The uses of Chance

“I’m not saying, ‘Do whatever you like,’ and yet that’s precisely what some people now think I’m saying… The freedoms I’ve given [in a musical score] have not been given to permit just anything that one wants to do, but have been invitations for people to free themselves from their likes and dislikes, and to discipline themselves… The highest discipline is the discipline of chance operations. The person is being disciplined, not the work.” -John Cage on his use of chance in composition. Kostelanetz p102

Banishing Disorder

Hockey tries to banish disorder strictly approving of one dimensional stick play. This puts the primary focus on competition which distracts from actually playing the game. For those new to this dialogue, there is a stark difference between manufacturing hockey which is done almost everywhere today and playing hockey which is more fertile realm for a mature approach to the game.

By banishing disorder coaches attempt to implement a very orderly vision of how the game should be played while seriously constricting player growth and development. Players trust coaches to encourage a hockey that is worth playing, that will also help them understand the universally applicable concepts related to success. This is where coaches today fail.

They condition players to appease coaches, scouts, advisors in dangerous ways that run contrary to any individual development initiative. The hockey community suffers because of this.
By banishing disorder I mean there are really no surprises in the game today there are only mistakes. The territory that is the game is fully mapped. And no individual tied to the game can evolve from a closed system like this.
In one sense, hockey presents an ideal learning environment for young people to learn about challenges, grit, and persistence. In another sense, it is a manufacturing business that destroys individual mastery in favor of manager profit.
Two way hockey invites disorder back into the game. Two way hockey agility practitioners cozy up to disorder in pursuit of self mastery that will redefine the integrity of the hockey community and the individuals that comprise it.

2/22/22

“The number 2 is a representation of harmony, kinship, and cooperation.”

Saving Beauty

“Today’s society of intimacy removes more and more objective forms of play and the room for play in which one can escape oneself, ones own psychology. Intimacy is opposed to playful distance and theatricality. Objective forms are decisive in playing, not subjective, psychological states. Strict play or rituals unburden the soul. They do not allow for any space to be given to a pornography of the soul: ‘Eccentricity, egomania, exaltation are not to be found here. Grace and strict play rule out emotional caprice, nudism of the soul, and anything psychopathic.’ The actress, the passionate player, is de-psychologized, de-subjectified and freed of all inwardness and becomes nobody.’ Byung Chul Han p66

Playing Straight

I want my players to be skillful, discerning, and good. Winning is insufficient. Grafted from survival is insufficient from the book Station Eleven.

My program is based on spoken instructions handed down from Smushkin that scaffold or guide the player’s perceptual activity while skating. Holding or being yourself on the ice is a crucial practice that’s hurried and disrespected to condition an ‘other’ focus. One of the big promises of two hockey agility is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

“Taking on a challenge is a bit like riding a horse, if you’re comfortable while you’re doing it you’re probably doing it wrong” teddy lasso

Finding Game

In the end each player must find their own game. My hope is in dabbling with the all the varieties inside two way jockey agility that my students will find a variety that suits them and don’t finish their hockey story with a disdainful taste for the player they chose to be given the limited variety of their exposure which is mainly a reference to my own personal shortcoming in vision when I played.

You Can't Play Straight

I imagine the most common retort— to playing hockey with a straight blade especially at higher levels—to be that it’s impossible to control the puck and to shoot with it so why bother?

Hockey is a defiant game, the sport of kings somebody once told me. The game arising in the first instance is sort of a miracle given how difficult it is to play. But mirroring the improbability of it is one of the points of playing straight. The place it will leave you will be far different than the one you started in and certainly far from the one opponents who choose not undertake the challenge will be found at. Think of what it will make you overcome. Think of the demands of the challenge. Where blades do most of the work now for these booming shots coming off players sticks all of the skill, art and precision of shots coming off a straight blade must be generated by the players using it.

Its extremely hard to play skillfully with a straight blade but it’s not impossible. Like playing the game. So the next time someone thinks the idea is crazy or can’t be done— I beg them to ask where the game would be if someone proposed playing a hockey game without ever seeing one played.

