No. 32 on Sportsnet magazine’s list of reasons the NHL has never been better
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. —Pablo Picasso
There is a difference between your four-year-old’s finger painting and Picasso’s Guernica; between your high school poetry and Emily Dickinson’s verse; between a nightclub dance floor at 1 a.m. and the ballet the next afternoon.
There is a difference between hockey, played competently and well, and Pavel Datsyuk, painting with metal, rubber and a composite brush—the beauty of the game writ in sticks and pucks, splashed on the evening’s highlight reels. He is hockey’s foremost artist—his game calls your attention to the intricate hidden within the everyday. It offers a glimpse into the spontaneous joy of creation and imbues the viewer with the sense that, more than the other 11 men on the ice, he sees what is really happening. It is like watching a spider spin a web: The longer you watch, the more you realize every move has a purpose. To observe Datsyuk’s work, divorced from the rest of the game, is to appreciate what Jonathan Swift called true vision—“the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”
You don’t see it every second, because hockey is too chaotic for that. But you glimpse it in moments—a puck dancing forward and backward, mesmerizing enough to make Logan Couture fall to the ice without a hand laid on him; a crossover worthy of Chris Paul, executed on skates. A puck carelessly backhanded across the ice, its purpose only clear when it lands on the tape of its target without breaking his stride. A foray up the ice, directly into a snarl of four Predators, and somehow out the other side with the puck still on his stick. It seems, so often, that he is making it up as he goes. Among the Red Wings, his puck tricks in practice are legendary. There is no off switch. “True art,” said Albert Einstein, “is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.”
Datsyuk’s works are the moments in which, watching, you realize that hockey is the greatest sport on Earth, and that he is the only hockey player who really matters. Like the most arresting works in any medium, they don’t come from anywhere easily explicable. No scheming, brainiac coach drew them up in a playbook. No drill-sergeant hockey dad programmed them through joyless repetition. You watch them come to be, these moments that make you laugh to yourself late at night, in an empty living room with only a television and perhaps a pet for company. And when you hear the men calling the game share your reaction on air—a soft, disbelieving chuckle—you can picture them shaking their heads slowly. In these moments, you and these professionals who have called thousands of NHL games are feeling the same thing: a taste of that childlike wonder you felt when your zany uncle pulled a coin from behind your seven-year-old ear and made you believe in magic.
Many of history’s great works of art were commissioned to draw the eyes of the masses to the beliefs of their creators. Want to see Michelangelo’s masterpiece? You have to go to church. When people are inspired by great beauty, they tend to spread the word. Datsyuk’s highlights serve the same function for his sport. Ask any hockey fan who has converted friends which YouTube clips made the best case.
Whatever happens during the rest of his career, wherever the Red Wings finish in the standings this season, that is Datsyuk’s chief achievement. It’s one that can’t be measured in stats—not in points or plus-minus or Selke trophies. Or even in Stanley Cups.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
