Girls have to take the left overs. From bantams to seniors, the boys get the preference in rinks throughout the province. And when the boys’ teams have completed their schedules, then the girls get the opportunity to take the ice. Even in Preston and Galt, where the girls last year drew the largest two crowds to be seen there in a decade, even there the girls must wait until the men’s playdowns are all over.
—Alexandrine Gibb,
Toronto Daily Star, 1938
WHILE THE ISSUE OF SPORTS ownership and control underlies women’s struggle for equity in all sports in Canada, in the case of hockey it cuts to its core. Canada’s national pastime has come to epitomize an almost gross caricature of maleness: on-ice violence and office wheeling and dealing all too often characterize the game. At an amateur level, many organizers approach the sport as a feeder system for elite levels rather than attempting to make it an enjoyable experience for a child who wants to play.1 The intense pressure on boys to “make it,” and in doing so, to mimic the disturbing aggression of the professional leagues, has been partly responsible for driving them away from the game.2
The thrust to groom boys for the elite levels also has allowed male hockey organizers to ignore girls’ desire to play the game. If girls don’t have a chance of making it to the big league, the prevailing attitude is, why waste valuable resources and ice time on them? “There’s a whole rationale to exclude women from the sport and this argument is just one of them,” says Nancy Theberge, a sociologist at the University of Waterloo and a fiery proselyte of the women’s game. Theberge is part of a movement of sociologists that has existed since the mid-1970s that studies the way in which traditional male sports exclude women. Resistance to female participation is particularly severe in the case of hockey, she says, because the sport typifies those characteristics associated with manliness in our culture and acts as what she calls a “signature of masculinity.”3 “Sport is very important culturally and socially,” Theberge explains. “Historically it has been a way to give very clear messages about who we are. If you were a male you did sport, and if you were a woman, you didn’t. Now there’s a lot of ideological confusion, and men are holding on to any argument they can use.”4
Despite its shortcomings, hockey continues to hold mythic status in Canada. In all the glorified references to “our common passion” and “the language that pervades Canada,” little attention has been paid to its troubling aspects. Even less note is made of the fact that “the game of our lives,” until very recently, has been almost exclusively the game of boys’ and men’s lives.
Although female hockey has survived since the turn of the century, it has done so with virtually no support—and, in fact, much opposition—from supporters of the male game. Recently, however, a shift has occurred. Thanks to those lobbying for sports equity, the high profile of goalie Manon Rhéaume and the advent of international competition for women, including the new Olympic status, female hockey is no longer just surviving. It is flourishing. Unprecedented numbers of women are lacing up their skates and charging onto the ice. Between 1990 and 1996 alone, female participation in hockey rose 200 percent; the total number of players was more than twenty thousand by 1995–96.5 Ontario, a hub of women’s hockey in Canada, boasted over eight hundred teams in leagues outside of schools in 1995–96—a dramatic rise from fewer than two hundred in 1980–81. Also in (1995–96, the number of players registered with the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association surpassed the thirteen thousand mark, a number that does not include girls who play on boys’ teams or in most high school leagues.6
With this unprecedented surge of women into the sport, the pressure is now on those whose attitudes towards female athletes lie frozen in the past. But the resistance is proving difficult to overcome. Women and girls continue to be dealt fewer resources and programs than men and boys, as well as inferior facilities for competitions. Furthermore, their games are still scheduled in undesirable time slots. When female players do manage to get on ice, many are mocked, harassed and intimidated by the parents, fans, players and organizers of male hockey. Off the ice, women hold only a small share of sports administration positions, have little voice in policy-making and occupy just a tiny percentage of coaching positions across the country. With a few exceptions, female hockey players have been virtually overlooked by the media and sponsors.
Nowhere is the lack of equity between men and women more apparent than in the allocation of ice time. The average female hockey player receives a fraction of the time that a male player receives. This is mainly because large and small communities alike have obstinately resisted opening the doors of their rinks to girls and women. In some cases the opposition takes the form of assigning a girls’ team a one-hour time slot late on Friday nights. In other instances the effort to organize a female team has triggered acrimonious debate in communities that claim they need to “protect” the ice time of boys, who at least have a shot at the revered NHL.
In order to grasp just how fundamental ice access is to equity for female hockey players, an overview of the hockey equity debate and the different forms it has taken is necessary. The debate first made headlines in 1955, and on the surface, at least, centred on the issue of girls playing on boys’ teams. Eight-year-old Ab Hoffman registered with the Toronto Hockey League and played in it for one season. Officials, her teammates and coach assumed Ab was a boy, an assumption neither she nor her parents bothered to correct, knowing full well she would be expelled from the team if the truth was discovered. Hoffman proved to be an exceptional player, and it was not until she made it to an all-star team that it came to light that Ab was a girl. While the discovery launched Abby Hoffman into short-lived celebrity status, it also put an end to her hockey career. The following year Hoffman was persuaded to play on a girls’ team. When the female league ran into difficulties setting up a schedule, Hoffman quit to pursue track and field. She went on to become an Olympic-calibre runner.
By the early 1970s participation in female hockey had picked up, but the dearth of girls’ teams placed many players in the same situation as Hoffman. In urban areas more female teams existed, but the meagre practice schedules and long hours spent travelling to play other female teams prompted many girls to turn to boys’ teams. Three court cases in the late 1970s involved girls seeking to play hockey on boys’ teams: Forbes v. Yarmouth [Nova Scotia] Minor Hockey Association, Québec (Commission des droits de la personne) c. Fédération québécoise de hockey sur glace Inc. and Cummings v. Ontario Minor Hockey Association. In each case, the organization attempting to bar the girls from boys’ teams claimed to be subject to Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA) regulations, which limited membership to males. In the Forbes and Quebec cases, the judges involved broadly interpreted the associations’ mandate of offering services to the public. They ordered both hockey associations to open their programs to girls. The Cummings case was not as straightforward. After the Board of Inquiry decided that the Ontario Minor Hockey Association had discriminated against Cummings, the Ontario Divisional Court reversed the decision and held that the OMHA was private and did not provide a public service. The decision was upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal.