Playing straight means puck play happens inside an infinite variety for receiving and delivering the puck so players would become extremely adaptable teammates and deadly opponents. So playing straight would mean getting the most out of yourself when responding to the game.

Why do we play sports? To compete for some thing? We play sports for recreation, for fun and excitement, to share experiences with others, to develop ourselves and others, to see what we can create together, for the experiences, to lose ourselves and see what we’re made of..

Straight Blade Support vol. I

George Rochberg writes, “The physical concept of entropy, which plays a large part in the world of probability depicted by twenty-century physics, is the measure of the tendency of nature toward disorder, non-differentiation, and a final state of static equilibrium.” Aesthetics of Survival by Rochberg p6

Playing with a straight blade ambidextrously affords a player the opportunity to align themselves with deeper aspects of nature where more success in the game can be found based on unpredictability and effortlessness.

Norbert Weiner wrote, “as entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from the state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness.” The Human Uses of Human Beings by Weiner p12

Playing with an indistinct straight blade allows a player to camouflage their intentions and actions more skillfully bringing a deeper level of deception to bear in their favor in the game.

Jack Nicklaus on Modern Golfing

My teacher pointed out Jack Nicklaus’s style of playing the golf course versus playing the men he golfed with. In today’s hockey there is no playing the course there is only playing the other men. But this is a fatal error if we want hockey players skilled in all the varieties we need to practice playing the course not playing the men.

Snowboarding revelations

I went snowboarding the other day for the first time. The experience was a wonderful way to reset the clock in light of the new year, to freshen up my perspective, to shine my glasses clear of any residue that emerges from faithful repetitions of two way hockey agility. I have two takeaways from the experience.
First is the idea of adopting the board as part of my body while first trying to snowboard. My task was adapting the limits of my bodily cognizance to meld with the board extremities and communicate with the mountain slope while obeying gravity. There was an image of snowboarding myself that I was briefly able to attain and carry along in my mind’s eye that enhanced my beginning skill. But this image only emerged after I disconnected my eyes from my environment, elsewhere seen as softened eyes, and became cognizant of my feet, my arms, my hips, my head, and the board by way of feeling my orientation and sensing the direction I was heading.
This is why hockey is deranged,

The inner sense of the image (better illustrated by Bernstein’s theories) combined with body feeling in time and space aligned with individual goals is perverted in favor of pleasing the coach, fitting into the group formation, absolving individual player responsibility and neutering player decision making by deferring to this impoverished vision.

Being a ‘hockey guy’— or ‘knowing the game’ as people in the higher echelons of the sport like to say while they draw a line in the sand between those uninitiated to the game’s ways thereby preying on outsider confusion and aligning themselves with the other hockey company men who also refuse to accept a proper hockey orientation in favor of manufacturing known gameplay patterns so the game can be corralled and ordered to their liking, control and domination while stifling new variation and cooperation— means you will not accept change, beauty and real self mastery in the game. Actually playing the game is lost.
The second idea I took away from beginning snowboarding was my resistance to the flow experience. I could get up on the board and start going straight down the mountain but my insufficient knowledge for how to navigate the mountain slope carrying a significant amount of momentum led me to bailing on the simple feeling every time. The feeling of flow— weightlessness, frictionless procession— that accelerator when stepped on is terrifying until you gain some command over turning and stopping. Smushkin gave me the knowledge of the accelerator while being unafraid in the pursuit of its gifts and cognizant of the inevitable friction on the way to flow. A grounding in this process as opposed to external direction/reward inevitably leads to the intrinsic motivation inside two way hockey agility’s friction and flow.
Thanks for reading.

The Field's Purpose

The linked video below depicts scenes from yesterday’s Field of Dreams reenactment by Major League Baseball. I thought it was really cool for a couple reasons. First, the scenery is spectacularly well done. The other reason was the end of Ray’s/Kevin’s speech when he mentioned that the field was for the players. He states the purpose behind all the magic.

