Hockey As... ART?

Yup.  Art.  The irreplaceable Kukla's Korner informs us the Albright-Knox Art Gallery has an exhibition going on entitled Forty The Sabres In the NHL and quotes a piece from this essay by John Massier.  I shall do the same, coz I think the writer "gets it:"

In the same manner that works of art play with notions of time—the time of creation, the time of viewing and experiencing—each sport treats time in a distinct fashion. Baseball is often languid, allowing for a cerebral, elongated experience in which the drama bursts forth, unexpectedly, with breathtaking speed. Football alternates between perpetual states of organized, violent action and slow, in-between moments, thereby ratcheting up the tension to often unbearable levels. Basketball, closest to hockey in its sense of time, moves with a blend of chaos and grace, changing direction with wild spontaneity and speed.

But hockey is unique among team sports in a few key respects. It is the only team sport that, rather than using a ball, utilizes an elegant, hard rubber disk, its own modernist, minimalist sculpture. Hockey can be said to be the only sport in which players carry weapons (though they are called “sticks”), paradoxical objects through which a player can express his sublime talent or jostle and intimidate his opponent. (If you are an especially good artist, the way you wield your brush or camera may inspire the same fear and awe.) Hockey is the only team sport with a trophy the players actually care about, a chalice and a sculpture upon whose skin the names of champions are engraved for eternity. It is the only sport in which championship matches are concluded by facing lines of opposing players gliding past each other to shake hands, hug, and express their mutual respect. Most fantastically of all, hockey takes place not upon a grassy field or a polished floor, but upon a frozen sheet of ice, across which the players move with metal blades attached to the soles of their feet. No team sport moves faster, or spends so much of its time on that fine edge between intense action and actual violence (evoking the frightening daring of great performance art). If you had no idea what hockey was, you could not be faulted for thinking it preposterous.

Yup.  The man really does understand the beauty, grace, excitement, and... above all... the uniqueness of the game.  Read the whole thing, coz there's a lot more.