Not Stardom

Chris Cahill ·

“Authentic play comes from deep down inside us. It’s not formed or motivated solely by others. Real play interacts with and invokes the outside world but fundamentally expresses the needs and desires of the player. It emerges from the imaginative force within. That’s part of the adaptive power of play; with a pinch of pleasure, it integrates our deep physiological, emotional, and cognitive capacities. And quite without knowing it, we grow. We harmonize the influences within us. Where we may have felt pulled in one direction by the heart and another direction by the head, play can allow us to find a balanced course or a third way. All the evidence indicates that the greatest rewards of play come when it arises naturally from within. Page 105

“The recognition of personal improvement, not stardom, is the gauge for mutual respect.” P116

from the book Play by Stuart Brown

One trick pony

Chris Cahill ·

Darren Pang recently called Alex Ovechkin a one trick pony as he closes in on the NHL goal record.

Hard to argue who brought more art, meaning more variety in connections to his teammates, between him and Wayne Gretzky.

Ovechkin’s game is a reflection of the mechanized play of the moment. All coaches and players in the lower ranks aspire to improve and get to the higher levels so it’s hard to fault them.

But when the best players in the NHL aren’t trying to be the best they can be, truly pursuing an excellence of skill and play in the great position they are afforded, and the coaches aren’t coaching to that standard, then passion flames out. The structure of play is stagnant. It’s an Incomplete ending for those willing to see it. There can be a more beautiful story.

Meanwhile ask former pros whether the current game interests them.. Worth corroborating this story.

Challenge or Harmonize

Chris Cahill ·

"There have been architects who are geniuses—Michelangelo, Palladio, Frank Lloyd Wright. But a city is not the work of geniuses. It is the work of humble craftsmen and also the by-product of its own continuing conversation with itself. A city is a constantly evolving fabric, patched and repaired for our changing uses, in which order emerges by an "invisible hand" from the desire of people to get on with their neighbours. That is what produces a city such as Venice or Paris, where even the great monuments—St Mark's, Notre Dame, the Place Vendôme, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco—soothe the eye and radiate a sense of belonging. In the past, geniuses did their best to harmonise with street, sky and public space—like Bernini at St Peter's Square—or to create a vocabulary, as Palladio did, that could become the lingua franca of a city in which all could be at home.

In contrast, the new architecture, typified by Gehry's costly Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, by Norman Foster's lopsided City Hall in London, by Richard Rogers' kitchen-utensil Lloyds Building, or by the shiny gadgets of Zaha Hadid, is designed to challenge the surrounding order and to stand out as the work of some inspired artist who does not build for people, but sculpts space for his own expressive ends." - Roger Scruton

Do we want to craft players of the former or closer to the latter examples of architects? My experience says the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the challenging latter with the game desperate for more of a skillful harmonizing power.

How does one break through to a game of harmony when the game is full of challengers?

Skaters Circle

Chris Cahill ·

At some point in my hockey career stopping on pucks, or really abrupt transitions became the norm and players choosing their own turns in gameplay became less of a standard.. In light of that check out this beautiful passage on skating in the third paragraph below. Swap out ‘skaters’ with ‘players’ and you’ll find its relevance to playing hockey well.. excerpted from Scarry’s Dreaming By The Book page 209

Heaney’s Crossings

Chris Cahill ·

Crossings Poem by Seamus Heaney

Travelling south at dawn, going full out
Through high-up stone-wall country, the rocks still cold,
Rainwater gleaming here and there ahead,

I took a turn and met the fox stock still,
Face to face in the middle of the road.
Wildness tore through me as he dipped and wheeled

In a level-running tawny breakaway.
O neat head, fabled brush and astonished eye
My blue Volkswagen flared into with morning!

Let rebirth come through water, through desire,
Through crawling backways across clinic floors:
I have to cross back through that startled iris.

Only to come up, year after year, behind
Those open-ended, canvas-covered trucks
Full of soldiers sitting cramped and staunch,

Their hands round gun-barrels, their gaze abroad
In dreams out of the body-heated metal.
Silent, time-proofed, keeping an even distance

Beyond the windscreen glass, carried ahead
On the phantasmal flow-back of the road,
They still mean business in the here and now.

