dump and chase,” and championed by the likes of Grapes, has prevailed for decades in and around Ontario: Canadian hockey central. The old idea involves chipping or flinging the puck down to the far corner, and then chasing after it, with an aim toward pinning the opposing team in its own defensive end: first guy pounds the retrieving defenseman into the boards, second guy collects the loose puck. It’s a conservative approach, meant to negate the possibility of costly turnovers in the neutral zone—the middle section of the ice.
“Possession,” meanwhile, is the name of the new analytics game, and it has an intuitive logic: if you’ve got the puck, why get rid of it, only to have to work so hard to get it back? (Well, a cynic might say, because this gives you an excuse to pound someone into the boards.) Pond hockey really is the best hockey. A corollary of all this is that it’s not just pointless but counterproductive to devote a precious roster spot to someone who can’t really skate. Enforcers are an endangered species, thanks in large part to hockey’s newest outsiders. This summer, the Devils hired an Indian-American from suburban Bergen County, Sunny Mehta, to run their new analytics department. His background? Professional poker player and jazz guitarist.
Perhaps the biggest factor in the ascension of the possession mantra, however, is the rise of players like Subban. He is emblematic of a generation of defensemen who are nimble enough to fetch a dumped puck, dodge the onrushing bull, and start carrying it back the other way, thereby negating the old strategy, which was tried and true only so long as defensemen were selected for their size instead of for their puck-moving prowess. “High risk, high reward nowadays” is how Seth Jones, a twenty-year-old American defenseman for the Nashville Predators (and the son of Popeye Jones, the former N.B.A. rebounding specialist), put it to me, mentioning that Subban has become “the face of modern defensemen.” Jones is six feet four, but not what we beer-league players would call a pylon, as a man his height would have been in the old days.
The flourishing of multifaceted defensemen, in fact, helps explain the strangest indignity of Subban’s career thus far, when he was nearly left off the Canadian Olympic roster for Sochi, just six months after he won the Norris Trophy, as the N.H.L.’s best defenseman. The ostensible top player at his position in the world’s most élite league somehow not worthy of representing his own national team? Canada now has so many good defensemen, the argument went, that it could afford to rely on a lower-risk approach. The team won gold, and Subban played just eleven minutes, in a blowout victory over Austria. Evidently, the truism that compelled Karl Subban two decades ago is no longer so true: it turns out you can have enough good defensemen, and not every team needs another.
Subban has found, in the Sochi humbling, an opportunity to demonstrate his maturity to those who thought him insufficiently deferential when he came into the league. “The Olympics is about representing your country, and if you get an opportunity to play you give it all you have,” he told me. “At the end of the day, we won. I got a gold medal. I don’t care how I got it.” He added, “People make a mistake saying I’m trying to break down barriers and change the game. I’m not trying to do any of that.”
Nevertheless, as the face of modern defensemen, if not of the evolving sport itself, he offered a few thoughts on the state of play. Take diving, for instance, the bane of rinkside fundamentalists, who ridicule soccer stars for writhing in fake agony at the mere hint of a trip. “Embellishing happens in all sports,” Subban said, shrugging. “The thing about hockey is, people are like, ‘Hockey’s too good of a sport, nobody should be embellishing.’ Well, the best players do it, the worst players do it, mediocre players do it. It’s just part of the game.” Never much of a fighter, Subban calls himself “indifferent” on the subject of its possible eradication. “Whatever they decide to do, I’ll be happy,” he said. He also offered a novel and, to my mind, worthy suggestion, that the league could benefit from replacing some of the tired heavy metal that is pumped into arenas with a little old-school Michael Jackson. “That would get me fired up,” he said.
Subban doesn’t see himself and Don Cherry as all that different, and admired Cherry’s suits, recognizing, by comparison, his role as a “rookie” in the fashion game. “It’s fun watching Don Cherry, man,” he said. “Negative or positive, when he speaks about P. K. Subban it’s the highlight of my day, O.K.? Because I’m that same little kid sitting in front of the TV screen with my dad, watching Don Cherry talk about whoever.”
Cherry, when I spoke with him recently by phone, reminded me that he had coached Bobby Orr, the greatest skating defenseman of all time, and that he had been one of the biggest champions of Subban (whom he has occasionally compared to Orr), advocating a bigger role for him at the Sochi Games. “But he’s got to stop the bow-and-arrow stuff, and he was climbing the glass after a goal, doing handstands, and in hockey, when you do that, you just piss off the other team,” Cherry said, likening such “hotdogging” to a baseball slugger showing up the pitcher by admiring his home run. “Don’t get me wrong,” Cherry continued. “He’s great for hockey. And, if you ever talk to him personally, he’s the most polite, nicest kid. You’d want him for a son, you know what I mean?”