It was not until 1986, when twelve-year-old Justine Blainey and her mother took the Ontario Hockey Association (OHA) to task, that this ruling was challenged. Blainey had successfully tried out for a boys’ hockey team in the Metropolitan Toronto Hockey League, an affiliate of the OHA. Her reason for choosing to play with boys was simple: it meant more ice time, less travel time for games and better practice hours. “I used to watch my brother’s games and practices and realized that he was playing twice as often and getting more practices,” recalls Blainey, still exasperated. “My practices would be at 5:30 AM, his would be at 11:00 AM. My tournaments would be a four-hour drive away, his would be close by. Mine would be outside, his would be inside. And there was a huge difference of what was expected in terms of quality.”7
To register with the boys’ team, Blainey needed a CAHA player’s card, which could only be obtained through the OHA. The rules of the OHA restricted eligibility to boys, however, and Blainey was banned from joining the team. She challenged the ban. In her challenge, Blainey asked the Divisional Court of Ontario to find the OHA regulation contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. On behalf of Blainey, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), with the help of the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport (CAAWS), argued that provincial sports associations were subject to the equality provisions of the Charter, just as government agencies were, because they were heavily funded by the government. The court rejected this view. Instead, it held that both the CAHA and OHA were private, autonomous organizations that were not subject to the provisions of the Charter. Blainey also asked the court to declare section 19(2) of the Ontario Human Rights Code, which allowed athletic organizations to restrict activities to the same sex, contrary to section 15 of the Charter. The court agreed that the Ontario Code did violate the Charter but held that based on evidence of physiological differences between girls and boys, the impact on the local league in which Blainey played, and historical precedent, section 19(2) of the Ontario Code, and hence the rules of the OHA, were justified. The evidence of physiological differences was particularly absurd given that Blainey had tried out for and made the team.
Blainey appealed this decision before the Ontario Court of Appeal. This time the court found that section 19(2) was “grossly disproportionate to the end sought to be served” and struck it down. “In substance, it permits the posting of a ‘no females allowed’ sign by every athletic organization in the province,”8 Justice Charles Dubin said in the majority decision. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision, and Blainey took her original complaint back to an Ontario Board of Inquiry. The board ordered the OHA to allow any girl to compete for a position on a boys’ team and to display prominently on its materials a statement to the effect that both girls and boys are eligible to play. It also forced the OHA, which spent more than $100,000 fighting to keep Blainey out, to pay her $3,000 for the mental anguish it caused her to suffer.
The Blainey case achieved two important results. First, it eliminated an exemption in the Ontario Human Rights Code that had permitted sports organizations in Ontario to discriminate against women. Second, it established that a private sports organization discriminated against girls when it did not allow them to participate in its programs. A less beneficial result of the case, however, stemmed from the Divisional Court of Ontario’s rejection of CAAWS’s argument that provincial sports associations should be subject to the equality provisions of the Charter because of the funding they receive from government. The court’s rejection of the argument has meant that predominantly male organizations, such as the CAHA (now the CHA), have no obligation to include girls and women in their programs. In 1987, the year that Blainey won her case, the CAHA received over $1 million from Sport Canada, with an additional $560,000 going to Hockey Canada to fund the men’s national team. Funding for the Women in Sport category within the CAHA was non-existent for that year.9
In hindsight the Blainey campaign was clearly aimed at broadening girls’ opportunity to play hockey. Surprisingly, however, Blainey’s plight led to a bitter rift among female hockey advocates. The Ontario Women’s Hockey Association (OWHA), barely a decade old, feared the outcome of the Blainey case would destroy its fledgling league. If girls had the option of playing on boys’ teams, President Fran Rider argued, the female teams would be drained of the better players—or worse, most girls would simply quit if faced with mixed competition. CAAWS, on the other hand, supported Blainey’s aim and fought hard to have the Ontario Human Rights Code changed.
Time has proven Rider’s predictions to be unfounded. Nonetheless, the controversy sparked by the Blainey case set off a larger debate about the very nature of the female game. Inherent in the OWHA’s campaign against the Blainey case was its desire to preserve the women’s game as not only separate, but distinct from the men’s game. In its promotional literature, the OWHA stresses the safety and recreational aspect of female hockey, placing great weight on its rule against intentional bodychecking. “Female hockey is one of the fastest growing participation sports in the world. It’s fun; it’s fantastic exercise; it’s safe and it’s a great way to make friends,” the OWHA brochure proclaims. In a coaching manual for female hockey the CHA also stresses “Friendship … fun … [and] social benefits ….”10 Fun and friendship are undoubtedly important to young people. But by trumpeting these aspects, the OWHA and CHA do what promoters of women’s sports have done since the turn of the century: they assure girls and, more importantly parents, that the sport is gentle, non-competitive and, when stripped of all its protective gear, essentially feminine.
Most advocates of female hockey wholeheartedly support the option of recreational hockey, but some have criticized what they consider to be a palatable version of the female game. Sociologist Nancy Theberge contends that Fran Rider does a disservice to players, especially to those striving to become elite athletes, by continually emphasizing the fun and social nature of the women’s game. “All the talk about sportsmanship is an evocation of the Play Day philosophy,” she says, referring to programs developed by physical educators in the 1930s to expunge hazards of aggressive play from women’s sports.11 “It’s belittling a bit. Everyone should be able to play sport to win. There’s nothing wrong with that.”12 Or, as Abby (formerly little “Ab”) Hoffman, director of Sport Canada in the 1980s has bluntly stated, “The game is being sanitized for women as a reaction to the violent play of men. The response should be to clean up men’s hockey, not limit women.”13
Helen Lenskyj, a well-known feminist sports sociologist who assisted Blainey with her case, concurs. Lenskyj is one of the sharpest critics of the “female deficit” model of sport that upholds traditional male values and attitudes as ideal,14 but she also stresses the need for a range of options. “Not everyone wants to play a recreational [sport],” says Lenskyj. “If they [women] are serious players, they are very frustrated by the fact that it’s mostly fun. It doesn’t aim at winning and the competition is downplayed. And that doesn’t serve all women’s interests. So there have to be all sorts of choices available.”15
Bodychecking was one such choice that was hotly debated by the female provincial representatives of the CAHA in the 1980s. While it continued to be a part of the game in some provinces, the CAHA phased it out for the national championships in 1986 in order to lower the high number of injuries due to the uneven skill levels of female players across the country. Female players rarely received proper coaching and most were not taught the art of safe bodychecking. An injury during a game could mean time off work and a loss of income. Unlike male Junior A players, a level comparable to the women’s senior level, women players receive no financial incentives or perks to make this risk worthwhile. The elimination of bodychecking has also proven to be detrimental to the promotion of the game. Promoters and fans of the men’s game consider bodychecking to be an essential element of the sport, one that defines “real” hockey. Its absence in the women’s game has provided those who object to women playing hockey with one more reason to dismiss the female game.
