Of Boys and Men, Rethinking "Slap Shot"

Richard V. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is internationally recognized for his scholarship on equality of opportunity, with a focus on divisions of social class and race. But in recent years, he has become concerned about a less-scrutinized axis of inequality: the myriad ways in which boys and men are falling behind girls and women educationally, economically, and on many indicators of social well-being. In his new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Reeves examines the difficulties that millions of boys and men are having in school, at work, and in the family. As an advocate for gender equality, who has devoted considerable study to closing the pay gap for women, Reeves rejects right-wing calls to repeal feminism. But he also contends with those on the left who believe that focusing on men’s problems distracts from the challenges still faced by girls and women. “We can hold two thoughts in our head at once,” he writes in his new book. “We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.” And the problems of boys and men falling behind — in absolute terms as well as relative to women — are real and serious. For example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students. The wages of most men are lower today (in real terms) than they were in 1979. One in five fathers is not living with their children. Single and divorced men account for hugely disproportionate numbers of drug-related deaths. Men account for two out of three “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide or overdose. 65,000 more men than women died of COVID in this pandemic. Source: www.niskanencenter.org

In Slap Shot, Paul Newman played Reggie Dunlop, the ageing player-coach of the fictitious Charlestown Chiefs, a sad-sack minor league ice hockey team in a collapsing steel town. Dunlop confesses his worries about the future: Charlestown's steel mill is closing and the Chiefs will fold after the season, his losing record as a coach raises doubts about his future in hockey, and he cannot imagine himself "in one of those bullshit nine-to-five jobs." Trying to encourage him, the experimental lesbian Suzanne tells him: "Hey, use your imagination. That's what I've been doing." Dunlop will embrace that mantra, even use that quote to encourage one player's unhappy wife, but neither he nor the male characters display the creativity that many of the women do in dealing with the uncertainties facing them. At the time of its release, Slap Shot seemed so profane and violent many viewers found the film objectionable, and certainly beneath an actor of Newman's stature and popularity. The New York Times reported that Slap Shot may have been the "most obscenity-sprinkled major movie ever made," while famed critic Rex Reed called the film "violent, bloody and thoroughly revolting." Not all reviews were so negative--noted critic "Pauline Kael raved that Slap Shot was Newman's best work to date: 'one of the best performances of his career,' but the film was widely disparaged. The New York Post critic Frank Rich observed that "Nancy Dowd has an ear for American vernacular that Ring Lardner might have appreciated; she realizes that cussing can be an exhilarating folk art".

Given the boorishness, violence, profanity, sexism and homophobia of many of its characters, Slap Shot is understandably associated with a retrograde vision of combative masculinity, but a closer look reveals the film is better understood as prescient and forward-thinking in its representation of women's superior adaptability in confronting the challenges of a changing economy. While the men look to cling, or return, to formulas that are increasingly unworkable, the women in the film operate with much greater creativity. Slap Shot's perceptiveness about changing gender roles, its dramatization of the decline of Rustbelt manufacturing, and the film's relentlessly negative portrayal of people involved in hockey, all combine to make this film much more profound than its image as a foul-mouthed glorification of hockey violence would suggest. At the film's start, the Chiefs are losing, despite their talent: Their roster includes the league's leading scorer, and in one pre-game pep talk Dunlop proclaims, "Man for man, we're better than any fuckin' club in the league."

But the announcement that Charlestown's steel mill will close at the start of April forces a reckoning. Dunlop initially maintains a brave front, confidently telling his estranged wife that he's not worried about the future because of his coaching experience. Francine (Jennifer Warren) tells him bluntly, "You're no good at it... you can't make 'em win." Once General Manager Joe McGrath (Strother Martin) makes it official that the team will fold after the season, Dunlop becomes more worried about the future. Most players join him in those worries. One has options: Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), a Princeton-educated American, has his Ivy League degree. But team captain Upton exemplifies the worries that he and most of his teammates face when he blurts out, "Fuckin' Chrysler plant, here I come!" Yet, as Charlestown's closing mill suggests, the high-paying, usually unionized manufacturing jobs that enabled the working class to enjoy a good standard of living on a single wage-earner's income were disappearing. The result is a much less certain future for working class men.

After the road trip where Suzanne tells Dunlop, "Use your imagination," the player-coach tries to win back Francine and save the team--and his job--by encouraging all of his players to fight, including Braden, who is the team's best player and league's leading scorer. Dunlop had been critical of violence at the movie's start. When the team thought their next opponent would include Ogie Ogilthorpe, who Upton called "the worst goon in hockey today," Dunlop said, "For the sake of the game they ought to throw this fuckin' guy in San Quentin. He is a criminal element." Initially, Dunlop was so appalled that the newly acquired Hanson brothers tape on brass knuckles--"every game!"--that he kept them benched. But, desperate to salvage a career in hockey, Dunlop embraces the violence he initially disdained. 