Ken Dryden, writing in “The Game” (1983), his celebrated rumination on hockey and on the particular experience of playing for Le Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, as Francophones call the Canadiens, described the old Montreal Forum as “hockey’s shrine, a glorious melting pot of team, city, and sporting tradition.” He went on:
The Forum was abandoned in 1996, three years after the Habs (as Anglos say, alluding to Les Habitants, another French coinage) won the last of their twenty-four Stanley Cups. They are the Yankees without the Steinbrennerian renaissance. And, like the Yankees, they have replaced their historic old building with a newer, more corporate one that is better at milking the tradition for money.
The Bell Centre is not all that distinguishable from the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, or the Prudential Center, in Newark, for that matter—a brick-and-glass box that relies on flashing lights and Jumbotron gimmickry to assault the senses. The fans in Montreal do not dress more stylishly than any others, unless you count the ubiquitous sweaters—the replica jerseys—with their iconic “CH” logos, for Club de Hockey Canadien. Coldplay blasts over the P.A., and the rotating cast of new anthem singers is not as good as the operatic tenor in Vancouver. Between periods, fake Zambonis with Coors Light logos perform rooster tails on the ice while a passenger fires T-shirts out of cannons into the stands. It seems only fitting that the defense once anchored by a gifted player called the Senator is now led by the Subbanator.
But Subban may be the perfect heir to the august tradition. Old-time Montreal partisans retain a snobbish pride, because to root for the Habs of old was not to cheer on plodding dump-and-chasers or would-be boxers on skates but to celebrate genuine artistry (with an edge). And not a small part of their pride comes from the team’s historical reliance on local boys—Québécois, hockey’s original minorities. Maurice (the Rocket) Richard, the first player ever to score fifty goals in an N.H.L. season, was a target of frequent ethnic taunts in the forties and fifties, and hotheaded as a result. The so-called Richard Riot, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1955, occurred after the Rocket was banished for the remainder of the season by league officials, for knocking out a referee during a fracas that began with a Bruin’s errant stick clipping Richard in the face. Fans pelted the league’s president with eggs and garbage, and then spilled out of the Forum onto St. Catherine Street, where they smashed car windows.
For many years, the hockey world (or the portion of it showcased in the N.H.L.) was small enough that this regional connection gave the Canadiens more than a marketing boost. They could play with a distinct style—a river-hockey flair—and still win, like the Brazilian national soccer teams of Pelé’s day. Richard was preceded by Newsy Lalonde and his Flying Frenchmen teammates, and followed by Béliveau, Cournoyer, Savard, Lafleur, Lemaire. Then came the Czechs, the Russians, and a boom in American participation, plus free agency. A provincial team can’t easily win a global game, and the franchise has struggled, since Dryden’s days, to maintain a balance between honoring the community’s pride and satisfying the fans’ essential preference for victory. Its leading scorers today hail from New Canaan, the Czech Republic, and Denmark. The terrific goalie Carey Price is a British Columbian.
After last season’s captain, Brian Gionta (a Rochester boy), left for Buffalo, the club balked at promoting Subban, continuing a pattern, dating to his arrival, of hesitant embrace. Even his big contract, a coup by any standard, came only after negotiations stalled and the two sides went before an arbitrator. “I feel that if people were watching every single hockey player as closely as sometimes I’m being watched in Montreal, they would realize that I’m not the only person who talks on the ice,” he once told me. The Bell Centre may not be the Forum, but it is still haunted by legends. After he signed the eight-year deal, Subban received a congratulatory phone call from the wife of Jean Béliveau, le Gros Bill—who died last week, at the age of eighty-three. A Montreal friend of mine e-mailed, “Sounds insane to say this, but Béliveau and Mandela are the two people I’ve met who impressed me most. It’s like the air moved around him. He’d walk by and you’d feel his presence.”
The future belongs to Subban, but, for now, he gets to wear an “A,” for alternate captain (he is one of four), and only during home games. When I first approached a Canadiens press officer about my interest in doing this story, during last season’s playoffs, he asked if I’d seen the video that the N.H.L. produced and put on its Web site, titled “A Superstar’s Life,” featuring Subban. “We wish they hadn’t done that,” he said amiably, in a charming Québécois accent. “He’s just a twenty-four-year-old kid. We like P.K. to stay just the way he is. We don’t think of him as a superstar. We think of him as P.K.”