Bodychecking was banned in world championships in 1992 by the International Ice Hockey Federation. The move has reduced injuries, but it has obscured the root cause of injuries: the lack of access to top-quality coaching and the limited availability of ice time for women. Girls and women simply do not receive the proper training to learn how to bodycheck and receive bodychecks. Practices for girls’ and women’s teams continue to be squeezed into the gaps between male teams’ practices and games; community rinks still ignore women’s requests for more ice time, claiming there is nothing they can do to alter the decades-old rules of first come, first served. Because men have traditionally played the game, they have established connections with rink managers and can often secure prime-time ice by simply calling these managers. Women and girls, then, get stuck with undesirable ice times. Furthermore, players on adult teams which are mostly male, are unregulated, unlike their minor hockey counterparts, who are permitted to play on only one registered team. As a result, many men have monopolized the ice, playing on several different teams whose games are all at prime time—the time safest for young girls to travel to and from rinks.
The Toronto area offers several examples of the resistance mounted against women and girls who want to play hockey. It also offers examples of different strategies that can be used to ensure that female players get a fair crack at ice time. In the spring of 1995, Fran Rider of the OWHA and Phyllis Berck, recreation manager for Toronto’s Parks and Recreation Department, met with the city’s rink managers to discuss the need for more ice time for girls. “It was basically a closed door,” Rider recalls.16 The women were told by these managers that for decades the ice time had been allocated based on who used it the year before. “They said it worked for them, so they saw no reason to change,”17 says Rider, appalled. Berck, however, did not stop there. Spurred by community groups’ demand that city-owned rinks serve their residents more fairly, she made numerous recommendations that explicitly required Toronto’s seven rink managers to respond to female needs. The recommendations called for ice-rink management boards to give ice time, freed up when teams disbanded, to female leagues before offering it to male teams and to report yearly on what had been done to give females increased access to ice time.
The recommendations also called for changing residency restrictions, which require a certain percentage of women’s team members to live within city limits. (Residency rules within the male leagues are not adhered to; many players simply give fake addresses in order to play in a certain area.) Instead of the 75 percent requirement for men’s teams, the Parks and Recreation Department suggested a 50 percent requirement for women’s teams. This would help to foster the growth of women’s hockey. In Toronto, and in other parts of the country, residency restrictions have essentially prevented new female teams from playing on community rinks. This is due to the fact that in many communities there are not yet enough women to form full teams, which makes it necessary for new teams to draw players from a larger geographical area. Coaches find themselves caught in the difficult situation of attempting to promote the sport’s growth while being unable to provide players with facilities. Cheryl Harper, president of the Toronto Red Wings Ladies Hockey Association, faced this dilemma in 1994 when she was asked by the William Bolton Arena in downtown Toronto to launch a girls’ house league. Harper, who had requested ice time at sixty-two arenas in greater Toronto, had managed to negotiate only a tentative promise of two hours per week at one rink for the five girls’ teams she already ran. She therefore jumped at the chance to form a league at the Bill Bolton Arena, quickly pulling together three girl’s teams. But arena officials changed their mind about the girl’s league when they discovered that many of the players did not live within city limits. They ultimately cancelled the league and told the girls to join teams elsewhere. Harper, who reports she almost has to harass arena managers to get even a few hours of poor ice time, says residency restrictions for girls serve only to keep them away from the sport. Berck agrees: “Sport develops with opportunity. That’s the catch-22 of women’s hockey. People don’t join hockey and then not have a venue to play.”18
In April 1995 Toronto city hall approved the recommendations, in theory paving the way for more female participation. City Councillor Pam McConnell captured the essence of the issue at the meeting. “I can recall having to walk one and a half hours to get a chance to skate in an outdoor rink as a girl. Then I’d have to put on those skates with picks on the toes that I was constantly tripping over,” she recounted, her voice thick with irony. “We girls were sort of like Bambi—shoved to the margins of the rink while the boys skated and played their hormonal games in the middle.”19
The city’s approval of the recommendations did not resolve the access issue, however. By August, four of the seven city-owned rinks had done little or nothing to make ice time available for female hockey. Once again, on the table at the Neighbourhoods Committee were recommendations designed to open the ice to female hockey. This time, however, the council named the guilty rinks—Forest Hill, Ted Reeve, George Bell and North Toronto Memorial—and approved a recommendation that required each of these rinks to make two hours of prime-time ice available for women’s groups by 1996–97. The council also requested that the Budget Review Group look at how well the rinks were serving female hockey players when considering their annual operating budget. Since the arena boards are appointed and funded by city council, city council is essentially their landlord. By threatening to pull the arenas’ purse strings, city council was at last endorsing the recommendations. “It was clear that [we] were getting nowhere, that arenas weren’t adhering to the [April] requests,” says Councillor McConnell. “Some had no difficulty, but the other four put the blinkers on and dug their heels in and basically said we don’t have to and we won’t do it.”20
Judging from a lengthy letter accompanying a half-page Metro Toronto Hockey League (MTHL) advertisement published in the Toronto Star, arena managers were not the only ones digging in their heels. MTHL President John Gardner had also put on the blinkers. In a letter entitled, “New Season Starts with Old Issues on Burner,” Gardner depicts the amateur hockey community in Toronto as “being targetted by Councillor McConnell [sic] war games computer.”21 Utterly misinformed about the issue, Gardner accuses McConnell and other city councillors of having demanded that 50 percent of all ice time allocated for hockey be handed over to women, rather than the meagre two hours a week. He then writes:
Now before … a few mothers or feminist groups start sharpening their knives, let me explain that this isn’t meant to be an anti-female hockey editorial. So put the blades away and let’s pose some legitimate questions that should be addressed … before Councillor McConnell decides which of, or if each of the existing user groups in the arenas under attack are forced to give up currently contracted ice.