He also convinces gullible local sportswriter Dickie Dunn (Emmett Walsh) to publish stories, without identifying the source, about a possible relocation of the Chiefs to Florida--if they start winning. When a player reads one of Dunn's stories aloud to the team, Dunlop looks at the paper and says, "Dickie Dunn wrote this. It's gotta be true!" He then uses the lure of Florida to motivate his players. He taunts Long Island goaltender Hanrahan about his wife's sexuality until Hanrahan attacks Dunlop, earning an ejection. Since Long Island has no backup goalie, the Chiefs win easily--the win that ends their long losing streak. In the next game, Dunlop manipulates the sweetly sensitive Carlson into a fight that leaves him injured and out of the lineup, finally giving the Hanson brothers their chance to play. They escalate the fighting and violence to new extremes, helping the Chiefs beat and beat up most of their league rivals, and turning Charlestown into a title contender.

Despite their new, winning ways, the Chiefs have their critics. Francine responds to Dunlop's claim that "We got a whole new attitude--it's bringing us a lot of success" by telling him, "Any fool can fight." Opposing fans protest the Chiefs' style of play more vigorously. During one game in Hyannisport, an angry fan throws an object that hits one of the Hansons in the face, triggering a wild scene in which a number of Chiefs leave the ice and climb into the seats and fight with spectators. When the Chiefs are one win away from the league championship, Dunlop finally meets the team's mysterious owner, Anita McCambridge (Kathryn Walker). She tells him she cannot make enough of a profit to justify a sale, so she will fold the team for tax purposes after the season. Dunlop comes clean to the players about his deception before the final game, telling them, "I conned you guys. I just lied to you. We were never anything but a rich broad's tax write-off." Of the fighting he himself had encouraged, he tells his players, "We've been clowns... goons... We're a bunch of criminals. We ought to be in jail." 

He professes to be "ashamed... really ashamed of myself." For his final game, Dunlop says, "I want to win that championship tonight. But I want to win it clean. Old-time hockey." He specifically singles out Toe Blake, Dit Clapper and Eddie Shore as "the greats" he wants to emulate in his final game. The Chiefs' opponents, the Syracuse Bulldogs, have different plans, though, and have fortified their roster with some of the worst goons from recent league history, including the dangerous Ogilthorpe. The Bulldogs pummel the suddenly pacifist Chiefs in the first period. When the general manager scolds the Chiefs at intermission for their refusal to fight back, and tells them NHL scouts are in attendance looking for tough players, Dunlop abandons his commitment to play it clean. In the next scene, all of the players on both teams, aside from Braden, are fighting on the ice in a comically appalling spectacle while Braden sits by himself on the Chiefs' bench. When his estranged wife Lily walks into the building, freshly made over by Francine, Braden sees her, looks smitten, then leaps onto the ice and does a strip tease, with musical accompaniment by the marching band. Braden's strip-tease triggers a protest by the Bulldogs' player-coach Tim McCracken. Furious that the referee refuses to stop Braden's "disgusting" display, McCracken punches the referee. The referee then declares a forfeit by the Bulldogs, and awards the game and the championship trophy to the Chiefs. The film ends with the Chiefs' victory parade but with a bitter taste. We suspect Reggie will keep on losing, as his ex-wife Francine abandons him for good.

This was an era of particular violence in professional hockey: the rapid expansion of the National Hockey League (NHL), from just six teams in 1966-67 to 18 in 1974-75, the establishment of a rival World Hockey Association in 1972, and a related expansion of minor leagues and teams, led to the watering down of talent. Players who previously would have lacked the skill needed to stay in pro hockey could do so through violence and intimidation; their presence forced teams to keep players whose main role was to fight opponents' goons. The situation was worsened by the fact that the NHL's initial expansion doubled the league to 12 teams, permitted established teams to keep so many players that few of value were available to expansion teams. This combined to create a race to the bottom in terms of fighting and thuggishness that led to frequent bench-clearing brawls and other episodes that made the hockey league a joke to many American sports fans in the 1970s. In the pre-expansion period the league's penalty-minutes leader for the season typically recorded fewer than 180, but this number ballooned after expansion; in the seasons starting in 1973-74 penalty-minutes leaders respectively recorded 405 and 472.

Slap Shot's portrayal suggests the decline of Rustbelt manufacturing, the process Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison in 1982 called The Deindustrialization of America. Johnstown, located about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, was known for catastrophic flooding that got it nicknamed "Floodtrap City" and the "Valley of Death". Nonetheless, it had enjoyed a "golden age" of steel manufacturing and coal mining. In the 1970s, though, Johnstown joined other Rustbelt cities like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and Fort Wayne, Indiana in being hit hard by plant closures that eliminated thousands of industrial jobs. The loss for industrial workers continued into the 1980s, when "competition and new technology eliminated millions of jobs and permanently reduced the wages of millions of workers"--even during a period in which the economy as a whole enjoyed a period of sustained growth. At its peak in 1957, Johnstown had had 40,000 full-time jobs in steel-making and coal-mining; by 1996 that figure had declined by about 90 percent. Conditions for industrial workers had deteriorated so markedly that Jack Metzgar's 1985 Dissent article surveyed the loss of unionized jobs, the decline of manufacturing wages and benefits, and the relative generosity of pension benefits accrued during the 1950s and 1960s and scathingly concluded, "In working-class Johnstown... the best paying job is retirement".