The other day I happened onto a good article from Justin Bourne on SportsNet recently where he commented on playing hockey at high levels. He said, “To make it, many players have to play heavily coached hockey, and that’s not a brand of hockey anyone actually set out to play as a kid.” It’s an interesting point. Players appeal to coaches with their style. But do coaches appeal to players with their styles as well? I think we’ve seen major leaps in this exchange recently. But I think there’s more magic to be had when coaches experiment and leave the players to their own devices, especially after they’re given two ways to consider.

Duality Refines Control or Yakovlevian Torque

The title of this post is taken from Iain McGilchrist’s book, “The Master and his Emissary”. A book I’ve slowly started working my way through. Here are a couple passages that stuck out to me that shine interesting lights on a two way approach:

In marmosets, individual animals with more strongly lateralised brains are better able, because of hemisphere (brain) specialization, to forage and remain aware of predators. There are shorter reaction times in cats that have a lateralized paw preference. Lateralized chimps are more efficient at fishing for termites than unlateralised chimps. Even individual human brains that are, for one reason or another, less ‘lateralized’ than the norm appear to show global deficits. In a word, lateralisation brings evolutionary advantages, particularly in carrying out dual-attention tasks. p26

In Hockey attention is split between tasks of managing actions on the ice and actions in the game.

Iain goes on to mention two types of attention that operate: focused and open. Focused attention operates on the minutiae while open attention observes the situation or wholeness. He also writes about allegiances outside of the self which are lost foraging only for what is desired by one’s self.

Hence the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and inso doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one, we experience— the live, complex embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power. p31

Lastly, a diagram of what neuroscientists call Yakovlevian torque— the idea that the brain is not oriented symmetrically but is slightly rotated on its central axis.

All of this information begs one to engage in a curious approach serving a growth that seems far outside the realm of any hockey game but that is crucial to success inside one.

Redundancy and Resiliency

Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems.

Redundancy allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of corporate executives)—and each has more capacity than needed in ordinary circumstances. So redundancy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintaining these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness.

Nicholas Taleb wrote the above in reference to the redundancy and resiliency of natural systems. For those that still wonder about the reasons for a two way hockey played with either handedness, here is a reasoning for it.

Gordie Howe HandShake

This is footage of Gordie Howe playing for the Houston Aeros. In this short clip Howe illustrates the "handshake" (handedness switch) or the fundamental tactic of two way hockey.

The following is excerpted from Gordie Howe’s book, “Mr. Hockey”:

“I’ve heard people say that I am naturally ambidextrous, but that’s not exactly true. The reason I could shoot from both the right side and the left side goes back to playing goalie as a kid. As you can imagine, proper goaltender equipment was expensive and pretty tough to come by. When I was scuffling around for gear, the only thing I could find for a catching glove was a first-baseman’s mitt that went on my left hand. If I was a left-handed shot that would have been fine, but I shot right— and there is no way you can shoot right with a catcher’s mitt on your left hand. Since the glove was dictating the terms, I didn’t have much choice... I learned to shoot the puck as a goalie, clearing it up the ice and steering it into the corners, from the left side. When I played out as a defenseman or forward, I would flip back to shooting from the right side. That’s how I developed a shot from both sides, but for a long time I didn’t realize I was switching hands. I just shot whichever day I thought had the best chance of putting the puck in the net. It wasn’t until my first training camp with the Red Wings, when I was sixteen, that I found out I was doing something out of the ordinary... I went in on one of the goalies during a practice, switched hands, and scored. Jack Adams, the coach at the time, was watching. He called me over with a gruff ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What’s that, Sir?’ I asked. He stuck his chin toward the goalie and said, ‘You shoot both ways.’ I hadn’t ever thought about it, so I asked, ‘I do?’ I had no idea. After growing up playing every position on the ice, it just seemed natural.”

— Gordie Howe

Connor McDavid 100 Points

Connor McDavid tallied four points for the Edmonton Oilers a few days ago. This game gave him a season total of one hundred points with a few games remaining.

We’re all in awe of his game, his individual feats. But he lacks that shibui element that Gretzky had. Healthy reminder that team play is what we’re after, open heartedness and resourcefulness. Two way hockey style looks beyond hockey kings and pawns.