First, has she checked to see if the local community-based hockey associations have taken steps to determine if there are a sufficient number of young girls in the respective communities to justify the formation of female teams? If there aren’t, then what’s all the fuss about? And if there are, then I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that the requirements wouldn’t be responsibly handled.22
When later questioned about the inaccuracies in his letter, Gardner admitted he never attended the city council meeting or read its minutes, but instead based his editorial on a small article that had appeared a week earlier in the Toronto Star. He did not, however, back away from his accusations. “It’s almost gotten to abuse and intimidation,” he says of women vying for, more ice time. “In essence, girls get the better run of it by being able to play on boys’ and girls’ teams …. And the, women’s aggressive approach lessens the will to cooperate with them.”23 Gardner cites a meeting with North York’s city council concerning ice time for female hockey in which the OWHA’s Fran Rider, renowned for her fear of appearing too radical, “showed up with the representative of some ladies’ rights group. They weren’t there to listen, they were there to say, ‘To heck to the rest of them.’ The OWHA takes a very aggressive stand and boy, it was man the guns, no subtlety at all.”24
Gardner was referring to a February 2, 1995 meeting in which women from the Newtonbrook’s Senior Women’s Recreational League voiced a complaint after Newtonbrook rink officials unilaterally took away two of their hours and reallocated the time to an AAA boys’ team. As a result of this move, the twenty-year-old league had been forced to cut four of its twelve teams. At the meeting, the representatives from the league, some of whom were lawyers, also requested that residency requirements similar to those passed by Toronto city hall be implemented. According to Fran Rider, the reaction of many male hockey players was exceptionally hostile. “‘Why should women have any ice at all?’ was the mentality,” says Rider.25
Although the City of North York Parks and Recreation Department seemed amenable to lower residency requirements for women, when the Parks and Recreation Committee of Council voted on the issue in May 1995, it reinstated the original 75 percent level. Members of one of the leagues teams, the Apotex Bombers, responded in December 1995 with a human rights complaint. Paige Brodie, a lawyer and the Apotex Bomber who officially filed the complaint, calls the residency requirements discriminatory and wants them struck down. This is particularly the case for senior women’s leagues, she says, which will not benefit from the influx of girls for some years to come and cannot possibly meet a 50 percent requirement, let alone a 75 percent one. Currently, the highest percentage of senior female team members who reside within North York is 40 percent. “Women need to be more aggressive and to take a strong stand on this issue,” says Brodie. “Some people think the way to get things done is not to make waves and be nice and the arenas will not take anything more away. This approach hasn’t gotten us anywhere.”26
Women’s hockey teams in smaller communities have faced the same willful ignorance. In Parry Sound in 1989, the Bobby Orr Community Centre manager, Jack Lawson, gave the women’s team’s traditional 6:15 PM slot on Sunday to a men’s industrial league and moved the women to 5:00 PM—without their consent. While the time slot represented 100 percent of women’s hockey scheduling in the arena, the men’s industrial league were allotted two blocks of prime-time ice on Sunday and Thursday evenings. Outraged, team representative Chris Cardy and other women approached town council to reinstate the original time. The councillors refused to reverse the rink manager’s decision, informing the women’s team, the Trilites, that the men who played in that time slot “owned it.” Cardy and teammates then filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. While the decision was pending, the team was obliged to drive thirty miles out of town to a smaller rink where they were permitted to play. “It went on and on,” says Cardy, recounting the ordeal with be-mused annoyance. “Every time we tried to set up a meeting, the guys would say, ‘We can’t have it then, that’s hunting season, or that’s when the guys work.’ As if the women don’t work!”27 At one point a male hockey player attempted to launch a counter-case, claiming that the men were victims of discrimination at the hands of women usurping their ice time. “You know,” Cardy comments wryly, “they only could play on three teams each, six times a week. Real tough.”28
After a three-year wait, Cardy and teammates won the case in August 1992 and they can now claim Tuesday nights at 8:30 for their one-hour practices, an improvement from the original Sunday night time. But the resistance did not end with the commission’s decision. The Trilites were subsequently harassed by leering male players and this harassment did not abate until Cardy sent a letter of complaint to the arena management, the police and town council. Furthermore, the human rights victory has brought no sense of security to Cardy and her teammates: their ice time was taken away again in the fall of 1995 and reinstated only after Cardy sent a letter warning town council that she would take action.
The Orillia Girls Hockey Association in Ontario has endured a similar trial. The league was set up in 1991 and by 1995 it had attracted more than sixty girls. Its players, whose ages range from nine to seventeen, share a Friday time slot of 8:45 PM to 11:00 PM, a slot that was given to them by the boys’ minor league. The former treasurer of the Orillia association, Roger Czerneda, approached the Parks and Recreation Department of the City of Orillia to request a better time. Officials told him they would not make room for anyone, girls or boys, because it would mean bumping men who had played at the same time for years. “The whole thing is very brutal,” says Czerneda with contained frustration. “It’s been detrimental to the whole organization. If we invite a team from out of town, it’s midnight before they go home. It is very late for the younger ones. A lot of girls are ready to pack it in.”29
Czerneda and his wife, Julie, pursued the matter. In February 1995 they sent a letter to Cliff Turner, director of the Parks and Recreation Department, protesting the city’s refusal to acknowledge the league or treat it fairly. With their letter they forwarded a copy of the handbook that outlines the Ontario government policy on equity in sport. The Czernedas asked if Turner was aware of the policy and, if so, if he had explained to City Hall that it stipulates that girls and women must have fair and full access to recreational facilities. Turner replied that he knew of the policy but had done nothing to implement it:
I act and react relative to various policies/legislation. To my knowledge this is not legislated. This is a policy position. Having said that, Members of Council are interested in providing services for all ages and both sexes in an equitable manner. As a Department Head, I act on their behalf.30
But Turner then writes that of the 74 percent of ice time contracted to youth organizations in the city, 19 percent is allotted to girls’ figure skating and hockey. This means that girls receive 14 percent of the town’s ice time, a fraction of which goes to female hockey.