Part of what made Slap Shot prescient is that the decline in manufacturing, and in private-sector union membership, continued into the 21st century, as did men's difficulty in responding to it. Hanna Rosin's 2010 Atlantic article, "The End of Men," described the Great Recession in 2008-09 as doing most damage to predominantly male occupational categories. She found women were proving themselves much more adaptable than men, and that many men simply withdrew from the labor force rather than undergo retraining. Rosin's article dovetailed with findings in a July 2010 New York Times article that described male college graduates unwilling to settle for jobs they considered beneath them; that article led with the story of a newly-minted Colgate University alumnus who turned down a $40,000-per-year job because he considered it "dead-end work." In Slap Shot, the men similarly struggle to adapt to the changing economy. Dunlop tells Lily Braden, "Use your imagination. That's what I've been doing." But he, like most of the male characters, reaches backward, trying to recapture a disappearing past, rather than trying to look forward in genuinely imaginative ways. This is exemplified in Dunlop's belief that he can reclaim Francine's affections if his hockey team starts winning, despite her obvious loss of interest in the game. The male characters, rather than the film itself, are sexist. And even their sexism conceals admiration for the women in their lives. 

Dunlop tells his team what he had said to infuriate the goalie Hanrahan: "His wife is a dyke." But he adds sincerely, "She's a fantastic gal! I mean, fantastic!" Recalling the late Jackie St. Pierre, a teammate whose wife left him before "that great Peterborough game" in 1968, Dunlop says he thought Jackie was right to beg her to come back to him: "She was a dynamite broad." Dunlop also has a complicated connection with Lily Braden. As part of his mind games designed to get Braden to fight, Dunlop flirts with Lily, and encourages her to leave Braden. He tells her, "I think you're a champ. Only you've gotta stop killin' yourself." After Lily finally moves out of Braden's house and in with Dunlop, Dunlop taunts Braden by telling him Lily is a "terrific gal"--adding, "We've been havin' a hell of a time!"

While the men react with sexism, homophobia, and attempts to either cling to or return to formulas that are no longer likely to work, the women show much more ingenuity. Some of the hockey wives, admittedly, accept their sad circumstances passively, best exemplified by Upton's wife confessing that she "only drinks in the afternoon... Or before a game. or when Johnny's away." But other women act more forcefully. Anita McCambridge becomes the villain because she folds the team, but she is in charge, and will still be living very comfortably long after the team is just a memory. Suzanne goes well outside contemporary conventional norms with her approach to escaping her unhappy life with Hanrahan. After leaving Dunlop, Francine has become a successful hairdresser; by movie's end, with business collapsing in Charlestown, she has accepted a new job and is moving to a salon on Long Island. Lily leaves Braden, accepts a makeover by Francine, then gets her husband back, on what appears to be her terms. Even Jill St. Pierre, the "dynamite broad" who left Dunlop's teammate a decade earlier, showed initiative and an ability to imagine a completely different life than the one she had as a hockey wife. Not only are the female characters more creative than the sexist, homophobic hockey players, it is the male characters who perform the film's most memorable nudity, even though we see Suzanne's exposed breasts in her scene with Dunlop. There is Braden's strip tease in the climactic scene: with his wife sitting in the stands yelling, "Take it off!," he strips until he is naked except for his jockstrap and skates. 

Owner Anita McCambridge can't make "enough of a profit" from a sale of the team; she could make money, and provide her players with the chance to continue their livelihoods--"We're human beings," Dunlop tells her when they finally meet--but choses instead to hurt or end their careers to fatten her own, already substantial bottom line. General manager McGrath's gleeful performance of simulated masturbation in one early scene makes him appear perverted. When he learns that the team will fold because of the mill closing, he selfishly tries to conceal the news until he can find a different job for himself. He frequently speaks of his past work for Eddie Shore to establish his hockey credibility; when the players invoke Eddie Shore as an inspiration to play clean, "old time" hockey in the final game, McGrath, who wants the team to goon it up, hypocritically blurts out, "Piss on Eddie Shore!"

Paul Newman sees himself cornered by the narrow-minded characters around him, and somehow he gives up. Newman seems to capture in his expression a contradictory feeling of victory and defeat in the ending. So while Reg Dunlop and the hockey players in Slap Shot showed the lack of imagination that has made it harder for many men to adjust to changes in the economy, the people of Johnstown, like the female characters in Slap Shot, have used more imagination. After the golden age Johnstown enjoyed with coal and steel in the 20th century, its citizens and leaders understand that it, like other industrial centers, will be unable to make it "Right Back Where They Started From." —"Rethinking George Roy Hill's Slap Shot as a Tale of Feminist Empowerment and Male Struggle in a Post-Industrial World" (2020) by John Soares Source: galeapps.gale.com