For many Habs fans, who have grown used to losing—or, rather, not always winning—the organizational paternalism has become a source of frustration. “Let P.K. be P.K.!” they argue, in response to a coaching staff that has consistently tried to rein in his wandering ways. The sentiment is strongest among Francophones, who now include a substantial Haitian population, but to spend time with Subban in Montreal is to experience widespread appreciation.
At a restaurant in Westmount one afternoon not long ago, a middle-aged woman approached Subban’s table and identified herself as “Michelle’s mom,” causing Subban to blush with embarrassment. Michelle was a sometime waitress at the restaurant, with whom Subban often flirted. “She says you come in and you guys chat a little bit, and it’s O.K.,” Mom said, beaming. “I always say to her, ‘You have to tell him that he reminds me of Rocket Richard.’ The Rocket, that’s what I call you.”
The arrival of a force as disruptive as Subban, in an institution as self-regarding as le Club du Hockey, is as significant, in its way, as Gretzky’s arrival was in Hollywood a quarter-century ago. Last month, with the Canadiens off to a terrific start, atop the Eastern Conference, Montreal’s probationary superstar made the cover of Sports Illustrated. Well, the Canadian edition, anyway.
On the red carpet of the Montreal International Black Film Festival, shortly before the start of this season, a group of hockey reporters waited impatiently for the Canadiens’ alternate captain. “P.K., can you tell me—this being an event celebrating black culture—can you give us a word about what happened in the Vancouver Sun this morning?” one of them asked.
The Sun, in its coverage of the Canucks’ victory over the San Jose Sharks in an exhibition game, had printed a photograph of Jordan Subban being congratulated by teammates. It was Jordan’s first game in an N.H.L. uniform, and, on his first shift, on his first shot, he’d scored a goal. The caption read, “Vancouver Canucks celebrate goal by Jordan Subban (dark guy in the middle) . . .”
“Listen, obviously there’s things in the world that happen that we have no control over,” Subban said. “I thought they made the right adjustments.” (The paper removed the description from the online edition.) He was determined not to let a careless error of judgment distract from a triumphant occasion. “We made history yesterday,” he said, and reminded everyone that Malcolm, the goalie, had also played the previous night, for the Bruins, against the Canadiens. “I had a smile on my face the whole time,” he said. “It’s something I’m very proud of as an older brother. I feel I helped them get there.”
Subban was at the festival because Spike Lee had requested his presence. Lee was being honored with a lifetime-achievement award, and wanted a worthy eminence to give it to him. Subban brought along Marwan Ismail, his real-estate friend, and Marc Patrick Chevalier, his tailor, and before posing for the paparazzi with Lee he handed one of two phones that he always carries (for business and pleasure) to Ismail so that he could snap some mementos. Chevalier stood off to the side, and discussed the principal challenge of bespoke hockey tailoring: working around the players’ ample posterior. “They all have it, some of them bigger than others,” he said. “If you touch it, you say, ‘Is that steel?’ A typical tailor will make it wide, to make sure it’s safe. It’s not the right way to do it.” Subban’s ensemble for the evening included a seersucker shirt (“It’s the first time he’s trying it, and I can’t wait for his feedback”) and a pink tie. “Today, we toned it down a little bit,” Chevalier said. “It’s fall coming. It’s a film festival. It’s not actually about him.”
Backstage, before the start, Lee asked Subban when the Canadiens would be coming to Madison Square Garden.
“November,” Subban answered, after consulting with Ismail, who was still carrying Subban’s phone.
Lee appeared to make a mental note. “You come in the day before?” he asked, suggesting that they ought to make plans to get together again, the beginning of a friendship, perhaps. “Where do you guys stay?”
“Last time we were there, we stayed at this Omni hotel.”
“Omni!” Lee feigned a loss of interest. “Dag, you guys are cheap!”
“Yeah, Spike, we don’t—like, these N.H.L. teams . . .”
“It’s not the N.B.A.”
“It’s not the N.B.A.,” Subban agreed. “But we’re Montreal Canadiens. They take good care of us. Sometimes we’re at the Ritz. Sometimes we’re at the Four Seasons.”
Lee, passably assured, scribbled his phone number for Subban. The lights flickered. Out in the theatre, a montage of Lee’s films began playing. The festival’s director, Fabienne Colas, welcomed everyone by saying that the black community “here in Canada” had been lacking role models. “So today it’s my pleasure to welcome somebody that we all love, somebody who is one of a kind.”
Subban took the stage. “First off, I want to talk about respect,” he said. “You know, I’m twenty-five years old, and I learn every day of my life that you have to earn respect. It’s not given.” ♦