Czerneda was angered by Turner’s response, but was reluctant to file a human rights complaint. “This is a very close-knit community,” he explains, almost apologetically, “and we’re afraid there will be some retribution there. They could try to give our sons the worst ice time if we push too hard for the girls. So we’re trying to be careful and not make enemies.”31
Girls’ hockey in other regions of Canada has not fared much better. In Saskatchewan, where women and girls now make up 12 percent of the province’s registered players, funding for girls’ teams has proven to be the most serious obstacle. In Saskatoon, the Youth Sports Subsidiary Program requires team players to reside within city limits to be eligible for city funding. Because newly formed girls’ teams have such difficulty filling their rosters with players from one area, some have to function with no funding at all. In 1993–94 the Saskatoon Selects, a Midget girls’ team, found itself paying the full costs for rink time, referees and the performance bond—a sum that totalled $10,000. On the other hand, boys who are part of the Saskatoon Minor Hockey Association can easily comply with the residency restrictions. As members of the association, they are reimbursed by the city for approximately 39 percent of their ice costs and have schedules and referees booked automatically. “It is ridiculous the way we have to go about raising money,” says the Selects’ former coach Sandy Johnson. “Not only do we have to organize bingos, but because the team wasn’t comprised just of city players, we didn’t qualify for subsidy or practice time. Because of that, we must book our own ice, arrange our own games, and arrange to have ice time cancelled if we go out for a tournament so we don’t get charged.”32 Johnson, who has been involved in hockey in Saskatchewan for over a decade, says that approximately 70 percent of girls in the province play on boys’ teams. Regina is the exception. There the Queen City Hockey Association has managed to secure decent ice time for its players and ensure a thriving girls’ league.
In Prince Edward Island, Susan Dalziel, director of female hockey with the PEI Hockey Association, reports that parents’ have been the largest impediment to girls’ participation. Dalziel, whose no-nonsense commitment to female hockey has led the game to its current popularity, recounts that once parents abandoned the notion that girls shouldn’t be playing hockey, the game flourished in the province. Although local hockey boards made no effort to develop the game, they did not put up roadblocks as boards have done in other provinces. Prince Edward Island also fares well compared with most other provinces in regard to female representation on local boards. The PEI Minor Hockey Association appointed a girls’ coordinator in 1977 and a director of female hockey in 1980. The latter appointment was made two years before it even occurred to the CAHA to create a female council.
Ninety-five percent of PEI’s female players are members of girls’ teams who play other girls’ teams under the auspices of the local hockey associations. PEI enjoys the distinction of having the highest number of indoor ice rinks per capita in the world, says Dalziel, with twenty-five rinks for a population of 125,000. The province’s girls also profit from the fact that they are seen as the saviours of the game. The number of male hockey players has dropped significantly in the last decade. In order to revitalize the sport, leagues are now encouraging females to form teams.
Another league that is flourishing is the Ontario London Devilettes Girls’ Hockey Association. In 1986, its first year of operation, it had thirteen players. The Public Utilities Commission (now the Parks and Recreation Department) cooperated with the associations founders, who worked hard to win the city’s support. Although the league was initially given poor ice time, it now shares time equitably with the boys’ league. By 1995 more than five hundred girls belonged to the league which now has thirteen competitive teams and twenty-eight house leagues. The league brought home three provincial gold medals and one silver medal in 1995 alone. Its recent success is no doubt related to the improved ice time.
Although Devilettes’ President Connie Rice says she still has to contend with parents who accuse the league of “using the boys’ ice,” the association’s size prevents those who oppose it from edging the girls off the ice. The league not only represents the girls’ interest in the game, it also sets an example of how women can effectively run a sports association with female-centred goals. More than 50 percent of the association’s twenty-five-person executive is female. Parity in gender representation is unheard of in boys’ leagues, where women are usually confined to organizing fundraising dances or bake sales. The league’s next step, says Rice, is to bolster the number of female coaches, who currently account for less than 20 percent of the coaching staff.
The allocation of ice time not only affects the hours in which women play and practise, it also affects the length of their games. Most women continue to be given three ten-minute stop-time periods compared with men’s three twenty-minute stop-time periods. However, since the mid-1980s at least one group of players has been allocated longer playing periods. Members of the Central Ontario Women’s Hockey League who are at the Senior AA level now play for two fifteen-minute periods and one twenty-minute period. According to Fran Rider, male organizers have claimed for years that shorter periods were all girls could handle. They have argued that female players do not possess the stamina to last three twenty-minute periods. “If there’s a shortage of ice,” comments Rider, “people will come up with lots of different reasons to turn women down.”33
For more than two decades feminist women and men have protested the inequitable allocation of sports facilities and resources to activities aimed at grooming boys for professional careers. In 1981 these dissenting voices united to form the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport and Physical Activity (CAAWS), an organization that has since been highly critical of the persisting bias against women and girls in sport.
Although the need for a national organization that would address the issue of gender equity in relation to sports was not formally recognized until CAAWS formed, conferences, workshops and seminars on women and sport had begun to spring up in the early seventies. Leaders in this area included Abby Hoffman, Marion Lay, Bruce Kidd and Penny Werthner, former world-class athletes who remained connected to sport through administrative or academic positions. When CAAWS was formed, its founders defined their mission as “advanc[ing] the position of women by defining, promoting, and supporting a feminist perspective on sport and …. Improv[ing] the status of women in sport,”34 a statement that would prove to be problematic given the diverse and often diverging views of feminism held by members. For CAAWS’ first six years, however, the sheer excitement of tackling equity issues with other like-minded people produced a dynamic, if cash-strapped, organization. Members focussed their energy on leadership development, research and especially advocacy. This initial period of productiveness waned by the late 1980s, however. CAAWS became increasingly estranged from the very sports organizations it was trying to influence and more closely aligned with feminist organizations such as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) and the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW). Rather than educating organizations about how to promote sport for girls and women, CAAWS took on the “bad guy” role of publicly chastising groups for excluding women from promotional materials or failing to fund female programs. Dissension within the organization also contributed to its inability to effect change.