So draw no attention, steer and concentrate
On the space fleeing between like a speeded-up
Melt-down of souls from hell’s deep, straw-flecked ice.

Everything flows. Even a solid man,
A pillar to himself and to his trade,
All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat,

Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet
As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and cross-roads,
Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.

‘Look for a man with an ash-plant on the boat,’
My father told his sister setting out
For London, ‘and stay near him all night

And you’ll be safe.’ Flow on, flow on
The journey of the soul with its soul guide
And the mysteries of dealing men with sticks!

The ice was like a bottle. We lined up
Eager to re-enter the long slide
We were bringing to perfection, time after time

Running and readying and letting go
Into a sheerness that was its own reward:
A farewell to sure-footedness, a pitch

Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves.
And what went on went in, from grip to give,
The narrow milky way in the black ice,

The race-up, the free passage and return –
It followed on itself like a ring of light
We knew we’d come through and kept sailing towards.

Choose one set of tracks and track a hare
Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.
End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?

Back on her tracks, of course, and took a spring
Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.
She landed in her form and then ate snow.

(Which is why Pliny thought the fur goes white
And why one friend imagined the Holy Ghost
As a great white hare on the summit of a ridge –

Then sprung himself at last, still weaving, dodging,
Haring it out until the very end,

Think the Game through

Chris Cahill ·

Where is the contextual analysis of all this hockey data?

How do lefties fair in the face off dot in the d zone on the east side of rink?

Are righties more prone to giveaways in the neutral zone on the west side?

Are lefties better checkers on the west side of the offensive zone?

In all this data analysis there are gems hidden in plain sight if you think the game through..

Reactive versus Constructive

Chris Cahill ·

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernstein (Russian: Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бернште́йн; 5 November 1896 – 16 January 1966) was a Soviet neurophysiologist who has pioneered motion-tracking devices and formal processing of information obtained from the use of these devices. He was also one of first psychologists to suggest that behaviour is generative, constructive and not reactive.

My hockey agility teacher, Yasha Smushkin, was a student of Bernstein.

Hockey play is generative, constructive not reactive. Because of the handicap imposed by handedness, these handcuffs keep the game stuck in reaction. Meanwhile Two Way Hockey Agility gives the game back to itself, back to its positively constructive roots.

If we want players to have the whole picture then it is essential they study two way hockey agility. Right now the game mainly serves profit..

Relaxation of Muscles

Chris Cahill ·

“Could you succeed in doing this?“ I asked. “No,” admitted Paul. “But we did get an idea of how it will feel when we shall have worked up to that point.”

“Is it really so difficult?” I asked, puzzled. “At first it looks easy. And yet not one of us was able to do the exercise properly. Apparently there is no escape from completely transforming ourselves if we are to be adapted to the demands of our art. Defects that pass in ordinary life become noticeable in the glare of the footlights and they make a definite impression on the public.”…

Since they did not succeed in part they could not succeed in the whole exercise, which was so much more difficult. Page 104 An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski

Mass Police Entertainment

Chris Cahill ·

“In the history of our species, in the history of Homo sapiens, the book is anthropological development, similar essentially to the invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not so much of our origins as of what that sapiens is capable of, a book constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page. This movement, like every movement, becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to elevate this denominator’s line, previously never reaching higher than the groin, to our heart, to our consciousness, to our imagination. This flight is the flight in the direction of “uncommon visage”, in the direction of the numerator, in the direction of autonomy, in the direction of privacy. Regardless of whose image we are created in, there are already five billion of us, and for a human being there is no other future save that outlined by art. Otherwise, what lies ahead is the past – the political one, first of all, with all its mass police entertainments.” joseph Brodsky ‘Uncommon Visage’

Business versus Art

Chris Cahill ·

The business of the game has perverted the art of it.

It’s why we don’t see higher levels of excellence in play.

I’d rather work at Walmart than lay down for a business paradigm. Is that what the game is suppose to teach? Certain there is another teacher for that way..