Marion Lay, former manager of the Sport Canada Women’s Program and a founding member of CAAWS, attributes the resulting frustration and internal strife partly to the mistaken tactics of its leaders. “We put the sport agenda on the women’s movement, rather than put a women’s agenda on sports,” Lay explains. “We need to do both.” Lay comments wryly that by the early 1990s, CAAWS had become “the menstrual hut of Canadian sport. More blood was let there due to infighting and lack of direction than anywhere else.”35
Nevertheless, Sport Canada hardly helped, despite its official commitment to equity. Its 1986 policy on gender equity provided an excellent discussion of how fairness could be achieved, but it lacked accountability and specific goals, and because of this was in essence a non-agenda. Consequently, sports agencies such as the CAHA have continued to swallow millions of dollars while doing virtually nothing to boost female participation. “It’s been shocking how little change has happened. And this newest policy that just came out still won’t address sports equity until 1996,” says Lay, referring to the Sport Funding Accountability Framework, initiated by Sport Canada. “It will be interesting to see what kind of teeth they’ll put into it ten years later. Change has always been left to best intentions.”36
The Sport Funding Accountability Framework, developed with the input of Ann Peel, chairperson of the Canadian Athletes’ Association, provides a precise point system for deciding which sports organizations will receive funding from Sport Canada. Groups that commit resources to women and girls and include women in leadership roles will be awarded points for their efforts. The accountability framework offers the first objective evaluation of who receives money at the federal level. Prior to 1996 Sport Canada raised or cut an organizations funding based on the previous year of the group’s budget, the history of the sport and its performance internationally.
At the same time that these policy changes occurred at Sport Canada, CAAWS underwent a major shift in focus. As a result, it no longer acts as a feminist watchdog group for sports organizations: it has now assumed the “good guy” role of educating sports organizations about how to boost the participation of female athletes, coaches and administrators. On the provincial level, however, only Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia have designed sports equity policies. Ontario’s 1995 equity policy is known as Full and Fair Access for Women and Girls in Sport and Physical Activity and is particularly noteworthy. The handbook that outlines this policy is appropriately entitled Walking the Talk, a reference to the need for action, not just discussion. The policy has helped municipal equity groups such as Toronto’s Women in Action and London’s Females Active in Recreation (FAIR). The policy also brought equity pilot projects in nineteen municipalities to fruition and resulted in these programs being funded to the tune of $230,000.
While Walking the Talk is meant to empower women in sport, the process will no doubt be slow. “The problem with policies on women in sports is that they often precede the public’s readiness to include women,” says Sue Scherer, program consultant at Ontario’s Female Athletes Motivating Excellence (FAME). “So many of the committees set up are advisory groups with no ‘doers.’ And what’s to advise? The policies are strategically written so that they almost guarantee no compliance.”37
Examples of ineffective policies abound. Saskatchewan’s provincial amateur sports agency, Sask Sport, touts a policy called Sport for All as its answer to the inequities in sports funding. Here’s how it helps girls: this policy stipulates that 35 percent of a sports group’s budget must go toward grassroots activities, namely, events that fall below the provincial level of competition. Of this 35 percent, Sask Sport requests that a mere 20 percent—or 7 percent of the overall budget—be earmarked for target groups such as aboriginal people or people with disabilities, seniors or women. According to Dale Kryzanowski of Sask Sport’s Regina office, it is up to the individual groups to decide how they wish to allot the 7 percent.38
Not only are the equity requirements weak, but Sask Sport’s methods of assessing whether a program makes a difference lacks accountability. Evaluation is limited to a financial audit and a review of the overall program when the group reapplies for funding. In Saskatchewan, as in many other provinces, the lion’s share of its sports budget, 35 percent, is designated for high-performance sports. Male hockey receives a significant portion of this; a small part of it is earmarked for the selection camps for high-calibre female players. “When you ask the provincial sport governing bodies, ‘What does this [equity policy] mean?’ they say they don’t have a clue,”39 says Pat Jackson, a member of the sports equity group 52% Solution. Jackson claims that the organizations that make up Sask Sport feel that Sport for All imposes rules on them that the associations do not know how to implement. Traditionally, provincial sports organizations have viewed their main role as serving the needs of elite athletes and have not seen any problem in excluding aboriginal people, people with disabilities or women from their programs.
The group 52% Solution (the name refers to the fact that women make up 52 percent of the world’s population) is just one of the handful of equity groups that has arisen across the country to help include women and other excluded groups in publicly funded sports. Jackson’s group set up its board in June 1994 and has since put out a quarterly newsletter on sports equity issues. Its goal is to act where the province has failed to and to transform Sask Sport into an agency that serves all members of the public. Promotion Plus in British Columbia led the way in 1988 by setting up a network for girls and women in physical activity and sports. Albertans formed In Motion in February 1995. After three years of strategy meetings, the group produced a humorous play about sports inequity called See Jane Run, which it used as a launching pad for discussion about gender issues in sport. New Brunswick, which has an equity group called Alliance des femmes actives, and Ontario are in the initial stages of forming advocacy groups.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it is the intercollegiate level of sport that may well prove to be the most progressive in terms of gender equity. This is because the growing female student body at Canadian universities is demanding a say about where its tuition dollars go. In 1993 the University of Toronto’s Athletic Council set an exciting precedent for how far and how quickly fair distribution of funding can be achieved. A task force identified a $60,000 disparity between funding for men’s and women’s sports and persuaded the Athletic Council to eliminate the gap by 1996. The move has pumped thousands of dollars into the women’s hockey team, a team that was slated for cancellation in 1992 when the university took $1.2 million away from the Department of Athletics and Recreation (DAR). Men’s football, a very poorly attended sport, was also slated for extinction. Such a clamour of protest resulted over cutting football, however, that the DAR was forced to reinstate both teams, recouping the lost revenue in increased student service fees. Because students were now required to contribute directly to sports, they began to ask questions about just what they were getting for their money. Since women make up 54 percent of the university’s student body, the Office for the Status of Women was particularly interested in how fairly resources were being distributed.40 When it came to light just how inequitable sports financing was, the Task Force on Gender Equity was created and eventually redressed the imbalance.
Women’s hockey benefitted greatly from the reallocation of funds. In 1994 the hockey team, then known as the Lady Blues, scraped by on a yearly budget of less than $11,000—one-tenth of the men’s hockey budget. The women were also allocated second-rate ice time; their practices were scheduled in the unpopular 7:00 PM slot, after the men’s team had finished. The team also had to make do with second-rate equipment passed down from the men. As well, the women were absent from the university’s annual sports publication, a book that dedicated pages to write-ups and photos of members of the men’s teams.
When the equity recommendations were implemented, the situation changed almost overnight. The women’s team now shares the coveted 5:00 to 7:00 PM practice slot that was the men’s team’s for more than sixty years. Furthermore, the women’s budget was more than $40,000 for the 1995–96 season, an increase that allowed the team to acquire proper equipment and to travel to more tournaments. “The recognition makes such a difference,” says Hilary Korn, a player who was with the team from 1991 to 1995. “People at U of T now know us and how many games we win and lose, so we feel the pressure to win. That’s good. We’re more like an intercollegiate team, not some recreational league. The calibre is definitely higher.”41 Karen Hughes, a former player who has been head coach of the Lady Blues since 1993, says the whole process also showed up a dangerous apathy on the part of female athletes. “It was a big eye-opening year for us,” says Hughes. “We now understand we have to be involved in these issues. It was our own fault that things were so bad. We never participated on committees.”42
Still, key inequities persist. Publicity, per diems for coaches,
and most importantly in these times of government cutbacks, the lack of donations from alumnae remain stumbling-blocks. Women are years behind men in terms of being able to establish networks that can rally round a faltering sport and inject it with vital cash. And although the University of Toronto move represents a critical breakthrough for female university athletes, the reaction of other universities to it hardly inspires hope. “We sent the policy around the country and the reaction was, ‘Oh my god, thanks! Now I’m going to have to do one, too!’” says Paul Carson, sports information director for the University of Toronto. “I mean everybody said they liked it, but there were some who said, ‘The handwriting’s on the wall at my university.’”43
Other than the University of Toronto team, the women’s hockey team at Concordia University is the only one in Canada that enjoys equitable funding. Concordia has had a women’s team since 1975, and since 1985 this team has received its fair share of money from the university’s athletic budget. The funding has directly translated into better hockey—and varsity status, which means the team is financially supported by the university. Julie Healy, who is the athletics facilities coordinator and assistant coach, says, “Players see how serious we are about the program, so we get players with high goals. Very few of them don’t strive to be on the national team.”44
But Concordia University, like the University of Toronto, is the exception. The reluctance of other universities to implement equity policies is hardly surprising given the lack of incentives to do so. In Canada, no sports equity legislation exists. The governing body for university sports, the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAU), has left it up to its forty-five-member schools to offer equal sports opportunities to women and men. Although it has a gender equity policy, the CIAU sponsors nine national men’s championships and only seven women’s championships. President Liz Hoffman hopes to redress this imbalance by the summer of 1996. But as public funding for both education and sports rapidly evaporates, it is unclear if obtaining equity will translate into more sporting opportunity for university women or cuts to male programs.
For female hockey, in particular, the struggle for financial security will no doubt continue for some years. At thirty-seven Canadian universities, women’s hockey remains at club status, receiving little or no university funding. Ontario is the only province that has a league of varsity teams. This league, which is made up of six teams, is part of the Ontario Women’s Inter-collegiate Athletic Association. If the CIAU decides to add more women’s sports to its program, there will be resistance to including women’s hockey because the game is not played in official intercollegiate conferences across the country. Liz Hoffman, however, insists that there is tremendous interest in the game but that it lies at the unacknowledged club level, where university women form their own teams and cover their own expenses. “We have this fear that it’s too expensive,” she says of the CIAU, “but nobody’s complaining about how much we spend on men’s hockey.”
Even in the United States, where female college athletes have had legal recourse to inequity under Title IX legislation, the scales are proving slow to balance. Title IX refers to a portion of a US law that prohibits sex discrimination in all high schools and universities that receive federal funding. Title IX was passed in 1972, and schools can comply with it in any of the following ways: by offering men and women athletic opportunities that are proportionate to the gender ratio of students; by demonstrating that sports opportunities are growing for the underrepresented sex; or by meeting the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex. When this legislation was enacted in 1972, less than 2 percent of college athletes were female and women received less than half of 1 percent of the sports operating budgets and virtually no scholarships. By 1995 women made up one-third of college athletes, took home one-third of athletic scholarships and received 20 percent of the money allotted for athletic budgets. In February 1992 the Supreme Court ruled that monetary damages could be awarded in Title IX cases. This decision resulted in schools taking equity much more seriously in light of the very real possibility that they might be sued.45 Nonetheless, some American schools have decided to wage legal battles against Title IX instead of redressing financial inequities.
A less auspicious outcome of Title IX legislation involves the fate of female coaches and women in sports leadership positions. As women’s sports programs became properly funded, gained more recognition and, in many cases, merged with men’s programs, female coaches and administrators lost their jobs to men. Consequently, there was a sharp decline in the number of women in leadership positions. This is no small point in the US or in Canada. Leadership is the linchpin to equity: without women in key positions, damaging practices in sports organizations will go unchallenged. A number of recent American studies have found that many male athletic directors dismiss the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions. They argue that there is a lack of qualified women, that female coaches are unwilling to travel, that women don’t apply for the jobs, and that they are held back by family obligations.46 In Canada, University of Alberta sociologist Ann Hall studied the gender structure of national sports organizations in 1990 and found that while 60 percent of women reported that discrimination played a major role in the absence of women on their organizations’ boards, only about one-third of men cited sexist attitudes as the barrier.47 Another study of board staff relations in provincial sports organizations was completed in 1994 by Sue Inglis, a University of McMaster professor. Inglis found that the women she surveyed perceived that including them on boards was not a priority and that developing female programs was seen by some male board members as an “unfavourable exercise.” Female respondents in the study also reported that they had to work very hard to be listened to and to ensure that their suggestions were not dismissed by male colleagues.48
Penny Werthner, a sports psychologist and founding member of CAAWS, has worked to help women move into positions of leadership in sports organizations. In 1992 a group of Werthner’s colleagues visited Norway, where they discovered how equity legislation at the government level has transformed the country’s workplaces to reflect the needs of women as well as men. “What they learned is that you need a critical mass of women in leadership positions in order to change the culture of an organization,” relates Werthner. “They also saw that working with individual women to give them specific skills was essential.”49 Werthner’s greatest fear is that with government cutbacks, women and other marginal groups will be squeezed out of the few positions they now hold. When it comes to the crunch, she says, male programs and positions remain in place, while female initiatives get dumped. Werthner cites the reneging of the Canadian Basketball Association on its promise to centralize the female national team in Victoria in 1995 as an example. Head coach Kathy Shields resigned in protest and was swiftly replaced by a male coach. “There are very good women who get passed over constantly because the assumption is they can’t take the pressure,” says Werthner angrily, “and that the best coach will be a male coach.”50
Shannon Miller, the coach of the women’s national hockey team, agrees. Miller has dedicated most of her adult life to developing her coaching skills and has paid a high price for her commitment to this profession. Before heading up the women’s high-performance hockey centre at Calgary’s Olympic Oval, Miller worked as a police officer and was constantly encouraged by the force to gain the necessary qualifications for promotion. But she turned down these offers, because she could not put equal amounts of time and energy into both coaching, which she did on a volunteer basis, and her career.
Unlike coaches of the men’s national team, Miller is not paid for coaching the women’s national team, although her expenses and flights are covered by the CHA. Appointed as an assistant coach in 1994, she received an honorarium of $1,500 for what she estimates added up to about four months of full-time work over a two-year period. Although the CHA initiated a Women’s High-Performance Coaching Pool in 1994 to groom five women for national team coaching positions, it has done little else to encourage female coaches.
Putting women in leadership positions will not only help to increase sports opportunities for girls and women, it will also help bring to the fore the problem of harassment, which is rarely acknowledged. Harassment can be as overt as leering, whistling and hostile accusations of lesbianism or as subtle as a coach commenting on the looks, not the performance, of a female player. One former member of the women’s national hockey team recalls a male coach praising another team member for her “bedroom eyes.”
But coaches are not the only culprits. By all accounts, parents can be the worst offenders. When a girls’ team dominates a boys’ team in a game, for instance, parents of the boys have been known to encourage their sons to use violent tactics against the girls. Coach Sandy Johnson recalls that her talented Saskatoon Midget team has put up with parents yelling, “Hit her! Smash her! Knock her down!” from the stands. Although the league was no-contact, by the end of the season violence had escalated to such an extent that the referees cut
Ontario’s Karen Hughes with Alberta’s Melody Davidson and Shannon Miller, members of the CHA’s first national team coaching pool for women’s hockey.
games short several times. One outstanding team member was singled out for abuse by the male team. The injuries she received were so serious that she was unable to participate in the Canada Winter Games in 1995.
Star player Hayley Wickenheiser has experienced similar harassment from parents who objected to a girl playing in their boys’ league. Wickenheiser’s father remembers parents in the stands yelling, “Kill her, kill her!” On one occasion the Wickenheiser family will never forget, the mother of a boy from the opposing team followed Hayley to her makeshift dressing room, where she hammered the door with her fists and screamed, “You little bitch! That’s not the way to play hockey. Get out of here and never come back!” “Would it have happened had she been a boy?” Wickenheiser’s mother, Marilyn, asks. “I would suspect not because that town had a boy that was pretty equally skilled as her, but there were no vicious attacks on him.”51
While this outward rancour clearly makes sports arenas a hostile place for girls, more often than not it is the everyday kinds of innuendo and sexist remarks that have kept many girls off the ice. Shirley Cameron, former Team Canada member and twenty-year veteran of the women’s game, admits that until the mid-1980s, she hid the fact that she even played hockey. She feared that if she revealed this she would be subject to verbal and physical abuse. “We used to be called that [dykes] every time we stepped on the ice,” Cameron says of the Edmonton Chimos, anger resonating in her voice. “It got so only those married with kids would feel safe saying they played hockey.”52 Even at the organizational level, the Chimos have had to deal with pressure to comply to a heterosexist image of how women should appear. In the fall of 1994, the president of the newly formed girls’ hockey league in Edmonton requested a “feminine-looking representative”53 from the Chimos to address its board. These kinds of requests are nothing new. Helen Lenskyj’s research reveals that women who participate in sports that have traditionally been the domain of men have been called lesbians for decades. This labelling not only deters females from becoming involved in sports, but prevents many athletes from rejecting unwanted sexual attention from male coaches.54
Harassment, inadequate access to ice time, underfunding and the underrepresentation of women on organizational bodies all attest to a sports world that promotes and guards the aspirations of some boys and views the aspirations of girls as a threat. That the resistance to female hockey players is so widespread and, in many cases, so acute, speaks volumes about what is at stake. As has been said countless times before, hockey for Canadians is more than just a game: it is a tradition, an entrenched way of life. Accompanying this tradition —as glorified and reassuring as it may be—are myths, opposition to change and a “putting on the blinkers” attitude as Pam McConnell so aptly dubs it. Not only have many hockey enthusiasts not welcomed the influx of girls and women into the game, many will not even acknowledge that women want to play.
Overcoming such resistance is a daunting task, one that has not been tackled with the unity and force that have been applied to other sectors that exclude women. This is in part due to the perception of sports as a male domain. But it is also due to ignorance of female sports history. Women have, after all, been playing hockey for almost as long as men, and as Alexandrine Gibb wrote in 1938, they have been continually denied ice time. Despite this fact, many female players and organizers share the misguided belief that with gentle prodding and just a little more time promoters of male hockey will open the rinks to women and girls.
Officials at the 1982 women’s national championship.
This has not been the case. Nor is it likely to be in the near future. Female hockey players must insist on equitable ice time by using one of the most effective means employed so far: human rights complaints. Filing such complaints is uncomfortable at best. In smaller communities in particular this act does not come without retribution, as Chris Cardy of Parry Sound has shown. But it does expose the raw prejudice that lurks behind so many of the excuses that keep girls away from hockey.
This is not to say that other methods of ensuring ice access are not valid. Certainly the efforts of Phyllis Berck and Pam McConnell in the City of Toronto have been extremely worth-while. So, too, have the networking and educational efforts made by feminist sports administrators and female hockey representatives. But in order for all of these approaches to succeed the “old boys’ club,” which lies at the core of our hockey culture, must be tackled. This challenge has not been taken up by enough female hockey advocates. Until this changes, opportunities will continue to glide by girls and women.
In the meantime the loss continues to go unacknowledged, even by the most well-meaning chroniclers of hockey history. “The sorrow is that there may also be Wayne Gretzkys of the piano or the paint brush who, because we expose our young to hockey so much more than to the arts, we will never know about,”55 writes Peter Gzowski in his classic account of hockey, The Game of Our Lives. While this is undoubtedly true, Gzowski and others have failed to pen such touching requiems for the lost sporting opportunities of girls with whom, as children, they scrimmaged in their backyard rinks. The fierce drive towards the pro leagues and the intense sense of ownership felt by many advocates of male hockey have all but numbed Canadians to the fact that “the game of our lives” has really been the game of their lives, a game from which half the country has been coolly shut out.